Chapter 1

1

I drop to my knees as an iron banded barrel flies over my head, smashing into the brick wall of the alley, as the dust clears you can see where the bricks have crumbled under the impact. One of the iron bands is lodged in the wall, with a fragment or two of wood still hanging from a couple of rusty nails. that makes four of those things, it’s thrown in my general direction, I’m not sure it is aiming for me. I very much doubt it's even aware I’m following it; the barrels are in its way and rather than just kicking them to one-side or stepping round them, it's chucking them without any thought to the surroundings. It just lobs them over its hulking armoured shoulders, so it doesn’t have to deal with them again. After all, it might have the brain power of a Christmas turkey that's walked into the local butchers. The usual signs of a mental break are just not there. To start with there’s no berserker rage, it is acting totally bonkers, nothing here makes sense, it should have just rampaged. Instead, it took an elevator from the

docklands level to get down here. A normal full on berserker, would have just smashed and stomped those huge iron boots from the docklands to wherever it ended up being stopped. Ok a couple of metal gates, and some brickwork in an alleyway or two got damaged, easy repair for the city’s maintenance. It only broke the corners because its shoulders wouldn’t fit through the gaps. I’m not sure on this one, it’s something to investigate once I've stopped it, of course I’ll be told it’s not my place to investigate such things, I’m there to just bag them and tag them.

 Here in the first great city of the Martian colonial expanse, new London or just London as the locals call it. We tend to leave the adding of the word, new, to place-names to the Americans.

When you need a priest to hunt down your rogue undead, you get an overweight middle-aged man with a moustache that you could strangle a badger with, Reverend Matthew C Courtney. A sort of priest, one of the old order, that's me. There are many types of priests around, a few actual old school that fully believe one hundred percent in what they are saying, but they are mostly on earth where they think they can do some good. Except Russia where there are

hundreds of their so-called priests, they are very heavy on their religion, though the Tzar rules in name, it’s the church that actually rules, but that’s a long story. As for the rest of the worlds, it's complicated, when anyone can turn water into wine or walk on water, and I’ve already mentioned bringing the dead back to life. Miracles became second nature to the masses, then the masses stopped believing in the church. The church and religion aren’t totally gone,

it’s just not as powerful as it was before Ira.  When almost everyone can cast magic, you need rules and laws, then you need people to enforce those rules, the church was there, it had the infrastructure, but mostly it had money, it had to change to fit the need. But that was some time ago, many with the right skills join the clergy, we are assigned areas to work, I got the Martian colonies, most countries understand we are neutral. We take no official

sides during conflicts, officially we deal with the problems, punish the guilty, hand them over to the local authorities. I’m stationed in London because my French is worse than my Italian, and of course the Russians won’t let me work alone.

 As a chapel exorcist, I’m used to officers telling me to do my own job, leave the rest to proper coppers. In the old book of the faiths, we the exorcists would remove demons from the

possessed, by the power of our gods. They were revered and feared amongst the faithful. Right up there with the sin-eaters, and the other sacred orders of the holy city. Now we hunt monsters and kill them, for whichever country we happen to be assigned to, heck it's better than curing some posh gits syphilis, because that’s what a healing specialist usually ends up doing.

  The rank and file coppers or beetles as they are known locally, are keeping the public back, for their own safety. Half a dozen blue beetles with shock sticks, these guys will crack skulls, zap any person with a few hundred volts if they have to. As for the city guards, the highland boys are on standby, in case I fail, but then throwing men at this thing is a waste of time, no room to use a mech unit this far down. As for the marines, they might be the closest friendly group I know, they have the right tools to do the job. I know what the commander will say. not their problem, its internal city, so they won’t get involved. unless this thing attacks one of the

naval bases, not that we are anywhere near one, more's the pity. I shouldn’t keep calling this thing a thing, he had a name once. Not just the identification code, J fourteen, written in white paint on his chest back and head, Gregory Talbot, age 42 at time of death, a widower, profession dockside loader, he worked at the planetary dockland’s southern wharfs, so he dealt with ships and tankers. Hard work, low pay, if memory serves from previous investigations, but once you’re employed that’s it, you’d have to be totally crap, at your job to lose it, skilled labour is at a premium on Mars in every one of the big cities.

