by Gavin Smith
Hamad came at him with the blade, his fist, open-hand attacks and a series of short kicks, each strike calculated to be the most efficient, to cause the most damage. A fighting system perfected across centuries.
Du Bois moved sinuously, swaying, his hands and feet moving to be where they were least expected, blocking punches with raised legs, checking Hamad’s blade with a hand to the wrist, slashing his leg open with the tanto when the Syrian tried to kick him, all the while the seductive urge to sleep becoming fainter as the alien nanites were hunted down and destroyed by his own defences.
Hamad was by far the better knife fighter, but mental fatigue had taken its toll. Du Bois never stopped moving, swaying, making debilitating finger strikes to his opponent’s eyes, groin, nerve clusters using rapid whipping movements, all the while looking for an opportunity with the blade.
He found one. The incredibly sharp folded-steel blade sliced across Hamad’s throat, opening it. Blood surged out. Hamad staggered away holding his neck. Du Bois backed off.
‘You fight like one of them!’ Hamad hissed when his throat had knitted itself back together enough for him to speak.
I should do, du Bois thought. One of them taught me.
Hamad saw what du Bois was slowly moving towards and charged. Du Bois threw himself back, grabbing the .45 from the floor. Blossoms of red appeared on Hamad’s soiled suit as impact after impact slowed his charge. He staggered to a halt over du Bois. The bullets’ nanite payloads were overwhelming Hamad’s own systems. Du Bois was breathing hard. The slide on the .45 was back, the magazine empty. Smoke drifted from the barrel. It seemed quiet and still in the destroyed church.
‘Would you do the right thing?’ Hamad asked and then collapsed.
Du Bois crawled over to Hamad’s body. He looked peaceful.
‘Sorry, brother.’ Du Bois drove the tanto into Hamad’s head, prised off a piece of skull, cut open his own thumb and pressed it against the brain. Du Bois downloaded yottabytes of information just before ephemeral electronic Ifreet destroyed it.
Then he sat back and looked at his friend’s cooling corpse. He could hear them if he concentrated. All the souls. He did not concentrate. He did not want to hear their voices.
Southsea seemed still, as if abandoned. It was a grey day. All the colour had been bleached out of the city as Beth made her way through terraced street after terraced street.
It wasn’t until she turned onto Pretoria Road that she saw signs of life. About halfway down, it had been sealed off. The middle part of the street was encased in an opaque tent-like structure with some kind of airlock leading into it. Police vehicles and officers prevented people from getting close. There were other official-looking vehicles behind the police cordon and Beth saw people wearing NBC suits going in and out of the airlock.
Beth could not see a connection between this strange sight and her sister but somehow couldn’t shake the feeling that Talia was involved. She headed down the street, head down, arms in the pocket of her leather jacket, trying to avoid drawing attention to herself. She did not have to go far before she realised that the address Billy had given her had to be in the tented area.
‘Hey, what’s going on there?’ she asked a slow-moving cyclist being trailed by a scruffy mongrel dog. The guy braked the bike and shrugged.
‘Don’t know. At a guess it’s some kind of terrorist thing. Maybe a germ bomb or one of those dirty bombs. Makes you think though. Be lucky if we don’t all end up with cancer or a head growing out of our neck or something.’
He wittered on for a bit as she stared down the street at the tented area. Eventually he said goodbye and headed off. Beth was wondering what to do. The thought of her sister as a terrorist actually made her laugh.
‘God is a prude.’ The voice was all but a croak. Beth had to replay the words in her head until they made sense, or not as it turned out. Very little of what the bag lady actually looked like could be made out through the layers of clothes, the dirt and the tangled mess of hair. She was crouched beside a nearby garden wall. She could have been anything from thirty to ninety for all Beth knew, and she stank. Beth’s initial reaction was to move away. What stopped her was the night she had just spent on the cold concrete.
‘He can’t stand nudity. Hawkings said that.’ The bag lady pushed herself up on the long stick she was leaning on. Even with the stick she was still hunched over.
‘Are you talking to me?’ Beth asked. She genuinely wasn’t sure. The answering dry chuckle sounded like twigs being snapped. The chuckle turned into a cough and the bag lady spat up something red or black that Beth did not want to think too much about.
