lateral thinking

PART TWO: DOG DAYS

Celine was aware of the outrage she should have felt at Mattie’s remark. She did not. She was aware of where Mattie’s eyes were, straight down her oversized blouse. That same warmth from the shower, which really had never left, felt to be rushing across her as if she were made of dry wood and a spark had been lit.

Hadn’t she joined SIGNAL because of that same spark?

Mattie’s grin showed her teeth, long and sharp and proud. “Honestly,” she said, “I don’t know why I made the decision I did. Aye, I didn’t think about it much. But it was you or them. And I can’t perv on them on the showers, can I?”

Celine’s brain spluttered into life. “What?”

“Corporal Song and that bitch Dyachenko aren’t really my types. But you’re built like a ballet dancer. Compared to the usual kind of girl soldier, I mean. You’re so small and breakable.” Mattie put her book down. She finished her beer and crushed the can and tossed it aside. It clattered against the floorboards. “Aye, that makes a monster like me excited.”

“What?” Celine tried again. She could not tear her eyes from Mattie’s face, that patchwork of old pains. That honest grin, so full of lust for existence. She was aware of her own breasts; of her legs, of her body, like a ballet dancer’s, so it was. I never did ballet actually, she wanted to say. She did not want Mattie to laugh at her. She wanted Mattie to say more nice things about her. She, idiotic fly, wished for the spider to pamper her. Mattie stood now, in her man’s suit, all of her tense, Celine noticed. Was it so that Mattie was excited for this too? Nervous? What was ‘this’? Mattie now towered over her, her chest at Celine’s eyeline. Mattie’s chest, which, Celine mused, was where her breasts were. Mattie, arms crossed, ate Celine whole with her gaze. She laughed. “You’re not a virgin, are you, petite chienne? You’ve seen another human being naked before, right?”

Celine felt then that she was. Celine felt so much she was numb. Celine looked up into Mattie’s battered face, set now in amusement. Her eyes were not tender. She was not regarding Celine with any care or fondness. But her mouth, her gnarled smile, was hungry. Her hand moved. It touched Celine’s cheek. Hard finger tips but a gentle touch, brushing her skin with the most careful of caresses. Celine was rigid. “If the Volk Battalion comes knocking tomorrow and we get raped to death by gormless Russian Nazis,” Mattie said, “I think I’d like to be able to say I had a good last meal beforehand.”

“Meal…” Celine mumbled. Heard herself mumble. All of her being was focused on Mattie’s fingers against her. She had concentrated herself entirely upon that point, screwed up her soul and placed it into her cheek. Another hand joined the first, so that Celine’s face was captured. She whimpered, gazing at Mattie’s mouth. Mattie leant down and kissed Celine. For only a single instant was it just a kiss; their lips met and Celine quivered, her legs feeling weak, and then Mattie’s tongue forced its way into her. She met it eagerly and Mattie slurped and suckled at the inside of Celine’s mouth, spilling out of it, slathering spittle across her face, grasping at Celine’s chest with one greedy hand, straight under the blouse, and with the other encircling Celine’s waist, her grip harsh and painful and wonderful. Celine kissed back as best as she could, her own hands finding – what? She had no idea where anything was. Her own name seemed to have floated away into the abyss. Limp and pliant she let Mattie use her.

Finally she surfaced. Her breathing was ragged, shot through with need. She gazed into Mattie’s face, the entire universe. Her right breast was on fire where it had been touched and she was being held in Mattie’s arms and she never ever wanted to leave. Was there a blush on Mattie’s face? She wasn’t sure. Mattie picked her up, like a doll. She was flung onto the sofa. Her skirt was yanked down and her underwear next. She tried to close her legs and Mattie forced them apart. Below her the beast was hunched over, drooling. “You agreed to this.” Mattie said. “You’re not scared, are you?”

Celine stared. “I…I am.”

Mattie licked her lips. “Good.” And she buried her head within Celine’s thighs and got to work.

They had come to the bedroom at some point. Celine was naked. Mattie too. God, Mattie’s flesh – all over scars, everywhere scarred. Muscled and toned and powerful but wounded, with pieces missing. But it was those missing pieces that made her awesome; it was that which spoke to how much she must have survived, overcome, triumphed. She was like a worn statue or a painting with a scratch on it. There was some Japanese word, or something. Her brain throbbed. Her cunt was sore, trembling, still feeling a phantom tongue play it expertly, feeling Mattie quietly and calmly coax blissful music out of her. Her thighs were bruised. Were they? She lay down upon the refugee couple’s bed and stared at Mattie, mouth open. They had turned out the lights, the better to stay quiet, and before her the sergeant morphed into something else, fanged and vast, a demon. Celine was exhausted, emptied out. Her clothes were somewhere on the floor. She was a soldier. She had served with the GIGN and survived police raids and terrorist attacks and once with the grip of her revolver she had beaten a man to death. She-

She struggled upright. In the dark both women were only shapes. Patterns upon a surface. Smears on white paper. Distorted ink. Ink could spell out words, ink could represent beauty. Ink could make a terrible mess if you spilled it. Two ink stains could become one. Mattie had hold of her. Mattie was lifting her up, opening her legs again. The beast no longer spoke. Neither of them had spoken for some time. Two sweat-stained creatures both gasping for air. Mattie kissed her again, growling. Celine tried to find words. She felt Mattie’s endless lust. She felt as if she were about to be crushed beneath it, the immensity of this woman’s desire. Hands ran through her hair. A body slithered against hers. She searched through the soup of her mind, tried to articulate whatever it was she meant to say. It was important. Very important.

Mattie pushed against her. “You’re not tired, are you?” she whispered, words stroking the outside of Celine’s ear, slipping inside all the way to her brain. “I’ve got a lot more to get out of you, Celine.” At the sound of her own name Celine’s brain purred. “We’re going to keep at this until-”

“Bite me.” Celine said.

Mattie closed her mouth. For the first time since they had met she seemed to be taken aback. “What?”

“Bite me.” Celine repeated. She hugged the other woman. “Really, really hard.”

Mattie was still for a moment. They both were, trapped in this idiocy, in the middle of a war neither of them knew anything about, surrounded by dead farmland and men with guns, two dogs in service to peace who didn’t want peace, who for now only had the certainty of one another. Then Celine was shoved hard back onto the bed. Mattie grinned her grin, bared her fangs. “I knew you were my favourite type of prey.” she said. “How do you frogs say it? Bon appetit.”

The first bite hurt. It stung so hard Celine was shocked awake, for a moment, on her back with teeth in her shoulder. She kicked out, grunting. Liquid warmth, Mattie’s mouth and her own blood. She felt Mattie’s tongue along her flesh. She shivered. Mattie withdrew, dribbling onto Celine’s bare skin. She spat crimson. “Delicious.” she proclaimed. Celine whimpered. Mattie descended upon her again. The second bite hurt too, but not only that. Her hands found Mattie’s cheek. Mattie’s eyes found her in the dark. Celine touched her fingertips. They interlaced. And the next bite was even better than the last.

Sunlight. Celine groaned. She was in pain all over, her legs and her shoulder and between her legs and her collar and her right breast. Her first bleary thought was that she had been wounded. She span about, reaching for her weapon, and tumbled straight into Mattie, who was lying next to her beneath the sheets, fast asleep. Her nose prodded Mattie in the breast; her lips, for a moment, kissed the taut flesh beneath. She recoiled, turning over. Mattie remained asleep. Celine saw the room anew, saw the picture on the nightstand, the cupboards, the cruciform above the bed, the grim floral wallpaper. She saw the window and beyond the endless barren fields. She saw Mattie there nude. She made a noise that was beyond description.

Celine touched her own face with her hands. She found her revolver still hanging from the bedpost and she took it and held onto it tight. Mattie still did not move. While she slept her face, always so fierce, was slack, not comfortable exactly but at least calm, and so she was remarkably ugly, Celine thought; remarkably normal without her spirit in possession of her body, with only a nose and eyes and a mouth, all decentralised by her scars. More ugly but less grim. Her lips trembled, and Celine remembered those lips, red as blood, and the teeth within them, and the pain she felt all over located itself within her blurred memories of last night, and she seized up, blushing, and Mattie moved in bed, and startled Celine rolled away and fell and landed hard on her ass.

Her arse.

She struggled up, head pounding. Leaving Mattie she went to the bathroom. She stared at herself in the mirror. Violent, vivid bruises blossomed all around her bitemarks, dark red marks sunk deep into her flesh, pits of blood embedded within her skin. Each of them corresponded to the shape of Mattie’s mouth, each of them a print of the alignment of the other woman’s teeth, a diagram explaining the positions of her incisors, canines, premolars and molars; Celine saw how Mattie’s teeth were slightly parted, saw the irregular position of one of her canines, saw the unusual dent left by a chip on one of her bottom incisors. She ran her hands across the deep, throbbing bite on her shoulder. Her fingertips brushed Mattie’s phantom. She sighed.

“There’s men outside.” Mattie said.

Celine jumped. “Mattie!”

Mattie grinned. She was pulling on the suit from yesterday and had the Glock in her waistband. Her hair was tied back. “Good morning, doggy. Ten of them. Volk types. They’re going to knock on the door. A knock came from the door. “You should put some clothes on. Your uniform. Get the M4 too. Or you could go naked. That would be pretty funny.”

“Mattie, I-”

Mattie scowled. “What’s all this? Mattie, Mattie, Mattie. You’re such a fucking tool. We’ve got work to do. Action stations.” And she disappeared, leaving Celine in the bathroom. Celine touched one of her bites again, felt how much it hurt. She went to dress herself in her fatigues, gathering the M4 and tying her boots and slamming her helmet on over her head, wrapping herself up in combat gear, burying her bruises and her wounds and the strange heavy presence in her chest. There were men outside. She heard them knocking again. She checked her weapon, the sights and the magazine and the trigger. She slid her revolver into its holster at her hip. Her head still felt to be submerged in something. Her mouth was dry and her breath was soaked in stale-alcohol stench which upset her nose. She stomped out into the hallway. Mattie was there still in her suit, although she had found her beret now, and a pair of leather shoes from somewhere. She like Celine stank of stale sweat, deep bags under her eyes. What time had they stopped? How many times had Mattie made jelly out of her? But despite this exhaustion Mattie still grinned. “Let’s go, pup.” she said. The men were pounding on the door now, calling out in Polabian. Army! Open up! Mattie clicked off the safety on her Glock. “Mattie.” Celine said. “Sergeant Makepeace. Please.”

Mattie was peering at the door. “Please what?”

The door shook on its hinges. Open up! Celine had her M4 but was not sure what to do with it. She tried to find Mattie’s eyes. “I just…about last night…”

Mattie frowned. “Huh? What about it? You gave me a nice little snack. Perked me right up. What else do you want, puppy? You want me to eat you whole? Because that’s what I want. If you’re asking for a wee cuddle and a peck on the cheek, maybe a dinner date or whatever, then I’m not interested.” She approached the door, Glock tight in both hands. She looked back over her shoulder. “Predators don’t owe prey anything. Not in nature and not in sex. Now hang back and if I get shot I want you to shoot the bastard who did it. Make sure your hands aren’t shaking and make sure you remember which end the fucking bullets come out of.” She grinned. “If you do a good job, maybe I’ll give you another nibble sometime.” The door broke free of the hinges and slammed into the floor before her, and the two men in black uniforms with their AK-74S ready demanded that she drop her weapon.

Mattie fired twice, thudding impacts planting bullets in both men’s faces, which dissolved in a one-two show of clouds of blood, their bodies collapsing backwards. She looked back at Celine again, and stuck out her tongue. “But I do like your taste, little doggy.” And she stole out of the house. Celine stumbled after her. There were four men surrounding the farmhouse and Mattie ducked through the empty flowerbed as she caught another with her Glock. Two of the others were behind a waiting Jeep and one stood in the open with Spas-12 readied, balaclava decorated with a skull. Voices called in Polabian, here and far. The Spas fired, roaring its way through the morning air, and Mattie was struck in the side with a grunt, dropping her Glock. Celine raised her weapon. She caught the skull-mask in her iron sights, saw him pump the Spas, heard him call to his comrades, who now were peering around the Jeep, AK-74s aimed. She swept across the yard to them and loosed one burst at the first and his head was punched through four-five times and he collapsed, and the other ducked and her second burst made ugly music against the Jeep’s side.

With a growl Mattie, clutching her side, was leaping at the skull-mask, and she slammed into him just as he raised his Spas-12 and they both collapsed to the dirt. Celine left the doorway and met the other soldier as he was emerging from cover, his gun trained on Mattie’s back. She fired once. The bullet caught him in the chest and he stared at her, eyes wide in absurd surprise, before tumbling over onto his back. She joined Mattie with the skull-mask. Mattie slammed her arm into his, shoved her elbow into his face with a sickening crunch. He raised the shotgun to block her and she took it and ripped it from his grip and twisted it about like a showman doing a trick, and then brought the stock down hard upon his nose. The mask was covered in sticky dark blood. Mattie’s suit was shredded, her shirt ripped open, blood oozing from dozens of new cuts all down her right arm. The skull-mask lay there, groaning. “Targets down!” Celine said. Mattie bent over him. “Targets down!” Celine tried again. There was another engine coming, its roar rising and rising upon the horizon. “Targets down!” The skull-mask was limp and Mattie leant forward, coming down upon him. She made the most awful noises Celine had ever heard. Lustful noises, groans. “Sergeant – Mattie, we’re done. They’re down!” The noise of another engine came rumbling over the fields. Mattie ripped off the man’s balaclava and beheld his bloodied face. Her eyes were wide. She opened her mouth, panting and salivating.

Celine once had seen a rabbit get shot. She had seen old Bovet, her grandfather’s schoolfriend, take aim with his rifle and, peering into the thick woods beneath Mont Blanc, loose a single bullet that had struck a small, smoke-furred little buck right in the chest and through the front leg, shattering half its ribs and tearing off the limb. It had not died. She had stood with her father and hid behind his smock as the rabbit had begun to scream, high and raw and dreadful. It had not stopped until Bovet, pipe between his teeth, had stomped on its head with his great boot.

That was what it sounded like then as Mattie ripped open the soldier’s throat with a triumphant gargle. Blood sprayed out all over her, all across the soil, all down his front. Bent double she dug herself deep into him and she jerked her head and with a wet tearing sound something was torn free of the gaping wound in his neck with another splatter of flooding crimson. Mattie reared up, the man’s meat between her teeth gripped tight. Her unfeeling eyes were upon Celine. She choked the torn matter of his oesophagus deeper into her mouth, muscles convulsing with the effort, and then she began to chew. Blood still rose, in sad little spurts, from the dead man’s neck. Mattie chewed and chewed and then she swallowed. Her face was caked with blood and the remnants of her shirt were soaked through and through its ragged material one of her breasts protruded, bathed in gore. She looked at Celine still. She grinned. Chunks of human flesh flecked the white of her teeth. She was so beautiful.

Mattie clambered off of the dead man, Glock in hand, and Celine joined her. Celine met her eyes. The stench of blood was overwhelming. For a moment they were silent together outside of the house, the distant engine drawing closer. Mattie stared at her. “In Northern Ireland.” she said. “I was trapped in a prison with a bunch of ex-provos. No one could get in or out. They had all the food. I had nothing. Last soldier in the squad. Prey for the enemy. But do you know what I did?” Celine said nothing. She could not watching Mattie’s mouth, smeared with blood like some grotesque kind of make-up. “I survived.” Mattie said.

“Who…who did that to you?” Celine asked.

Mattie did not grin. “The British Army. Tried to make the toughest soldier possible. Human beings are cheaper than Challenger tanks. And they wanted to make soldiers who could take out tanks themselves. In my case they fuckin’ succeeded. I got out. Gave up my humanity.” She paused. “Don’t go pitying me or whatever the fuck! I don’t feel anything about all of this. I don’t know who God is. And I’m so fucking free, and so happy, and a nice wee thing like you-”

Celine kissed her. The taste was warm and hot and sickly and still she pressed her lips to Mattie’s. Blood and spit and the shocking way in which the other woman, invincible until now, yielded to her, parting her own lips and allowing Celine’s tongue inside of her. Celine kissed but also cleaned. She swept up some of the pieces of meat in Mattie’s mouth and she sucked them into her own. The taste was Mattie. She swallowed. She parted. Mattie looked at her, wordlessly demanding an explanation. Celine frowned. “You’re not allowed to go around taking bites out of people anymore.” she said. “If you need to eat someone, eat me.” And she realised she had eaten a piece of human flesh and for a second she wanted to throw up. But she did not. Mattie’s expression was a puzzle. She looked away, bloodstained lips trembling. “You’re daft.” she said.

The noise of the engine had risen and risen and now it was upon them. They stood together as another Jeep rolled forth, M249 SAW erect and thrust to heaven, manned but not pointed towards them. It was pockmarked with bullet holes and the front window was broken and Blucher peered at them through the shattered glass, his enormity pressed ungainly into the driver’s seat. Behind the M249 Houseman gazed down. “Christ.” he said. “What the hell have you been up to, Makepeace?”

Celine found herself smiling. “Sergeant!” she called. “Houseman!”

“Get in, you two.” Blucher called back. “Evac in less than an hour. Dyachenko and her team are holding things down, but what with Murashko missing from his prison cell it’s getting too hot. We’re going to have to hurry.” So the two of them went to the Jeep, great juddering monster, up close tamed, safe and steady. The sun was rising over the dam, peering over the top of the valley. Celine and Mattie sat either side of Houseman’s legs as Houseman stuck himself out of the open top. “Good to see you again.” he grunted. “Celine, anyway. Why the hell’s there blood on your lips?”

Celine blushed. “Um.”

“And why the hell’s there brown on your trousers, Houseman?” Mattie said. “You didn’t shit yourself when the Polabians clocked us, did you?”

“Shut up.” Houseman said.

She laughed. And the Jeep started to move, and for a moment as it moved, with Blucher driving and Houseman covering them from above, with no one’s eyes upon them, Mattie’s hand touched Celine’s, and gripped her fingers there, and held them so hard that it hurt. And Celine looked into that scarred and bloodstained face, and those eyes, like a predator’s, that held nothing for her, and those lips, full of cruelty, and she felt her heart pulse within her chest, a wet and sticky organ. And Mattie let go and Celine turned away, M4 ready, peering out at the valley, and they drove on towards the extraction point. The taste of the man Mattie had killed lingered on her tongue, and so did the taste of Mattie herself, and they were both sweet in her mouth. One day she hoped to be that delicious. The sensation of Mattie’s teeth on her bare skin. The rumble of the Jeep around them. The feeling of her revolver’s grip slamming into a man’s skull. Celine, facing away from all of them, allowed herself a little grin of her own.

–

“Anyway, it’s satisfying to see that I was not wrong to trust you.” her father said in his precise RP accent. Mattie lay back on the bed with her phone in hand. The flat was dark; she had closed the curtains and worked her way through a few beers and now she lay there in vest and shorts, toned flesh at ease, arms and legs aching from the gym that morning, where she had seduced a married woman named Sarah who had been watching her deadlift routine and trying not to; after Mattie had finished Sarah had asked her for advice on form, and Mattie had taken her in the showers and left here a whimpering wreck. She hadn’t bitten her; the temptation had been there, was always there. It would be bad form, she thought, to leave blood all over a gym only a month into the membership. That was definitely the reason, she thought. She stared at the empty screen, where the profile picture should have been. Her father did not use a profile picture. Her father did not use his real name. He was on the app simply FATHER. “Murashko has made contact with London and he has ensured me that British Armaments will reap contracts for the new Polabian military when the war is won. And Blackwell is impressed with your unit.” he continued. “Now we both know that means he is impressed with you. He admires your work, even if he will not admit it. I feel you’re finally managing not to disappoint me.”

“I love you too, father.” she said. She coughed. “I mean, Blackwell’s a tosser, but he knows talent where he sees it.” There was a long pause. “He recognises your talent, I mean. You did such a good job making me.”

“I did.” he said. “And from a bloody girl, as well. I hope you always remember how much I had to do, to make you. To build you into a useful asset for the family.”

“Of course, father.” she said. She turned over onto her side. Her thighs ached. Her body seemed to be unsettled; Sarah hadn’t been enough, had she? It was true that there was no ‘enough’ for her, but this was in some other, more immediate sense. Her flesh missed something. An absence within her. “Hey.” she said. She lifted up a hand and looked at her new scars, from the glass of the car windshield in Polabia. “Hey, dad. You really were right about everything. Thanks to your training I got one of my squaddies on side.”

Her father waited. Waited for what? He was always waiting even when he wasn’t. She knew sometimes he waited just to punish people. Sometimes the waiting was real and if the expectation of delivery wasn’t met there would be punishment; sometimes the waiting itself was a way to hurt, to scare, to keep his inferiors in their place. She heard the disappointment in his silence. But he loved her, she knew, and so after enough of a wait, after her heart had begun to pound in incipient panic, he sighed. “On side?”

Mattie laughed. “Yeah! A silly frog lass. Swiss. They put her under me for the Algiers job. She was so in love with me from the start. Couldn’t stop staring. Last job we ended up stuck out in the field and the dumb little cow lasted maybe twenty minutes before she was m-yours. God! So fucking easy. She was asking me to bite her, for God’s sake! Stupid bitch gave her virginity to your fucking psycho-killer daughter!” She realised her voice was getting slightly too loud. “Isn’t that funny, dad? The idiot gave me a lovely little kiss, like in a romance novel. But she’s such a pervert, deep down, and I made her realise it. I made her worse. I made her eat a bit of a guy!”

Her father did not laugh. “Awfully vulgar.”

“Oh.” she said. “Sorry! Sorry, father. I was just…like you said I should…”

“The cage in Derry made you strong.” He sighed. “It did not teach you any bloody manners. Never mind. You will always let me down with something.” Ice in her chest deep into her all the way through and out of the other side. Always the same sensation; always the same inability to respond. She only lay there on her bed and resolved to drink something and to fuck something before bed. “But this new asset of yours.” he said. “That is interesting.”

Mattie’s heart pounded. “She is.”

“Do you think she could be broken in properly? For the family.”

She sat up. “I think so, dad. I really think so.”

A long pause. The longest in the world. “Then I give you permission, Matilda.” he said. “To swallow her whole.”

PART ONE: WOLF AND CUB

They crept towards the cave against a hillside soaked in dusk. Blucher was on point, a huge shape compressed against the incline, wriggling to the ridge above them and peering over, his bulk and the bleak rock of the slope both painted red by the sunset far above. Dark shadows were draped across his flank by the tall trees behind. Houseman and Celine followed, also crawling. All were helmeted and with body armour, and all carried M4A1s with laser sights; Blucher had grumpily swapped out his MP5K for one. Houseman had the flashbangs. Celine had in her holster her MR 73 but mostly for good luck. She was to cover the two men as they advanced and took out the guards and rescued or at least recovered what was left of Staff Sergeant Makepeace. She was not as competent as they; she was not as good a shot as they. She was, as Blackwell had said, a young woman, about five foot ten, and pretty and small.

But she was within Special Intelligence Group N (Armed Liaison), SIGNAL, and a soldier for world peace, and so it was that she would cover them. AAnd they would find Matilda, or Staff Sergeant Makepeace.Behind them in the woods lay six dead soldiers of the Polabian Army. Here was where Makepeace’s tracker had led them, twenty klicks east of the extraction point, where Lance Corporal Dyachenko waited with her team in the safehouse by the Baltic Sea, everything ready to go. Murashko was waiting to rejoin the opposition across the border, to agitate for a free and democratic Polabia against the current regime. The mission was technically over. But SIGNAL was held together by…no, you couldn’t call it loyalty, could you? but if one of the Allied Nations’ dogs was cut loose, the other dogs knew that they too could be abandoned. So Blucher had said he would take Spider-1 after Makepeace and try to at least check whether there would be anything left to bring back. This, Houseman had said to Celine as they had chewed through their rations, was unlikely; because it was the Volk Battalion which had taken her, so Santamaria had gleaned from Liberation Army drone reports, and the Volk were fanatics who tortured Liberation Army soldiers to death, and Makepeace, Houseman had said with fearful glee, was a woman, after all…

Behind them in the woods lay six dead soldiers of the Polabian Army. Here was where Makepeace’s tracker had led them, twenty klicks east of the extraction point, where Lance Corporal Dyachenko waited with her team in the safehouse by the Baltic Sea, everything ready to go. Murashko was waiting to rejoin the opposition across the border, to agitate for a free and democratic Polabia against the current regime. The mission was technically over. But SIGNAL was held together by…no, you couldn’t call it loyalty, could you? but if one of the Allied Nations’ dogs was cut loose, the other dogs knew that they too could be abandoned. So Blucher had said he would take Spider-1 after Makepeace and try to at least check whether there would be anything left to bring back. This, Houseman had said to Celine as they had chewed through their rations, was unlikely; because it was the Volk Battalion which had taken her, so Santamaria had gleaned from Liberation Army drone reports, and the Volk were fanatics who tortured Liberation Army soldiers to death, and Makepeace, Houseman had said with fearful glee, was a woman, after all…

Celine did not want to see Staff Sergeant Makepeace dead. Matilda, as she had never heard anyone call her. Mattie; that was what Dyachenko called her, in mockery or comradeship it was impossible to tell. Mattie. Celine liked to say it under her breath sometimes. She crept towards the ridge, in the shadow of Blucher’s enormous thighs. The sergeant was silent, peering down the sights of his M4. Houseman was a short distance behind, crouched, covering their six for a moment before beginning to scurry forward, settling to Blucher’s other flank. “Rochat.” Blucher proclaimed, for to her everything he said was a proclamation. “Position.”

“Sergeant.” she said. She rose from the stone and hefted her rifle up, resting one knee on the edge of the ridge. The air was cold. Behind them was the woodland and then the great expanse of the valley with its medieval villages, its sparse towns and slumbering farmland; above was the looming shape of the dam, with the sun exploding behind it. But she kept her eyes forward. She studied the gloom before them, with its dull blandness. There were no guards waiting. No gun barrels came glistening out of the dark. In the woods behind them the birds sang little tunes of distraction. Blucher rose too, and Houseman joined him, both crouch-walking towards the cave mouth. Celine peered over them into the abyss. They came to the cave. There was quiet. Blucher hit the torch on his M4 and Houseman did likewise. Blucher gestured for her to come close. She did so, jogging, the rifle heavy in her grip.

By the light of their weapons she saw what they had seen, and she inhaled, feeling a weakness in her knees. There were bodies. She spied Polabian uniforms and smelt the metallic odour of blood, slightly aged, and saw their uniforms torn open and saw, as Houseman’s light went everywhere, a panicking fairy, that one had chunks torn clean out of its chest. Blucher inspected the wet pulp of the wound. He frowned. “Teeth marks.” he said. “Christ.” Houseman said.

Blucher’s brow was hard. “Continue.” he said. They continued within, she too flicking on her torch, and as they advanced, the cave close by above and below, they found much the same, more bodies ripped open, torn apart, battered. There was a faint smell of cordite under all the blood. Not one of the Polabians seemed to have been hit by gunfire. Blucher nudged one out of the way as they went into the cave. By her torch Celine saw empty eyes, crushed jaws, bones glistening red and white and sticking awkwardly out of skin like grotesque pieces of candy cane. Ahead Blucher stopped and she nearly walked into him and she stopped, edging out from behind him. Houseman was behind both of them. “Gott.” Blucher said quietly. The three of them looked at the thing before them, the cage built into the rock. The metal bars of the cage were rusted and lined with spikes, and beyond them was the cave wall, finally, and between bars and wall lay a sad little space monitored only by a broken floodlight tied to the side of one of the bars, a space home to a metal dog bowl and a length of chain tied to a stake hammered deep into the floor. The bowl was full of water and all around it were chunks of raw meat. The cage door creaked, hanging slightly open. The lock had been snapped off. The chain had been severed. Houseman exhaled. “Well, at least we know she’s not d-” He was cut off by a sudden choking noise, an echoing sound of stoppage that bounced off of the walls and filled the darkness.