Greg is going somewhere, some memory, a longing is driving him onwards and I’d have to follow, wherever he leads. Now this chap Greg, as I remember from the briefing I got, when this kicked off, he’d been killed while unloading a shipment. “So sad, never mind, people die all the time.” Chief Inspector Morris had said, Brandon Morris is my departmental boss. I kind of remember looking over the report, while he had been talking about Greg, there was an employment file, plus the various other certificates provided by the warehouse company. On the surface it looks like poor Greg signed a contract, which allowed his company to reanimate him, in the case of his death. Not the normal contract, in civilian employment. However, it looks like Greg had needed money for some unlisted surgery, being a low paid loader

at the docks, he couldn’t afford it normally. So, he signed away his life, the company paid for the surgery, they’d take a cut from his pay while he was alive, not a very big cut, just enough, so it tied him to them, until he paid it off, zero percent interest, which was nice of them. Regardless he still couldn’t save enough to pay them off, nor could he quit without getting a loan from a new company, which would then tie him to them, which sucks to be low paid labour. Mind you there’s not many in my line of work that get to retire and live the life of old age, if they make it that far, it’s off to the monastery to train the next few priests until you die in service. Of course, if he died before he’d repaid everything, they’d get to reanimate him and he’d be a zombie, sorry that should be an animated manual drone, they do like their fun

titles, AMD for short. which means he would continue working, they’d get the job done, added benefit they didn’t have to pay him. If he had family, they’d get an insurance pay out if he died at work, that was within the common law, but they wouldn’t get his body back, that was the property of the company, After all reanimation is easy, for the right person, and cheap, just cut off certain parts of the brain, and you have a worker, that doesn’t need food or sleep just to be kept cold and recharged. They can last five years if they are looked after, if. The docks don’t look after their toys, they have low safety records, cutbacks, all kinds of excuses. Now these working stiffs they needed the power suits, as they are going to be use for manual labour, you’ need to enhance its strength, so it can walk faster, and while you’re at it why not

enhance its strength further so it can do heavy lifting as well as other manual tasks. Then add in a safety rig, so they don’t get damaged when they bump into things, something similar to the armoured versions the black guard use.  no actual weapons you understand, this makes it just slightly smaller than a scout mech unit. So now we have a monster of science and flesh, with a spark of alchemy, something which can lift an omnibus, and has metal plates that can

stop most bullets, with a helmet that needs a special anti mech round to bust through it, just so we can destroy the only part that can actually fully stop them. And people thought that this was a good idea, well those people have never had to try and stop one, and if I’m totally honest I’m not sure I can even stop this one.

Doesn’t answer the big question, why is Greg dead, and in an alley hurling expensive wooden barrels at me, in one of the cheapest residential levels of London.  Another barrel skips past me; really Greg! don’t you know how much it costs to import actual wooden barrels

from earth, these things have to last. It's why most storage is glass or synthetic, with some stone or clay, plenty of that kind of raw materials on the planet surface, Martian glass is super tough.

I throw myself flat against a wall, as another heavy barrel skitters across the alley and smashes behind me, the smell of stale fish lingers in the air. The staple food of the lower levels, salted fish, pickled fish, smoked fish, so many ways to store and eat fish. So glad I

wore my heavy coat tonight. It's a good woollen coat, of course it’s got synthetic fibre-plates sewn into it, so minor impacts like hitting a wall or falling over, don’t hurt as much. But it also cleans well, because I’m going to be smelling of fish for the next few days. This is getting silly, all I need is one clean shot at the coolant pipe, on the back of his helmet, but he’s too far away. My target is on the back of the huge bucket like helmet, two pipes feed in cooling liquid; they stick out like heraldic wing devices on a knight’s helmet. It’s pointless just shooting them off, it wouldn’t stop him, the only actual effect, would be to give him, a sort of smoke screen, as the coolant mixed with the damp air of the lower levels, of course it would waste ammunition as well. Given the suspected level of brain degradation needed to cause him to go berserk, then he would be already too far gone for a lack of coolant to do anything positive. Yet this is the one-week spot to take out his motor functions and end this whole problem. The coolant intake points, on the left and right rear quarters, just above the neck, are the largest holes other than the neck joint itself, however that’s an even trickier shot. I mean I’d have to lay between his legs, then shoot straight up through his body, and hope I don’t get stepped on, or the bullet doesn’t ricochet off a bone and deflect out of the body, trust me, this is my best possible target point. The intake pipe has a big enough hole, so one of my bullets can enter the skull, and destroy the brain completely. Well not completely, there would still be some gloop left, but it would sever the motor controls along the spinal column, it should do enough damage to stop Greg. The eye holes in the helmet are just too small for

me to get a good fix upon, so it has to be the coolant vents. Now I favour something a little old school, as my personal firearm, not one of these modern semi-automatic peashooters they issue today, I have my old army blaster, ok that’s not its proper name, nor is calling it an Enfield Mule, apart from the long string of letters and numbers its usually just called a Sterling L4 heavy pistol. As personal side arm for certain members of the British military, it was

