by Gavin Smith
Scab turned back but Ludwig had gone.
They had mostly stopped firing. Ludwig was barely aware of taking hits from automatic close-in weapon systems as it drifted close to the Church cruiser. The ancient machine mind shifted out of phase, vibrating its molecular structure to become intangible. It felt the resistance of some of the cruiser’s defensive screens but combat was a bidding war and more resources had gone into Ludwig’s creation and augmentation than had gone into the cruiser.
Many options on how to destroy it presented themselves to Ludwig. It was not about the most efficient way of dealing with the cruiser; it was about relieving countless millennia of boredom.
Ludwig dropped into the areas of smart matter in the hull. It became solid again and infected the smart matter with itself. Effectively becoming a material virus.
Most of the crew who weren’t extensively hard tech-enhanced were still reeling. Their knowledge and stranglehold on S-tech aside, they had not expected to hear the scream of the dying S-tech craft in their head. Bloody tears leaking from their eyes blinded many. Blood seeped out of their ears and noses.
Ludwig made the cruiser’s smart matter grow organically, like a tree, if a tree was made of spikes and edges. The smart matter grew through the heavy cruiser, impaling, rending, seeking out soft flesh and lifting it up into its branches, turning the very ship itself on its crew. Through his new viral smart matter branches, Ludwig got to taste the crew.
When Ludwig rose through the dormant Church cruiser’s hull, the liquid-like coating of his armour bubbled with the crew’s screaming faces.
Vic was sitting on one of the so-called smart chairs in the minimalist lounge that doubled as the Basilisk’s Command and Control, though most of the ship’s systems were handled neunonically. After a brief interface squabble with the chair to get it into an even vaguely comfortable shape, Vic was now just waiting for death, his head cradled in his upper pair of arms. He hoped the Elite would make it quick.
Vic was still receiving the external feed into his neunonics. Without using active scans it had taken him a while to find Scab clinging to the package they had apparently been paid a lot to retrieve.
Vic glanced up to the ship’s hull and sent the signal to magnify that piece of space. For a moment there was just a spark of hope. Perhaps Fallen Angel would kill Scab but ignore him, Vic thought. Maybe, just maybe he would be free of his insane ‘partner’. After all, he was small fry – he didn’t matter in the big scheme of things. On the other hand, if Scab was any indication of how the Elite thought – and this was after the neuro-surgical spaying he had relieved upon leaving the Elite – then who was to say what they would do?
Scab stared into the featureless black glass face of Fallen Angel and saw himself reflected. The Elite hung there motionless in front of him. Subjectively below him was the corpse of the Seeder ship. Above him the dead Church cruiser was slowly mutating into another form; the Consortium cruiser was now little more than a field of debris.
For some reason Scab saw sadness in the Elite. Almost like a child’s. He wondered if it was because Fallen Angel hadn’t been the one to kill the Seeder craft. He also wondered if this death – anonymous, body never found – would be enough.
As Fallen Angel reached to take the cocoon, Scab decided it wouldn’t be a good enough death. His employer would have no reason to fulfil his part of the deal. Fighting Fallen Angel would have been foolish, nothing more than an empty gesture, still it galled Scab to just hand the cocoon over. It was the feeling of powerlessness.
With a flap of his wings, an affectation, Fallen Angel propelled himself back from Scab and then soared up towards the Church ship. Suddenly, in a series of jerky moves that somehow looked panicked to Scab, Fallen Angel wrapped his massive wings around himself and they morphed into a rectangular shape that looked like a mixture between a coffin and an arrowhead. Both Fallen Angel and Ludwig disappeared into the clouds.
Scab glanced down as what had looked like a tumbling piece of inert wreckage lit up. The Black Swan’s main engines took it quickly away from the hulk of the dead Seeder craft. The tug’s bridge drive, that Scab had paid for out of this job’s expenses, tore a blue pulsing hole in space as the oversized engines propelled it through the rip into Known S pace.
‘Vic, come and pick me up,’ Scab said as he re-established the interface connection.