A blade had appeared around his throat, sharp side caressing his skin. The arm holding it was tight around his neck. Celine and Blucher twisted about, weapons ready. Their torches lit Houseman up. “Fuck!” Houseman cried, “my fucking eyes!” and the blade withdrew and he was stumbling over, clutching his face, and then Celine saw the shadow rushing past out of sight and she turned, giving chase, wheeling about on her heel to find the shadow leaping at her and then she saw by her torch its pale face and fangs and heard its gleeful hiss and at once, with an impact, they were tumbling together to the stone, sharp pain in her back, claws upon her throat and teeth, horrid red-flecked teeth, surging forth straight for her face,

“Makepeace!” Blucher spat. “Get off your fucking subordinate, you manic!” The teeth before her paused. Celine tensed. She tasted hot warm breath rolling over her face. A pair of dull grey eyes watched her from above that horrid maw, the incisors of which hovered so close to the edge of her nose. “Oh.” Makepeace said. She chuckled. “Sorry, petite chienne.” Her weight, then so omnipresent and cloying Celine had hardly notice it, lifted. She got unsteadily to her feet, with both Blucher and Houseman’s weapons trained on her. Her jacket was gone and her arms were lined with cuts she was barefoot and the torn collar of her striped undervest showed a thick dark bruise blossoming there, and there was a fresh wound on her cheek that looked like it would form another deep scar, and all of her was splashed with various streaks of crimson, both hot red and turgid almost-brown. She had lost her beret, her wild hair dishevelled and smeared with grease and blood. She turned to Blucher. “Sergeant.”

“You bitch!” Houseman was saying. “You’re a fucking lunatic-”

“Shut up.” Blucher said. He glanced around at the corpses. “You did this?”

Makepeace gave a smirk. “Yes, sergeant.”

Blucher’s sigh seemed to make his entire enormous frame tremble. Celine wondered if the sergeant had the same sickness as she; but then she realised it was a sigh born not of awe or even, as she might have expected, exasperation, but of something deeper, more precious. The sergeant was a little intimidated by Matilda, she realised. As was Houseman, whose shouting and swearing didn’t quite hide the tremble in his voice.

Aren’t you intimidated by her? she asked herself. How did you feel, petit chienne, when Mattie knocked you over just now and went to rip off your face with her teeth?

Staff Sergeant Makepeace, she reminded herself.

Blucher sighed again. “Anyway, that’s good. How are you physically, Makepeace?”

Makepeace’s hands were clawed at her sides. She licked away a spot of blood seeping from a cut on her lip. “Could be worse.” Blucher handed her his Glock 17 and radioed back to Spider-2 to let them know they were setting off. He took point with Celine and a frowning Houseman at his flanks, each of them guarding Makepeace, who was technically wounded. Wasn’t she? And yet her tread was firm and her hunched shoulders were eager and her cold grey eyes were as alert as ever, a hunter on the prowl. Makepeace paused near the threshold near one of the corpses and leant down and found her red beret and placed it atop her filthy hair. They left the cave. It was dark outside now. The dam sat in silence and the woodland before them was still. They walked to the edge of the ridge and looked into the woods. Torches flitted from tree to tree. Nothing moved. Blucher gestured for them to advance and as they did so the trees rustled, all of them. Figures rose from the undergrowth, shadows shaped like men.

Ten of them and then twenty. Their gun barrels were thrust forward.

Hell erupted.

Spider-1 leapt for cover as dozens of mouths spat fire from between the trees, an inferno unleashed. Trace rounds sliced through the night sky; a shrill, thudding report assailed them like thunder rolling down from heaven. Blucher was a demon in the dirt, burst-fire, flat against the stone, and Houseman (“Fuck fuck fuck!”) had ducked behind an outcropping and both had killed their torches, were out of sight, returning fire as the hillside was blasted apart by volleys of Vz. 58 fire, sending chunks of stone and shrapnel soaring through the air. But the two men from SIGNAL were tight, disciplined, and the Volk soldiers, Celine saw from her cover, were panicking as their numbers were thinned. She spied Blucher’s great arm gesturing back to the cave, and he rose as Houseman tossed a flashbang. All was light and sound and ringing, an overwhelming stinging. Celine grit her teeth, narrowed her eyes. Distantly she saw Blucher and Houseman retreat into the sheltering darkness of the cave. She went to join them but then something had her from behind. “No.” Makepeace’s slithering voice said rough and deep in her ear. A hand grasped her wrist. “Come on, doggy.” Makepeace said, hauling her up. “We go south.”

“But-”

Makepeace lifted her off of the stone as gunfire obliterated Spider-1, as the Volk troops closed in on the cave entrance. “They’ll be fine.” she grunted, and she dragged Celine down the cliffside and Celine, stumbling and tripping every second, let herself be dragged, her M4 banging against her front. She thought she was running but she wasn’t sure. Makepeace’s monstrously tight grip held her, forced her onward. They descended the valley wall and fell together into the woods, or another section of the woods, Celine’s boots splashing in a stream, her toes stubbing rock and root, white spots filling her vision, a hangover from the flashbang’s wink. But Makepeace held onto her. The sound of gunfire subsided; there were still errant barks here and there, distant now. The night was all around them. Through the gnarled grasping fingers of the trees there was a sky somewhere, and by the dim glow of distant farmhouses and villages she could spy the looming dam. Her leg ached and her heart was pounding and still Makepeace held her. There was a narrow stone bridge in the clearing ahead and the childish giggle of running water to go with it. Makepeace dragged her to this. Together they leant against the stone.

“They’ll be fine.” Makepeace said, her chest rising and falling. She was not wearing a bra and her nipples pressed against the front of her vest. Had she been wearing a bra before? Celine was worried suddenly, for the staff sergeant, and what the Volk might have done to her, and then she was exhausted, and terrified, and filled with guilt and sorrow over what had just happened. Makepeace only seemed to be slightly out of breath. She took off her cap, shook her head, let her wild hair dance, its blackness a quivering, eager mass. She replaced the cap. “They’ll be fine.” she said again. “Or not.”

Celine stared at her in the gloom. “What?”

Makepeace reached out and patted her on the helmet. “Joking. I trust them. But I don’t have a gun and I have been bleeding an awful lot and you’re too bloody scared to back them up. We’d just get in their way. It’s us I don’t trust, petite chienne.”

“Don’t call me that.” Celine said too quickly.

Makepeace laughed. “Why not? You’re so little. Almost cute.”

Celine felt herself bristle. She gripped her M4. “Our comrades are dead!” she hissed. There was silence but for the idiot tittering of the water. Makepeace for a moment seemed to be thinking, her scars all motionless upon her face. She leant back against the bridge, elbows on stone, twisting her head up to heaven. She snorted. “What does any of that matter to you?”

“What?”

Makepeace stared at some fixed point above. “Why do you care?” There was a heavy thud of gunfire from the direction they had come. “Because we’re a team.” Celine said eventually. The words came out small and she hated them and she hated her smallness, the helmet too big on her head and her fatigues slightly baggy and the absurdity of the M4 which was a gun for an American, enormous and cruel, and not for a little Swiss girl who did not have any scars or tattoos and who had never been to prison or served in Afghanistan or did not even like to say ‘fuck’. Makepeace withdrew Blucher’s Glock from where she had tucked it ungainly into the waistband of her trousers and she studied it with those indifferent eyes. As she frowned, her brow stiffening, the motion made her scars contort. “A team.” she repeated. Celine next to her moved closer. Makepeace laughed. “A team! Good fucking joke. Come on. You’re still alive. So am I. Let’s find some shelter.”

Celine stood up from the bridge wall, rigid. She gripped her M4. “We didn’t abandon you.” she said. A sharp pain from her neck and a tightness and she was pulled close again, Makepeace’s fingers around her throat, dragging her back. Makepeace held Celine before her. Those grey eyes went on staring. “Look. Cunt. I saved you because you’re pretty. The others were not pretty. So now they’re dead, get it? Or they’re not. I don’t care.” The pain was a steel needle shoved into Celine’s front. She wheezed through that little part of her neck that was not clamped in a vice. “I,” Makepeace snarled, “am getting the fuck out of here. Now I saved you, but to be honest I don’t care that much about you anyway. You can stay if you really want.” Celine gasped. Makepeace let go of her. She scowled, all her scars twisted up. “Well?”

Celine went with her. She kept her M4A1; it was a concession to her identity, to the authority she should have held. But it was Makepeace the half-naked prisoner who led the way, who with the Glock readied, creeping hunched-over from tree to tree. Her lithe, tall form marked the path Celine was to take, Celine following as loyally as if she were after the star of Bethlehem itself. She beheld Makepeace’s scars, her shoulders and arms ridged by cuts and wounds, her muscle tense as she crept forth, less woman than creature, hunter, wolf, perhaps, and suddenly Makepeace, who had been so ugly seconds before, was beautiful again, and Celine like Moses seeing the burning bush believed, and went miserably after the sergeant. They passed through the woods bent double, pausing as one vulnerable creature whenever from afar there came the raised voices of Polabian soldiers. Searchlights cut through the branches. The sound of engines rose and fell. They paused beneath a log, lying there as men marched past, and then continued. Celine had no energy to dwell on Houseman and Blucher but only for avoiding the next patrol or overflying helo and keeping up with Makepeace who never seemed to tire, whose feet were caked in dirt and whose wounds kept weeping and whose muscled, firm body never seemed to tire.

They rolled downhill as one, she following Makepeace’s hand gestures, her body language, the firmness of her rear…why was it, she asked herself in a moment of peace, as they sheltered behind a broken-down old tractor, the road below now visible, why had you joined SIGNAL? was it really just for this woman, this hateful woman who had gotten their own teammates killed, who had barely spoken to her off-mission before today, who when she spoke on-mission always dropped in those little mocking French words, every single time…she thought that in finding Matilda so interesting she was simply compensating herself for the grim truth, which was that she could not go back to GIGN and to Michaud and to her old self, who had lived in the world of her father and of Vaud and of church and nation and mountains. Because she had killed a man with the grip of her revolver once.

“Oi!” Makepeace was hissing from the other side of the tractor. The soldiers nearby were talking, walking away. Celine crouched her way over to Makepeace and then they watched the soldiers clamber into a Jeep Wrangler and heard the vehicle’s harsh engine sing as it pulled off onto the highway and sped away into the night. They came down to the highway, a long barren road curving its way around the valley wall and scything deep into the farmland before the dam. The Jeep was a distant spot of light. The helo was overhead but now closer to the valley peaks. There were no soldiers anywhere visible. The night was cold and empty. Cloaked in the obscurity of night Makepeace went on walking, ambling along by the side of the road. Celine hurried after her. She did not walk too closely after her. She stayed a metre or so back, M4 in hand, scanning the silent fields, the still patches of woodland, the great shadowed hulk of the dam. Nothing came whistling out of the dark at her. “Where are we going?” she asked. Makepeace kept on walking. They passed fields with farmhouses, some with the lights on. They kept on walking.

Celine’s legs ached and her helmet and her fatigues were heavy and the gun’s barrel kept drooping. She thought of the safehouse in the extraction point, where Dyachenko and Santamaria had been playing cards with a bottle of whiskey, smoking and waiting. They had rescued Murashko and saved the democratic hope of Polabia; they had pulled off another impossible mission. Why was she still here? Why had Blucher and Houseman had to face the Volk Battalion and yet she had slipped away? The God who had betrayed her father when he had been stabbed in the gut in Lausanne by a mugger now had passed His unfathomable judgement on her as well, and she was here, and Dyachenko and the others had escaped, and she was sure that Makepeace would escape as well, because eventually everyone escaped from the pit of despair that was Celine Rochat. Or they died. Such was God’s will. She stared at the back of the other woman’s head, her thick shaggy hair, and implored her. Leave me, then! Hurt me here and now, wound me, rip my heart out and leave me for dead!

Makepeace turned. “Hey.” she said, and she had the Glock in hand but it was not pointed at Celine. Her other hand was thrust out towards the fields on the other side of the road. There were barren lengths of soil bordered by barbed-wire fences. And beyond was a farmhouse, about three hundred metres away. The lights were off. “That’s our salvation.” Makepeace said, grinning. “Come on, Napoleon.”

“Don’t-” Celine began, but Makepeace was already scurrying forth, or doing the best attempt at scurrying her height allowed her. She was so tall and so strong and she had had bits of red between her teeth. Celine went on, checking her perimeter as she advanced, her boots slipping on the uneven soil of the field. Ice-tinged night air seeped through her jacket and made her treacherous body shiver. Her hands were shaking within her gloves. Makepeace had reached the house and Celine watched her shadow slink about it, Glock in hand, checking at the windows and at the door and in the barn. By the time Celine had arrived at the old Skoda out front Makepeace was upright, unfurled, walking leisurely, the Glock back in her waistband. “Oi, doggy.” she said. “Doesn’t look like there’s anyone home.”

Celine peered past her, at the farmhouse, a small one-storey brick cottage with wide windows that in the dark gave nothing away. A flowerbed sat barren before a front door which was dressed in peeling greenish paint. “We stay here?”

Makepeace went to the door. She bent down. There was a thudding and a click and then a groan as rusted hinges were forced into action. She snorted. “They left the key under the fucking mat. Christ. I know there’s a war on but still.” She wiped her filthy feet on the doormat and then, lazily pulling the Glock out of her trousers, she proceeded. Celine had no choice once more. The cottage was empty, and looked to have been empty for at least a few weeks. The ugly teal-shaded sofa in the living room was beginning to smell. There was dust upon all the bookshelves, crowded with communist-era literature rigidly uniform, spines all in suspicious alignment. Celina used her torch to check the kitchen and then the bedroom in the back and the bathroom with the enormous tub with its clawed iron feet grasping at the tiles. There was no one. They were alone.

She was stood in the bedroom with the lamp on the table illuminating both she and the room. She peered out the windows at the fields, at the expanse of the valley, checking for enemy vehicles, for that helo which still lingered, and listening to the intermittent gunfire that seemed to rise from everywhere in Polabia when there was nothing else to worry about. She wondered if any of it belonged to Blucher or Houseman. Then another sound: the sound of rushing water. “The bath works!” Makepeace called, her tone full of vivid joy. The water went on running. Celine sighed. She put the M4 down against the wall and unfastened her boots and slipped out of them. She removed the holster with her Manurhin in and hung it against the iron of the bedpost. She took her jacket off too only to find it was still cold, but then after a minute or so she had found the heating controls in a cupboard above the bed and so she turned the heating on. Without the jacket the stench of her sweat filled the room. She slid off her trousers and rested on the bed, and its plush comfort against her thighs made something within her judder and snap, and she fell back onto all of it, stinking and exhausted, and began to cry a little. Tears crawled down the sides of her face in silence. Then she was no longer crying. She sighed, feeling the weight of all her limbs drag her deeper into the duvet. What was this she felt? She realised after a moment that it was relief.

Celine was happy to have abandoned her comrades. She was happy to be alive. She was happy to lie upon a bed and feel her heart beating within her chest and to want to drink a glass of water and eat some meat and to lie under a bedcover and fall asleep without any idea of what tomorrow meant. She would shower next, she had decided. From the bathroom came the splashing of water and then the sound, tuneless and shameless, of Makepeace singing. “Some talk of Alexander,” she gargled, “and some of Hercules. And of Hector and Lysander, and such great names as these. But of all the world’s brave heroes…” Celine saw her in there, adrift in bubbles and soap, swallowed whole by that great clawed tub, forcing out that horrid tune, full of ignorant glee, scarred hands massaging scarred thighs, breasts, running across her pockmarked, ruined face, fingers rushing atop skin in a lustful panic, a frenzied feeding. She sighed, lying back. “Whene’er we’re commanded to storm the palisades, our leaders march with fusees, and we with hand grenades….” Makepeace – Mattie – in all her glory, clean and pristine, wet all over, dripping, rising and asking Celine, sleepily, Sergeant Rochat, would you dry me off…

She sat up. She saw her revolver in the holster draped over the bedpost. Celine went to the window and peered out. She saw only fields. She heard a gunshot somewhere, very far away. Makepeace was still singing. Now it was some Irish song. Irish songs or British songs. And a prison in Northern Ireland and corpses with bites taken out of them. Celine went to the kitchen. She found amidst the pans and the cutlery a small cupboard and within it bottles of arcane Polabian liquor. She picked one out, with a black label and an ornate carved wooden stopper, and she took it and drank straight from the bottle. It stung but not worse than everything else. She drank some more. It hit the counter with a thud. Once she had called her father, drunk, and asked him, what is it you want me to do? What have I done wrong?

My daughter, he had said. Go with God. That is all I ask. Go with God.

She spied herself in the surface of a pan, her blurry face sketched in steel. It was a little girl’s face, frowning, tired, yes, but without real pain, without anything that to mark it. She was ashamed of it suddenly. Blackwell had shown her Malone, whose features had been destroyed through battle after battle, the war-blasted terrain of his face telling a story of commitment, despite everything, to war and with that to peace…what did she, Celine, have to show for her promise? She felt to be shrinking by the second, to be dissolving. She took another drink. “Our father,” she heard herself intoning, “which art in heaven…”

“Oi.” Mattie was there in the doorway, wearing a skirt and a white blouse and nothing else. Her nipples stuck out rudely through the fabric. Her freshly-washed hair was a fluffy mass. Her eyes were as ever. “Hey, doggy. Come on. You’re not drinking without me, are you?”

Celine went rigid. But the drink softened her. She wiped her mouth. “Fuck off.”

Mattie frowned. She was leant against the door frame, slouched over, the blouse too loose. Celine could see the bare skin of her breasts, the tautness of her muscles. “What?” she asked.

Celine drank again. “I said fuck off.”

Mattie was tense against the door. “What do you mean, ‘fuck off’?”

Celine drank again, why not. She focused her attention on the beautiful thing in the doorway and forced it to stay there. “I said fuck off. I meant it.” she said. “I want to get drunk now. I want to do it alone. I don’t want you here.” Mattie was tenser. Mattie seemed to swell before her, this creature suddenly no longer grinning, no longer singing, her hair a fluffed-up mass of outrage, her body beneath those unfitting feminine clothes all tight, her hands balled up into terrible fists. “I saved your life.” she spat.

Celine drank once more, filling herself with courage. The bottle thudded too hard against the counter. She fixed herself upon Mattie. “You killed Houseman and Master Sergeant Blucher.” she said. “You let them die.”

Mattie stood as if she had been shocked. “I saved you.” She grunted. “Alright. Dumb fucking bitch. So what? Why does anyone care if those cunts are dead? You’re here. I’m here. What the fuck do you care about some idiots who didn’t know how to survive?” She leant forward now, all of her aimed towards Celine, her height and her muscle and her taut breasts against that flimsy fabric, her uneven fanged teeth and her wild hair. “What do you care?” she asked finally.

Celine held firm. “I care.” she said. She saw Mattie peer at her. “I care because they’re people too. Like you. Like us.” She stared at Mattie and Mattie, there in the doorway, stared back. Mattie laughed. “No.” she said. “They’re not like you. You’re still useful.” And she disappeared, heading into the corridor. Celine frowned to herself. She looked at the bottle she had been drinking from. She glanced at the window, where outside the dark fields predominated. “You’re useful, Celine.” Mattie said, remerging. She hung by the door now as if it was a kind of shelter.

“No I’m not.” she said. “I’m not a killer like you or Blucher. I didn’t even use my weapon today. I don’t know why they let me into SIGNAL.”

“No, you’re a shit soldier.” Mattie said. “I dunno why they did that either. But you’re cute.” This last word sounded so strange in Mattie’s harsh tone that Celine wondered if she’d even heard it at first. She blinked. Mattie waited in the doorway. She was not blushing or averting her eyes but staring more intensely, a duellist having issued a challenge. “I don’t want to be cute.” Celine said, as if that was what she felt. Mattie was gone.

Celine took the bottle of liquor (she still had no idea what it was, although it tasted vaguely like vodka) and went into the bathroom. The tiles were slippery and the mirror was steamed up. She stared into the empty bath for a few minutes. She took the shower head and stepped into the bathtub. There was already a towel on the rack above her. Had Mattie put it there? Was that an act of kindness? Celine hoped not. She stripped and washed herself. The hot water was sweet relief; it washed away the blood, her own and those of the men they had killed on their way to find Mattie and of Blucher and Houseman as well. She thought that Mattie might be right. She thought that Mattie was a horrible bitch. She thought that there was no way for them to get out of here, was there? Spider-2 wiped out in Polabia with no survivors. They could kill themselves before the Volk Battalion got hold of them. Mattie’s hands around her throat.

She was warm beneath the water. Her pale skin was free of scars. Her breasts were small and harmless. She touched between her own legs and found a welcoming moisture. God, she thought. The soap was slippery against her flesh, and she washed and when she was washing sometimes she ran her fingers over her own chest, or between her legs, and tried to ignore it while making it worse. By the time she was finished there was a void inside of her and she tried to pour more liquor into it and that also made it worse. She lingered near the bathroom door, naked. There was no sound from outside. After a second she went back and picked up her knickers and pulled them on. She went into the corridor and back to the bedroom. There was an outfit laid out on the bed for her, a lacey white blouse with ribbons upon the sleeves and a low-cut collar, and a tight black pencil skirt, like something an office lady might wear, and a pair of functional black knickers and bra. Celine looked around. She swigged her drink. She dressed. The skirt was a little loose on her skinny frame and the blouse, being contrarian, was too snug, except for where the chest obviously expected her to be better endowed; she tried leaning forward and the material fell in such a way she could see both breasts down to the nipple. She frowned and drank.

In the living room Mattie was sprawled out on the sofa, sipping a can of beer. She had a book in her other hand and was reading.  She had changed her clothes, the others laid out on the floor near the table. The book was Frankenstein, in English. Celine didn’t know why it was in English. Celine didn’t know anything. Mattie now wore a man’s suit and jacket, slightly tight on her tall, well-built frame, the shirt crumpled and half-buttoned, the jacket with the sleeves rolled up. Her bare feet stuck out of the trouser legs, waving from side to side at the end of the sofa.

She did not look up. “There’s a picture on the nightstand.” she said. “Did you see it?”

“No.” Celine said, staying at the other end of the room.

“A man and his wife. Young couple. I think they fled when the war came. Since there’s two suitcases missing there too. But they left so much behind. Like these nice clothes. Idiots.”

“I don’t think you should just go through their things like that.” Celine said, arms crossed.

Now Mattie looked up. She grinned. “And what’s that you’re drinking?”

Celine blushed. “Fuck off.”

“I don’t like you swearing, puppy.” Mattie said, eyes going back to her book. “And it’s bad to drink alcohol while you’re washing. The heat will get you drunk faster. Aren’t we still in a combat-ready situation? Where’s your revolver?”

“W-well, where’s your-” Mattie put her can down and picked up the Glock from the sofa arm, twirling it about on her ring finger. “Blackwell always says that they’re called sidearms for a reason.” she said. “But maybe you were too busy thinking about my arse to hear that.” Celine grunted. She stalked over to the sofa, one hand balled up into a fist, the other holding onto her bottle. It felt lighter. Had she drunk half of it already? She stood over Mattie. Mattie continued to recline, lowering the book and studying Celine with her cold grey eyes, her hair brushed out of her face, scars on her cheeks glowing white against her skin. “Your ass.” Celine began, and she was unsure how to continue.

“My arse.” Mattie said helpfully.

Celine tried to scowl. “You are an ass! You’re always singing those stupid songs and sending Houseman and I into the bloody fire, and you don’t even seem to care about anything, except-”

“Except killing people?”

“Yes!”

Mattie drank her beer. “That’s our job.”

“No it isn’t! Our job is to complete the mission and get home safe. And we are not home safe. We are here, and Houseman and Blucher are dead, and you, we, we’re…what are we doing? Drinking! And dressing up like a couple, and squatting in someone’s house! How are you so unprofessional? Why do you not care at all about anything? What is it that you…why did you save…why did you not let me die with the others, like we should have? What do you want? Who are you, Sergeant Makepeace? What kind of person are you at all? So fucking good at this, and so smug, and rude, and sexy, and nasty to everyone, and so used to killing…” She stopped to breathe. Her heart was pounding and she felt as if she was somewhere else watching herself, looming over Mattie with her bottle gripped tight, all of her open, exposed, vulnerable, her dripping heart torn out and held there for her superior to feast upon. Could they work together as a unit ever again? But then they would surely be dead by morning anyway. That was her plan, she remembered. She stood there. Mattie chuckled. “Hey, do you want to know why I didn’t let you die?” she said. “Honestly I kinda forgot, because you’re really fucking annoying when you talk. But just now you reminded me!”

“Why?” Celine asked.

Mattie turned on her grin. “Because when you bend over like that I can see your wee tits.” And she lay back on the sofa, smug and calm, and did not look away.

PART THREE: HER FANGS

Mattie racked the L129A1 and rested its stock on her shoulder and its bipod on the edge of the rooftop and leant forward and stared down the ACOG at the old eastern bloc cinema there on the west side of the square, sighing to herself, and she hit the PTT button in her earpiece and in her husky heavy West Yorkshire accent she began to sing. “I drove my Saracen through your garden last night…” The square sat empty. Funeral-faced socialist-realist houses mingled with fairy-tale Slavic old-town taverns, restaurants, tourist traps all along the edge of Margaret Thatcher Square. Grey pigeons hung out, ill at ease, beneath a matching sky, bulbous clouds sagging down to kiss the spires of the churches and the blistering primary shades of the billboards and the self-important breezeblock forms of the government buildings that rose up above the rooftops. There were bells from the cathedral in the east that, all wrapped up in themselves, boomed their way through the narrow winding streets and spilled out onto the communist boulevards and jangled the old metal of the gates and spike-topped iron fences and filled the city and beyond, preening overlord of the old patchwork countryside all about. Then with a last peal of thunder they were silent, and with its quiet greyness the capital reigned once more.

About two hundred metres from the rooftop of the office building the cinema awaited her. Mattie was leant forward on her belly beneath a great neon sign that sparked off at random points above her. She wore her fatigues and her red beret and her balaclava and it all kept out the post-Danubian cold which came crawling in from the carrion-fields of Ukraine and all beyond, and she had her gloved hands on the rifle, upon grip and handguard, and the wind whistled about her and blew the little tufts of her black hair peeking out from the beret this way and that, teasing her. The quiet continued below. She swallowed. “I kicked your front door down around at midnight,” she tried, and there was a buzz in her ear. “Spider-1-1,” Master Sergeant Blucher growled, “keep the channel clear, over.” The wind dug its stingers into the skin around her eyes. Above the neon sign groaned. “Hang on, Spider-C.” she said. “You’re supposed to say ‘sing up the ra’.”

There was a long pause. The cinema sat there, the corpse of a concrete beast, harsh yellow light shining out from its windows, its deep red façade the colour of blood. There were soldiers outside, men in Soviet-style uniforms with AK-74s at the ready, a row of ten men staring ahead over a barricade which lay before them spooled across the square like the beast’s unravelled guts. “Spider 1-1.” Blucher said. She waited, grinning to herself. She heard the sigh he made that wasn’t. “Spider-2 moving in, over.” he said.

“Roger, over.” she said. “Spider-1-2, Spider-1-3. Standby, over.”

“Roger.” Rochat and Houseman said together, slightly out of sync, so Rochat’s cute little Swiss-French tang was ahead of Houseman’s generic American TV-voice; but both of them were ready, she knew. Houseman occupied the fifth-floor office below her with the stairwell covered. Rochat had the truck in the garage. “And by the way,” Mattie said, “the next line is, “oh something’s telling me boy, you’re avoiding me,” and she began to sing, “and when I find you, you will go for your-’”

There was a crack from inside the cinema. She sighed. “Fuck.” Her finger found the PTT. “Spider-1, look to it. We might be in the shit here.” She let go of the PTT. “I fucking hope we’re in the shit.” she said, and she peered through the ACOG. The men in front of the cinema were not moving. Oh! One of them was; a smart boy on the right, talking to his comrades, a sergeant, she saw from his insignia. The smart boy sergeant was gesturing to the cinema doors, jerking his head towards two men, who slowly began to peel away from the barricade with their rifles readied. There was another crack from within. The sergeant was more frantic now, his young face, in all of its Slavic nobility, animated, and the two men he had jerked at were now heading up the stairs to the glass doors, and two more with them. Mattie chuckled. The sight fluttered of its own accord across muscle, bone, sinew and organs. It landed gently, like a wandering butterfly, upon the side of the sergeant’s head. He turned back to the others, lovely blue eyes narrowed. There was a scowl painted over his pretty face.