‘God abhors a naked singularity because that’s when things stop making sense. Predictability breaks down. That’s why the universe takes all its dirty little secrets and hides them in the centre of a black hole.’
The woman laughed to herself and began to shuffle away. Beth watched her go. She turned back to the tented area and found a policewoman watching her. She’d been there too long, she decided, and left. She wasn’t sure where she was going.
By the time du Bois left the church it was his clothes rather than himself that were the worse for wear. His phone started ringing the moment he was on the street. In the distance he could hear sirens. They would be intercepted, he imagined, and a clean-up crew sent to the church.
Du Bois ignored the phone until he had changed his clothes in the back of the Range Rover.
‘Report,’ Control’s voice said placidly as soon as he answered. As tersely as possible du Bois explained what had happened, including him taking the souls from Hamad’s neuralware. Control asked pertinent questions and even remonstrated with him slightly for wasting resources when he requested a new punch dagger and a magazine of nanite-headed bullets.
‘We have godsware that needs harvesting and two L-tech artefacts,’ du Bois told Control. Nightmare had tried to hack his systems the moment he picked the evil weapon up. He had locked both weapons in a strongbox. ‘Nightmare and Gentle Sleep, assemblers in the handle and AI aware. Nightmare’s AI is badly corrupted; both will need containment.’
Control gave him a cache drop where he could pick up what he needed and leave the two artefacts. They would even cut the Marduk Implant, the two extra eyes, out of Hamad’s head.
‘What do you want done with the souls?’ he finally asked.
At first there was silence.
‘They are surplus to requirement and may already have been corrupted by the Brass City,’ Control finally told him. The pause had meant some kind of consultation, du Bois knew. ‘Erase them.’
Du Bois said nothing.
‘Du Bois?’
‘It’s done,’ he said.
Du Bois wasn’t sure why he’d lied. He would have to find a way to hide them for the next neural systems audit if he wanted to keep them. He was not sure why he would even bother; after all, the Brass City had doomed them all.
‘Du Bois, there has been an incursion in Portsmouth,’ Control said. Du Bois started the Range Rover’s engine as Control downloaded coordinates into the vehicle’s satnav. He glanced at them before pulling out into traffic.
‘Is this the beginning?’ he asked.
‘No, the evidence points to this being something else.’
As he drove, du Bois edited his memory. Just a tiny bit. He made himself think that he had erased the souls as per his instructions from Control. He was ravenously hungry.
7
A Long Time After the Loss
Scab hugged the cocoon like a lover as he watched Eldon Sloper get torn apart. The crew of the Black Swan had played their part. The Basilisk, Scab’s ship, had tapped into the Swan’s sensor data. The suggestion he had implanted when he had meat-hacked them had sent them on board despite the stupidity of such a move, and they had provided a distraction. Now there was a race on to see if they were going to be vented into Red Space or torn apart by the Seeder-augmented human throwbacks.
When they had given him the
viral they had described it as some kind of song. The Scorpion, an ancient and very illegal piece of S-tech, had drunk it like it was milk. Scab had felt the weapon’s excitement as it dug its legs deep into his arms, making them bleed again. He’d had to reseal the wound before anything too toxic had leaked out of him. As the scorpion had fed the poison into the Seeder ship he had shared the weapon’s near-sexual pleasure at the murder. After all, it wasn’t every day you got to kill a genuine alien as opposed to just another fucking uplifted animal, Scab thought, unable to prevent his lips curving into a smile. Scab wished he were naked. Pleased that the only people who could possibly see this were his soon-to-be-dead dupes.
Scab had absently wondered how old the song the Scorpion was singing to the Seeder craft was. Had humanity’s lost sun even been born then? The first stage of the viral song the Scorpion had sung had got him in. It had felt like being pushed back in after being born. Or so he imagined. The second stage had started killing the ancient creature/craft. The third stage had delivered the message to sever the craft’s hold on the cocoon as high above him preset explosives fed on the matter of flesh, turning it into fire and force.