‘What the fuck!’ Vic screamed at him. ‘What the fuck!’
Scab was still wondering if something had startled the Elites when it happened. The holes that appeared subjectively above him didn’t so much look like gate rips, more like larvae eating through rotting fruit. More holes opened in space; white lightning seemed to spark and then flicker out as if consumed. The energy involved must have been colossal, Scab thought. More and more holes appeared until Red Space began to resemble a rotten honeycomb.
The things crawling through the gates, dissipating the clouds they touched, were not black. They were the absence of colour – wriggling, hungry, maggot-like voids. Where they touched the debris of the two cruisers, the wreckage simply ceased to exist as if it had been consumed. It was beautiful, Scab thought, utter oblivion. Not just the antithesis of life but the antithesis of everything. Scab could hear their idiot song. An acidic tear traced its way down through the pale makeup, mucus and blood on his face. Then the sleek wedge of the Basilisk was in front of him.
‘What the fuck!’ Vic screamed at him hysterically when Scab was back on board. The tall hard-tech-augmented ’sect was pointing at the external display that took up one wall of the hull. Red Space was still being consumed.
With a thought Scab sent co-ordinates to the ship. The ship’s engines lit up as the view changed and the ship headed towards the co-ordinates. Outside, red was becoming black, or rather the absence of colour. If you focused hard enough you could see it wriggling like all-consuming bacteria.
Scab sent the ship into a series of rapid evasive manoeuvres to avoid being consumed, though the ship’s anti-gravity field compensated for this and both he and Vic remained comfortably standing.
Scab sat down on one of the two smart chairs, the only real furniture in the otherwise bare room. With a thought he peeled the arm of his spacesuit back. His arm hung limp. The Scorpion had reacted badly to something and squeezed, powdering his radius and ulna.
Vic was watching the screen on the edge of collapse as the Basilisk spun and banked, narrowly avoiding consumption or ceasing to exist or whatever was happening out there.
Scab coaxed the Scorpion out of his flesh, grimacing at the pain he allowed himself to feel. The lockbox rose through the carpeted floor at his neunonic summons. The room was suddenly bathed in blue light from the gate rip. In the lockbox was some fluffy, core-world pet creature designed to appeal to spoilt, mid-echelon corporate children. The Basilisk had already injected the previously hibernating creature with the wake-up. It looked up at Scab with big soulful eyes. Scab was more interested in the neunonic feed of the very fabric of Red Space being consumed by whatever it/these were. Scab absently dropped the brass-skinned Scorpion in with the pet. The Scorpion immediately reared up, sting coming over its head, as Scab gave the signal to close the box.
Scab had time to light a cigarette with his left arm and they were through the rip.
In Real Space Nulty was dancing on the hull of the Black Swan. He’d made it! Somehow, among all that, he had cut the Swan free and remained unnoticed until he could get out of there. Sure, he had a long ride home, but the Swan was his now!
The modified Corsair-class ship swept out of the rip, its engines on high burn. To Nulty it looked predatory and violent. He couldn’t even be bothered bringing the Swan’s paltry weapon systems online.
‘Bollocks,’ the engineer said.
Lasers lit up the darkness; the Swan briefly became light before its energy dissipation matrix was overloaded, but it was the kinetic javelins that did the damage. Penetrating the Swan’s hull, shredding it, scattering the remains, the vacuum co
oling the heat from the friction of hypersonic impacts.
Nulty was still alive. He was damaged, missing limbs, but largely intact and spinning away from the wreckage.
‘Bastard!’ he screamed at the receding light of the Basilisk’s engines.
Scab took a long drag of his cigarette, savouring his retro vice.
‘What the fuck!’ Vic screamed at him again, spoiling his contemplative mood. ‘The Consortium navy! The Church! And . . . and the fucking Elite! And what was happening there – it was like space was being eaten or something?!’ Vic paused for breath, for psychosomatic reasons Scab assumed. ‘What have you got us into?!’
Scab gave the question some thought. ‘It’s exciting,’ he finally said.