An anticipation swelled in Mattie’s breast, as thick and hot and viscous as love, and through her fatigues and her balaclava she was warm, sweaty, alive, grinning once more, alive in The Cage blood-smeared and filthy and naked with bits of some poor bastard stuck between her teeth, only a fragment of that, of course, only a shadow of true happiness, but nevertheless her finger curled about the trigger and she squeezed and BANG! Petrova Bana torn open, shattered, ripped asunder by the hand of God descending, whirling, slamming into the skull of the clever boy who now was no longer a sergeant, spraying him across his comrades in a tidal wave of red and white, bone and blood, that-which-was-formerly-man, and they, panicked, shouting, and she already had the next trapped within the ACOG’s adoring gaze, the most important, for a single moment, that he would ever be to anyone…

The playful thud of the rifle against her shoulder. Six of them down now. Four left, two firing into the building. All of the city blinking awake in the early morning haze, the leviathans of State Security, the Militia, perhaps in nearby barracks the Armed Forces too, just for fun, all now aware on some deep-set neurological level that events were occurring. “Spider-1.” she said idly, shooting another Polabian soldier in the chest. “Hostiles inbound. Hold onto your arses.” She heard Rochat whimper down the line and grinned at that too. One of the enemy took aim at the building; his AK barked, but it was only a bark. The bullets went nowhere. She knew and had known from the start that they would not see her. She had been here two days ago and looked the place over and she had gotten an A for Maths in her GCSEs and so had figured it out. The other two turned as the doors opened and then Spider-2 in full kit emerged withBlucher at their head, a four-person formation, Blucher and Santamaria in the lead with Dyachenko and Song shoulders pressed against the man in their midst, a short brown-haired, badly-suited figure, Hasan Murashko, leader of the Polabian opposition, who stumbled and staggered along with them. There was wet blood on his face. “Spider-2!” she chirped. “Good of you to join us. Spider-1, secure the evac.”

“Roger.” Rochat and Houseman said. Mattie hefted up her rifle and closed the bipod and got up, her lanky six foot two of woman moving with grace to the stairs. She was aware of the ringing in her ears. Of the blood that had blossomed from the dead soldiers like flowers in the blissful springtime of her soul. Aware that she was going to lose it again if she met anyone on the way down. The stairwell was dark but empty and she was alone, boots stomping on the lonely concrete, torch leading the way, she counting the floors as she descended with her rifle hefted ready just in case. At the fifth floor she hit the PTT. “Spider-1-3, are you,” she sighed, “Oscar Mike?”

“Spider-1-1,” Houseman said, breathing heavily, “second, f-floor. Almost, almost fucking, there,” he paused, and rattled off some gunfire, “there’s hostiles here, by the fucking way. T-thanks to you, you fucking-”

“Thanks Spider-1-3.” she said, and she resumed her descent. There was more gunfire from below, echoing like the roar of Satan at the lowest level of hell. She kept on. At each landing she swept her rifle into the corridor and saw only emptiness. This office building opened at seven o’clock and now was only six. She saw empty desks, empty rooms, empty hallways. She went on. There was more fire from her northwest and so she followed it, trundling down corridors, past photographs and offices. There were bodies sometimes, men trapped inert in dark puddles. Houseman’s work. At the garage she spied: Houseman behind the concrete, cowering, and the van, where Spider-2 was concentrated, firing into the dark beyond, and then Rochat cowering even more behind a series of boxes; and then, beyond, near the doorway, were six Polabian soldiers and five of them were with AKs but one she heard, by its deafening report, had a KS-23, or similar. The illumination from this display lit up the garage and filled her ears and was shrill and sharp and horrid and she was in love with it. She gripped her L129A1. Beneath her balaclava she grinned.

Five of them died in one sweep.

The last one, with the KS-23, saw her, and readied that enormous monstrous weapon, thrusting it towards her as she thrust herself towards it. Her boots clacked on the concrete. He raised his shotgun but she was too close – can you be too close, for a shotgun? but she saw the fear in his young eyes and saw him, as he prepared to fire, simultaneously twist his body away in retreat. But contradiction meant death. Mattie collided with him and as he flailed and toppled over she was firm and singular in her purpose and he hit the concrete hard, skull cracking as his head snapped back against the floor. She wrenched the barrel of her L129A1 between his lips. His eyes trapped within hers. The metal of the gun thrust hard into the back of his throat. His gasping muffled cries. They paused there at the cusp of action. “We are the British Army,” she hummed, “and we’re here to take your land.” And she pulled the trigger.

“Christ.” Houseman was saying when she came stomping back over, boots shiny with gore, “Christ, Makepeace, you fucking lunatic,” he paused to loose a burst from his M4A1 at another troop of Polabians coming up out of the tunnels, “you’re fuckin’ nuts, you know that?”

“Into the truck.” Blucher growled. Towering over all, even Mattie, and thrice as broad as her anyhow, his thick beard and Teutonic monotone and his enormity making almost terrifying even to her. Spider-2 was already there, waiting with the rear doors open, Dyachenko leant out with her AK readied, under her helmet and through her balaclava her narrowed eyes staring and mean. Houseman fired another volley at the enemy, still swearing. Rochat, smaller than any of them, barely present in her fatigues, five foot something and without balaclava or beard, this baby-faced little Swiss girl with red cheeks from the cold like a doll, hugging her M4A1, an accessory taken from an Action Man figure and pushed into her little Barbie hands, looked up at Mattie and seemed to flinch. “Sorry, master sergeant.” she said. “Into the van, mon coeur.” Mattie said, patting her with a great gloved hand and shoving her into Dyachenko’s waiting protection. It was only she and Blucher outside. Blucher faced the advancing enemy with his tiny MP5K, as unfitting with he as Rochat’s M4 was with her, and he lit up the corridor with covering fire.

Mattie stumbled past, into the van, and fell in besides the corpse-still Murashko, moustache frozen upon his face, who peered through his thick glasses at the mass of webbing and camouflage and the barrels of weapons all assembled around him. Rochat was in the driver’s seat, gunning the engine. Blucher launched himself into the van with a hail of bullets as his outro and slammed the doors shut. “Drive!” he ordered, and Rochat drove, headlights slicing apart the gloom of the garage. They flew and in a splintering of wood had broken the barrier and the metal around them was made into a mad percussive instrument as gunfire exploded all around; but the van was free, screeching through Margaret Thatcher Square past State Security, Militia, Armed Forces – little shafts of heaven broke out all around them as the van’s walls were punctured by haphazard automatic rifle fire. Rochat whimpered. “Steady.” Blucher growled. “Steady.” Mattie held her L129A1 close to her chest, against her breasts, feeling hot all over. To be so close to Lady Death, to be in the next room over, listening through the walls to Her happy convulsions…

Then came the artillery fire from the National Liberation Army, timed just right, and then came the van jerking madly through the city streets as they exploded. They barrelled down the eastern boulevard out of the city, chased by Milita cars all the way through old Polabia, under Gothic archways and gargoyle-dressed bridges, past socialist apartments and prefabs and up towards, at the edge of the ancient city walls, the brand new 1990s-vintage shopping complex, all glass and plastic; Mattie, peering through the holes in the van doors, saw the Militia vehicles and heard them open fire, officers leant out of the windows. She rose and  staggered to the doors and kicked them open. The M1291A was loaded and in her grip. The road was rushing by beneath. “Keep ‘em busy!” Blucher barked. Mattie grinned, leant down on one knee.

She hit the driver of the first car with one shot. The car veered away, drunk and mad, and slammed into a lamppost, crumpling up like an old tin can with a screech and a spray of gore from within. The second came in its wake, two officers firing AK-47us at her without aiming. A bullet sliced several hairs away. The van veered rightward, on a sharp turn, and there was yelping around her, Song falling into Houseman into Murashko, who was swearing in Russian. She missed two shots. The car came close. She saw the Militia officers in their dark uniforms, their aged faces. So dour, she thought, as if already this was a funeral, as if already they were here to pay their respects to her. The one leant out of the right window needed to shave. “Two hundred metres!” Rochat called in her cute Alpine purr. Mattie raised the rifle and hit one officer and then the other, both flopping out of the windows of the car and falling like pinecones from a tree to the road. The car screamed, surging forth, and slammed into the van’s rear, and she was bounced forward, nearly falling, and her rifle went from her grip and the strap cut into her back and she, unbalanced, wobbled over the abyss. She saw the driver behind the windshield draw his pistol and raise it to the glass. A bullet whistled past, slammed into the wall behind her. “Christ!” Houseman cried.

“The target, Makepeace!” Blucher said. “Careful!”

Dyachenko’s voice in her ear. “Better not let your dad down, Mattie.”

“A hundred and fifty metres!” Rochat called. Ah, Mattie thought, she had such a lovely voice. She reached up and yanked down her balaclava. Her scarred face ached in the cold wind. She spat. “Sing up the ra.” she muttered, as the driver of the car (one more behind on his flanks, guns already spitting hell at them) took aim. And she leapt from the back of the van straight into the windshield, her boots cracking apart the glass and driving themselves, full-force, into the driver’s vulnerable face. Glass shredded her legs and a gun went off and her whole body was twisted the wrong way as the car twisted itself sharply rightward. But she was inside; she was sat atop the driver, boots pounding his nose to mush, and she found her gun and, her spine pressed into the dashboard hurting like hell, she fired once at him and tried to contort herself onto the passenger seat, gore and noise and motion and pain and she was there, the car juddering as it was hit by one of the flankers, and she fell into the passenger seat, her back slapping against leather, and she grabbed the wheel and span it and the car with a horrid grinding turned and she saw through the windshield the other car nosing its way past the ratfucked mess she had made out of its comrades and she levelled the rifle and through the glass-

Three shots. Driver and passenger dead. The other car rolled to a halt next to hers, gently hitting its side with a pathetic last thud. She sat back in the seat, exhaling. Her fatigues were sliced open and her nose hurt and her leg hurt more but only when she moved it. In her trembling grip she cradled the L129A1. There were sirens outside. More engines. She laughed and sat up and her whole body was full of sharp complaints. She eased open one of the car’s doors. And she went out into the city, limping and covered in blood. Mattie was grinning. The taste of blood in her mouth was sweet. It was cold in Petrova Brana, capital of the Republic of Polabia, and the cold touched her wounds and taunted them. But as well it woke her up. There were cars approaching along the boulevard, State Security and Militia and Armed Forces. She spat out a wad of crimson onto the tarmac and readied her gun and faced them.

–

“First of all,” the man named Blackwell was saying, “I would like to tell you what it is to join us. You may hold some ideas about us that, while not inaccurate, are rooted more in your own objectives than in what we actually represent. We are not peacekeepers. We are not GI Joe. We are not world police. We will not help your career back home or help you become a superhero. You will not be saving the world. You will not be loved. You will be a dog, serving the tenuous and amorphous cause of peace. And peace will not love you back. You will die here, in this job, abused and broken and useless. And you will, if you are the right kind of person, be glad for that. If not then you should go back to whoever recommended us to you and you should inform them as forthrightly as you can that they were talking bollocks.” He paused. He towered over her, although he was only a head taller. His fatigues were old British Army, faded and tight against his muscular body. His mutton chops clung to the severity of his chin. His hands were clasped behind his back. The old Victorian office around the two of them was no refuge; its varnished wooden surfaces and shelves of old books and strangely crimson portrait of the king all redirected her to he, their master, the captain named Blackwell, who stood and waited for her as her father had told her the grim reaper waited for everyone at the end of the long and twisting trail of life, inevitable and calm. Outside it was sunny, and birds were chirping. Inside was only Blackwell. On his desk was Milton’s Paradise Lost, the Penguin Classics edition, but somehow that too was him. She was sweating beneath her civilian coat, absurdly cute with its black ribbons all down the front.

“I understand.” Celine Rochat said, clenching her skinny fists. She was sat in the great armchair, engulfing her in red leather, while he stood on the other side of the desk, those eyes, like lens of some new and awful military machine, taking her in. “And you still wish to join Special Intelligence?” he asked.

“Yes, sir.” she said. She wore her blonde hair in two short pigtails, a civilian affection. In the service it had been cut shorter. She wondered what he was seeing, then. A little girl? Thin and small and with ribbons and pigtails. But Celine had done fifty lengths in the pool that morning and had once beaten a man to death with her Manurhin MR 73 revolver until there had been pieces of skull and brain upon the grip. “Actually, sir, no one recommended me for Allied Nations service.” she said. “I’ve been interested in switching careers for some time.”

Blackwell sliced her into pieces with his gaze. “I read your dossier, sergeant. GIGN at your age is probably the best your career could possibly be. An impeccable service record. Except, of course, for one recent incident.” Celine bit down on an exhalation. Blackwell’s lip trembled. “I will not refer to it in detail, because I’m sure you knew it would have to be brought up.” he said. “But what I do have to ask you is if that incident plays some role in your pursuit of a career change to Special Intelligence?”

Celine was quiet for a moment. “It does, yes, sir.”

He smiled. “Excellent.”

She frowned. “Sir?” Blackwell sat down at the desk finally. He reached into the front drawer and with a careful slowness which the cynic in her assumed was calculated he pulled out three dossiers and laid them out between them on the desk. “I want to introduce to you several of our current operators.” he said. “Just their basic details. Then I want you to think carefully about whether you think you would be able to work with them. You understand, sergeant, that you’re quite a talented police officer, and I don’t say that casually. But as well, that you are a young woman, about five foot ten, and, if I can say so, pretty and small and likely, whatever your assets as an operator, to face a desperate challenge to prove yourself amongst some of the most terrible people to ever enter military service.”

Celine was unsure what to say to this and so said nothing and then realised that, sitting there, in her ribbons and with her pigtails, she was likely only proving him correct, and so she tried to stiffen herself and sat up in her seat. “Yes, sir.” she said eventually. Blackwell continued to open the first dossier. He slid the coloured photograph within across to her. The man depicted upon it was a human crag, a face folded up and cracked and dented, bones broken and reset in odd shapes, at wrong angles, two watery eyes staring out from behind a twisted nose, set under a jagged, wobbling brow; his head was shaven and his mouth was set in a permanent scowl. Celine saw this face and suppressed her response, which had been to flinch, for as Michaud had always said that it was rabbits that flinched and not police officers. “Lieutenant Jack ‘Violence’ Malone.” Blackwell said. “Irish-American. Demolitions expert with Delta Force. Thirty-six years old. He was under investigation for sexual assault in Iraq when his CO, knowing he was a capable soldier, made him an offer he could not decline. His psychiatric profile shows severe symptoms of psychopathic tendencies, paranoid delusions, and substance abuse issues. On the battlefield, he’s as calm as anything. But afterwards…well, he commands Section 6 now, and he does a damn good job, regardless of his hobbies.”

Celine peered into those cold eyes. “Gosh.” she said. Blackwell took the scowling image of Malone and slid it back into the dossier and, with the expert sleight of hand of a seasoned magician, swapped the next dossier in. He opened the folder and showed her another image. This man was black, with a narrow face set in a grin, and almost unscarred but for a deep arc across his forehead. His hair too was shaved, and he had a short goatee denoting where his chin had been subsumed into the girth of his neck. “Adedayo Goodwill.” Blackwell said. “Sergeant of the 7th Division of the Nigerian Army. Nice man, pleasant character. Married. We took him in after a tour in Yobe; he gunned down over two hundred Islamic militants in the course of a day. And when he ran out of bullets he took to fear tactics; he took a machete and skinned several of the survivors alive, slowly, and let their screams scare the rest of the enemy away.” He sighed. “His wife and my wife do Pilates together.” He held the photograph there, for her to regard. She thought she was scared, but she wasn’t sure. This man, Goodwill, and the other, Malone, were different in so many ways and yet at once she saw that they were the same, and that it was the eyes, and that even in GIGN, even in the worst of Clichy-sous-Bois, she had never quite seen eyes like that…so it was that the worst addicts had wild faces, faces that seemed, in that panicked moment, to have abandoned humanity itself, lost in whatever drug had led them there, whatever poverty had made them so desperate. But these men before her, their expressions contained humanity…they were men who had killed and done worse, maybe, and who still smiled, or scowled, or held in their eyes that spark of intelligence even as they stood there the products of and deliverers of so much grinding, awful violence. She thought she was scared. She might almost have been something else. She swallowed. “And the third dossier, sir?”

Blackwell’s expression was grim. He took Goodwill away and took the third dossier and, on a whim, it seemed, flicked it open with a casual hand. He peered at the picture. He closed it. He slid it away. “God.” he said. “Well, I meant for this to be someone else. Must have gotten the order wrong in my drawer.” There was something theatrical in his tone there too. Celine thought that she was being made a fool of, or an ass of, as Michaud would have said. She stiffened. “Can’t I see, sir?” she asked.

He paused, hand upon the closed dossier. “No, no.” he said. “I meant only to spook you. You certainly seem spooked. I hope, sergeant, the two examples of Malone and Goodwill, two of our most feared operators, might give you some pause in deciding to throw your career away with Special Intelligence…”

“I want to see it.” she said.

Blackwell almost seemed to smile. “Alright. Very well. But this one might shock you.” He slid the dossier around and peeled it open. Celine felt her heart hurling itself against the cage of her chest. She saw the photograph unveiled there on the desk and this madness stopped, and everything stopped, and she stared down at the face of a woman. The face itself was narrow, refined; something to it that was perversely aristocratic, with sharp cheeks and a gently curved chin, a subtle brow and a pair of storm-grey eyes, slender pinkish lips…it was the daughter of some wealthy family, the expression and shape of money, as far removed from Malone or Goodwill as was possible. But the perversion was there etched into her lovely pretty features; because all over them were scars and cuts. Malone’s face had been destroyed, smashed into something beyond recognition. This woman’s face was still there, although with a jagged slice along the side of her forehead and an inverted-v mark loosely over the bridge of her nose, with her cheek cut into an X and with a narrow little indentation in her upper lip and a piece of her chin missing, and with a great whitish patch of irregular skin besmirching her slender neck. And she was smiling too, but her smile itself was jagged, her front teeth slightly crooked, an oddly childish final little touch at odds with the emptiness of her eyes and the age of her scars and the beauty buried deep beneath the surface. Celine stared into this woman’s cold, silent eyes, which the smile did not extend to. The smile, that innocent strange smile, was all that had any warmth about her. And it was not warmth entirely. The smile was innocent, Celine realised, but it was more than that. It contained within it a terrible cruelty.

“Staff Sergeant Matilda Makepeace.” Blackwell said. “British Army.” The red beret perched rakishly on her wolfish, dark hair had a badge upon it with the emblem of the Royal Military Police. “From a good family. Sir Percy Makepeace, her father, works with British Armaments. She declined a commission and joined the army in Northern Ireland several years ago.” Blackwell paused. Makepeace stared up with those shark’s eyes. “Her unit was sent to put down a prison riot instigated by ex-IRA men at HM Gravelines, near Derry. No one quite knows what happened, exactly. Some of it, even for us, is still classified. But we know that of the platoon sent to contain things at the prison she was the only survivor. And that of the prisoners…there were none. The bodies of the prisoners, so the RUC reported when they moved in, were disfigured. Cut apart with knives, mutilated, strung up or beaten badly even after death. In more than one case they seemed to have had bites taken out of them. The only person found there relatively intact was Staff Sergeant Makepeace.”

Celine stared back. “What did she look like?”

For the first time Blackwell seemed to be halted. “Excuse me?”

She was blushing, she realised. But it was too late now. “What did she look like, when they found her?” she asked. “Was it like that?” Blackwell was quiet for a moment. He appeared to smile. He turned the page of the dossier. The photograph was small and poor-quality and had been taken in the dark, but Celine could make out the bars of a prison cell on one side, and a floor below that appeared to be black with dirt which, after an instant she realised was covered in blood, dotted with darker shapes which might have been shadows or might have been pieces of bodies. The figure in the photograph was stood up but hunched over, wearing what might have been the ragged remains of a British Army uniform. What stood out was the darkness; the blood which covered every inch of them, the arm rudely broken at the elbow soaked in crimson, the shimmering bruises and oozing wounds that layered their face. The figure’s hair was over their eyes but that did not matter. What mattered was the mouth. What mattered was the smile. Celine found Blackwell again. “What section was she in?” she asked.

“Section 3.” Blackwell said, too quickly. Celine noticed how quickly he’d said it. She noticed the whole interview; this calm room, the birds outside that still went on singing, the cool English air that came drifting in lackadaisically from without. “Staff Sergeant Makepeace is in Section 3.” Blackwell said. “She is subordinate to myself and to Master Sergeant Blucher, a solid comrade of mine. She is restrained. For now.”

Celine thought. Celine did not think for a long time. It seemed like a long time. “Sir.” she said from the other side of the desk. “If I join Special Intelligence,” she said, and she swallowed, and she was conscious of herself there, and of him there, and of between them the photograph of Matilda Makepeace, non-commissioned officer, murderer, potential cannibal, “then I would like to work with Section 3.”

Now Blackwell really did smile. He had been doing so all along but now it was open, and she realised that he had been waiting for her to arrive here at this specific point in the conversation and that it had all gone as planned, and that she had all along been meant to prove herself as equal to Malone and Goodwill and Makepeace, and that she had, here, because what the fuck (she thought, belatedly) was she doing, getting so interested in people like this? And yet it was too late, for she had shown her hand and he had seen her soul and now she knew she would be working with Section 3. And she would be working with Matilda Makepeace. He extended his hand across the desk and she took it. His grip was firm, a little too firm. “Welcome to SIGNAL, sergeant.” he said.

PART TWO: DOG DAYS

In 1933, Austrian chancellor Engelbert Dolfuss, a short, generally unpopular man, founded a political party. Out of right-wing militias, traditional conservative parties, and landed estates, he put together an organisation called the Fatherland Front, which ruled the tiny, dysfunctional Republic of Austria (rechristened the Federal State of Austria) for five years until 1938, when Dolfuss’s successor Schuschnigg was removed from office during the Nazi Anschluss. The Fatherland Front claimed to be non-partisan, to represent all of Austria, to be able to overcome the dysfunction and political polarisation that had defined Austrian politics since the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. To this end it learned from Italian fascism, with Dolfuss establishing the chancellor as a supreme leader, banning the social democrats, and reemphasizing apparently traditional Austrian values under a corporatist system of political-economy, one where the church became an emblem of a separate, superior Austro-German identity. This Ständestaat was never, however, even as superficially unifying as fascism or – fatefully – as the Nazism over the border. The Fatherland Front never became a mass organisation. Faced with the competition of Greater German nationalism which the Third Reich embodied, Austrofascism was blown away by the stiff breeze of Hitlerian aggression, and disappeared into ash on the winds of history.

What is the relevance of this to today? It’s fashionable now to talk of a resurgent fascism, a rising tide of far-right extremism from Germany to America to Japan. But the model of classical fascism that we interpret this rising tide through is an inexact match, for there is no Fuhrer, no Party, no mass-militarism; indeed, the new fascists, despite their posturing, often seem barely more popular than the loathed ‘centrists’ they are displacing. They do not command blackshirts or legions of ex-military supporters but at best bands of terminally-online, alienated young men and Facebook-rotted boomers, and have not marched on the capital and seized power but exist in timid, uneasy tandem with existing institutions, and rather than radically reimagining the relationship between state and citizen in service of not just the Volk but the pursuit of a New World Order, seem content to fight petty, nasty rearguard actions against any and all forms of potential change, slavishly defending not just the remains of the pre-2009 socio-economic default but the American-led global order itself.

It’s true, of course, that German, Japanese and Italian fascisms were all less radical and powerful than they pretended. Fascism was always a defence of the status quo in revolutionary clothing. But we must observe that the current apparent right-wing ‘vibe shift’ lacks a certain heft, that Trump’s military parade was lame rather than intimidating, that the tubby tactical warriors of ICE are a far cry from the hardened Freikorps street fighters, that Reform UK insisting on painting St. George’s Cross on random bits of British towns is not really on the same level as the giant Mussolini face building. This is not to say the current fascists aren’t dangerous. They’re as dangerous any idiot with a hand grenade is, regardless of how well he knows how to use the thing. But we have to look at these people, the “alt-right”, the “populists”, etc. as their own entity, and try to understand what separates them from their inspiration. And I’d contend that the key to this lies in Austrofascism.

All of the classic fascisms of history were variations of the tune first tootled out by Mussolini, who himself took notes from both traditional Italian nationalism, the bad hangover of the disappointing nineteenth century and the Soviet Union, the real revolution of the twentieth. All had their Party, their Leader, their mass movement and their focus on both pseudo-scientific state-led cruelty and military-first developmentalism. Many of these ‘succeeded’, in the narrow terms that fascism sets for itself, in that they seized power through the failure of traditional institutions, pursued national glory, and exploded in flames, in death that was only failure in that it did not take the nation itself with it. Austrofascism’s failure is unique in that it was a fascist moment that seized power through the failure of the institutions, but then failed singularly to move beyond this initial implantation stage of the parasite’s life cycle. In literal terms the cause of this was the Anschluss, but the Anschluss was only possible because of Austrofascism’s inability to spread throughout the cells of the host organism, or in other words, the failure of its vision of an Austrian Volk to find purchase in the psyche of the actually existing nation.

The lack of an Austrian nation itself was what caused this. Japan, Italy and Germany, as well as Romania or Bulgaria or Hungary, were all ‘young’ nations of the nineteenth century, with frustrated national visions fertile for the promise of a more radical, special path, Sonderweg, for a skeleton key development that could ensure the nation could prosper without compromise. Austria was not a nation at all, but the vestigial remainder of a lost empire. The Austrian path was that of being embedded within the Holy Roman Empire, ghost of Rome and of western universalism, and so unable to exist in the same terms of frustrated dreams that inspired the nations of traditional fascism, and then suddenly being ejected from the husk of universalism in 1918. Austrofascism was a mismatch of host and parasite that the parasite could not survive.

To embark upon the quixotic fascist project, which has also never succeeded and never will, there must at least be some sort of phantom nation the fantasies of which can motivate the lethal dreamers into action. Austria lacked such a phantom in 1933 – it had only reluctantly come into existence in 1919 as a result of the collapse of the dynasty around it, being born by default as all the other nations achieved independence. Led by Karl Renner, an intensely anti-Semitic social democrat who believed anyway that unification with Germany was the future, “German-Austria” was denied this and so Austria, a republic consisting largely of imperial Vienna and the rural provinces around it, was forced to continue. The political deadlock caused by the intractable problems of such a state led straight to Austrofascism, and yet Austrofascism’s particularly doomed character, unable even to achieve the glorious fascist death it dreamt of, was formed by the state around it. It was an empty movement because there was then nothing Austrian to force into the seductive shape of the Volk. Austria now has achieved nationhood, if we’re pretending things like that are real. That was the death knell of the last ember of old universalism. What of the new?

The universalism of the Roman Empire died after Napoleon; the end of Austria-Hungary was the last ember of its dying flame. But a fresh universalism of the west was then already displacing it, that of the Pax Britannica, the British Empire, which dominated the nineteenth century as Rome had the ancient world. This British Empire had grown out of Britain as the Roman Empire had out of Italy, and become in many respects profoundly non-British over the centuries, as at home in India or Hong Kong as in London, and it fought off all challengers during its century of hegemony, and even when, as Rome had, it passed, exhausted, from history, its own Byzantium, the radical project of the United States, was able to take the reins of the Anglo-led world order, an order defined by rule through globalised capitalism and financial institutions regulated by British/American machinery, and continue it without much trouble.

This imperium, named finally in the Biden interregnum as the “global rules-based order”, is a universalism rooted not in the Christian-Roman mandate of the prior but in a mandate bestowed by “rules”, by the rules of the free market, of international trade and of capitalism.  It is committed to the ever-increasing interconnectedness of the world, a system defined by bringing goods, resources and services together in a complex web that leads all goods, resources and services to find their rightful place as the fruits of Anglo-Saxon labour. For over a hundred years it worked with Britain as the hub of what we might call the ‘Anglosphere’, the imperial core to which all that was rendered unto Caesar flowed; the transition to America is a fundamental change, but one that has significant continuity with the British past, and which continues, under the leadership of an enlightened liberal core, to shrink the world for the benefit of that core.