There was pain as the Scorpion sank into the flesh of his arm. He was more aware of than actually felt it scraping against bone as it wrapped itself around his radius and ulna.
More pain when he heard the Seeder spawn’s death scream in his head as he was pulled into vacuum. Scab felt blood trickle from his ears. It all but exploded from his nose, covering the visor of his suit as he rode the cocoon out into a Red Space strobing in violent light.
‘Well shit,’ was all that Vic could muster. The eight-foot-tall insect was extensively hard-tech-augmented, initially for work in gravity and then after a stint in the military for combat as well. He looked through the transparent smart-matter hull as he searched through his neunonics for accounts of combat in Red Space. Very few people did it. It always ended badly. ‘Well shit,’ Vic tried again, speaking out loud to nobody. He then followed that up with ‘Fuck.’
He was receiving more information on the full-scale space action from the ship’s sensor suite. Both cruisers were ponderous but graceful as they simultaneously tried to use the Seeder craft for cover while manoeuvring for a clear shot on the other.
Laser batteries fired so rapidly that they looked like arcing curves against the black, their beams lighting up energy dissipation matrices like neon. Battery after battery connected the two ships with lines of bright light. Various kinetic harpoons hit armour so hard they heated it white-hot as the reactive plate exploded out, trying to lessen the force of the impacts. Carbon reservoirs fed the assemblers with the raw material to regrow and replace the reactive armour. Broad-pattern DNA hacker beams lit up disruptive countermeasure screens. AG-driven autonomous suicide munitions hunted for each other and openings to the enemy ship. Meanwhile, both craft tried to bring their big guns to bear: the Church cruiser’s D-guns, the Consortium cruiser’s fusion and particle-beam cannons.
While in the Thunder Squads, Vic had personally carried enough ordnance to severely damage cities and with his team had done so on various conflict resolution worlds; this, however, was on a different scale. Outside everything was fire and force. Night turned to day.
The ship’s upgraded stealth systems would keep the Basilisk hidden while this mess was going on. However, when one side won they wouldn’t be hiding from a beaten-up old salvage tug like the Black Swan. Red Space or no Red Space, Vic doubted that Basilisk’s systems could hide them from military-grade scanners.
Vic nodded to himself. ‘Well shit,’ he said again. Yes, Scab had properly fucked them this time. Then he saw part of the Seeder craft’s hull burst. Basilisk was kind enough to zoom in on the area and pick up the bodies tumbling into Red Space. Vic was peripherally aware of a tiny white light coming from the Black Swan moments before the Seeder craft exploded. Actually, Vic thought with a sort of hysterical calmness, it was less like an explosion, more like it had just burst. Vic completely reset his initial estimation of just how much Scab had fucked them both this time. There wasn’t enough meat left in his brain to hear the Seeder ship’s death scream. Still, Vic thought, the intensity of the fight between the Church and the Consortium cruisers had slackened off considerably.
Vic let off the pheromone equivalent of a human shitting himself when Fallen Angel tore through space. He wasn’t sure if the enormous wingspan of the hermaphroditic figure armoured in liquid obsidian was some sort of hologram or shadowy exotic material. Fallen Angel was shorter than Vic, though not by much, but its wings seemed to cast a shadow over both the cruisers.
The Elite were the ultimate expression of armed force. Extensively augmented, each was armed with fully integrated S-tech weapons of near-unimaginable sophistication that allowed them to go toe to toe with entire fleets. There were only six of them in existence at any one time. In part this was because of the tremendous expense of keeping them operational. And in part it was due to the worry of what would happen if one of them ever broke its extensive conditioning and turned against its master. Three Elite served the Consortium and three served the Monarchist systems, and an uneasy balance was maintained. Fallen Angel served the Monarchists. Mostly the Elite acted domestically. For the Monarchists to break the uneasy cold war and utilise one of their Elite against Consortium interests like this was all but a declaration of war.