Vic stared at him with multifaceted eyes, his mandibles agape. Vic was a humanophile, a worker ’sect who had rejected the tightly regulated, genetically programmed, caste-based social structure of ’sect society and escaped into gravity, augmentation and, somewhat ironically to Scab’s mind, military service. Scab’s military service had been different. He hadn’t volunteered. Before he had been chosen to be an Elite he had been Legion. Offered the choice between serving the Consortium in the CR worlds as one of its most expendable troops or execution for his crimes as a street sect leader on Cyst.
The mandibles-agape expression wasn’t quite working for Vic, Scab decided. ‘Besides,’ he said as he started looking for the portable assembler, using the interface to send it his medical requirements and some more of his debt credits, ‘how often do you get to see two Elite in action?’
Vic’s mandibles clattered together tightly. ‘Oh yes, that was a real treat for me,’ he told his ‘partner’.
He cast his mind back to one terrifying night in the Abyssal Reaches. The destruction of an entire habitat. Their officers had told them that the subsidiary they had been fighting had gone rogue. However, a rumour had spread that they had found Seeder ruins in the Reaches, the Consortium board had done the maths and it had simply proved cheaper to use an Elite to bring the conflict to a rapid conclusion. Vic had never quite worked up the nerve to ask if Scab had been the Elite that had killed all those people. Women, children, larvae, it hadn’t mattered. Then he realised what Scab had just said.
‘Two! What do you mean two?’
‘Ludwig was there as well. What do you think took out the Church cruiser?’
Vic allowed more calming agent to mix with his neurochemistry.
‘But we’re out now, done, yes?’ Vic asked when the chemicals had calmed him enough. The ’sect was more than a little worried about how Scab would answer. He knew that Scab was psychotic and more than a little self-destructive but you didn’t go up against the Elite.
Scab finally nodded. ‘We’ve lost the package and we don’t have anything like the resources to retrieve it.’ Once, he thought, once I could have done it.
8
Northern Britain, a Long Time Ago
Surely the body cannot lose this much blood and live? she thought. It had felt painful at first. Now it felt like getting close to sleep. She was weak and tired.
Britha lay naked on the ground among the undergrowth. The surrounding oaks reached above her to form a canopy that the sunlight filtered through. The sunlight had a green look to it. She had been lying there for a while. Night was best for blood magic. She had been drifting in and out of consciousness dreaming of the night. She had dreamed of stars and then what the night sky would look like if there were no stars.
Britha had dug a small pit and lined it with a skin she had waxed to make waterproof. She had placed a framework of trimmed branches above the pit and hung clay pots filled with various herbs that she burned for their fragrant smoke. Then she had opened her veins with the sickle and worked the flow, covering herself in her own blood. She had lain on the cold earth, her arms over the pit in which she had placed the sickle, blood dripping onto the iron blade.
There should be more, she had thought. Normally rituals had various parts to them – words, movements, ingredients each designed to focus the will on what she wanted to achieve. She concentrated on the death of the invaders, who were not more than five miles from where she lay.
When Britha had returned to Ardestie she had found the village in chaos. Many of Cruibne’s guests had ridden back to their villages. Those who lived to the north, particularly on the coast or along major rivers, had returned with stories of destruction. There were a lot of very angry, grieving men and some women with swords and spears. Some felt that Cruibne was responsible and had lured them away from their homes; others pointed out that they paid tithes and swore oaths to Cruibne so that he and his cateran would protect them from such raids.
Talorcan and Nechtan had returned before her, Nechtan telling of the black curraghs on the sandbanks. Many had wanted to set off immediately to exact revenge. Britha had arrived as Feroth was trying to prevent them moving without a strategy. There was a lot of shouting, anger, posturing and very little getting done.
‘Quiet!’ she shouted. The cry silenced them. Cruibne’s shaggy dark-haired head whipped round to see who was giving orders in his land, immediately relaxing when he saw Britha. ‘I will not shout over you again,’ she said quietly enough to make them strain to hear her. ‘It is the Lochlannach. Demons from the ice and sea. They are hard to kill.’