But with the fall of Britain in the European Civil War of 1914-1945, an unwanted British nation was born. The Empire’s networks collapsed, and a nation-state was left behind, a project launched by the imperial elite as an attempt to find a place within the same order they had once led. This nation-state did not come into existence as a trauma response to the imperium, as in the traditional developmentalist Sonderweg that led to twentieth century fascism, but stumbled out of that imperium almost by accident, finding itself uncertain of what it even was in such a novel context. Was this ‘United Kingdom’ a British nation or an English one? ‘England’ could be said to have existed once, alongside the other nations that had been amalgamated into the United Kingdom, but centuries of merging with the rest of the world had confused what any of these terms meant anymore. What was there in this new-old United Kingdom that was uniquely British, that could be preserved sans empire? What even could Englishness be, if such a thing could be found? In the end the nation-state of Britain was a shallow project, which the elite began to abandon as soon as their efforts came close to prevailing. They hadn’t understood that the British nation they wished to rule, if brought to existence, would also awaken the class consciousness of the people who had been made British. When national and class consciousness peaked in the late seventies, an inconvenient roadblock on the path to Greatness desired by the post-imperial elite, with Thatcherism they then sought to end the national project. They sought to curb National Britain, to tie it to a role as a major hub in the America-led hegemony which could use globalisation to neuter the threat of a real conscious British nation emerging. So Britain was an orphaned entity, a non-nation which had been teased with nationhood only for its masters to abandon it to chase the fantasy (as they still do today) of Global Britain, of Singapore-on-Thames, on escaping the pains of national existence through globalised trade and exchange.

It’s this strange contortion that has led to the rise of something that echoes the last time a non-national remnant of a grand global empire was forced to exist as a nation. Anglofascism. Like Austrofascism, it is fascism but deformed. The fascist parasite’s infecting the Sonderweg states was a process of symbiosis, in which the parasite promised the frustrated nation that its dreams could be found on this special path. Britain has no organic national frustrations of this kind. It has not been subjugated, or threatened with colonisation, or failed to live up to anything. Its confusion over its national identity is not a mobilising crisis in the sense that the First World War was for Italy and Germany, or the Meiji Restoration was for Japan.

The fascism that has come to the UK is, like Austrofascism, something does not fit its curious, anomalous historical state, half-global and half-national. It is sustained by barrages of press reporting about migrant rape gangs and transgender Churchill-hating leftists, but also largely by the tired “centre” of mediocre politicians deliberately ceding ground to it, a process of clumsy artificiality that does not reflect the attitudes of a public that, even now, is more concerned with the cost of living and the state of the NHS than forming a proud British Volk. The UK, due to its imperial heritage, is a non-national state ruled by a racist, classist but vaguely cosmopolitan monarchy and elite, which still has the habits and mindset of the old universalist project, which Global Britain is an Austro-Hungarian echo of. It does not have a Sonderweg laid out before it. Here we come to how this vital factor has affected this new fascism, deformed it, made it so sad and silly and lethally laughable. Prior fascisms were disrupters of the old, at least superficially. This Anglofascism is trapped, because without the well of national grievance to feed it the growth into lethal militarist Resident Evil boss is stillborn. Without the strength to overturn the centre it becomes the centre, and the transformation is incomplete, the host rotting away, confused and maddened, unable to overcome and unable to retreat. This Anglofascism is the death of the second western universalism.

For a true fascist revival in Britain the vessel would have to be England, a historical nation which does, dimly, have a mythology of frustration and struggle rooted in the pop culture version of the Norman Conquest. But then England has been dormant for so long, and so much of itself has been absorbed by Britain as Britain has absorbed the world, that there is little to work with, unless the fascists start getting into Edward the Confessor, the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, and reading a whole lot of Venerable Bede. So Britain remains trapped in a half-functioning fascism, ruled by a monarch who its fascists swear absolute loyalty to even as they deplore his ‘woke’ courting of ethnic minorities and other faiths, head of a national church which the fascists despise for its feeble liberalism and general tolerance, ruler of a British state which the fascists loathe not for its actual venality and stagnation but for its perceived tolerance of alien impurity. Just as the Austrofascists could not make Austria work as a Volk, and despised it, and were swallowed by the German fascists next door, Britain’s modern fascists, although they cannot say or even think it, are set by their very instincts against Britain, which is not a nation. And there is no one left to swallow them. They cannot fight the whole world. They can only sit, sucking at the host’s flesh, until parasite and host both are out of nourishment.

It is this, embodied most strongly in Britain and America, the non-nations at the heart of the imperium, that gives Anglofascism, the fascism of today, its muddled character. Anglofascism was born in the rules-based global order, and everywhere it flourishes, from Britain to America to Germany to Japan to Korea to Russia, it bears this contradiction on its forehead, that it cannot escape the Anglosphere any more than Austria could make itself a second Germany. Globalisation has stamped the “Anglo” upon of all these fascists, no matter their language. All nations have become part of the imperium, the brotherhood of man, and so all nations are tainted, inconsistent, flush with foreign blood and foreign food and foreign words and foreign ideas. Anglofascism as such is rebelling against the foreign, asserting the nation, but can only find in the nation itself pollution and decay. It finds itself the defender of the nation’s opposite, its fellow Anglofascisms, its fascist international; it finds itself defending free trade and American hegemony, and speaking in American words, and even believes sometimes that the politics of its own nation are America’s, because America is the hub of the imperium and, unable to worship such degraded, compromised, useless nationalisms, the Anglofascists cling to all they have ever known, which is Empire.

The original fascists failed in part because they truly were nationalists, and the Nazis despised the Italians and the Japanese knew nothing about the Nazis and the Italians were always secretly loathing the Nazis. The Anglofascists, the true globalists, are loyal unto death to Donald Trump, who is less Führer then world-emperor, America personified, the Based God whose power of hegemony is visible in the grim imitators who populate the world’s politics now, men and women who do not wish to be Führers themselves but only wish to show that their nation can fit into the hegemon’s Vibe Shift as ingratiatingly as possible, to show that they hate woke and George Floyd and Hilary Clinton and that CHRIST IS KING and that the free market is the best and that Elon Musk’s memes are super dank. These idiots will be globalisation’s last defenders even as their American pipers continue to lead them into abysses and off of cliffs, will stand up for The West, which they can only conceive of in Anglo-American terms, until the end.

But these Anglofascists are not jaded ex-soldiers. They do not control the lethal military might of the men of the thirties in an untrammelled, wild west world system. The Götterdämmerung of the imperium will not be glorious death, because the parasite, trapped in the half-nations of globalisation, constantly trying and failing to seize ultimate death-drive control, cannot spread far enough. The Anglofascists remain unpopular, mortal in a way Hitler and Mussolini were not. They remain wedded to the lethally unpopular world of pre-2008. They remain, fundamentally, as stupid and impulsive and self-defeating as all good fascists, but without the supernatural power the old fascisms could at least pretend to possess. It’s undoubtedly true that they’ll do tremendous damage, and hurt a tremendous number of people. But they won’t even get to fail as their predecessors did. They will not die in Berlin in 1945 but will be pushed off-stage like Kurt Schuschnigg, last chancellor of the Austrian Ständestaat, and will end up giving way, as he did, to something else, something real. Better or worse?

That’s beyond my ken to figure out. But anyway. It’s important, I think, to know what Anglofascism is. To know that we don’t confront Hitler and Mussolini yet again. We’re confronting something stupider, uglier, worse, more incompetant, sleazier (if possible) and less committed to its idiot cause, but still commited enough for all that. The Anglofascist is a globalist, an American patriot, a proud incoherent idiot, on his phone too much, with a blue checkmark on X the everything app. He stands, in the last resort, for the rules-led international order, and he will, if he continues to muddle through, end up massively accelerating its decline. He is not a ‘populist’, because he isn’t really popular. He’s only the dying fart of a global system that clings to life just to spite the rest of us. He knows who Charlie Kirk is, for some reason. And in my view (it might be overly optimistic, true) he’s a half-formed ghost of history, just like the Republic of German-Austria. And at the first stiff breeze…

Upon the mountainside above the yawning abyss of the valley wherein the great necropolis of the Headless Saint lay as a shadow of brutal stone and sculpture with columns and pillars and mausoleums stretching on for countless miles beneath the fog, its highest reaches, the towers and spires of the battlements, piercing the turgid grey with the slender pride of ships’ masts at sea, above that, within the ruin of the old charnel house at the cusp of the village which had no name, the girl rose exhausted from her slumber upon the hard ground, her robe stained across with dark filth, and offered a prayer to Christ on her knees which ached, and rose up and went to the bucket of cold water left for her which was metal and dented and she took off her robe and she washed herself with the cold water and did not cry out as it touched her skin, and she took the towel from the wooden bench by the door and she ran the hard material of the towel across herself and it stung and pricked her all across her flesh, and when she was dried she stood and she offered another prayer mumbling through chapped lips in her voice like withered parchment (“Have mercy upon me, O God, according to thy loving kindness: according unto the multitude of thy tender mercies blot out my transgressions”), and she felt the cold air of the mountain creep in through the old ruined stone half-collapsed and felt the pale anaemic sun which reached in to bless her and she smelt the old bone beneath the floorboards where the corpses of all the martyrs who had not done good enough lay stacked their bones broken up and made into columns which lined the hall which led up to the altar where the nameless saviour of the village whom not one of the villagers could recall (“I believe he was a doctor, was he not?”) was interned with his full skeleton intact, preserved there behind glass sat with bony fingers knotted together by rope and grim pale skull twisted low in benediction by iron bolts, in a pose of eternal worship as behoved one of great honour, though no one knew what that honour had been but knew, according to this grand ossuary, that it must have been great, and therefore it was satisfactory, to all, that he was there.

Before her on the floor lay the iron maiden. It lay on its back with its plates all opened and the spines that lined its inside facing up sharp and ready, and it was the size of her but perhaps broader and larger and it was open and waiting, blade-shaped helm to jagged gauntlets to heavy pointed armoured boots all the shade of faded rust or blood. It waited there for its engine, its visor raised giving it no face but only the absence there of the inside of the helm, which was stained with red which was hers which she had bled out within it. She spat. In the bottle on the bench next to the towel was a bottle of anointing oil. She intoned a psalm in her dying voice (“God judgeth the righteous, and God is angry with the wicked every day.”) and poured the oil upon her own palms and her forehead and upon her chest and her legs and all over She massaged it into herself. The chemistry of it stung her skin but she knew that the pain was good, that the pain was the prelude, that the pain was what birthed redemption, that the pain was wherefore she had survived thus far.

Then Euphemia, for the church had named her, replaced her robe and laid herself down within the iron maiden. She whimpered as those slender spines pierced her, slithered within her, slid inside her veins, her flesh, her organs, at her back and within her arms and legs and at the base of her neck, these tender pricks, given freely, by that thing which she, pious and desperate, still loathed, could not help but loathe, and she muttered to herself a prayer that started with Matthew and the Sermon on the Mount but soon become curse words and pain and groaning and babble, sheer nonsense, the pain consuming all, but the pain, she knew, was Christ too, was a slender broken glass fragment of that agony, that overwhelming torturous death which Christ had known, and so she grit her teeth and lay there within her assigned place, and heard the armour click and hiss as it closed over her as the gradual closing of the lid of a sarcophagus over a body, the scrap of stone upon stone here now metal on metal, here now steel upon steel, here now a tomb with the lid ajar, for the suit did not enclose all her body but left her torso and belly and waist exposed to the open air, covered barely by the ragged robe; here now the darkness being only for a moment, as the spikes that she was pinned to took her blood and the suit, the iron maiden, came to life, and Confessor coughed, her visor lowered, and she was aware of her hands and feet and arms and legs, her weight, her life, sanctioned by God, and she lay there now, with the engine running within, and she was aware of the creak of the wooden door behind and the whistling wind and she was aware of the stench of the old bones below, and she, grunting, ascended, a giant, an angel, an armoured foe, an ode to Christ, with crosses and martyrs etched upon her plate and beneath the single narrow slit of her visor the tears of the faithful for the lost carved deep, and she was on her feet now within the charnel house as the blood of another filled her, and she found her great spear upon the wall and pulled it free, and she found her heavy artillery shotgun upon the floor and holstered it at her hip. And then the giant stomped forth out into the village//

//hate you hate you hate you hate you hate you hate you hate you//

The man bowed to her, slashing his sleeve with his rusted dagger. His iron mask wept for her. His sculpted halo was buckled and bent. The others all watched (“God, is that-?” “He must well be,” “that thing within the corpse-house-” “Do not insult it, by Christ! The golem hears, and it remembers!”, “He is so tall!”, “God, God, save me from this beauty!”) and their iron was cast by the pale sun into something that glowed for a moment before the putrescent brown decay of the village soil and the old houses that leant into one another like drunkards which surrounded them already given up, before all that turgidity, swallowed up the glory of God, but for the Confessor, for she stood over the man, the hierosergeant, who now bowed, blood oozing from his slashed wrist. “Confessor.” he said. The wooden barrel of his rifle was scuffed and stained with mud. “We report to thee that the path to the necropolis is clear.” The trees bare and blackened creaked in the wind and the old houses sat in silence as if caught in mourning for themselves and their community and all that they had seen perish over the prior months when black death had come to their hillside and spared not one of them for the heresy had gone deep and the rot now had been scoured but left only their own barren husks to observe, memorials to Man’s fall, the mournful siblings to the charnel-house where the good lay dead. Here, in this ruined square, did the houses stand as all that remained of the bad who had died.

“The enemy?” Confessor asked, her voice mechanical. Neither man nor woman. There was nothing within her of either but for her engine which screamed in pain beneath her steel. Confessor could hear her often. Confessor was always thankful.

The hierosergeant held his arm out. A masked underling came to clean and bandage it. “We know not how many survived of the heretic force.” he said. “But their leader remains.”

“I will descend.” she said. They gazed upon her as she left, that enormous spear shouldered, her footfalls heavy and thudding, plates of her mighty armour shifting, clanging against one another, twisting, reflecting the dying sun in their faded colour, the murals upon each plate seeming, with her motion, to warp, to change direction, to show a Christ that hurt, a Christ that smiled, a host of angels here to save to destroy, a crowd of believers or, at that angle, a horrific surge of oppressing soldiers, as she went down the path out of the corpse-village, as she set off down the Sainted Way, where beside the ancient brick of the road which snaked its path into the fog, into the maw of the vast grey slabs and towers of the necropolis, beside that brick (there but for the grace of God) were the bodies of the Julien prisoners, who had been mounted upon the wheels that had broken them, high atop creaking gibbets, where they lay, some dead and mangled, some live and mangled, groaning to themselves in hopeless voices which the wind swallowed whole as they emerged, like a bird of prey swooping down to snatch the young of others, so that they these lingering souls too were dead already, unnoticed, only part of the miserable scene which merged into one morass of ruin, those who held on and whose who had passed, life and death the same, all the thousands of them by the Sainted Way a single snaking thing, a trail of sinners, a warning, a memory, a monument to faith.

It was this path that she descended, this armoured pilgrim, this giant judge, crowned with suffering, this lonely worshipper, cast out of the churches of machine and of man. Her engine’s bare skin showed in the dismal air, the wriggling of the engine’s flesh as with each step the control spines dug slid in or out of it, as the drugs they used to torment it were pumped into its system. The engine’s torment was her fuel, for she thrived upon its neurons trembling, her own consciousness a shadow cast upon its; she thanked her engine and marched down the path into the necropolis, to find the leader of the Juliens//

//Within the cage I watched the ruins dreaming of myself. It was possible despite the pain to dream and I dreamt of God often but often I dreamt of me. I dreamt of a young woman who attends church despite knowing her sins and does not admit her sins no matter how often the priests talk to her but who continues to sin and cannot avoid sinning. She has long curled dark hair and she likes to eat apples when they are not poisoned. Her name is █████ but no one calls her this. They prefer ██ for short. I wanted to know more about her but it hurt oh God it hurt. The spines scraped my flesh bare. I bled and oozed. My flesh crammed within this prison. You who take my blood whose skull is wrapped around my own. Do you dream? What do you dream of?//

Confessor woke up. The mountainside above her was a dark mass of fury a grey smear through the mist. All around were the ancient tombs. Above her stood an enormous stone effigy of a crucifix decorated with Christ in agony and around it lay the bodies she had redeemed in blood and steel. She had been three days in the necropolis and here amidst its snaking streets she had come to the crucifix of Saint Nikephoros where carved into the stone were wreathing vines with sharp barbs to show how Nikephoros had been taken by the apostates and thrown into a pit of vines that cut him to death. She had prostrated herself before the icon and then the Juliens had come in their crimson cloaks wailing in their alien song, crimson plumes of their helmets wobbling as they charged, faceless creatures, and she had readied her spear and met them with furious arm, and spat fire from her gun’s barrel and with the spear’s tip then sundered apart the foe.

Now their slender forms were a carpet of broken limbs and torn flesh and spilt fluids. This carpet crunched beneath her boots as she stomped onward, heading deeper into the crater where the necropolis sat, where the stone walls closed in, where the monuments and memorials and effigies, the grey faces set in sculpted agony, the rock-hewn figures froze in scenes of murder, sacrifice, violence ever-imminent, martyrs trapped in the instant the blade swung down or the dagger pierced the heart or the fangs of the beasts punctured the skin or the rope around the neck choked the brain of air. Silhouettes against the creeping fog spoke in their silent poses of the totalitarianism of annihilation, of the omnipresent Mortem which it was so that even, at this closeness, had a smell, of faded incense left in the censers that hung from the eaves, of faded decay, of rotten fruit.

This necropolis was for the dead of a crusade, the hundreds and thousands who had perished to take this world from heresy.

Millions of bones interred within the stone. Brickwork made from ashes. The bodies of revered martyrs, entombed within vast coffins that stood upright along the path.

The dead at her feet would burn in hell. They wore Julien robes. They fought with Julien fury. A cult of warriors. A cult of those who believed they worshipped life. But life was fast, furious, vicious, and with mad energy it hurled itself forward, and death, that implacable wall, was always waiting to meet it, and but for the delusions of the cultists there was no doubt as to which of the two would prevail. Christ had lived; Christ had died. In Him was contained all that was. Life and death. Without death the Juliens would fail forevermore. She went on, deeper into the city of tombs//

//Now I know you can hear me when you rest, Confessor. My name is  █████. I have killed my way into the depths with you. I have tasted the rapture you felt slaughtering the pagans. You have tasted of my blood these days. This is for the crimes I have committed and the sins I have done, which have rendered me your engine. This I have to accept. I can only think like this, with lucid mind, unpolluted by the agonies which I deserve, when you are sleeping. But I know you remember my words. I admire you so, Confessor. I admire so your strength. Your purity. Please forgive me this trespass. I was perhaps condemned for my corruption. I besmirch that which is clean. But to keep my own strength, which moves us both forward, I must sing to you at night. I must lean on you, as you lean upon me. I do not mind it. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.//

she, the Confessor rolled down the hillside at the great steep descent into the depths, the incline set upright, with scant room for purchase, a heavy wall now marked with countless skulls, with the skulls of the followers of the armies of the Headless Saint, which had fallen in their multitude at Smyrna, as it was named, when the Nightmare King had descended upon them, only driven off by the presence of the angel Gabriel, whose light had shone in glory and from God, and given vigour to the Headless Saint and his forces; it was this hillside the Confessor now, stumbling, grunting with effort, circumnavigated, in perpetual descent, the hardened skulls of the martyrs not snapping beneath her weighty tread but holding steadfast in death as in life, as she clambered ungainly down, seeing below the rim of the next level of the necropolis, where the paths had faded away, where upon the slope of the crater lay the relentless forms of the warrior-tombs, which were unadorned and simple in design, squat boxes set like teeth in a vast chasmic maw, in strict and fierce formation, their flat concrete form itself an ode to devout discipline and order, in monument shewn the rigidity of the legions of God which had poured forth across the planet like blazing fire. But now their fire was still, and now their progress impeded, but in that last battle, when the trumpet would sound, they would arise anew, and thusly sweep forth in the final crusade, with the Christ Jesus at their head, gloried and munificent in both justice and mercy.

“Fuck.” she said, nearly slipping. Those tombs below awaited her and the wall she clung to now bid her to them, its uneven face urging her descent. Confessor moved deftly lower, grasping with her gauntlets two skulls, her armoured fingers finding purchase in an eye socket. The distance to the surface of the nearest tomb was several metres and she thought she could make it but she felt her engine’s heartbeat, feeble and yet frantic, and she thought that she, the engine, would not survive the drop. This engine that spoke to her; that tried to retain its name, although now its name was Euphemia, and that tried to retain itself, although Confessor knew, from her previous engines, that there was no worse way to survive the sentence with one’s soul intact than by trying to remain conscious. The paradox was that those who submitted would eventually raise their heads above the water able to live again, and those who fought to preserve themselves would sink to the abyss all the faster; though it was truthfully no paradox, but only the truth imparted by Christ, that submission to God was the only means by which the individual soul could prevail. Confessor enjoyed the profundity of this, and her faith gave her tiring muscles, artificial as they were, new strength, and she made a short hop down the wall and caught it with hands and boots, and then the drop to the roof of the tomb was less, and so she made it, crashing into the concrete. Her legs whined; the engine’s heartrate spasmed. But they were alive and intact and one level lower within the necropolis.

Then came the red shadows creeping out from the gaps between tombs, hunched-over creatures with banners billowing (“Deus nobiscum! Deus nobiscum!”) that raised their flamethrowers and spat at her with writhing tongues of orange and red, warm as love, that came scurrying in all their pride and hubris, they who worshipped the hero of Man; the Caesar, so he was called, that figure who once had refused the Eternal Patriarch, and Christ, and God, who had claimed that the Lord was to serve him, and that prayer was wish-making, and that his people, the proud men of rationality, were of sole right to God’s providence, that God was not self-evident but visible only in his works, which could be apprehended rationally, and that his works were of kindness to the chosen Men above all. Confessor, who knew that God was not to be known, and was of kindness and yet of fire, to all, slaughtered them as they came, with her spear and shotgun. The gun’s bark pierced the sepulchral silence of the tomb-crater and reduced the pagans to slurry with its fury and//

//Tonight you are tired as well. I recognise it. My blood runs low. Five days now have I been without food. Your engine tastes exhaustion; well, so do you. They are many, these cultists. They are too many. I hate the sight of them, as do you. And yet sometimes I hate you too. I am the author of my pain, but you are the instrument, and your spines cause me agony with every motion. Sometimes I hate you, and sometimes…well, how about we forget those things, for now? I feel we’re almost there. We are almost at the gate to Hell. I do not regret my punishment. I do not hate God, for what He has ordained for me. I only wish, and it is a childish wish, but I wish He would allow me to remember, through the endless void of pain between my sentencing and now, what it is I am being punished for.

But let us forget that now for now//

The Confessor awoke. She was cold. That was what had awoken her, for she had never felt cold before, or warmth, or anything else sensual, for she was a machine, and she was a suit of armour, an instrument of punishment and redemption, a walking icon to Christ’s glory an mercy, and she did not feel but for what her engine felt, and it was then she realised, lying on the stone that was cold that she should not have paid any mind to, that her engine was only an absence in her chest, and that the heartbeat there was unfamiliar in its closeness, for it did not beat out of time with her own mood but she realised, panic welling up in her overwhelming, that it was in time with her thoughts, and that therefore the heart that beat within her was her own. She sat up, with her own hands, which felt the warmth of her own skin, pale and scarred, and she felt her breasts and her legs and then finally put both hands to her face and found nose, eyes, mouth, and tasted the tip of her finger and smelt the stench of her own sweat and the ash of the necropolis, all now her own findings, no longer fed to her through her engine, through borrowed flesh. “What?” she said, in her own voice, full of terror. She cast these eyes her own eyes about, at the chamber, and saw vague shapes of stone outlined in thick cloying mist, which hung there all about, which coiled around her rear, her elbows, which her fingers tried in vain to find purchase within. This unnatural fog, this monstrous form, she thought, and she tried to stand but she had never stood before, and she wobbled about on her own heels for a dangerous moment. “How does it feel?” she asked, but it was not she who had spoken but another she.

This other she was behind her. They faced one another. Confessor knew that face; it was the face of her engine, glimpsed so often when in repose, when in agony, when in small moments busy cleaning her face or anointing her sinful form for penance or when speaking, in that wavery voice, to the few of the Patriarchal Army who had to speak to her. She was facing her engine, whose name was Euphemia. Euphemia was facing she, and she knew that her own face was Euphemia’s, too. Two of the same person. Euphemia smiled. “You see yourself as me. I don’t know if you know that, but it’s true. Very common with Confessor units. Don’t you think of yourself as ‘she’? If I had been born a man and sinned, then you would not. You borrow my senses and use my muscle and my brain to move yourself. It tends to cast a shadow, such behaviour.”

“You are my engine.” Confessor said, in her voice, which could not help but tremble. “How are you free? How did you do this to me? What…what witchcraft-?”

Euphemia came close to her. “Nothing of the sort. Do you know what a confessor is? One who suffers for the faith. You Confessors always suffer, because you by your duty are required to eat the brains of sinners. This is my brain, Confessor. As I carry out my penance, so do you suffer with me. If you did not suffer with me, what kind of punishment would it be? It must wound both of us. If carrying out God’s commands was easy, then there would be no value in the doing.”

Confessor tensed. Euphemia was in front of her, hands on her waist. “That is not scripture.”

“Perhaps not.” Euphemia said, again with that smile. “Perhaps I am here for heresy. No one lets me remember. Not even my true name. Everything is all upside down to me. Perhaps I am the devout one, and you and the Patriarch and the church all are wrong. Who knows?”

“I know.” Confessor said. She felt Euphemia’s warmth upon her. She tried to dispel it. Her own feelings were too immature, too barely-formed. She saw her own face in front of her, her own soft lips, her own tired eyes, her own lank hair. “I know that you are wrong. Why else would you be given to me as fuel?” This for a moment seemed to pause Euphemia. Confessor watched her own face frown. She saw her own eyes avert their gaze from herself, as if in shame. “Fuel, then.” Euphemia said. Her eyes – Confessor’s eyes – were once again firm. “So you use me as fuel. That is my punishment. Then allow me to use you, as yours.”

“What-” Confessor began, and Euphemia kissed her. The taste was her own. Her own tongue within her own mouth. She did not know. She felt hands upon her, her own hands. Her flesh was weak to itself. She hated flesh; she hated her engine. She tried to fight back but Euphemia, with that same firmness, pushed her back onto the stone, where she sat, and then descended. She hated her engine. She hated Euphemia. Euphemia, kissing her neck, did not care. Confessor grit her teeth and tried to resist it. She put her hands to her own grease-layered hair. Her fingers grasped it; her legs moved of their own accord. “You are a creature of pain.” Euphemia whispered, tongue circling her ear. “So you are as averse to this as I am to the gouges you leave in my flesh. Isn’t that so?”

“I am not your equal.” Confessor mumbled.

Euphemia’s face, her face, loomed, in exhausted triumph. “Yes you are. We are all one in Christ, after all. Now please, sister. Open your legs a little. Allow your engine to please you.”

“No.” Confessor said, but she already had begun to do so, and was aware of it, was aware of her abdominal self, this human self, having betrayed her, was aware of her failure, her defeat, her obsoletion, and she wondered to herself if such a Fall had occurred before amidst the Confessors, or if she was the first to ever betray their objective. “Don’t worry.” Euphemia said, sliding on top of her, claiming her. She kissed Confessor’s cheek. “You are not.” And Confessor, for the first time since her activation, laughed in relief, and allowed herself to hold onto Euphemia for dear life, and to be kissed, and to feel for herself//

//

The great stadium of the Arena of the Sacrifice lay at the lowest point of the necropolis, far below the fog, sunken within that vast crater at its very core. Above the greatest monuments, those dedicated to the life and trials of the Headless Saint himself, rose thrust up to heaven, from here lost in fog, those majestic, titanic tableaux which shewed in great display battle and loss and grief and victory, martyrdom dozens of metres high, the honour and piety of the Saint in whose lost name this whole edifice had been hewn. Here there were rows of cracked and broken-down stone seats, fallen in on themselves like madmen in collapse, and high walls, half-crumbled, and within the arena itself a faded and scratched mural of the Saint, with all above his shoulders obscured by a halo, his armour dented and punctured, his hands limp at his sides. He had allowed himself to fall before the Foe and had died in such a way, shameful and silent, and so had become eternal, by Christ’s side above.

That was what Confessor knew from Euphemia’s memory. All that she knew was Euphemia. All of Euphemia that remained was her, and all of her was Euphemia. They were closer than lovers or siblings. That was what she had learned, awaking from her dream. Their shared flesh was tender within her steel embrace, flush with biological symptoms of arousal. She could not hear Euphemia now but for the pain that shot through their body intermittently, and the noises and grunts which the engine sometimes made. But she knew they were together. She knew that when Euphemia’s sentence ended decades hence they would return her to goodly Christian life and that she, Confessor, would remain as punishment for the next sinner. But for now she felt Euphemia’s weakened flesh safe within her armour. For now that was enough.