considered a piece of art, each round was three inches long by one inch across, it only held four rounds in the rotary drum, the pistol grip was weighted to counterbalance the recoil, personally set for each user, it could be used to break coconuts open as easy as skulls, something that I’ve done. maximum range 110 yards, yet the effective range was 50, 75 at a push, there wasn’t any point in trying to hit anything beyond that. It wouldn’t have the penetrating power to pass through paper unless you were using special rounds, hence maximum and effective ranges. Add to that, you had to have the arms of a heavy weight boxer just to use it for any extended period. This sealed its removal from service, though those of us that got one, didn’t swap it for the newer smaller lighter, M45 automatic that they brought in. Though I do like a Webley revolver over and automatic if I have to use something else. The best feature of the mule was the interchangeable ammunition, you could have solid slug types, both lead, copper jacketed or armour piercing, pellet or flechette even incendiary’s, the list was huge. As a firearm it didn’t just put holes in stuff, it put dirty great

big holes in things, when you have a monster running towards you spitting fire, scraping its claws along the stonework, then you want a handgun that takes the top of its head off with one bullet. Sadly, they stopped making them ten years ago, in favour of lighter smaller firearms, that wound your enemy, rather than blowing them to pieces.  I have to make my own bullets from converted rifle rounds when I can get them. Funny really as a so called man of god, and a trained healer, I’m supposed to revere life and creation, you think killing would be hard, but I prefer those things, I have to shoot, to stay down. These days I don’t tend to be shooting random people in a dark jungle, I do tend to be hunting monsters and the criminals that make them. Monsters like our friend Greg, who just pulled a fricking door out of a wall, and is now using it, to break the rest of the wall in. I guess this one’s tougher than the nine other walls he’s just barged through to get to this point. It does have its good points now that Greg’s playing with this wall. He’s stopped throwing barrels at me.

Tonight, we are dealing with a proper zombie, or in its technical term, a class five reanimated worker unit, with medium level motor function and low-level self-awareness. Not cheap to make or maintain but damn useful. We appear to be making more of these, every year, and

when I say we, I’m talking about morticians. They spend their lives around the dead, preparing them for burial, rebuilding them, cutting them up for research and of course bringing them back to life. It’s a living, as we always joke, but then the client never laughs, in fact most morticians never laugh, except the mad ones, then it's more maniacal, like a theatrical evil scientist laugh, then you know you’re in trouble. Not that its actual life, as much as the loved one’s would like it to be, it’s as close as the rest of us can get to it. Why do we need to bring people back from the dead, you ask? It was a parlour trick originally, quite a sick little sideshow, that actual professional morticians despise, but once the trick was applied to real world applications. like witness statements from the victims of murder. Then later the Prussian mortician Franco Beliton, reanimated two hundred soldiers in one day to defend

the City of Berlin from a Russian attack, and the idea of the zombie warriors was born, then zombie workers soon followed. I’m sure Beliton either killed himself, to do such a feat of magic, or he had help, just bringing back one head takes a lot out of me, so two hundred soldiers, I’d be asleep for a month. Mostly it's used for workers in extreme environments, or with natural hazardous places where it would be unwise to send the living, which worked great. Killers or serial murderers who planned their crimes. Started to destroy the brain or

take it with them. This I suspect is where the whole brain eating myth started, but in truth without a mostly whole brain the reanimation doesn’t work. Zombies need brains; therefore, zombies eat brains, you can kind of see the connection. In truth we can keep the bodies going for longer than we can keep the brains working. but they overheat, then the zombie goes mad, running amok, a hulking great monster of science and flesh with a spark of alchemy, smashing everything in sight with no idea who it was or what it wants. The more brain power you want it to have, or memories of its life you want, then the more the brain

needs to work. Therefore, you need more alchemicals, more energy. This will cause the brain to heat up faster, so it needs to be cooled or it will burn out, then you’re back to a runaway zombie. Zombies don’t just stop because their brains aren’t working, like I said you need a mostly intact brain. To save on degradation you can just cut the energy supply during recharge, it kind of slows the problem, but if you don’t notice the degradation. Then your zombie goes running riot through your town, killing people, destroying property, that’s when, we step in, the Chapel investigation division, we are attached to the police, in short we are tasked with dealing with lots of magical crime, the rogue undead they’re our domain. You want a zombie put down or a vampire destroyed, call for a priest. The chapel division will send one of us to clean up the mess.