They couldn’t hide from the Elite, Vic knew. If bounty killers were celebrities then the Elite were celebrity killer gods. It wasn’t a case of sophisticated sensors. They understood their surroundings on an instinctive level as if they were somehow connected to the very fabric of time/space itself. Vic suddenly found himself envying the human ability to weep. He wanted to weep like the little hairless monkey infants wept. Underneath the panic, the combat veteran of more than a dozen CR worlds and hardened bounty killer had just enough presence of mind through the fog of rapidly administered calming drugs to feel awe, as once again Scab reset the bar on just what a total fucking shit-magnet he was.
Tumbling into a storm of fire and light, at first Scab thought he was seriously ill as a foreign sensation flooded through him. He had forgotten what joy was. Then he saw Fallen Angel. They had actually sent an Elite. He wondered if this would be a good enough death.
The fire from both craft had severely lessened after Scab had blasphemously murdered the Seeder spawn, but now both were trying to fire on Fallen Angel. The exotic, some said dark, matter of the Elite’s armour phased the kinetic shots that hit it. An entanglement effect transported the solid-state munitions elsewhere. Lasers hit the armour creating a prismatic effect as the beams of killing light were redirected away from the Elite and back at the two cruisers.
Longing drowned Scab’s joy. Once the Elite’s power had been his; now he was nothing more than a spectator, soon to be like every other piece of biological waste in Known Space, a victim.
He watched enviously as Fallen Angel lifted its weapon to its shoulder. The smart matter of the spear it held reconfigured into a wide-barrelled rifle/cannon weapon. Scab knew that all the weapon really was, was a conduit for an entanglement effect connecting it to munitions in the Citadel, their hidden base, and also, like the rest of the armour, to the vast network of primordial black holes that powered the Elite’s armour and weapons.
Scab’s neunonics chose to interpret the focused particle beam from Fallen Angel’s weapon as a thick line of blue light. Fallen Angel played it across the Consortium’s Free Trade Enforcer-class cruiser. The beam disrupted the craft at its molecular level – disassembling it, changing the signal, sometimes removing molecules, sometimes agitating molecules into an explosive reaction. The result was the craft started to come apart. To Scab it was a slow, ponderous yet strangely beautiful death as the ruptured craft spilt crew out into the swirling clouds of Red Space.
Fallen Angel continued to cut at the hull a long time after it needed to. Scab could identify with that. It wasn’t so much that they wanted to kill by t
he time they were chosen, though most of them did. He had. But once you merged with the armour you felt its need to destroy life. Scab had always been told they were weapons that understood their own nature rather than being just tools for killing. Their ancient creators apparently hadn’t been hypocrites. Fallen Angel was painting with the particle beam. Scab remembered what it was to hate life and crave destruction, to be one with a poisoned and violent technology.
Scab was remaining very still. Trying not to be noticed. Wondering how best to get the cocoon back to the Basilisk. Then he noticed that the Church cruiser had stopped firing as well. Augmented soft-machine biotech eyes searched space. He only saw the disruption in the Red Space clouds because he knew what to look for. Surprise was another emotion he was unused to.
The CR worlds were a game, nothing more, R & D, a way of keeping score and training executives or minor nobility. When it was serious, when the outcome actually mattered, the Elite were sent. One being sent was rare. The number of times that two were sent in the entire history of Known Space since the Loss could be counted on one hand, even if you were a lizard.
The Monarchists had sent a second Elite. He saw it through the butterfly-wing shape of its disruption of the Red Space clouds. It was squat, roughly cylindrical with various strange technological components attached to its external body, and covered in the same liquid obsidian-looking armour that all the Elite merged with. Ludwig was the only automaton Elite. Ludwig was a supposedly ancient S-tech automaton that had continually upgraded itself from scavenged tech as it had drifted through Real Space. It had been a ‘found weapon’ during the Art Wars in the Monarchist systems.
Ludwig was heading towards the Church cruiser.
Scab glanced back at Fallen Angel. It had become bored with the particle beam. Fallen Angel’s wings were a manifestation of its coffin. The coffin acted as a personal satellite, a slaved extension of the Elite’s weapon systems. The morphic nature of the exotic material the coffin was made from could also turn it into what was basically a tiny one-man ship. Fallen Angel had made its wings very sharp and was dancing among the remains of the Free Trade Enforcer-class cruiser. Using its wings to slice through wreckage as it went.