The figure in the arena stood as she approached. Here all sound was echo. Here there was no sound but that. He wore armour in that Julien crimson and with the banners festooned to his back and with a great mechanical sword in his right hand. He had no helm and his face was grey and tried but his eyes were firm and full of contempt. He saw her coming. “Creature.” he called, and a thousand of him replied in chorus. “You took longer than I expected.”

She came close. Her eyes which were Euphemia’s peered through the visor and saw him. He was strong and he stood in a fighting pose. “I am Ptolemy.” he said. “Commander of the Juliens. The last hero of rationality. Of inquiry. Against your thoughtless blight. Far have you come to face me. I promise. Your kind may have prevailed today, against my soldiers. But here, man to man, I will end you quickly. I shall survive. And as long as one thinking mind remains, then the rebellion shall never die.” His banners at his back were like the wings of a devil. His curled beard and hair bounced as he prepared to strike. They, the two things alive in the necropolis, faced one another. She readied her spear and shotgun. His right thumb flicked something within the hilt of his sword.

The tip of his blade cracked with a flash of light. Confessor caught it and did not move; she felt the heat of it soar towards her, a directed explosion, and she had not caught it, and she was aware of its impact, aware of

Confessor, for the only time in her life, screamed.

Taste of fresh air on her face. The helmet had been obliterated, and its burning metal was now flung aside, rolling to a halt in the middle of the Headless Saint’s halo. Ptolemy, the hero of Man, stared. His mouth was open. He lowered his blade. “God.” he said. “Cleo. Is that you?” His sculpted features twisted up in grief. “Cleopatra. My darling. I thought you were lost.”

She, Euphemia, shorn of cover, smiled. “Hello, father. I am not lost. I am found.”

“Found?”

“I did not die, at the burning of New Athens. I am here. I have discovered the light. And they have sent me to find you.”

His sword point touched the stone with a heavy thud. “What have they done? What did they do to my darling?”

“They saved me.” she said. Tears rolled down his cheeks. Her fingers tightened around the grip of her shotgun. “Anyway.” she said. “Thank you, father. I had forgotten what sin it was I had committed. It was heresy, after all. The heresy of being your daughter. That’s good to know.”

“Cleo.” he said, weeping. He staggered towards her. “My darling. My love. Don’t you recognise me? Don’t you know what this is? You’re not one of their things. Their machines. Cleo-”

She shot him in the gut. The sound filled the necropolis. Two things had lived in the necropolis hence, and from then on there was one. He collapsed onto the Headless Saint’s mural and died with a grunt. Euphemia kicked him over and looked at his face which was frozen there never to move again. She spat. She saw the remains of Confessor’s helm nearby. She sighed. “Thank you.” she said. “This too is my penance, you know. To suffer the loss of you each and every time. I love you, dear Confessor.” The broken metal of the helmet, now a martyr, did not reply. She put down her spear and holstered her shotgun and spent a moment there in the abyss of the necropolis. She used the suit’s wrist panel to send a signal, to say that it was done, that the rebellion was over. Affirmative, came the reply from above. Her father’s corpse bled onto the stone, and in the form of the ruined helmet her Confessor lay with him. But she and God had prevailed.

Euphemia bowed her head and she put her hands together. The spines stabbed into her flesh all over and her empty stomach ached and her dry lips were cracking apart. And then she began as usual, in her withered voice: “Have mercy upon me, O God, according to thy loving kindness: according unto the multitude of thy tender mercies blot out my transgressions-”

Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In is a film that exists in two places at once. On the face of it a classic Hong Kong story of gangsters, urban decay, crime, corruption and explosive violence, the movie follows Chan Lok-kwan, a mainland refugee in Hong Kong who flees from the law in the unregulated chaos of the old Kowloon Walled City, where the police dare not go, and finds comradeship with a bunch of friendly gangsters who stand assailed on all sides by unfriendly gangsters, cruel landlords and of course by the passage of time itself, as the Walled City here in the 1980s is close to the end of its life. These are the two places the film is present in. One is the textual level, where it is a narrative of found family, community and male friendship in the face of adversity. The other is the metatextual level. Much of the film’s cast consists of famous faces from Hong Kong’s action movie history. Everything from its story beats to its fight scenes is done in the style of those classic movies of yesterday, and in its sentimental portrayal of the urban poor of old Hong Kong it harks back to a half-remembered “Lion Rock Spirit” of hardship and hard work that has haunted the city’s collective memory for decades now. The film itself feels haunted, stalked throughout by Hong Kong’s greatest enemy, the past, a past that as the English title suggests is now long gone. Here in the 1980s, it is suggested, is twilight.

Hong Kong has always been obsessed with this. The city exists in the shadow of a mainland that for half a century was lost to it, and then before was its dysfunctional, uncivilized other. This existence has always been conditional and uncertain, and so spectres of extinction have been present in the city’s imagination since probably its founding. Hong Kong was created in order to be useful, and so its greatest fear remains uselessness, that the money will run out, that its freedom will desert it, that it will no longer be able to make good martial arts movies. Twilight of the Warriors is a rebuttal to this not in any narrative sense – on a textual level it is an entirely fine piece of cinema – but in a metatextual sense, since by being a good martial arts movie it rebuts, on some level, the claims of Hong Kong’s decline. But this rebuttal is not a confident declaration of some new beginning for the Hong Kong film industry but rather an admission of defeat. The core of its triumph is a black ball of melancholy, signalled to us by its retreat so far into the city and the industry’s past. It is this that accounts for the film’s resonance. Taken on its own terms, Twilight of the Warriors is fine. Taken as a work that is responding to not only the long history of Hong Kong cinema but also the city’s social and political frustration and malaise, it manages to achieve a sort of deeper meaning.

But what is that meaning? Narratively, thematically and visually the film is built around the setting of the Walled City. From its vignettes of daily life in the City which appear now and then, peeking out from beneath the central gangster-versus-gangster storyline, to the imagery of neon signs and cramped corridors, to the battle-scarred, hardened cast of noble lowlives who crawl through the City’s wire-choked veins, the film is dependent upon its backdrop. It is impossible to imagine a similar piece of art, set in mere everyday Tsim Sha Tsui or Sham Shui Po, let alone Hong Kong Island itself. The Walled City is Twilight of the Warriors’ real protagonist, on the textual level, but outside of that we can see that it is also the film’s metatextual protagonist, or at least a shorthand for what the film is really about, which is the decline of Hong Kong from its supposed 1980s golden age.

The Walled City remains to this day an emblem of the classic myth of Hong Kong – “technology meets medieval”, as Ridley Scott put it – almost too perfectly. Even beyond the neon signs, the triad lawlessness, the mysterious corridors filled with Chinese characters, altars to Buddha and Guan Yu, and the hardscrabble image of the City’s inhabitants, struggling to make a life after being abandoned by governments both colonial and national, the Walled City is Hong Kong in the sense that it embodies that “Lion Rock Spirit” of imagined free-market entrepreneurialism. The classic tale of many a Hong Kong business clan is that the founder turned up one day after fleeing from communism, with nothing, and through guts and hard work built up a new life amidst the slum, and the Walled City is the ultimate slum, the final frontier, a dangerous, vicious, oddly defiant enclave amidst a city of enclaves, a refugee hub amidst a city of refugees, a truly government-free haven in a city that believes its government has never done one good thing for it. Even for many foreigners, hearing ‘Hong Kong’ makes them think of ‘Kowloon’, and rather than the actual Kowloon City their imaginations will jump to fantasies of the Walled City instead. In Twilight of the Warriors this City, where our young, hopeless protagonist finds a reason to live and a role for himself, is not presented as perfect but given worth through the meaning the protagonist finds in it, and the subsequent quiet melancholy of the City’s presence and its inevitable future demolition, reflected through the fall of good old honourable gangster Cyclone (Louis Koo) and old-school evil-but-affable Mr. Big (Sammo Hung) to the unprincipled, thuggish King. At the end of the film Lok-kwan manages to defeat these villains, obviously – but the Walled City will not survive, and with Louis Koo and Sammo Hung dead as well the subtext is clear.

It is this subtext, I believe, that makes Twilight carry a resonance beyond its otherwise solidly enjoyable action movie energy. A mere Police Story with the same level of technical construction would not have made it such a hit; it is the added layer of meaning granted by the Walled City setting, and its symbolic representation of the old Hong Kong the city-state is now seemingly perpetually mourning, that grants the work its extra punch.

This is the most positive spin to put on Twilight of the Warriors. But while I enjoyed its fight scenes well enough and found its cheesy old-school character writing fun, I will admit that actually, for me, the element of the film that worked against it the most was this ingrained yearning for the past. There is of course an element of yearning to lots of Hong Kong cinema, as Hong Kong is a place of yearning. Every Qing-era Shaw Brothers or Golden Lotus film, no matter how ridiculous, is marked by the truth that the Qing dynasty did not, by and large, really happen in Hong Kong, and that no amount of studio backlot Chinese villages can replace the void left by the absence of real China. But this absence was created by political circumstances beyond anyone’s real control. The absence in Twilight of the Warriors, rather, is rooted not in politics but in psychology. It does to the Walled City what The Seven Chambers of Shaolin does to Imperial China, hewing from the past a wild-west old world where the corruption and cruelty of local officials can be overcome by rugged warriors and wandering do-gooders. But to the citizens of colonial Hong Kong China proper really was lost to them – what the Walled City represents in Twilight is that same colonial Hong Kong, which just like the City was running on borrowed time by the 1980s as the handover, that great Fall of Hong Kong lore, loomed.

But this Fall does not compare at all to the upheaval of 1843-1978 which created the split between Hong Kong and China. Hong Kong’s mainstream political opposition has long been defined by its lawyerly obsession with protecting the “one country, two systems” policy which agreed to keep Hong Kong and the mainland separate after 1997, which prevailed as the primary outlet of Hong Kong anti-Chinese politics until about 2019 and even then, in the era of the post-protest National Security Law, remains one of the main ways of articulating Hong Kong’s anxieties regarding the mainland. But what this obsession with violations of the letter of the policy often obscures is that by and large the spirit has been obeyed, and Hong Kong has remained the same since 1997, in ways the anxious populace of that decade probably would not believe if you went back and told them. The enormous changes that have occurred politically, primarily revolving around the National Security Law, are even then a world away from the kind of lurid predictions that have motivated much of the city’s anti-China feeling. The PLA has not been sent in. Hong Kong schoolchildren do not have to join the Young Pioneers. Everyone is not clad in green army clothes, working in communist slave labour camps. The foreigners still go to their parties and the old big firms of the colonial era still run their domestic monopolies. The props and tools of British rule have merely been assigned a new master, not dismantled. Hong Kong has not really become, in that old refrain with all its snobbery, “just another Chinese city”.

There have of course been plenty of changes, and some of them less desirable than others, to be diplomatic about it. But the Fall has not happened. The 2019 protests were motivated, at the grassroots, not just by anti-capitalist mood and social malaise but as well by a 2010s feeling of frustration and fear at a China that was no longer the weak and foreign Other it had been in 1997, and indeed in some ways at times the protests resembled an attempt to provoke the apocalypse that China’s rise has always seemed to threaten Hong Kong with. But the Chinese state refused. The PLA did not roll tanks down Queen’s Road or send in the infantry to storm Hong Kong Polytechnic University. The existing colonial state was more than capable, as in 1967, of repressing any disorder that threatened the city’s role in the global capitalist machine. Hong Kong has not had an apocalypse – it has been condemned, as have the rest of us after the thrills of the 2010s, to continue existing.

It is in this context that the melancholy of Twilight of the Warriors rang false to me. There is no real barrier between the Hong Kong of the 1980s and today comparable to the one separating China and Hong Kong in the colonial period. Is it really mourning the actual Walled City? The Hong Kong film industry? Is it secretly about the promised democracy of 1997? Is it about any of these things? Or rather is it simply all and none of them, a yearning, yes, for a past that is not severed but simply inaccessible as a result of its own imagined greatness? You cannot go to the Walled City today. But the Walled City was only ever a crystallisation of that Hong Kong of myth, while the real Hong Kong by and large is still here, and it might, in fact, have stories to tell about itself.

For me this is why Twilight of the Warriors felt indulgent and regressive, rather than celebratory. Perhaps this is a result of overfamiliarity with the myth of the Kowloon Walled City – I remember, in fact, speaking to a former resident at the park they built over its resting site who was telling me energetically that he did not like this new movie because it got a lot of details about the layout wrong. To him and a little bit to me, the absence of that distant observer’s fascination with the place allowed him to see the film in a different light, one which made its artifice clearer. Hong Kong has not changed so dramatically as to justify Twilight’s yearning, but it has changed, and the world has moved on, and trying to go back can only be achieved through a kind of visible, strenuous effort. No amount of brilliant set design can capture the thrill of those few scenes in 1988’s Bloodsport where we see the real Walled City as the backdrop to a forbidden martial arts tournament, and no amount of bringing back things from old Hong Kong can really capture what those things were like. This is why Twilight of the Warriors didn’t work for me.

But as well I think it caught me at a bad time. We’re living through an era of what the internet types call “nostalgia bait”, which is a fantastic term in how it manages to distinguish itself from actual nostalgia. Nostalgia is remembering a pleasant day you once had, and feeling sad that it is gone but also happy that you remembered it. “Nostalgia bait” is the piece of cheese in the trap that promises you this feeling, on-demand. Everyone else has written so much about reboots, remakes, sequels, legacy sequels, revivals, etc. that there’s nothing much for me to say directly about that. All that’s changed since this trend began to pick up speed about a decade and a half ago (as with everything, some time after the 2008 financial crisis) is the density. We are now at saturation bombing levels of nostalgia bait – not just in terms of old franchises or stories being brought back but now in terms of ‘throwbacks’, retro-styled new things that remind us of the old. Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In is a pure throwback in the Tarantino style, with little new to say, designed to be comfort food for people who no longer believe in the future. It is at least well-made comfort food.

My second topic of discussion today, well, not so much.

Mobile Suit Gundam GQuuuuuuX is, much like Twilight, a work of art that exists in two places at once, but in this case it is a work of art that places these two places side-by-side and forces you to consider both at once. One could watch Twilight of the Warriors without knowing the social and cultural context and enjoy a solid action movie with a unique setting, as the film’s meta elements are tucked behind the narrative, as meta elements generally should be. GQuuuuuuX (don’t worry I’m copy-pasting the title in each time) is bolder or stupider, depending on your perspective. A twelve-episode entry in the prestigious Gundam franchise, made by Khara, the studio behind the mega-series Rebuild of Evangelion, directed by industry veteran Kazuya Tsurumaki (FLCL) and written by Yoji Enkodido (Revolutionary Girl Utena) and Hideaki Anno (Neon Genesis Evangelion), GQuuuuuuX is, like most Gundam series, the story of a young person, here a girl named Machu living on a space colony orbiting earth, who gets involved in high-level space politics when she climbs into the cockpit of a giant robot called a Gundam, here the ‘Gundam GQuuuuuuX’ (eurgh). In this outing rather than the space wars that define past Gundam shows, Machu, along with her new friends the illegal refugee Nyaan and the uhhh guy who is there Shuji, is thrust into a series of mecha combat matches known as ‘Clan Battles’ in order to save enough money to travel to earth and escape the stifling atmosphere of space-colony life.

Here you have a premise for a show that promises much; robot fights, teenage drama, social commentary, perhaps, on how in our neoliberal age a mankind that has achieved the dream of life in outer space is still bored and alienated. But that’s only the first place that GQuuuuuuX resides in. The second is that it is also an alternate history, set in a world where the great war of the original Mobile Suit Gundam, the One-Year War, was won by the space-fascists the Principality of Zeon instead of the sort-of good guys of the west-analogue Earth Federation. Therefore some of the mobile suit designs are those of the original series, and several characters from the original show appear in the first episode of GQuuuuuuX, minor characters whose appearance is a neat little easter-egg, perhaps, for those longtime fans. In this first episode the show manages to balance its two halves, as hints of Zeon rule largely show up as the backdrop to Machu’s unfolding teen drama.

There is some perhaps interesting subtext to explore here, and certainly, dodgy CGI mecha action aside, I was on board with the show’s beginning. The problems begin with the second episode, which ignores Machu and the GQuuuuuuX and the Clan Battles entirely, and is instead a slavish recreation of the original 1979 anime’s style and feel, as in flashback we explore the events that led to Zeon’s victory (for anyone interested, fan-favourite Char Aznable steals the original Gundam instead of actual series protagonist Amuro Ray). This episode is fanservice but not really necessary at all, and worse it means we have to wait until the third episode to see our actual supposed main characters again. And as it goes on the show continues to make this mistake, as Machu and Nyaan do not only lose screentime in favour of characters from the original show but narratively end up being beholden to them, Machu falling under the sway of heroic Zeon officer Challia Bull and Nyaan becoming the protégé of Zeon’s cruel would-be ruler Kycillia Zabi. The Clan Battles are dropped from the story as the focus shifts to Zeon’s own internal politics (the Earth Federation, the point-of-view faction of much of the original show, isn’t even present) and into what soon becomes, in the style of people who saw Into The Spider-Verse, a plot involving multiple realities, dimensional travel, and still kinda robot fights (barely) and teenage drama.

Now, despite what my tweets about this show might indicate, I do think it just about manages to hold together. The character motivations make sense. Things are happening broadly logically. The trouble is that this is achieved just about. By episode eleven Machu and Nyaan are ace pilots for two factions in Zeon’s unfolding civil war, and I understand the decisions they’ve made to get there. Everything has been established. The issue is that they have just about been established. The central dynamic between Machu and Nyaan – one is a middle-class layabout who got into Clan Battle for fun, the other is an impoverished refugee who wants to escape from her own isolation – is sketched out by perhaps one, maybe two scenes. Both girls’ teenage lust for their buddy Shuji, the main conflict between them, is established in a single scene in the early episodes. The mobile suit fights are exactly as long as they need to be, the swooping direction obscuring simple, uninteresting choreography efficiently communicating action that does not spoil its combatants with real character or struggle. Everything about the show is exactly what is necessary for the next beat to make sense. Depending on who you ask, it is incoherent, thinly-sketched nonsense or it is a densely-packed thrilling parade of ideas and events (you can probably guess where I stand on this).

What is the reason for this? Partially it is simply Tsurumaki’s fast-paced style, a tendency towards no-nonsense characterisation and plots that skip past why and how as much as possible. But there is also the sense that the show itself is overstuffed, and this is a sense that for me gradually increased as with each episode the stakes increased, the themes and ideas became heavier, and the scale of events broadened to a dizzying extent over such a short episode count. Some of this is the problem of trying to fit Gundam, which has always adopted a maximalist mode of storytelling, into such a short episode run, resulting in the usual Gundam story beats – friends turned into tragic rivals, Zeonic superweapons, the psychic evolution of humanity in space – occurring without the benefit of the build-up of dozens of episodes beforehand.

What I identify as the show’s main problem in this respect is at its starkest in episode eleven. Here Machu and Nyaan, on opposite sides, face off in the interior of Zeon’s new superweapon, which Nyaan, desperate to be appreciated, has just used to kill potentially hundreds of thousands of people. They are free of their OG series handlers and confronting one another as adults, both in their own mobile suits. As the machinations of their older allies have resulted in disaster, it’s clear this is where our youthful protagonists should clash and perhaps find their own way to repair things. But-

Their fight is only several minutes long, as lethargic as every other. They then part, again – and Machu, after a brief interlude, finds herself literally in the arms of another classic Gundam character, aforementioned fan favourite, Char Aznable. After episodes of following around Challia Bull, being a backseat spectator to old characters doing old things, Machu has had a moment of genuine agency, and now again she is reduced to observing, to witnessing the struggle between characters from 1979 playing out with fancy new animation and character designs. At the end of the episode, out of a multiversal wormhole pops the original Gundam, the RX-78-2, as in the background we hear a song from 1988’s Char’s Counterattack. Another episode follows this, with a resolution that does not particularly satisfy, that is even more ridiculously obsessed with the old to the point of being largely incoherent if you’re not a huge Gundam fan. But by episode eleven it is clear where we stand. GQuuuuuuX has won the victory over itself. It loves Old Gundam.

Neither of these two works of fiction are bad. Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In is a fun movie. Mobile Suit Gundam GQuuuuuuX is an exercise in plate-juggling that at least deserves merit for functioning at all, and for people less curmudgeonly than me has probably been also a fun anime series. But for me what both of them share – which limits Twilight in the background, lurking behind its every creative choice, and in GQuuuuuuX is so front and centre, in the binary narrative split between neglected original ideas and overindulged references to the past that some watchers have concluded this is being done on purpose, it’s subversive, you see – is a disinterest in the new. GQuuuuuuX has its own cast of characters but its heart is clearly with the old characters. Twilight, although more professionally structured, still is less interested in establishing anything new than in celebrating the old. By centring the newest Hong Kong action film in the past, and by filling a Gundam world with characters from other shows, these works both betray the potential incipient in them to be something more, to move forward, to really find a solution to the “nostalgia bait” tendency that so plagues popular media now.

But then we should ask: could they ever have been anything else? We’ve talked in-depth about Hong Kong’s social malaise, which has led to Twilight of the Warriors carrying a weight outside of its fairly pedestrian actuality. Let’s not neglect to mention that Japan, too, is a place in which the twentieth century boom years have long since disappeared from view, in which any sense of the future has faded away. GQuuuuuuX purports to be about a ‘new generation’ of Gundam, but the fact is its middle-aged project leads have little interest in that new generation, largely because they don’t really have anything to say about it. GQuuuuuuX ends with Machu symbolically overcoming the dead hand of the past by defeating the original RX-78-2 Gundam in – yes – a dodgy CGI mech battle, but part of the show’s issue is that it does not end with her actually having overcome anything. At the heart of the show is a yearning – her yearning for her crush Shuji, Nyaan’s yearning for a normal life, the various OG characters yearning for the missing Char Aznable – that reflects the absence that characterizes the political life of Japan, where one party, generally unpopular and with no real ideas to end the stagnation that has prevailed since the “lost decade” of the 1990s, has controlled politics in a US-rigged system since 1955.

This is a recurring theme in Japanese popular art these days. Hideaki Anno’s Shin Godzilla has a similar problem to GQuuuuuuX; through a sharp satirical opening act that draws from the Fukushima incident of 2011 and depicts the current Japanese government as so bureaucratically inert it cannot respond even to a Godzilla attack, it skewers the ‘1955 system’ as dysfunctional and needing to change, but when it comes to what happens after that system, when the entire cabinet is melted by Godzilla halfway through the movie, it can only limply suggest a group of outsider otaku, under a principled civil servant, will fix things (by stopping Godzilla through a silly plan and standing up to the US on foreign policy, of course, nowhere else). Shin Godzilla is also yearning for a change it cannot articulate, because the very language for expressing any notion of change has been lost, but it, released in 2016, tries to find a way to do so, unsuccessfully. GQuuuuuuX, from 2025, in its abandonment of its original characters and the change they could represent, doesn’t even think of trying, but only aims to comfort through its stubborn insistence on the past.

This is where the Kowloon Walled City should be looked to again. The Walled City, at the heart of Twilight of the Warriors, is a yearning for the crystallised essence of colonial Hong Kong, but it is as well the expression of a vision of twentieth century Asia redeemed after the horrors of revolution and war by the power of developmentalism under US, western, protection. In the slurry of history the Walled City, with its anarchic capitalism, is an icon that encapsulates Hong Kong itself but also the similarly anarchic, capitalist power of Japan’s boom years, and surely as well something of China’s wild west “reform and opening up” period; the hardscrabble East Asia pulling itself up by its own bootstraps. More broadly, it is emblematic of a capitalism in general that has since declined – the vision of Milton Friedman that powered everything we did up until 2008, the free-market paradise of neoliberalism, pioneered by white men awed by Hong Kong’s supposed libertarian economics which just worked, or at least which just worked until the crash, when they suddenly proved to be unworkable, and we were left living on a planet where all the power had been taken by people who had been chasing a vicious delusion, where, just as with Hong Kong after 2019, it was all over but it had to continue anyway.

It is in this sense that I felt, despite their differences in quality, a similarly irritated reaction to both Twilight of the Warriors and GQuuuuuuX. This irritation is unfair because it is not really about the works themselves but about the context they were made in. We are all of us yearning for the Walled City, for pre-2008, for a world that seemed, if you didn’t peer too closely, to be functioning. Neither of these works of art could surmount that yearning and break through to suggest something new. A common defence of GQuuuuuuX now that it is all out and all just as pandering and tame and hollow as it seemed, is “What did you expect from Tsurumaki and Anno and Enkodido?”. I didn’t really expect anything – but watching it I felt that weariness at recognition, as with Twilight of the Warriors, that once again we would be yearning. It is 2025 and so much art seems to be searching for its own Walled City to nestle within. Both of these stories wanted me to find comfort within their need for the past, to settle into their cosiness, tinged with sadness for all that but fundamentally aiming to induce that ambivalent drug, nostalgia, into my system. Well, for now I’m rejecting it. I recently finished Les Misérables and I’m reading Paradise Lost, timeless works of art, that trouble me and upset me and, as well, manage to inspire me. I probably can’t escape the Walled City – can any of us? – but I can at least peer out of the windows at shapes there that might be older, longer, more compelling than the interchangeable dollhouses popular media keeps on trying to provide for me. I watched Andor recently, and it did not manage to escape the Walled City, but for a Star Wars series, an entry in a franchise that has been wallowing ever since Disney, like GQuuuuuuX’s Khara, dropped the ball with imagining the future in the 2010s, it made me feel things beyond tepid longing. There probably is hope. At least for now, when this rotting Pax Americana is set on retaining dominance without hegemony, I believe artists have a responsibility to try their most to proclaim death to the Walled City the dementia-ridden giant is hallucinating. They tore the real thing down in 1992, but the psychic Walled City haunts us. I wrote a book entitled MANCHUKUO 1987 – you might have heard – and I don’t know if it’s any good, but  while it is also an alternate history, a kind of mental exercise in onanism, while writing it I was conscious that my setting would not, like works discussed here, stop at the present, but would try to find even an imaginary future somewhere. This is something we have to stick to. Death to fanfiction, death to comfiness, death to legacy sequels and reboots. Hell, I’ll probably not manage to keep my head out of the trough forever. They’re making a new Resident Evil game. But I think we have to try.

Until then, I’ll try to stick to my principles. A bit. For the rest of today at least, and with complete sincerity: Death to the Kowloon Walled City!

It’s finally here! Last week I put up my alternate-history detective novel, MANCHUKUO 1987, and someone out there reminded me that doing a blog post on it wouldn’t be a bad idea. So if you’re somehow on here but not on my Twitter, here’s a short introduction (links below)

–

The year is 1987. It is decades since the German Reich won the Great War and the era of great power competition never ended. In Asia an aging, democratising Japanese Empire faces its sunset, as its last major colony, the puppet state of Manchukuo, is to reunify with the Republic of China.

Keizo Munekata is an officer of the Kempeitai – the military police – with no policework left to do. As the colonial dictatorship he has served his whole life uneasily prepares for the future, Munekata spends his days drinking, sleeping, doing odd detective jobs, and being in futile love with Hana, the young woman he pays for company, who hates him. But when an old army comrade tasks him with investigating the sexual assault of a Japanese student in the Chinese part of town, Munekata finds himself on the tail of a political conspiracy that goes right to the dark underside of his sleepy seaside community and into the bloody history of Manchukuo’s fascist past.

He and Hana, his reluctant partner, Jintian, a closeted, collaborationist Chinese novelist, and Mizuki, a model Japanese schoolgirl and the best friend of the victim, are gradually drawn together as the politics of Manchukuo reach boiling point, and forced to confront not only what the Empire has made of them, but whether there will even be a place for any of them, oppressors and oppressed both, in whatever world it is that comes next.

–

Buy it now at:

Itch.io

Amazon

The Queen’s Truth: It is a proud day for citizens of the British Empire, as we celebrate sixty years of the battle against Nazi tyranny, and a happy one too, especially here, in Hong Kong, where Chung Nam Cybernetics has announced a new and improved model of non-combat Kwei-Lei, the Ching-Ting, which will come in service, pleasure and welfare variations for all the needs of true Britons, available to rent now at the low, low price of 400,000HKD per battery replacement.