You know there are countless things you do when you’re in a high stress situation, stupid things that don’t need doing, and in some cases there are things you should do. I’ve now checked the load on my pistol, for the third time, since I’ve been leaning against this wall, it’s

not going to have magically changed, since the first time I flicked the cylinder out, and counted the rounds, but I just caught myself, thinking about doing it again. It’s like idiots pumping the mechanical loader on a shotgun to get someone’s attention, in doing so they eject a shell, it’s not the worst thing some people do with firearms. That would be forgetting to put the safety catch on, when moving, the number of people who shoot themselves, with this

baby I’d lose my leg. The crashing sounds have stopped, I quickly check around the corner once again, there’s no sign of Greg, just a Greg size hole in the wall of the northside building. It is your typical red brick building for the city, four stories high, just short of reaching the under-workings of the level above. Where are we now? Must be level sixteen out of the current twenty-three, this would explain the grey fog covering the ground, the mixture of the heat exchangers and water reclamation units on these levels they produce this kind of vapour all the time. Once they engage the recycling fans in the morning, it will be sucked into the system, there will be more of it by midday, we get a lot of the city water via this side effect of the design. The environmental control systems aren’t as fancy this far down, so you can actually see the physical changes at work, if you hang around long enough during the day. Of

course, the main systems all function during the so called red hour, that’s the extra hour of time difference between Mars and earth, it just ended up being tacked on after midnight, all the clocks have special dials to allow for the extra amount of time difference, most people don’t even notice it anymore, cause they tend to be sleeping, but it’s good for people’s health having that extra hour of sleep every night. It does sort of have a sinister feel to it, the thirteenth hour of the night, the witching hour, spooky shit, and all that bollox.

So where was I before I started thinking about the myths about monsters in the fog, before I start seeing things that aren’t there, oh yes gun out, safety on. The brick dust fills the air, it's

going to leave a thin pattern all over my grey woollen coat. I'm not sure why I’m worried about that right now. I can hear crunching and scraping, coming from inside the building, so glad he wasn’t hooked up to the big load lifter unit, when he broke down, there wouldn’t be any building left, fuck there’d have been a ragged path of smashed buildings, from the service elevators too this point, big enough to drive a battle walker down. A frightening thought

really, especially, if some lunatic decided to do it on purpose, there is little anyone can do to stop such a thing. Damn, sometimes I hate my way of thinking. It’s just I’ve seen so much shit in my life and had to deal with it all. This day isn’t the worst by a long shot, this is almost run of the mill, textbook mission, says it all. As I’ve said zombies are the recently dead brought back to life, by the use of magic, with a mix of alchemical engineering, sometimes steam or clockwork components have been thrown into the mix. To stop the brain overheating they inserted rods into the skull, by directing heat away from the mass, through copper conductors in the surrounding tissue. This kind of engineering resulted in longer lasting zombies, the early versions had to wear thin metal hoods and backpacks, sometimes they set places on fire, when the heat exchange rods came into contact with flammable objects. Therefore, a

suit was needed, much like those used by deep recovery divers, the copper helmet was perfect for holding new alchemical mixtures that could be used to cool the brain, so it would last even longer. The insulated suits converted the build-up of heat into energy. Those early suits were heavy, the zombies ended up not being able to move very fast. So, they thought, why not put some of that energy conversion to use, by adding a strength enhancement frame, like the ones used in the dockyards to move cargo containers. This would allow the recently

reanimated to walk around and carry out tasks outside. These units were far too big, and bulky to have one serve you high tea, it would crush the cucumber sandwiches, I do like a cucumber sandwich. Dark mist filled alley, crazy monster, and no back up worth a damn, must be a Tuesday. Why can’t they turn the main lighting grid on, I know it's night period, but these streetlamps just aren’t cutting it for illumination.

Sparks of energy leak from a torn electrical outlet, blue alchemical liquid spills on to the broken bricks, illuminating the space that once was the building's ground floor utility and

laundry room. It is the back of the boarding house, that’s what these buildings were, I stayed in one when I first got to Mars, before I got my current lodgings, ragged looking buildings, made on a budget, manufactured on the surface in the factory district, then brought down in sections and stuck together, they hardly ever improved the design, like most of the lower levels once it was in place that was it. Of course, with all the damage from tonight’s runaway, they might get some upgrades, but I won’t hold my breath. Each one has four floors, rooms

on the top three, are basic small apartments, nothing more than one large room, enough space for a bed, a table and chairs, maybe something to store your clothes in. The ground floor has the building's utility rooms, for all to use, laundry room, bathroom and of course the kitchen area. You tend to find those that live in these apartments, come together like one big family, regardless of where they came from or what they do for a living. Some will cook and do the washing in return for a portion of the food provided by the others. They find it works, after all most jobs pay only just enough to get by on. Like I said, a kind of family. Right now, this family is in shock, because Greg is climbing up the centre of their home, carving out a new direct access route from the ground floor as he goes. I watched him force his metal clad hand into the structure of the inner building, then pull himself up, there’s no care or attention to what he’s doing, just pure force of will and power. He might be suffering from madness, but there is a direction to his actions, he is going somewhere.