‘Iron will do for them,’ shouted Feradach, one of the cateran and Nechtan’s closest rival. ‘My father always told me that iron will do for the fair folk.’
‘It has to be cold wrought,’ Brude, the smith and a dryw in his own right, said. He was a massive man who wore a moustache like those from the western isle, his bright orange hair tied into a ponytail, his right arm much larger than his left. ‘There is not enough time.’
‘Even with his head cut off he still fought—’ Nechtan started.
‘If you are too frightened . . .’ a warrior from one of the northern villages interrupted, his face still dirty from a hard ride, tear tracks streaking the dirt. Britha felt bad for the man but she silenced him with a look.
‘Cold iron is not enough. They have fire and metal in their flesh,’ she said. Brude looked more than a little disturbed at this. ‘They have to be dismembered.’ Talorcan and Nechtan nodded in agreement.
‘Feroth?’ Cruibne asked. The tough wiry old man looked thoughtful.
‘We know the terrain and the sandbanks are flat; our people know the ways of them.’ There were smiles as people caught on to what he was suggesting. The tear-streaked northern warrior looked confused. ‘How do we fight when the northern tribes are stupid enough to fight us on our own ground?’ Feroth asked the warrior. Britha watched understanding creep slowly across the man’s face. ‘We’ll need to attack soon or they’ll come for us.’
‘What about the giants?’ Talorcan asked. A number of people spat. They were looking to Britha now for an answer. She tried to remember everything they had taught her in the groves.
‘We did not see them,’ Britha replied.
‘They’ll be in the sea,’ the hunter said with a surprising degree of certainty. Britha had to agree with him. The sea was the Lochlannach’s home.
‘Grapples, like you would use to pull down a wall,’ said Britha. There was nodding from some of warriors assembled, doubt in the eyes of others. ‘You’ll need to work together, bring them to the ground. This is not a fight for glory. There will be no glory if we do not live past this. We either fight together or we die. No songs will be sung of this, and any who seek glory over their duty to the people I promise you now, I will lay a satire on them that will curse their lines down to their grandchildren’s grandchildren.’ There were mutterings and a few of the braver spat to show their unhappiness.
‘Is that all you can advise?’ Drust, the mormaer of the Fotlaig asked, sounding less than convinced.
‘These are creatures of water and ice,’ Britha told them. ‘We must take everything that can burn – oil . . .’ There were groans. Oil was expensive. The best had to be traded for
with southron merchants from across the sea. ‘Uisge beatha . . .’
‘You’re not burning good uisge beatha!’ Cruibne cried.
‘Shut up, you,’ Ethne told him. ‘It’ll be done,’ she told Britha. All eyes turned to Cruibne. He was nodding.
‘Gather the family,’ he told them, meaning the cateran, the warband.
When she awoke again she felt better. It was dark now but the cooler air didn’t seem to bother her. Britha pushed herself up and looked into the small skin-lined pit. Her sickle was there. Perhaps it was the darkness or her mind playing tricks on her, but the blade looked darker.
All the blood was gone. She would have assumed that it had just soaked into the skin or leaked through into the earth except there was no staining whatsoever. She reached down to touch the skin. It was dry. She touched the sickle. It was dry as well. She picked it up and held it in front of her face. It felt different. Somehow easier to wield. Somehow more connected to her. Britha could not remember her magic ever being this strong before. At some level she knew that the sickle shared her purpose. They would see the entrails of this Bress.
She looked at the wounds in her wrist. They looked fresh but had healed over. Britha had to suppress the fear she felt, fear of herself.
It was an effort to put the sickle down, but she had other preparations to make. She had to make friends with the night and look into the Otherworld. She reached for the clay pot of woad dye.
Cruibne and Feroth had no idea she was there. That was good. Both men were standing just below the peak of a dune on the headland that overlooked the sandbanks. They were watching the Lochlannach camp, using patches of dry sharp grass as cover. Their hundred-and-fifty-strong warband was concealed among the dunes. The war dogs with them had rags wrapped around their maws to stop them from howling.