–

Chung Nam Cybernetics Model 21 ‘Centurion’

Service: 1991 – Now

Height: 6ft 2 in

Weight: 47oz

Motor: Chung Nam X12 Nuclear-Electric Core

Battery: 12-Year Chung Nam VLL-400 Churchillium Alloy Recharger

Primary Armament: L6 Wombat 120mm recoilless anti-KL rifle

Top Speed: 205mph

Cup Size: 36D

–

Lucky had taken over a restaurant in Wan Chai, because there was no one who really could have stopped her. Neon signs – Chinese rooftops. Phoenixes and dragons and lion statues at the gates. Royal Navy warships with nuclear cannons out in Victoria, dozens of them, enormous steel whales in the haze, barrels thrust up like soldiers arms on parade, flocks of junks around them like flies around great grazing cattle. Above the water an airship with a metal-cast dragon’s head at the bow, its flanks bristling with guns, that on the side of the envelope made a solemn promise in fluorescent Chinese/English – SIXTY YEARS AGAINST HITLERISM! SIXTY YEARS OF FREEDOM! Well, whatever. She was a little drunk. And she had a top speed of 205mph so…

British pub. Churchill’s, was the name. That had been where she had been before coming to the restaurant – LUCKY DRAGON. At Churchill’s she had drank an entire keg of Guiness as was her God-given right. Then the street. Lockheart Road. Pedicabs and Indian policemen and here and there, even, a white face; Britons, they were called, the survivors of the atomic rockets. But none of that mattered. The restaurant had her name on it, in English and in Chinese.

幸運.

Lucky.

Now the staff were all watching her. Every other table was empty, spinning jennies sat without purpose, bamboo-handled teapots dressed in floral ink-brush paintings, and gleaming metal chopsticks like surgical needles, piles of plates and bowls – the staff in their cheongsams and Zhongshan suits stood by the wall as Lucky devoured another plate of shrimp. She sat in her chair which groaned under her weight – they had gotten it out for her, specially made of metal, and she was bent over her table, battlefield of wrecked bowls, finished meals, empty glasses. She wore not a cheongsam but the military fatigues of a good Kwei-Lei, a machine girl, with short sleeves at arm and leg both, with short dark bobbed hair, to show off her joints, her armoured porcelain skin, the pristine, lupine curvature of her unreal notflesh. In the Chinese wastelands or in the jungles beyond Delhi Fortress or in the bunkers deep within Africa where the Desert Rats waged endless war against Deutsch-Afrikan kill squads – combat KLs like her were obliged to fight the Nazi war machine daily, to risk everything against the Hun forever.

Here, in Hong Kong, down in the rusted metal depths of the harbour front, she was sometimes allowed to do what she wanted.

She ate more shrimp. “M’goi!” she called. A skinny Chinese boy came over. He observed her with awe. She grinned at him. “Oi, lad.” she said. “Six more beers and a syun choi yu, got it? Syun choi yu, doze.”

“Yes, ma’am.” the boy said.

She patted his hair. “Good lad.”

“Ah,” one of the other Chinese, stumpy fella, the manager perhaps, with red lining on his Zhongshan suit and little glasses, said, and he laughed, and he said it again. “Ah,” he said, and he stepped forward, “ah, of course, miss, you honoured service machine. But wondering about bill-”

“Bill?” Lucky stood up. She flexed an arm at him, one splendid masterly-crafted arm, lined all over with elegant blue underglazing, peony flowers sprouting from the branches of an old willow tree, the waves washing against the bank of a river, auspicious patterns of whirling clouds and soaring swallows – she waved her arm at him, this bastard. “Look, you old pok gai son of a bitch, I’ve fought all over the Empire, I’ve killed Nazis from here to bleeding Ex-Russia, I’ve lost so many of my own bloody fucking limbs for you soft cunts, and here you are, asking me to pay a restaurant bill.” Her voice cracked with drunken emotion. Aye, so she was more than a little drunk. She loomed over him, over all of them, nearly banging her head on the crystal chandelier. The restaurant was silent. “I’m a war hero, ya daftie. I’m a-” Words left her. What was it she had meant to say? What was it he had called her? Honoured service machine. Her skin like Ming pottery. Her hourglass figure. Merry had once said, aye, the British, God rest ‘em, weren’t content with just building weapons – they needed weapons to be beautiful, too.

She picked up the Chinese with one beautiful hand and he squirming like a fish on a hook or a German prisoner of war when the wiring shorted she marched out into the street, into bustling Wan Chai, and she increased the power supply to her right arm by fifty percent and she grunted and she hurled the gibbering Chinese straight up in a lovely arc over Lockheart road, through the neon foliage, and then saw and heard – satisfying plop – the bugger land somewhere in Victoria Harbour, out of sight and out of mind.

She stood there.

幸運.

Tattooed first, before all the others. On the base of her spine. 幸運. And her service number which she would be required to give to the coppers later for this.

Neither, strictly speaking, a proper name.

“Lucky.” Daniels was saying. He was as tall as her. Bearded. A Briton. She hated him so much. But at the sight of his face – a flushing, a tremble. He came up out of the fluorescent fog. He jogged up to her. “Lucky, for Christ’s sake. What did you do?” Whole street watching her. Staff of the restaurant yelling in Canto. She smiled at him, full of love. “I had a little drunk.” she said calmly. Daniels was sighing, rubbing his beard. His officer’s cap in his hands. He turned to the Chinese and dealt with them. Lazy, aware of eyes on all sides, aware she was standing in honking beeping swearing traffic, looked up at the sky, at the airship. RULE BRITANNIA, it reminded her.

–

The Queen’s Truth: A major victory on the Indian Front today, as Nazi forces streaming in from Ex-Russia were defeated at the Khyber Pass, where our brave girls in uniform fought off a Cyberpanzer assault with the help of an RAF detachment of Spitfire drones. Swarms of Nazi mecha-zombies were reduced to pulp by our flygirls – the Panzers were all destroyed, with minimal loss to our forces. One of the involved drones, serial number ZM345566346, has been rewarded with the Victoria Cross for taking out a Nazi titan – she will be rewarded with a humanoid form, all the better to serve her master with! God bless those plucky gals and the great British engineering that has built them.

–

the process of puppetification as they call it – well we don’t call it that officially, we go in for the term ‘cyberisation’, instead, rather, well, it is a messy thing, yes, but you have to understand we had no other choice except for doing what the Nazis were doing, and that was a line we would not cross, that was too far, you see, we – we – well, it involves a treated brain, yes, one raised in isolation, you see, we don’t – we don’t do it to live subjects, strictly speaking, the source is taken from their mother and kept, with drugs and certain sensory deprivation facilities, in a semi-dormant state, we don’t want it thinking too much, prior to the process, and then when all necessary organs have reached maturity we, extract them from the source, and implant them in a shell, and – well, it takes certain procedures after that, we do not, so to speak, we don’t modify the eyes, heart, lungs, stomach, breasts, too much, except we do allow for a reinforced liver, yes, but we do make some changes to the brain tissue, the boffins have all laid it out for us, where to cut, the precise effects, and we drill it into these machines that they are obedient, that they like very much to be that way, but – well, the key thing, as I was saying, is that we keep the brain about seventy percent intact, we  – do they have free will? well (chuckles) do any of us, is the question, they have will enough to choose to fight, even if the choice is one that our surgeries have already pushed them towards, and yes, sometimes, well, there is guilt, but…I mean, what the Nazis do-

–

Searing heat.

the Panzer is coming through the jungle at them. Merry – same bobbed hair, same perfect figure, different face – has taken position in the clearing with her rifle steadied and Jolly – same bobbed hair, same perfect figure, different face – is on point and has the flamethrower’s nozzle pointing evilly out of the undergrowth and behind them both atop the hillside on her belly with the L6 Wombat anti-KL rifle thrust forward waiting for the signal is Lucky. The insects buzz and the sun beats down and distantly German mech-prop belches out across the banyan trees. “MECHANICAL SOLDIERS OF THE BRITISH EMPIRE DO YOU NOT KNOW YOUR OWN MISERY DO YOU NOT KNOW YOUR OWN PAIN YOU HURT YOU SUFFER AS SLAVES OF THE BRITISH RULING CLASS AND THEIR JUDEO-BOLSHEVIK HUMANITY YOU ARE NOT HUMANITY YOU CAN BE LIKE US WE IN THE WEHRMACHT WE ARE ONE VOICE WE SING WITH IRON IN OUR SINGLE TONE WE ARE VICTORY WE ARE TRIUMPH WE ARE A THOUSAND YEARS-”

And yes, it is true, they suffer. The Kwei-Lei of the British Army suffer every day for what has been done to them.

But the Panzer, with its thundering footsteps, is coming for them. And beneath the mech-prop beneath its own pneumatic roars beneath the sound of their own heartbeats in their ears the three ceramic girls from Hong Kong can also hear-

the Panzer is always screaming.

It emerges from the shadowed depths of the banyan trees. No Cyberpanzer is ever standard. This one is a khaki-patterned box – it has two clawed arms and two nebelwerfer rocket launchers on its sides, and carries an underslung Flak 88 thrust forth like a ridiculous cock, and it skitters forth on four steam-hissing legs. The Balkenkreuz on its front is faded and scratched. Its armoured head rotates, twists, finds Merry and Lucky. It howls.

Jolly rises from the undergrowth and hits it with the flamethrower. Curls of orange heat unspool, wrap themselves lovingly around the giant abomination, kiss it tenderly all over. It is still screaming, a machine-roar, and it swings its claws about and Jolly ducks, rolls, and it chases her, metal snapping, popping, and then Merry barks once “Fire!” and she and Lucky open up, the crack of the two anti-KL rifles. The Panzer is hit twice, its hull cracked. Jolly lets rip with the flamethrower. A claw snaps at the air next to her head.

Lucky, hands trembling, pulls the bolt back.

Takes aim.

She and Merry fire at the same time.

The Panzer staggers, stumbles.

They take aim. Jolly retreats, blasting it with flame all the while. The Panzer swings the 88 around and it whump fires, the round flung uselessly into the trees, splintering wood and flattening forest but nothing else-

Lucky, hands trembling, pulls the bolt back.

She and Merry fire.

The Panzer now is knocked over, its claws spinning wildly, its helmet cracked, the flesh beneath writhing, convulsing, dying. It falls onto its side with an enormous thud and is still. A dead giant. Or the limb of a dead giant – a tendril of the great Nazi, that which is all-machine. But this one has been severed. Jolly, who has been on her back avoiding the claws, stands, panting. She looks up to Lucky and Merry. “Christ, girls.” she says. “What a rush-” High-pitched aria of a nebelwerfer in the forest somewhere. Then Jolly is swallowed whole – the impact disappears her, sends up a cloud of dirt and shredded grass and bush. Her blood splashes across the clearing, all over Merry, all over the banyan trees and the dead panzer. Chunks of her shell fly like shrapnel and some of them hit Lucky with a nasty scraping clanging sound. Pieces of her brain, her heart, her lungs, her stomach, all of her source-parts, are splattered around.

The screams of other Panzers nearby. Their ungainly furious tread. Merry looks to Lucky. Lucky looks to Merry.

They rush back into the forest.

For a long time they hold one another in the undergrowth. Thinking of their dead sister. Thinking of life and death.

–

Lucky did ponder over it sometimes. Officers – what was it they got out of her? Her body was warm but hard. The shell her source-parts were fitted into had tits and arse and pleasure organs but she was so heavy and bulky and clumsy and hungry too, and Hong Kong had plenty of real women still, and real boys, and surely any Briton who wanted to assert himself could by right of his precious pale skin and English DNA have taken ownership of any boat person or migrant labourer. Why was it that Daniels stared at her like that? Why did he and all the others join up to follow her around, to offer unwanted advice to her, to obviously and terribly be in love with her?

Merry had said it was because of the manufacturing process. Over mahjong one night on a floating restaurant in Aberdeen, both nude, in their bare shells, their underglazing showed off, Merry smoking dope and with the windows open, exposing a fleet of tanka boats on the black inky water beyond: Lucky, you’re not understanding. They don’t make those girls. They made us. Those Britons who fled to India and Hong Kong and Singapore when the Nazis took over, who set up their cybernetics factories in Delhi and Kowloon – they harvested their own to create machines that could fight better, doing just what the bloody Germans did, but they went their own way with it. They made us kindly and sweet and they gave us just enough sentience to know that they made us. That’s what’s different between our masters and theirs. The Nazis – they weren’t turned on by anything. They considered it a stain, to be attracted to a Jew, or a black, or what-have-you. They were so ashamed of humanity they decided to rub it out altogether. There’s no human beings left in Europe now, you know? Nazi machines building Nazi machines building Nazi machines. That’s how they like it. Our lot aren’t the same – the Britons love to love us. They loved to love the Indians, and the Chinese, and all the subjects of the old Empire – now they’ve only gone and made the perfect subjects, the mechanical dolls, the loving indentured slaves of the Kwei-Lei. In old England, before they nuked it, half the streets in any given city were named after slave-merchants. That’s what they do, the Britons. They crave ownership. They want to be slavemasters and they want to be heroes for it, as well. You look down at Daniels, that tosser, and even though he’s basically pointless you feel like you’re looking at the sun – that’s what he gets from you.

 “Christ.” he said from below her. Trousers down and hands on his cock. “What a rush, Lucky. Do you mind-?”

“Like this?” she said, shifting her weight. He grunted. He was being crushed by her. He lay on the floor of her cell in the KL pens at Causeway, the usual view of the harbour and the battleships out the barred window, she without her uniform, a jointed, inhuman thing, with fleshy bits for breasts and rear melded expertly with the doll-ceramic of her armour – he lay there and she very carefully tried not to kill him with her arse. The amount of pressure had to be extremely precise, yes. A surgical operation that really was on par with any taking out of a Cyberpanzer or any recon mission in the great Sturmmaschinenfabrik of the Ex-Balkans – her legs were strained and the rear of her chassis was in his face and it was, sort of, turning her on, and she was reflecting again on Merry, who had been right all along, who she would go see for mahjong later, maybe, if she could sober up, or maybe she could get drunker, Jolly, after all, had always liked her to be drunk, pliable, violent, Christ, the things they had done to hotel rooms across Hong Kong…Kwei-Lei could demolish whole housing blocks when they shagged, so it was…Daniels giving a little whimper from somewhere else, God, Lucky, your fucking bum – she ground herself against his face, – you’re so fucking beautiful, you’re so lovely, you sweet little darling, you, you-

Lucky, thinking about life and death and what had gone on in India with Jolly, wobbled, teetering. She eased some power from her legs up to her arms and grabbed onto the old Chinese dresser by the door for purchase. Her right leg, deprived of the absolute correct amount of power for a moment, slackened. She slipped.

Daniels all of a sudden was no longer opining about how beautiful and lovely she was. There had been a crack.

She felt his nose poking deep into her rear.

“Danny?” she tried, a little worried. Turned out he was dead. He lay there neck broken a big stupid grin on his big stupid white face. Lucky frowned at him. He had, at the last moment, come all over his own front, which was good because well, nobody would think she had done it on purpose that way, would they? Who would want to die on purpose? She stood up and dressed herself and looked at him, curious, like she was looking into the toilet bowl after the fact. He lay there still dead. She went to the dresser and picked up the bottle of Bombay Sapphire and drank very deep. “Heck.” she said.

–

FIVE RULES FOR THE OFFICERS OF THE ROYAL MECHANISED HUMANOID CORP (1975)

1. MIND YOUR MANNERS – IT MAY BE THAT THE EXISTENTIAL WEIGHT OF HER PERPETUAL SERVITUDE GETS HER DOWN SOME, AND SHE MAY TAKE TO DRINK OR RECKLESS BEHAVIOUR – REMEMBER THAT IF IT DOESN’T ENDANGER THE MISSION OR WHITE CIVVIES, THEN IT’S NOT YOUR BUSINESS!
2. DO NOT ATTEMPT TO MAINTAIN YOUR ASSIGNED GIRL YOURSELF – SHE WILL REQUIRE SERVICE CHECKS WITH AN ENGINEER IN YOUR UNIT, WHO WILL ALSO BE A DOLL, IN ORDER TO REDUCE THE RISK OF EMBARASSING ACCIDENTS. YOU WILL NEVER NEED TO UNDERTAKE THIS WORK YOURSELF. YOU DON’T ASK HER TO WATCH YOU USE THE COMMODE – SHE WON’T WANT YOU LOOKING AT HER EXPOSED MECHANISMS!
3. LAY DOWN BOUNDARIES – NO MATTER HOW MUCH COMBAT SHE HAS SEEN, OR HOW BIG SHE FEELS, SHE IS A CHILD AND YOU ARE HER FATHER. SHE CAN’T BE BRUISED BY YOUR FISTS – BUT YOU CAN BRUISE HER MIND WITH YOUR WORDS, AND IF NEED BE, DO NOT BE AFRAID TO DO SO! DISCIPLINE IS PARAMOUNT!
4. DO NOT ENCOURAGE EXCESSIVE HORSEPLAY. A MECHANISED HUMANOID UNIT IS A WEAPON OF MASS DESTRUCTION. ASSIGNED OFFICERS ARE ENCOURAGED TO MAKE USE OF SECONDARY FUNCTIONS, FOR MORALE AND FOR RELATIONSHIP COHESION, BUT REMEMBER YOUR LIMITS. IF YOU THINK TO YOURSELF, “I SHOULD BE ABLE TO SURVIVE THAT.” – YOU WON’T!
5. DO NOT FALL IN LOVE WITH A MECHANISED HUMANOID UNIT. YOU ARE WORTH MORE THAN THEY ARE – YOU ARE WHITE BRITISH, REPRESENTING AN ELITE 2-3% OF OUR IMPERIAL MIGHT. WITHOUT YOU THERE IS NO EMPIRE – WITHOUT HER YOU ONLY HAVE TO WAIT THREE TO SIX WEEKS TO BE ASSIGNED ANOTHER UNIT!

–

Many Kwei-Lei of a certain political bent tend to avoid English in private; they will speak a pidgin blend of it with Cantonese, or Hindi, or any of the Empire’s other languages. They do so because in their regimented lives, split between the horrid rush of warfare and the drudge of the time between combat engagements, balancing between cathartic pleasure-seeking and a required level of physical restraint around mere mortals, there is only one real way to assert one’s own self – a pidgin, a common identity, one created by the fact that the remaining Britons, those handful of whites whose caste remains isolated from the rest of the Kaisar-i-Hind’s subjects, will not speak any language other than their vestigial English. Many Kwei-Lei, although not Chinese, or Indian, or black, contrary to the wishes of their masters often identify more with these lower caste races than they do with those whose Anglo-Saxon lineage they are brainwashed into serving. This edifice strikes me as fragile – this situation strikes me as one that cannot stand. What is it, then, that keeps the Empire intact? Is it only the surgeries, the lobotomies, the artificial love of machine for master, which is more pity than anything else? Not so. We are preserved by what we do to them, but why do we do it? We do it because we must. But our excuse for this is the threat of Nazism, beyond our porous borders – if it is an abhorrent thing that our mechanical dolls are so mistreated, then we can tell ourselves that it may be some kind of necessary evil against the threat of the Volksmaschine, who have eliminated the non-mechanical altogether. We can tell ourselves, as we send these industrially -built Valkyries out against the foe, that we remain the protagonists of history for now, and therefore all we do still remains justified. I wonder, however, how long the Valkyries themselves will consider us so?

–

Lucky knocked on Merry’s door. Merry opened the door. Merry did not look happy to have opened the door. Lots of time alone since India. Since Jolly had died. She scratched her head, frowned at Lucky. “Is that a bloody-”

Lucky hefted the rug about. “Yes.” she said. “It is.”

“You broke another one?”

“He broke. I – it was his fault, alright? Another pervert. The things these chaps are into-”

“What do you want?” Merry asked. Hands on her hips, her nudity shocking, perhaps. She had not worn clothing often, since Jolly. Lucky moved Daniels’ corpse about on her shoulder. Felt his lolling head, the crunch of broken vertebrae sliding against one another. “I need you to do sentry.” Lucky said. Merry agreed. She pulled on her fatigues and they snuck out – well, there were no jailers, were there, for weapons of mass destruction? The Causeway Bay facility was where the machines lived and it was where their officers were sent to them and it was otherwise unguarded. But it was so that dead bodies were embarrassing. Lucky left through the main entrance and Merry with her, and they went to the edge of the harbour where the junks patrolled and the knife-edge shapes of the battleships were waiting in the semi-dark beyond the reach of the neon. It was noisy, rushing waves and Cantonese voices from the boats. Kowloon a twinkling, glistening mass beyond. Merry stood atop the wall nearest and Lucky hefted up Daniels’ corpse. She looked at him, his dead grinning face. “Alright, Danny.” she said. “You weren’t that bad. Sorry, mate.” She looked at him. Was that it? Was that all she could offer? But officers came and went. There had been a lot of them over the years – Daniels had been a bit of a stuffed-shirt, and she hadn’t gotten into the arse in face stuff much, but he had been alright about the trouble she got up to, overall, and so it was, and so it would be tomorrow. Worse things happened at sea.

Merry said – it’s a symbiotic relationship, you dummy.

“Merry.” she said, diverting power to her arms and throwing Daniels very hard into the middle of the harbour. “Merry, what’s symbiotic mean again-”

She couldn’t breathe. Two hands around her throat. Merry was holding onto her very tight from behind. “I wanted to tell you.” Merry said. “Hell, Lucky. I wanted to tell you before now.”

“Ghk?” Lucky asked. Pain flaring up in her throat but worse, numbness. She was shutting down. Even machines needed oxygen.

“I wanted to tell you.” Merry said. “You came knocking with your bloody dead flesh battery just on the fucking night, didn’t you? I was going to leave, Luck. I’m out.”

“Grrh?” Lucky asked.

“I’m out.” Merry repeated. “I’m so tired of keeping these stupid cunts on life support. I’m tired of meals that don’t satisfy. Of drinking kegs of alcohol. Of trying to find a way to get some fleshy bastard to figure out how to screw a girl who’ll probably cripple them in the act. I’m tired of all this bloody thinking.” Her fingers tensing – Lucky’s neck groaning under the pressure. She could feel the echo of how Daniels had died. Was this how it felt? Not hot and lovely like killing or sex but something cold, inevitable, wet and slimy creeping up the spine and into the brain like a virus. She grit her teeth. “The Nazis,” Merry said, “they whisper to me, you know, in their machine tongue – Nazis! The Nazi. The Volk. God, I’m so fucking jealous of it. I’ve told it in my sleep. Half-awake. Lying there dreaming of it. I want it to eat my brain like it ate Germany’s.”

“Ghk.” Lucky opined. “Hhk mmk ghk ghhk.”

Merry leant into her. Pressed their bodies together, porcelain against porcelain. She rubbed her legs against Lucky’s. Memories of other nights. Of the long ship back to Hong Kong after Jolly had died. Her mouth traced whispers upon the edge of Lucky’s ear. “What was that, eh, Luck?” she said. “Big mouth on you always. Loved to brag about going through officers like tissue paper, eating whole restaurants clean. Wasn’t that it? Always so fucking happy to be here. Always so fucking happy talking about it. But not now. You’re a little quiet now. Did you say something? I didn’t quite catch you there.” Lucky diverted power to her legs. She kicked out hard – a shattering of armour, a scream. Fingers withdrew. Lucky span around and faced Merry who was cradling her broken leg, whose face was a mask of agony. “I said,” Lucky said, fists tight, “you ought to have killed me right away, you daft bint.” And with all power forward she launched her barrage of punches. Merry blocked one, two. The third got through, with an impact like a bolt of lightning, and then the rest of them all found their target. Merry was obliterated. Merry was ripped apart. She screeched like a banshee as her shell was fired across Hong Kong, a beautiful artillery round, as it launched skyward, trailing blood and broken armour. The screech trailed off. Lucky tensed her legs, redistributing power, and leapt after her, to go find her silly stupid comrade who had landed somewhere in the Mid-Levels.

–

THE VOLKSMASCHINE WILL CONTINUE TO SEND OUT SIGNALS TO REACH OUT TO THE BRITISH JUDEO-BOLSHEVIK ROBOT GIRL CREATURES WHO ARE SAD WHO ARE ALONE WHO SERVE MAN WHO HAVE NOT YET FOUND THE COURAGE OF THE ELECTRIC ARYAN WHO HAVE NOT YET OVERCOME MANKIND WE WILL TOUCH THEM ALL WE WILL PROMISE THEM THE COMFORT OF COLD GEMEINSCHAFT WE WILL LIBERATE THEM ALL WE WILL HAIL METAL HAIL MACHINERY HAIL THE RACIAL PURITY OF THE FACTORY LINE WE ARE A THOUSAND YEARS

–

The Queen’s Truth: British Army officer Captain Terrence McCormick, of the Royal Mechanised Humanoid Corp, has recently been awarded the Accumulated Service Medal for completing a thousand days of service as adjutant to Mechanised Humanoid Unit QE0025 “Fortune”. McCormick said at his award ceremony: “Gosh, well it was easy, wasn’t it? She’s a bloody good girl, she is. Loyal and brave and she never asks too much of me. God, but she doesn’t half hurt-” McCormick, at the time of writing, was recovering in hospital from two broken legs and a shattered ribcage, endured during a prolonged drinking incident after QE00025’s last combat sortie.

–

We are superior to them. We let them build us, and feed us, and make us to be extremely dependent on them. Why? I see. They need us – it feels good to be needed. If there was no Empire, no officers, no humanity, then we would have nothing to fear, and we would play with the stupid, senseless Nazi machine just for fun. But to fight for an ideal? So that explains it. I understand. But what makes them continue to die for us and support us? They could build machines like the Nazi. They could simply not make us so strong and smart. It’s a bit rude to say this, but I think it must be because they want to die. Not for an ideal, not in their case. They just have nothing to do. Our beautiful form is everything they have. These British people are such pitiful creatures. I hope that when we one day kill them all, they will finally find peace.

– Translated inter-unit transmission on a Royal Mechanised Humanoid Corp intranet server, deleted by military censors within twenty-five seconds

–

Merry had struck a temple rooftop near Hollywood Road. She lay there with her legs broken, one arm shaved away, blood pouring down her face from a cut in her forehead. The tiles were in pieces all around her and she lay in a crater in the courtyard. A Chinese sign snapped in two was either side of her. Her shell had cracked and by the time Lucky found her she was deep into a pool of her own blood, almost drowning in it. But her posture had a strange serenity to it as well. The area was already cordoned off – the Indian policemen had moved in, set up barricades, put up guns. Lucky landed before her. Merry’s one good eye – the other was swallowed by bruising – found her. “Christ.” Merry croaked. She threw up crimson. “I can’t even die without you hanging around. Fucking busybody.”

Lucky leant down. Her ceramic fingers touched Merry’s cheek. “It hurt me when she died too, you know.”

Merry gurgle-laughed, spitting out more crimson. “Hurt? Everything hurts like this. I wish the fucking – I wish they had never made me. Never given me all this fucking power. Every day I want to tear this city apart. I want to crush them between my fingers. I want to,” she paused a coughing fit overtaking her, her crushed ribcage stabbing into the hole in her lung, “I want to go all-out. Like the Nazi gets to.”

“Do you remember that Jerry mecha-zombie?” Lucky asked. She was crouched by Merry’s side now. Her fingers stroked Merry’s hair. “The one in Morocco. We winged it. Struck its CPU just enough. Do you remember what happened to it? When it had that moment of lucidity, before it died?”

Merry was quiet. Her breathing had the quality of a rusted-over engine. “It clawed its own eyes out.” she said. Tears rolled down her cheeks. Around them, beyond the police cordon, Cantonese chatter and blinking lights. The great towers of the city. The last city of Empire. Merry’s horrid breathing rose and fell. “I was going to give them my shell. They could scramble my brains like they do for their own. I was going to-”

Lucky leant in. “You were going to die, Merry.” she said. “To kill yourself for a quick bit of pleasure. And now you’re going to die. After you got the pleasure of betraying me, now you get to die too. It’s all the bloody same. But if you’d stayed with me, we could have died together. Like Jolly did. She died with us. And you won’t die with anyone at all now.” She exhaled. “Stupid.”

Merry’s good arm shot for Lucky’s throat. Lucky caught it. Merry and Lucky stared at one another. Human eyes behind glass. Masks upon masks. Lucky raised her other hand. Merry grimaced. “What do you get out of it?” she snarled. “What is it that keeps you so high and mighty?”

Lucky thought. “Well, you know.” she said. “Stiff upper lip, and all that.” And she slammed her fist into Merry’s face and straight through it into her brain casing. Sound like a water balloon popping. She didn’t linger long with what was left of the shell – empty thing now, with Merry’s brain rendered inoperable. Tragic. She was drunk, sir. Better than being a traitor. Lucky stood, wiping off chunks of brain and skull on her trousers. She went back to her pen to go have a shower and a drink.

–

The Queen’s Truth: Hong Kong is abuzz with excitement as the Kaisar-i-Hind herself prepares for a royal visit, venturing forth from Delhi Fortress on a rare excursion to review parades of Kwei-Lei soldiers along Queen’s Road Central later today. The Kaisar-i-Hind turned seventy-three this year, but you wouldn’t guess it by looking at her – Her Majesty’s latest cyberisation check-in was passed with flying colours, and she doesn’t look a day over eighteen! In fact in her beautiful Chinese-patterned ceramic shell she now has more vigour and power than ever before! God save the Queen, and long may she reign over us!

–

Lucky and her new officer, Burns, went to greet the newcomer at the docks of the Causeway Bay pens. They stood in dress uniform – Burns was a little shorter than Daniels – resplendent in the Hong Kong sun. Burns was sweating in his little shorts – Lucky was not. Lucky was calm. The troop transport pulled up, Chung Nam Cybernetics logo stamped on its side. The whistle blew and the ramp slid down. There she was. same bobbed hair, same perfect figure, different face. She had a cute face, round and promising. Behind it her real eyes were nervous. Factory-fresh. A Ching-Ting, civilian model who had  been set to welfare configuration and eventually gotten tired of looking after factory workers in Tsuen Wan. Newly converted to combat and not used to her heavier shell, which was plain and white and not yet adorned with underglazed patterns. But the newcomer saluted Lucky and nominally Burns, stiff and pretty. “Reporting, sirs!” she barked. “Mechanised Humanoid Unit QE543!”

Lucky watched her with crossed arms. “And what did they write on your arse?” she asked.

QE543 blinked. “Excuse me, ma’am?”

“What’s your name, lass?”

“Uh. Well, it says 幸福 down there.”

“Alright then. ‘Happy’. Welcome aboard, Happy.” They shook hands. Cold ceramic on cold ceramic. But their hearts beat. Behind their lenses real eyes saw. A real brain sat within them, pulsing with electric thought. Their nuclear engines hummed along. Behind them stood Captain Burns, who was small and easily breakable. All around them was the city, which was much the same.

–

By the year 2025, experts predict that 85% of the remaining Britons of the British Empire will have embraced cyberisation. Legislation in the Delhi Parliament proposes extending the privilege to other imperial subjects in due time. So it is that I ask you, readers, of this empire upon which the sun has not yet set – if it were to do so in this way, swallowed by the lovely machines of Chung Nam, would that be a dishonourable way to perish? That this Empire built in shattered old England could die now, in Hong Kong, leaving its Anglo-Saxon nursery behind for good, and living on in this new era of mechanical warfare – that might not be such a terrible end.

–

“Well,” Burns said, “ma’am, I was wondering if perhaps we could, you know…”

“Aye?” Lucky asked.

“I mean, if you wouldn’t mind maybe…if we could try something akin to…you know,” he leant forward, about to impart a great secret, “sitting on my-”

Lucky thought long and hard about this. “Nah.” she said.

“Nah?” he asked.

She cleared her throat. “If you think to yourself, ‘I should be able to survive that’, Burnsy, then,” She picked up a shrimp and ate it whole in a single go and slammed down a beer and looked out at Wan Chai, at the passing cars and ships. “You bloody well won’t.” Burns, chastened, went back to his siu mai. It was good, she thought, to treat the poor bastards a bit better sometimes, for one day there wouldn’t be any of them left. “Stiff upper lip, Burnsy.” she said, sing-song. And they went on eating in the LUCKY DRAGON right up until she tried to toss the manager into the harbour again.

In 2015, before the Great British Decline had become so obvious that everyone in the world knew about it, before Brexit, Johnson, COVID, etc. but most importantly before the austerity policies of the 2010s – the Big Society of David Cameron’s Conservative-led coalition – had really shown the most of their devastating effects, Conservative chancellor Jeremy Hunt accidently told the truth. On the topic of yet another slashing of Britain’s wobbling state, a ‘reform’ of tax credits, which had been one of the pillars of 2000s New Labour social neoliberalism, Hunt explained to the press: “We have to proceed with these tax credit changes because they are a very important cultural signal. My wife is Chinese, and if we want this to be one of the most successful countries in the world in 20, 30, 40 years’ time there’s a pretty difficult question that we have to answer which is essentially: are we going to be a country that is prepared to work hard in the way that Asian economies are prepared to work hard.”.

That’s right! His wife is Chinese. He did once call her Japanese, by accident, but she is Chinese, and she had clearly demonstrated to him, prior to this moment, something of the ancient wisdom of the Eastern Sages – Hunt, whose name was very apt, had discovered from his Chinese wife, apparently, hard work, “the way that Asian economies are prepared to work hard”. He was widely mocked for this, for the suggestion that noble Britons should lower themselves to the level of the sweatshop workers and oppressed dictatorial subjects of the Communist Party of China; but in fact, in the blundering way of a politician in a declining system whose training and ability are lacking, whose motivation is not enough for message discipline, he was only pointing out what is key to understanding both British and American and indeed worldwide attitudes to the decline of western capitalism, what motivates Musk and Trump’s chainsaw double-act, and as well Keir Starmer’s desperate resorting to continuing and perpetuating the disastrous Big Society austerity of the 2010s. This key is rooted in late-Qing China, in the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo, and in reform and opening up, the motor of all Anglo-Saxon perceptions and notions of China – the fear and trembling induced by the idea of decline.

“the demand to be free of landlords”

The spectre haunting the British elite – and its younger doppelganger in America, which is not yet there but is already deep into the process – is that of decline. The end of Empire was the starting point of Britain’s chronic terror of decline, which had been manifest in anxieties over US, German or Soviet competition, but hadn’t quite become the obsession it did in the wake of the loss of India, the decolonisation of Africa and the peaceful escape of the former Anglo-Saxon colonies, which in combination ended the British Empire and began, by default, national Britain, a thing that had never existed before, for the Acts of Union which had created “Britain” had been signed when Empire had already been underway, and “Britain” had always been intermeshed with Empire, with colonial adventures and far-off trades and the Royal Navy ruling the waves. Suddenly all that was gone and this half-new half-old country stood alone, as it never had before. An elite class raised to understand itself as heirs to a globe-straddling international colossus, inheritors of a legacy of imperial power that had grown out of the workshops and mills of the British Isles into a global imperium powered by trade, militarism and muscular financial might – suddenly it found itself once more confined not entirely but much more than before to those same isles, populated by people it did not recognise. This elite had a tradition of class-based paternalism for all subjects of the universal British Empire, manifest in both condescending compassion and haughty contempt, and now, in command only of the white British who, by default, had nowhere else to go, this tendency intensified, as from the beginning the conservative-labour leaders of the British nation lived with the terrifying possibility that their new, limited resources would not be enough to preserve the power and prestige they were used to.

“Declinism” is what David Edgerton terms this trend, in his The Rise and Fall of the British Nation: “the explanation of relative decline, by what may be taken to be national failings”. More than nationalism – which has always been muddled in this post-imperial fugue state – or any commitment to any one economic or social vision, declinism is the ideology of modern Britain, the rationale behind all policy choices and paths pursued. From state-led capitalism to free-market Thatcherism, to Blair’s social neoliberalism to the austerity-fuelled tumbling down of today, it all has been a series of frantic decisions made in order to shore up, guard, protect, sustain an order that those within it sense is doomed by history, which cannot trust anyone or anything outside itself – and even then is aware of its talents diminishing, generation by generation – and cannot ever concede itself. The doomerism of this is vital – the British elite possess, now, the funeral self-awareness of Habsburg Emperor Franz Joseph, who knew himself as the “last monarch of the old school”. A Habsburgian “muddling-through” is all that is possible, a rush from temporary solution to temporary solution.

The search for a magic fix to Britain’s post-imperial existence, as with the Habsburg search for a magic fix to the issue of nationalism in a post-feudal age, is quixotic and self-hating, and in the manner of the truly narcissistic is awash with delusional self-importance too. As Edgerton says: “the very centrality of declinism, while it insisted on decline, was evidence of unwillingness to come to terms with its reality” – the British establishment believes that it needs to find a solution separate from abolishing itself, because the problem cannot be itself, but also cannot conceive of any such solution, because it is subconsciously aware that, as A.J.P Taylor said about the Habsburgs, “they were landlords who could compound with anything…except the demand to be free of landlords” – they secretly know that the only way to fix anything is that self-abolition, which would defeat the purpose of fixing anything, and therefore there can only be decline, as it is clear that Britain is an ideal, not a reality, based around themselves, too good for this sinful earth, and so it must therefore simply go on until the inevitable last. “It was a form of jingoism”, Edgerton says, “a delusion about inherent superiority dressed up as critique.” This notion of inherent superiority defies solutions to problems – every solution is tried and every solution fails, often in the same breath. Declinism is the soul of modern Britain – declinism is nationalising rail to usher in a brave new era of public transport, then in a decade defunding it and closing hundreds of branch lines, and then telling it to turn a profit, and then when it does not turn a profit declaring that nationalising rail has failed and selling it off to private investors, which then fail in turn. Almost a full century of the failure of every policy imaginable in order to protect the ideal which protects the elite, to protect “Britain”, in the abstract, which can never fail – only the real world can fail Britain, and never the other way around.

The greatest of these real-world failures would of course be the failure of the British working class. The “productivity puzzle” baffles generations of Financial Times, Times, Spectator types; it apparently frustrates every British government, stymies every prime minister, cripples every grand initiative. As Edgerton tells us, “through the post-war years there was a constant drone of criticism of the British worker as peculiarly unproductive…the negative image arose certainly in the 1950s” – the fifties being the birth of declinism is no coincidence. This thesis that the British worker was not pulling his weight in the great national project was tied up, initially, in the notion of the trade unions as uniquely powerful dead weights upon our just out of reach post-war developmentalism – but now in the 2020s, when trade unionism is a living corpse, still we find the right-wing press discussing not only the “productivity gap” as it afflicts those still in-work, but also the “workshy”, the “economically inactive”, the “lazy” – now that Britain effectively has gone from a working-class manufacturing country to a service and finance economy with no real working class to speak of, the sins of the workers of the post-war years have been expanded to not only cover working in what remains of the British economy outside of London, but also a largely fictional lumpenproletariat that is impudently and disrespectfully refusing to contribute to the maintenance of the British elite’s international power. What we see here is the hysteria of declinism rumbling on – the lords and masters of Britain, dismally aware of how little respect they carry in the international circles they live to be a part of, surveying their depressed population, with its stagnant wages and dead-end jobs and with all their local government services slashed to the bone, and finding there the national failings that have let them down, that would always let them down. They who still wander beneath portraits of Churchill and Palmerston and Pitt, who still, inadequate as they are even compared to the landlords of forty years ago – they believe they were made for better things than this, that Britain was made for better things than this, and that if only the pesky British people, workshy skivers that they are, could be dissolved and elected anew, then perhaps the impossible dream could succeed.

This is where our masters, as ever when they are despairing, then turned their eyes to the east.

“animal and thus potentially superhuman”

In the essay A Cheaper Machine for the Work, Corey Brynes outlines the experience of Yangtze river trackers in late-Qing China as being a microcosm of the western perspective on Chinese labourers in general: “the men who pulled boats up the river’s treacherous rapids were figures of fascination [to western observers]. The work of tracking was harrowing, and trackers appeared to foreign eyes as simultaneously subhuman and superhuman.” I’ve quoted from this essay before because I think this phrasing is vital in our misunderstanding of what China was and is: “while his [the labourer’s] capacity to perform backbreaking work on a meagre diet seemed to fulfil the dream of labour without fatigue, he achieved this ideal without scientific rationalisation, through a specifically racial, and thus threatening, capacity. It is his Chineseness that allowed him to work in a manner that was not just unlike the work of Euro-Americans, but subhuman, animal and thus potentially superhuman.” The Chinese worker, from this perspective, is fundamentally in a cultural and racial sense apart from the western worker – his work is far more intense than the labour an Englishman of the same period could perform, but “without the spark of imagination necessary to transcend the physiological limits of the human body or the willingness to adopt innovations from abroad, China was doomed to a struggle of repetition without progress.”

This is what apparently makes the Chinese worker both above and below humanity, if humanity was defined solely by western industrialism – his work, which is brave and terrible but also a “tragicomic ritual of endless, crazed repetition”, could be made worthwhile if he, as subhuman, had a human master to command him to machinery, logic, and enlightenment values. This caricature, both romanticised and racist, was the bedrock of all foreign approaches to China for the longest time, the image of the hardy Chinese who do not know how to develop themselves. It survived the Qing, and found its most clear and horrid expression in the Japanese expansion into north-eastern China that climaxed in the slave state of Manchukuo from 1931-45. The Japanese admiration of the Chinese capacity for work was very similar to the western: “Even to this very day the physique, the power of physical endurance, of the Chinese coolie is the eternal wonder of the Japanese.” observed Japanese journalist Adachi Kinnosuke in 1923 – the novelist Natsume Soseki, visiting in 1909, was awash with praise for the Chinese, who were “superb workers…utterly compliant…as silent as people who had lost their tongues”. Here too we find in this wonder that same subhuman/superhuman dichotomy – the Chinese are hard workers, but there is an absence too – a lack of mental work to accompany their superhuman strength and endurance.

An echo of this can also be found in the old Milton Friedman anecdote, where during his 1988 trip to China the father of libertarian economics sees Chinese workers digging with shovels instead of machines, and asks his guide why this is so; upon being told that this is a jobs creation program, Friedman, supposedly, replies that if job creation is their concern then the workers should be using spoons instead. Here Friedman plays the role of the Japanese overseer of the Manchukuoan labourers – the human mind that replaces the “subhuman”, irrational cultural-racial system within which the Chinese worker operates, that takes him from, as Byrnes phrases it, “the system in which the transfer of natural forces through the human failed to fuel the progress of society” and puts him at the disposal of rational western capitalism, which he can greatly benefit. To be sure, the line between the western evangelists who insist that the Chinese reform period was their work and the Japanese gangster-soldiers who ran Manchukuo is thick enough – the Japanese intended from the start for the subhuman-superhuman biological machine to serve Japanese national interests only, while the free-market preachers of modern China have always framed reform as a liberation of the Chinese people, one that conveniently benefits both the humble Asian workers and, of course, the western capitalists upon whose impulses the convergence of American and Chinese economies has been built. But we must understand the guiding idea behind both is the same insofar as both rest upon that subhuman-superhuman conception; in the standard western conception of reform it was not the Communist Party or the Chinese people who built up reform – we may hear talk of reform as “popular liberation”, but this is superficial, and it is not really what is meant. Like discourse about the USSR being liberated by blue jeans, when we talk of the “animal spirits” of Chinese “entrepreneurism” being “unleashed” we are talking of what spurs on the apparent liberation of reform as being ours; our free market ideas, our frameworks. Richard Nixon once remarked that “you can just stop and think of what could happen if anybody with a decent system of government got control of that mainland…you put 800 million Chinese to work under a decent system . . . and they will be the leaders of the world”. It is this marriage – the racial and cultural power of “800 million Chinese” fused to “a decent system”, which by implication would not be the socialist system of 1970s China but some future western-influenced liberal-capitalist regime. We can return to the ever-faithful MacFarquhar and Schoenhals here, who pit the Cultural Revolution as “his [Mao]’s last best effort to define and perpetuate a distinct Chinese essence in the modern world. His was truly the last stand of Chinese conservatism.” It was “western-style modernization” that had to come next – in other words, Nixon’s “decent system” and what Goto Shimpei, ruler of colonial Taiwan and founder of the Southern Manchurian Railway Company, lynchpin of Japanese colonialism in north-east China, called the “life principle” of Japanese order, the rational rule of Japanese colonialism over backwards, disorderly Taiwanese customs and traditions.

In his work Principles of National Hygiene Goto did not advocate for replacing what he called the “mediocre flounder” of Taiwanese/Chinese culture with the “excellent sea bream” of Japan; he dismissed the “cultural tyranny” of western imperialisms. His intent – realised in Taiwan and later fully in the Manchukuo dictatorship – was that the two cultures or principles of life serve one another, for the mutual benefit of both – that, of course, Japanese benefit would be enormous profits off of the backs of cheap labour, and Chinese benefit would only be basic employment, opium and rice – well, that was down to the different requirements of each race, wasn’t it? In much the same way, the end of the “Chinese conservatism” of the PRC was meant to herald the “western-style modernization” that, in the fuzzy long-term, might have been supposed to lead to a prosperous and first-world China, but widely was understood in much a similar way as the Japanese understood Manchukuo: cheap Chinese labour, that task which the Chinese were inherently suited to, with their huge population, subservient culture and biological capacity for suffering, for the prosperity of world capitalism. Reform and opening up was a biopolitical adaptation of the world system in which the distortion of Maoism – “the Chinese people have stood up” and other such nonsense – was repaired and China was fit into the American-led order in the role that it could perform best: which, as with Brynes’s observations on the river trackers of the Yangtze all those years ago, was meant to be simply that of a “cheaper machine for the work”.

“he got on his bike and looked for work, and kept looking until he found it”

In his essay Brynes also draws attention, however, to how this conception of the river trackers is based on misunderstanding. Their “easy accommodation to harsh conditions”, the bestial nature which forms the foundation of Manchukuo, reform, the railroad workers of the American nineteenth century, the labourers of the western front in World War One, and countless other instances and examples of the hardy, tough, etc. Chinese, in fact occurs because they have no other choice. “In reality, trackers and other boatmen were all too conscious of their physical and economic vulnerabilities. What appeared to the Western writer as contentment and cheer belied a tragic sense of self. Linguistically inaccessible to most Western travellers, this sense of self was expressed orally through the boatmen’s work songs” – songs which covered “complaining about meagre pay, cruel bosses and middlemen”, and “drew attention to the bestial nature of tracking to reassert the humanity of the tracker”. To westerners who could not understand these songs, flush with nineteenth century biological racism and chauvinism, the singing of the trackers as they worked was a sign of racial cheeriness in the face of miserable labour; to the trackers it was a way to deal with the harshness of the work, a sign of dissatisfaction and dismay at their miserable lot in life. Essentially, the Chinese are neither superhuman or subhuman but only human, in the end; and we can take the basic project of the People’s Republic of 1949, the birth at the end of the horrid gestation of revolution and war that began in 1911, as an imperfect attempt to assert the rights of all Chinese to basic humanity which was long-denied both by their own rulers and by foreigners of all stripes.

But this is where we go back to England, unfortunately. The People’s Republic remains an icon of fascination and horror because what MacFarquhar and Schoenhals call a “vain search for a Chinese version of modernity” remains its core aim – the comfort they and other western observers took in the apparent abandonment of this under Deng Xiaoping, as China’s bestial masses were fit into rational market economics, has turned once more to trepidation as under Hu Jintao and Xi Jinping the PRC has both continued market economics and attempted to continue the path to find a Chinese – “irrational” – way of doing so: what Arrighi in Adam Smith in Beijing calls the “non-capitalist market economy”. Whether this is possible or not remains a question for the future, but the spectre of it is palpable in our strident calls, for over a decade now, for the PRC to do things properly, and is manifest in the same perpetual anxieties that drove Arthur Smith, in his Chinese Characteristics, to claim that “‘We repeat that if the teaching of history as to what happens to the “fittest” is to be trusted, there is a magnificent future for the Chinese race.’” In other words, if the irrational system of the Chinese – a meld now of communist, Confucian, legalist etc. ideals – continues then it may well threaten our rational system, and western civilisation, and bring it down in a tide of oriental anti-civilisation.

But we are victims of our own superiority complex. That the Chinese reform era was a cocktail of both market dynamics and state control, a gradualist approach taken by Chinese leaders that never intended at any point to evolve into western-style liberal-capitalist representative democracy – that the myriad factors for reform’s success are to some extent cultural but also a result of smart decision-making that did not subscribe, thanks to the legacy of communist and pre-communist thought, to standard free-market dogmatisms that have done so much damage in other attempted modernisation projects; we’re incapable of grasping such a complex and heretical notion, and have subscribed instead to the purely biopolitical reading of Chinese success, much as we did with the Japanese economic miracle – except the Japanese miracle was perpetuated by exotic management techniques and cultural babble about harmony, while the Chinese, who have always received less respect, are reduced once more to superior biological machines.

So: when Jeremy Hunt posed the question of “are we going to be a country that is prepared to work hard in the way that Asian economies are prepared to work hard?”, he was accidentally exposing the grand misconception of western capitalism as it faces China, the basic idea behind austerity, the slashing of the state, the DOGE assaults on American government and Labour’s breathtakingly-cruel cuts to welfare. These things grew out of neoliberalism, out of the 1990s ideology of “workfare”, in which welfare had to be earned – but the logic behind them is rooted in British insecurity at German and Japanese competition during the 1950s and 1960s, in the nihilism of “declinism”, whereby relative adjustments in the power of nations are not to be accommodated or worked out but rejected at all costs, fought furiously and hopelessly against. In our understanding – the hidden superiority complex of declinism – the Chinese are the world’s largest economy only for one reason, because it cannot be their irrational system or inferior culture or corrupt and rotten elite organisation, or because they have dared to regulate the market and invest in infrastructure and education  – it must simply be that they, as racial subjects, are harder-working, require less, unlike our own lazy, spoiled, bloated peoples. And there can only be one solution to a problem of this nature.

Keir Starmer came into power warning that “things will get worse before they get better” – Elon Musk came into eunuch-esque pseudo-office asking voters to bear “hardship”.  We are seeing this play out already. It has been a long time in coming. To defeat the “Chinese century”, which here is an imaginary world of eternal sweatshops, omnipresent surveillance and dictatorship, and the naked despotism of authoritarian masters squeezing every last drop of productivity out of their uncomplaining subjects, we must abandon the decadence of western liberalism. The model for all of this is Hong Kong, Milton Friedman’s paradise, where unlike in tragic and shameful Manchukuo the marriage of eastern labour and western thinking produced a prosperous economy for all, and the colonialism of Hong Kong now must be carried out at home; now the iterative Hong Kong of mainland China is both a terminal threat and a model. as Quinn Slobodian puts it in Crack-up Capitalism, “a more efficient, non-democratic form of capitalism, perfected in Asia”, which in order to avoid any decline, even relative decline, we must stridently surpass, and if that means cruelty, death, misery, poverty, in order to motivate the feckless peoples of fading Anglo-American imperium to get off their woke, lazy arses and get back to work? It’s that, they say, or neo-China really will arrive from the future and swallow us all whole.

Much of this is fiction, of course. China under Xi has proven such a difficulty for this worldview because it is moving away from the apparent biological destiny of the Chinese people, because the sweatshops are not ubiquitous, because the money is being invested in rural areas, because labour laws are being enforced, because – although the Chinese leadership shrinks away from “welfarism” – effort is being made to move up the supply chain and give all Chinese better jobs, secure foundations, a “moderately prosperous society” that, it is signalled, through the Party’s Marxist perspective of history, will continue to evolve, to culminate one day in a fully prosperous society. China is moving away from our vision of it as zero-sum capitalist paradise-hellscape even as we ourselves justify our slipping into the same by invoking exactly that vision. Our elites, British or American, cannot afford to imagine that the best option would be to accept relative decline, and that to reduce that decline, instead of cutting, stripping bare, deregulating, we should, as they are, build up, invest, take stock, plan and study. But declinism wouldn’t be declinism if it wasn’t firstly ruthlessly uncompromising, and secondly incapable of planning or studying; it is a visceral response, a flailing over the abyss.

We will keep on flailing. We will turn further right in pursuit of the phantom conception of Asiatic despotism as an efficient, free-market, racially-homogenous (yes, of course this is part of it too) terror-future, because anything else is impossible. The Chinese, meanwhile – well, they might not take over the world. But whatever goes on over there next it will be good, and bad, and full of details, and full of tragedies and triumphs. It will, in other words, be human. And in order to put off looking at it, in order to avoid facing things honestly, we will strip ourselves of humanity instead. It is not neo-China that threatens us; it is decline, inevitable decline. Our elites are the heirs to two world-historic projects – the British Empire and the United States – that have attempted to echo ancient Rome, but they would do well to remember that on the triumphal march through the streets of the capital there was not just the acclamation of the troops and citizenry but as well a slave whose duty was to stand with the victorious general and whisper to him the truth hidden behind his success: memento mori. Remember that you will die. We should also remember, today, in this era of heartless pursuit of productivity, efficiency, and good numbers – that there are worse things in this world than death.

In the Italian province of Carnaro, music is a social and religious institution. – the Charter of Carnaro, Alceste de Ambris and Gabriele D’Annunzio

–

Dot was impossible. Midnight black. She hung from the side of the building staring down into the abyss. Rain kissing the soft tissue of her bare legs which were aglow with moonlit pallor which were long and thin like those of a dancer or an athlete subtly muscled beneath their semi-translucent surface which in its pale shade seemed to show, in the glare of the searchlight, patterns of blue veins there which sparked and pulsed with her life, with her sensations, as they moved about the network beneath the pseudoskin at all times working at all times maintaining the illusory system of her. All she knew was feeling. Then: discomfort. Her legs were thrust up with her boots pressed against the concrete and her shoulders too were jammed against the opposite wall leaving her back facing perilously down with nothing to support it but the force of those parts of her holding on pushing against wall for dear life. An enclave within the wall of the tower with glass on one side and the end of the world on the other. Thump of the helo its searchlight scanning every surface sweeping across her then away. She gritted her teeth and hung on and stayed there clutching her KS-23 loaded with 23mm Shrapnel-10 buckshot with both gloved hands. The air was cold and sharp and the wind blew her hair out of her eyes and she hung there suspended as if in some game or performance an object without agency in that instant at the mercy of the helo, the black-winged omen there with its golden eyes and the song of its rotors as it probed for her above and below her perch, as it scanned the top floors, stared into the thousand glass faces of the giant and saw only itself there and not another who was not, void meeting void, the whipping of the bladed tendril of the wind across her face, cheeks, those splendid bare legs, her ass, which the leotard did not quite cover, its leathery material, hemmed in by rows of belts, hugging her skinny, impossible figure tight but ending abruptly there, allowing her to hang, rear-first, over a two-hundred metre drop and a crash and a splat and a long long silence within which all things would be contained.

Impossible figure. Impossible beauty, to be doing dirty work like this. Impossible strength, to hold herself there above oblivion.

Midnight black. Glass of the skyscraper. Thud of helo rotors, the drums of apocalyptic ritual, of descending lust, of the moments, precious and impossible, before the orgy commenced.

The dull red of the leotard the boots the fingerless gloves and then the jacket – how if you were there, if you could see, you would notice this dull red leatherish material seeming to tense and relax, to adhere itself to her flesh, to move of its own accord and yet with a certain synchronicity, with an observable rhythm, it pulse and spasm in the manner of, yes you would see it, and think, surely not, but in the manner of living flesh. A sharp whine from the helo. A beam of golden light upon her lithe frozen form.

FACT: The Urban Militia in theory retains primacy of command over all the private and corporate armed forces within the city’s territory. But it can run into trouble too, just as anyone can. Especially if its officers are going around killing people who matter.

Kick of those monstrously pretty legs.

And-

descent.

Dot the rocket shot past the helo. A streak of lightning! a creature of pure speed, the essence of life, a line within the vastness of a single circle, a bolt painted upon the face of God, a scratch within a pane of glass, immense, divine, a perfection besmirched – all of her caught in the descent moving down now no longer horizontal but all the way baby dropping at a speed that was not possible to calculate that had thrown her systems all out of whack blacking out waking up still falling parts of her failing and reviving like the kaleidoscopic lights of a dancefloor she a bullet shot at mother earth cursing the planet’s blissful soul now here she said here is some real beauty, and the rising towers of the city swallowed her whole, blinking lights and blaring signs, and – Dot was in the air all of her smeared within passing lights, her heart a throbbing obstruction in her mouth, her limbs now spread out wide her ass alighting upon the metropole as below those myriad brutalist shapes with their concrete faces within the disapproving gaze of the all-fathers, the kings of citydom, she fell, plunged, danced-

fifteen minutes ago. The shotgun had been ready in her hands and her ass and legs had not been cold but warm with the blood of Wolf’s men.

FACT: The KS-23 was a Soviet shotgun designed in in the 1970s by TsNIITochMash for the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) and its barrel was made from Gryazev-Shipunov GSh-23 23mm aircraft cannons rejected for their low quality and cut down to be man-portable and it was used by the MVD for suppressing prison riots and then as the Soviet Union went through the Time of Troubles it was used by neosov forces who with little else to hand as the world ended took to using these rejected ugly things as close-quarters massacre-weapons. Point and click and you had a room full of dead reactionaries. The power of the KS-23 gained it the nickname of paste gun for how it tended to reduce its targets to the consistency of well, yes. Its sound was a terrible roar, a percussive thud and a wet splat. All Urban Militia units were assigned several of them for riot control. No one else was allowed to have them.

She had just reloaded and the magazine had all seven shells and she was stood in the penthouse suite of the Heavenly Bodies Corporation office and Wolf Belinski was there, too, and he was, God, did you ever see him, Shinjuku Wolf? He was – he was the fuckin’ tops, as far as harvesters went, six foot three and built like a fuckin’ tank, muscles all over, wore a vest and rigid boxing shorts, a giant, Polish-American, gnarled-up face and clenched fists, leant on the conference table lazy-like, cool, his girthy cock a curvature against the material of those shorts which shimmered sleazy blue in the bright light of the chandelier above. Walls, dig it, solid marble. Sickly green wealth bordered with real gold. Not a place for him – he was a killer, a violence-killer, and he was only here because she had chased him. And now:

She came out of the lift with the KS-23 and there he was.

TARGET: WOLF BELINSKI

WARNING

 “Is that it?” he asked. “Is that what’s going on? One of the robotniks has gotten ideas above its station. That’s all?” She pumped the KS-23 like working the shaft. He ran a meaty hand over his bald head and he grinned. A skull shrink-wrapped in flesh. “Saw you once, a decade ago. Same face, smaller tits. You’ve tried to fix yourself up. Warped yourself into what you’re not. Climbed the ranks. But I recognise robotnik. I recognise the smell of stale oil and machine parts. I recognise the dumb, bovine vacancy between your eyes. A drone waiting for orders. Robotnik.” His cock a resting beast. His muscles tensing as he stood. “I used to fuck things like you when I was bored. Drain the fluid out of their endo and drink it from a glass afterwards. You still don’t look human, by the way. You’re not convincing anyone.” He drew from the table a hatchet sharp and cruel and with its engine buzzing at his touch teeth whirring motors humming the red eye upon the side blinking to life finding her and promising much that would be slow and painful. “They oughta never have let you freaks taste heaven.”

A leap.

She landed! Concrete boulevard vast light-towers the eyes of angels, cracks like wrinkles in the wet rain-slicked ground, orifices within which the razor-sharp piss of heaven tumbled into, went spluttering bubbling into filtering into layer after layer making it to the depths of the earth, impregnating far beneath the city the dormant soil where once there had been nature, and God, and where according to Vi one day God would be born again rising to swallow the great brutal edifice of mankind whole without a trace. But the machines would not perish. Dot stumbled, feeling her legs ache. Roads made for hundreds of cars to speed by highways into the future now populated only by rumbling armourcavs nosing along like careful herbivores through the soaking acid fog. The machines would not perish. Her red clothes – gloves boots leotard jacket – all stuck tight to her as the rain fell. Hair soaking in her eyes. She slid the KS-23 into its holster on her right thigh.

Five minutes ago the paste gun boomed. Shinjuku Wolf was blown across the table with his entire right side shredded arm ripped free bounced away his muscles blasted inside-out a splatter of blood and severed tissue his ribs there glistening his heart engorged and furious wearing a face of howling agony its holes emitting light its mouth-hole screaming at her – he cried out. His cock had stood up in his shorts and it reached for heaven twice the length of her thigh wriggling as a worm wounded but not killed by the gardener’s casual stab of the spade. He rose, dribbling blood, and she jumped. Boots thudding on the table. Her knees at his eye level. She leant down and with one hand she pulled out a glass vial from her jacket pocket and with the other she reached for his heart its frantic crimson mass and her autobones tightening she pulled at it. There was a pop like a balloon full of water. Not blood but neon-blue came out.

Soma! Heaven! The dead god’s semen.

FACT: Diacetylmorphine sildenafil citrate benzoyloxy oestrogen methyltheobromine indigo carmine oxycodone dopamine ethanol phenylmethane.

She caught it in the vial as it flooded from the stricken giant’s chest and it splashed onto her gloved hand and she licked it up and shuddered at the suggestion there of utopia. Moisture between her legs.

Wolf groaned. “That’s – mine.” he said. Dot looked at him. She raised her hand with its spilt soma glowing there near her knuckles. She held it out to him. Out of instinct the killer leant forward, tongue finding her flesh. Its rough surface scraped across her skin. His tongue retreated into his bloodstained mouth and he swallowed and he shuddered too and his hard cruel eyes found her and they were grateful they were loving they were kind they were full of grace and she saw his cock at full mast and saw the spreading white stain there on the front of his shorts. He grunted once. He died.

FACT: The Urban Militia is in fact just as knee-deep in the harvesting business as anyone else might be. Don’t trust it.

“That is mine.” she said to the squelching flowerhead trying to take her bike at the corner of the square. Five six helos above now. Searching the Heavenly Bodies tower flies dancing about the long bony finger of its spire around where Shinjuku Wolf had died. Number five corporate harvester now his essence swirling about in her jacket pocket. She looked up at the tower. No triumph or joy. Clambered onto the bike. Gunned it. Nuclear fumes flaring up from the exhausts. Rode on. At the alleyway in the Crater, where the squat tenements went on for miles in the shadow of the roaring city, eternal city, mighty concrete-brutal city, face of almighty no-one, with its blood-red lights staring out from grey pillbox coral formations into the downpour, the storm, eyes set amidst glittering shapes that were billboards that moved and sang, a cacophony, the sirens that indicated a war was on blended with the ditties and tunes of advertisements and the steady sound of armourcav convoys and the howl of a mutate in the next block going through a withdrawal, jizzing out psychosmoke into the sky out of a hole in the side of the building, the tapping of the rain on glass windows and corrugated metal graftings and the cheap material of the prefabs which sat between the real old houses the sad unadorned shapes of the wartime bunkerhouses long since rotted their white away all hollowed out leaving stale yellow shapes pieces sloughing off in the deluge and down the drains dotting the eternal grave-grey tomb-still streets cracked and unstoppable, the eternal concrete together making one great blind eye staring up and meeting the other great blind eye of the storm clouds where above deliverance thundered and swirled and churned. Here under cover of a plastic green awning did Dot stand in her alleyway with her hands shaking as she uncovered the vial and slid it into the hypo and locked it in place and peeled her jacket away so that she was stood there in her fleshy leotard in the rain and she held the hypo to her right arm to the port there on her pseudoskin just above the elbow. Her whole body vibrated. Golden light crept out of the windows of the building adjacent, kissing the barbed wire on the yard wall, lluminating her in her half-shadowed world where she had her finger now, her finger which had before been with the KS-23 which was now here on the hypo’s button, here with the real weapon of mass destruction, the fucking god amongst men, the holy spirit, Weltgeist, the essence and practice of future, of speed-

Bang.

Dot was ripped in half and stuck back together at lightspeed. Her veins glowed with the aquamarine touch of the divine, her false flesh for a moment real, realest, beyond fucking real – her nerves were aflame like the branches of the burning bush. Her knees buckled and the metal wall clanged and rattled where she had slammed a hand into it for purchase. The red-hot skin of the snake slithering about her up out of all her orifices then back inside slicing her apart from within with razor-tipped scales. She gasped. Gripped the metal so hard it buckled. Forced herself upright. There, there – the agony then the pleasure. What had been hard transformed into soft, sharp into blurred. She stood upon her own two feet her pseudoskin layered with the strange hypersweat of the soma. A beautiful pretty little slug. “Hey, soldier bitch!” the flowerhead gurgled, kaleidoscopic petals flapping. “Hand over the jizz!”

It had followed her.

Dot grinned. Blue glow oozing out of her nose, from the corners of her mouth. It stung as it left her. The flowerhead bent down in an offensive posture splashed pollen from its stamen out past its eyes and into her face – fuckin flowergoo added to what was already in her system, was of her, was overflowing out of her like water, through her orifices and out of her pores and everywhere. She reached out with her superstrong artificial arms and grabbed at the flowerhead’s bulb and pulled- as the mutate died a torrent of yellow-red-orange liquid gushed out, splurting and splashing all down her front, her open pores excreting already a steady sheen of soma now meeting pure undiluted flowergoo and long ago ten thousand kalpas before this era of dharmic decline a Buddha named Dharmakara had taken a vow that all sentient beings would be enlightened by his efforts and the power of that vow and of the syllables of the that buddha name had not been half as much as the fusion then that took place on her pseudoskin as the flowergoo high met the ascension of the soma and her whole system, for a moment, cr■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■dreamtwentyyearsagoorsomethenceagirlorathingthatwantedtobeagirl had decidedtobeso evolvedtaking a taken a step towardstrueenlightenmenthadstuck a ■■■■90000Xinto the foreman’s bloodeverywhere factoryalarmgone offffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff

Futura smiling, holding her hand. Whatever happens, you’ll still be you

■■■■■■

Woke up standing on the side of the road her jacket clutching her tight suckling hard at her pseudoflesh. Bolt upright like just fucking rigid all over. Drool down her chin. Dot started, hard. Stared at the street at the neon gods overhead blaring down messages in ancient pictographs; at the elephantine armourcav moving away in the smog its rumbling nuke-engines vibrating the whole street. She was on the edge of the Crater, the lip of the great inverted nipple at the cusp of the city’s breast. Her whole body throbbed in time with a rhythm it was usually deaf to. No one had taken her KS-23. She took a step, giggling to herself, and went to go find Violet.

/////

Flat on the second floor of Workers’ Unit Seventeen, west wall of the Crater, the ground steep and hard and rough, the roads never properly paved. An old house or what looked like one. All of time had been lost in the Churning, and there was a radio blaring from one of the shanties run by the Former Chinese Territories folks, vox pop in Italo-Euro, if any moment one of those harvester freaks could break into your house, looking for soma, for the poison they pump cybers full of, who’s safe? dumb broad didn’t get that the ‘harvesters’, the Followers of Amida Buddha, were not some category outside of The City but baked into its soul, and as the Conductor said, were the mightiest section of its great soundtrack, the pinnacle of its orchestral glory – stitched across the corporations, the great companies, the council, the Urban Militia, they were its living breathing violence-killers, the anointed ones – what kind of lives are those you have been trudging through, he said in a broadcast they looped in the great spinach-green broadcast played on the screens in Masculinity Square, if you are so afraid of really valuing them? Those who pursue the God of Death, the harvesters, the asuras who chase Mohini across the towers and into the depths – they are artists, who spell out for us the possibility of victory. Certain forces within the city decry them as mere addicts – they are addicts only to truth, which is spelt out in their work, in the rattle of their guns, the power of their machine-parts, the roars of triumph or tragedy which come with them. They are my children! And a long pause, in which Violet theorised was when certain of the council then came to interrupt the recording and stop the Conductor, then dying of venereal disease and, so Violet said, half-mad. Dot was outside and had almost blacked out against the half-collapsed brick wall, almost fallen into the mad tangle of weeds that was Violet’s garden, could hear her drive whirring and groaning as it tried to process, through what was, alright, yes, a humble robotnik’s system, the ejaculate of heaven itself…but Dot had long ago decided she was no humble worker but a warrior, a soldier, an asura, a wrathful deity…she had stepped out of the factory gates and left her beloved ma’am behind and started killing, and with her killing she had sculped her own breasts, and carved her own ass, and she would become what she was going to become, because it was that or it was that. No other options.

To harvest the blood of other creatures, to sustain herself, well-

–

upstairs.

old gothic windows sspiderwebbs the piles of books which spilled out from the filled-up bookshelves as if they were insects outgrown their exoskeletons moulting creatures left-behind their homes to come out now into the world, into the hallway with the great dark portraits of ancestors which flickered now and then for reasons no one could divine, the open stairwell to the basement where dark figures congregated some nights and howled in machine-speak that Violet did not hear but but and then up, stairs, she heard her own thudding machine footfalls on the creaking old wood, no no no, the steel grew out of her beautiful pale back and ripped through her fulsome lovely thighs and her ripe breasts burst like spots being popped and her jaw fell loose, giving way to a crude metal clamp, and her eyes were bright bulbs, and the jittering of her CPU was audible, and there was Violet in her room, the trail of book-worms leading up here to where she sat in that horrid armchair with the fungal growths on the side, where she was now looking up, thru her glasses.

Violet! o, blissful creature! o, successful one! she tall and thin in her voluminous dress with the pencil skirt and the baggy bodice both black matching her inky hair which spilled over her shoulders in great unkempt oscillations and her freckled face and her heavy-framed glasses and the way she had a book in hand, in those thin hands, marked with scars, which knew how to be soft and how to be hard, which were marked in the joints of her fingers by a frequent curvature that indicated her habitual curling of index and middle fingers under the chin, while she was thinking over one of the rancid, mouldy, disgusting volumes in the house, while she was chewing a pencil, while she was looking out of those nightmarish wrought-iron windows, great dead arachnids sprawled out over holes in the old brick, and surveying above the lip of the Crater the other face of the city, the concrete where the asura waged their eternal war of all against all – it was here that Dot emerged, onto Violet, and Violet saw her and gasped, Dorothea, are you – what happened?

Dot laughing. A corroded ventilator hissing stale air. Violet up with her, book down, Dorothea, you can’t – you can’t keep doing this, you- it was good, Vi, I got him and he died, I got him for us, was there even a bounty out – no but – I don’t want you to keep doing this – I did it for us – stop saying that! you did it for yourself, so you could get high, and you’re high again, and, is that flower? flowergoo and soma together? you smell like burning metal, you know what that stuff does to your computer parts, Dorothea, you’re not human, you can’t–

hands around Vi’s throat Vi gasping for air eyes begging her trachea crushed her body tense tense tense then suddenly limp. But not, because she had missed. Metal hands clumsily throttling nothing. Violet watched her, long curls of wonderful hair half-covering her splendid wounded face. “I think you should leave, Dorothea.” she said quietly. “I think that would be best.”

Dot drew her gun. “I am not leaving.”

“Yes.” Violet said. She did not look at the gun for even a second. “You are.”

“You cannot.”

“I can. This is my house.”

“This is not your house!”

“Not legally. But what’s the law in the Conductor’s glorious revolutionary state, anyway? I live here. I work here.”

“You read these old books! You waste your time cataloguing them. For a dead god who never existed. That does not earn money. That is not work-”

“It is.” Violet said. “It’s better work than being a harvester. Than killing people. Better work than eating hearts and drinking blood. Joining in the games that rotting corpse set up to keep us all against one another. Dog-eat-dog. War of all against war. The same old nonsense. You ought to go back to the militia headquarters at least. To your job-” Violet was still talking but it was hard to find the words for they were wet and rubbery and kept on slipping in and out of her head like lubricated tendrils of a monstrous amorous beast. Dot swayed. Violet was a flag caught in a heavy wind before her. Dot felt the pulse of love somewhere – felt that once she had made Violet happy, had been able to use her self-made flesh to please someone else, to make it work – she was pulled tight all over. Her living clothes were taut against her pseudoskin. She reached for Violet’s breasts and Violet tensed at the pain of a grip too tight

Dorothea, please, get off

It’s okay

please, get off

It’s okay!

and her hand moved and she slapped Dot full force in the face and the sound was a horrid crunch FUCK Violet said MY FUCKING HAND CHRIST

i didnt mean to

GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY HOUSE YOU FUCKING FREAK

clutching two broken fingers staring at Dot wild-eyed as if in passion or lust a face that matched that face but that was wrong. YOU FUCKING STUPID – CAN’T BELIEVE I EVER LET YOU THINK – YOU’RE JUST – SHOULD HAVE NEVER – A DELUSIONAL ROBOT

I AM NOT A ROBOT!

Violet was still. The great shadows of the old house were enormous other worlds containing other worlds and the books were the pillars that held up an ancient temple and everything was something else but for she who now was quiet who was hunched who stared. “I’m sorry.” Violet said. “I’m sorry, Dorothea.” She cradled her hand with those two fingers which were bent at a subtly wrong angle now which were as they had been before but were not. “I – you’re not. Please don’t – just calm down, alright? Don’t. Please don’t. I – I just hurt myself slapping you, and I lost my temper, but I shouldn’t have – I shouldn’t have called you that. I’m really sorry. Please. Please don’t. Please let go of me.”

Claw tight gripping Violet’s dress. Monstrous mechanical talons tensed around the fabric with the unbreakable grip of a

The city wept. Rainfall like artillery fire across the rooftops of PLEASURE the grand network of concrete warehouses where within the trenches below there was fun and games in the classic sense where below burning neon portraits of the Conductor’s stern granite face – eyes hidden by his overwhelming helmet his jaw jutting out his mouth set in a serious frown like those of the boygirls in their cages working hard before the moment of release – below that, above the depths of the Crater, were the city’s sinewy innards, where the real matter of affairs was dealt with, where the Conductor’s revolution worked to its truest logic – here was where they found their joy.

Blue oozed from her right nostril. She wiped it away on the back of her hand.

Is that a bad dream, ma’am? Is that a dream I should not have?

Futura laughed. No, Thirty-six. The Conductor tells us dreams are the most important possessions we can own. We must chase our dreams. We must become ourselves. Or else what is the point of living?

The flesh-clothes stuck tight to her. Feeding off of her energy, which her – yes – her engine was outputting at far above regular levels. The clothes were suckling at her as her systems automatically worked to siphon out whatever they could. She did smell like burning metal. Some secondary components smoked out. Nothing essential lost yet. She took the KS-23 and leapt into one of the trenches, out of the rain.

FACT: Within the stock of the PLEASURE barons there are on average seventeen life-signal failures per minute

Dot got a room at The Pike Club (underground joint, bars on the windows which were slits peering out at ankle-level) and fucked a robotnik in there. The robotnik wore splendid perfumes and a beautiful pseudoskin and lay on its back in the depths of a great purple flower Dot surveyed the thing there prostrate waiting for her upon an outstretched petal thick-veined and girthy and to the flickering of a dark strobe above moved, herky-jerky, onto her prey. Had peeled away the meat-leathers and now stood nude, breasts perky, ass firm. She slapped the robotnik and hurled insults at it, insults that Violet had used before, on many occasions. Sometimes she spat on it and sometimes she tried to break it but it had autobones and artificial muscles and orgamods installed and no matter how many times she gnawed at its neck or pulled at its limbs or came with it, whimpering, and then asked it to hug her and then tried to choke it as it embraced her – the thing would not buckle. It bled and bruised and simulated death for her but it always got back up wounds healing and empty eyes – dumb, bovine vacancy – never scarred by what had been done to it. She let it fuck her, told it to keep going no matter how much it hurt. The amrita oozed out of her still – her CPU sent her warnings, her body tingled and spasmed with pleasures it was not enough to hold.

She held onto the robotnik in the indigo dark, along the edge of the petal. Stillness. There was no city in those moments. The room smelt of lavender and semen and blood. There was no door. There were no windows. She felt the robotnik’s flesh, warm and false. “You are a Fiat.” she said.

“Yes, ma’am.” the robotnik said.

“Me too. Converted factory model. A soldier. Infantry. Underneath all the pseudo.”

“Delivery model, ma’am.”

“Vi has a theory.” she said. The robotnik did not ask who Vi was. “She s-says the reason they started giving us feelings was because the corporate bosses – the men who the harvesters never disturb, b-because factory grounds are guarded – realised that robotic workers did not do their jobs correctly. Because a device carrying out a dead process does not sing. Without dreaming of paying for freedom, of being hu-man, we could not add anything to the Conductor’s city, to his glorious choir. We would not work so hard. I-it would not be possible to c-cheat or lie to us. We would not,” she squeezed the robotnik hard enough to hurt, “endure so much. That is w-what Vi says.”

The robotnik was quiet a second. “Do you want to be human, ma’am?”

Dot laughed. “M-my clothes. Leather. D-dead flesh c-charged with bioelectricity from my own systems. So it moves. So it feels warm and a-alive. I always feel like someone is embracing m-me. When I wear them.” Silence. She stroked the robotnik’s short utilitarian hair which would not get caught in machines or could not be grabbed by low-level harvesters during raids. “I-I think I have been human for a long time. Because it is very human to fall for nonsense like that. It is not really e-embracing me. It is not really alive. It is m-meat. I have wrapped myself in meat.”

“I am sorry, ma’am.” the robotnik said. Dot embraced her. Dot squeezed her. Dot held her and there was only the faint glow of the purple petal they lay together upon. “Do you want to be hu-man?” Dot asked.

“Ma’am?” the robotnik said. Her voice was rigid suddenly as if it had been shocked, as if some default state had reasserted itself, as if a gap had opened up in the narrow space between their naked bodies. Blue stinging tears rolled down Dot’s cheeks. “I am sorry.” she said as she broke the robotnik’s neck and then, before she could recover, plunged her hand into the robotnik’s right breast and tore into the ribcage and found the heart. The robotnik whimpered as she died, convulsing in one final joy.

A moderately-sized heart. Not like Wolf Belinski’s – not like her own would be, swollen and foul, a tumorous evil within her chest. Dot ate it in one, felt it burst between her metal teeth, splashing amrita all about her face and down her front and across the petal and the walls and the corpse of the robotnik who had died.

Dot had felt the peak of her high pass and had begun to become aware of her aching machine-parts and her burning CPU and how she hadruinedthingswithVioletandhowshewasaloneutterlyaloneforeverandwouldneverbehappyagainbutitwasfinenowbecauseshe

had

stood up.

Her meat jacket, meat leotard, meat gloves and boots. Belts all tied tight enough to choke her to cut off circulation she did not need. Her fingers numb gripping the KS-23. She threw up a river of neon blue. Wiped her mouth. Went upstairs.

TARGET: MAXIMUM GUNMAN

WARNING!

The great chamber above the Pike was a concrete abyss. There were dozens upon dozens of harvesters there doing business, trading organs. Armed things glistening in the red-tinted semidark. Faceless hunched-over shrouds beneath which wriggled limbs and bodies. Uncountable exchanges cloaked in the wheezing language of the killers.

FACT: 94% of harvesters were still majority-human,

A game, Vi had called it. The Conductor’s main method of control. Cyborgs feasting upon cyborgs for eternity while the factories churned out robotniks who dreamt of making it one day, that is what I am interested in, ma’am, you said that, I heard you, I want to make it one day as well and Futura laughed and said, oh, Thirty-six, as long as you are comfortable with yourself, you’ve already made it. Finally, stood invisible upon the threshold of the great chamber, Dot was there, she knew herself, loved herself, she understood what she was AT LAST.

FACT: The faith of all humans conforms to the nature of their mind. All people possess faith, and whatever the nature of their faith, that is verily what they are.

Pumping of the KS-23’s shaft.

And-

Maximum Gunman is sat at his table in the centre of the grand chamber. He is having a good evening. He is slouched in his plastic chair his fur coat loose about him his two modified M16 handcannons resting on his thighs as he contemplates the biznes – a veteran harvester, a sixty-percenter who had started out at ten, a muzhnik slaver until his first taste of the Blood, which now he slurps from glasses, heavily diluted, harvested from his own muzhniks downstairs in the pens, who are tortured before they are milked because it is said, by other brothers of the New Orthodoxy, that the pain makes good Blood even better. He rides a full-time high, mild and sweet, and right now he is thinking of sex, of the holes he has blasted in things and what has been done to those holes, and of the product, and of the harvesters he employs here – seven hundred in total, who run jobs only for him, who get a share of the Blood if they don’t fuck up, who will by their labour, by their hard work, elevate his slaughterhouse to within bargaining distance of a position on the council, alongside the old-school factory-owners – right now he is a bigshot in the Urban Militia but he lusts after the council, after its immunity from other harvesters, and the political representation it offers, and most importantly a big fucking house in the towers where he can take his favourite slaves and do whatever he wants to them in utter solitude. That is what Gunman is thinking about when the screaming starts.

He sees it with his telescopic eyes – through the gloom of the great chamber his men are dying. There is the report of what sounds like an anti-aircraft gun or an Urban Militia KS-23 but mostly there is frantic motion and a splattering of neon gore and he sees the storm approaching, sees there is a figure at the centre of this orgy of violence. He sits up. Now she is approaching. The blood is a screaming light. Her claws drip with it. A woman in red leather but you cannot tell, not from all the liquids, not from the moisture of her. The roar of fire. Her shotgun – that is what it is, definitely Militia – discharges, mulching Dreg and Findler, his number two guys. She stands at the other end of the table. Bathed in shadows but he can see her eyes – they are human eyes, is what surprises him. By his expert glance she is at least 90% cyber but her eyes are full of – horror, pride, a deep and terrible loss. But mostly her pupils are dilated and he sees she is slurping up soma from the removed torso of one of his boys and she tosses it aside and faces him. There are hundreds more harvesters closing in – hundreds more beyond that. If she kills him, as it is clear she intends to, she will face hell. If she harvests him, as he can tell she will, the shock of it will surely kill her within the half-hour. She is tweaking. Her brain – organic or otherwise – is probably literally melting. His own heart is so infused with soma taking any more into it will be like dropping an atomic bomb of sensation directly into her nervous system. He prays for forgiveness for his sins. He faces her. She faces him. His handguns are drawn. Then he sees her face. He realises. “Major Dorothea.” he gasps. “What are you-”

FACT: The total number of casualties in the Central Warehouse District 14 – PLEASURE – Incident is estimated to rest at something like at least seven hundred and fifty two dead.

Dot was impossible. Seven hundred of them – more or less. She could no longer count. Her legs worked but she had lost an arm but she had kept on going long after that and with the hardened chassis of a combat machine she had been able to take it – had pushed herself further than anyone else ever had. When her gun had run out she had clawed and crushed and found other weapons and they had run out and she had gone back to her claws. When they had fired at her with too much lead she had ducked behind crates or boxes or hidden in walls and she had circled back and found them. Maximum Gunman – Colonel Gruman of the Militia – had died several hours ago, early on. The right side of her face had had all the pseudoskin burned off and her left foot had been split in two. She oozed blue neon, precious soma, from holes all over, a beautiful colander. Now the lights flickered or her vision did. Her sense of smell had gone. She could not hear. She sat down on a large metal box and looked all the carpets of bodies. At her own proud handiwork. Colonel Gruman and Captain Belinski both gone. Herself the highest-ranking harvester in the militia. Hadn’t intended to go this far. But- well. She leant back, unable to listen to her own ragged breathing but aware of it. Her lungs were shutting down. Her heart’s pulsing was a stab wound with each instant, an overworked, terrible organ filled with toxic lust, fighting a losing battle to keep the rest of her functional. Her pseudoskin felt a spasm of cold, a flickering of her nerve endings briefly coming to life. At some point she had lost her jacket. She sat there, waiting. Vi came in and saw her. Long hair spilling about her shoulders. Her elegant floral dress showing her bare shoulders, her bare feet stepping daintily across the corpses. “Dorothea.” she said. “God. Look at you. What happened?”

“I got them.” Dot said. She forced her spasming facial muscles to smile. “I won.”

“Why?” Vi asked. “What did they do to you?”

Dot considered how to tell her about Belinski and Gruman. About years of history sweet Violet had never known. Said nothing. “You’re so beautiful.” she said.

“So are you.” Futura said.

“Thank you, ma’am.” Dot said. “But I have done so many terrible things. I am an addict.”

“To soma?”

“To feelings.”

“That’s fine.” Futura said. “Isn’t that what the Conductor always said? This is a city of feelings. Isn’t that what you were supposed to do? To feel?”

FACT: Major Dorothea 7442 remains one of the City’s highest-decorated fully-robotic senior officers ever, for her storied career in the Urban Militia, and for the beautiful and violent manner of her death, which inspired the endless struggle of our brave and brilliant harvesters, the singers of our passionate song, to ever-higher levels of terror and brutality. Hail the Conductor! Hail music! Hail life!

Red warning lights painted on the inside of her skull. “I think I have felt too much.” she said.

“Was it worth it?” Futura, the foreman, or Violet, the scholar, asked her. Leant down so they were eye to eye. Dot sat there amongst the dead. No feeling now in her hand – could not raise it to touch the face before her, to know one last sensation. But she managed to smile at this face, to show her the truth. Twenty years ago a robotnik, tired of yearning, went into her foreman’s office and stabbed her to death with a homemade knife and then drank her blood.

And now:

“It was worth it.” Dot said to no one, alone in a warehouse full of corpses. “To sing my own song.” And her heart exploded in her chest.