by Gavin Smith
The automaton wasn’t the Absolute. The Absolute was changed. Human was no longer a word that could really be applied to it. It was a series of complex sense organs with redesigned neural pathways that could process sensations which would destroy a normal human mind and physiology. Its mind was spread holistically throughout its physical whole. It was an organism designed primarily to experience pleasure. Its physical body was buried deep in its home planet’s crust, protected by vast amounts of automated security, and provided for by automated life-support systems far from the eyes and touch of other people.
The automaton was designed to look like something from myth, to inspire awe: an idealised body of brass complete with a suitably intimidating phallus, the face of a pre-Loss ancient god made from beaten platinum and gold. It was an avatar, a messenger; it shared a fragment of its creator’s intellect and did the Absolute’s bidding. It helped keep the signal constant.
The hall in the Citadel was an appropriate place for the automaton. It was a huge, empty, echoing chamber of black marble. It was meant to look like a place where gods walked.
The cocoon lay on the cool marble floor. There was still a blue-white glow from within but it was fading. The automaton stared down at it for a long time. Finally it climbed onto the cocoon and lay down, caressing it.
One of the Absolute’s favourite toys materialised from the wall, like the cold dead marble had given birth. The Elite’s armour disappeared into his body, its absorption feeling like breathing in. The tall male-favouring hermaphrodite was no less alien and god-like despite his nominally human appearance. Expressionless, he watched the automaton’s sensual display as he walked over to the cocoon. Animated shadow followed him, making abstract but somehow terrible patterns on the floor.
‘Where is Ludwig?’ the automaton asked quietly. Its voice was the result of thousands of years of research by the uplifted races and AIs into trying to synthesise charisma and awe.
Fallen Angel closed his eyes. Sight had long since become an overrated sense. ‘He is drinking a star,’ the Elite answered, his voice deep and melodious.
‘They know it was us?’ the automaton asked. Fallen Angel just nodded. ‘Any trouble?’
‘Scab’s pale reflection was there.’
‘It is no matter; he is no longer an Elite. If he comes looking for it then he can play the Game.’
‘If the Consortium send their Elite?’
‘You’ll fight them, and stars will weep, but I don’t think they’ll risk full-scale war. They don’t have our sense of adventure. They like to control and measure their wars. Fight among themselves. That way they can be sure of the outcome.’
‘The Church?’
‘They would but don’t have Elite,’ said the automaton.
‘They have access to lot of S-tech.’
‘Embargoes are more likely, but the Consortium are as sick of their bridge monopoly as we are. We may find they are unexpected allies. No, this was one dice roll and we won.’
Fallen Angel knew that the wants and desires of the Absolute were not necessarily the wants and desires of other sentient life forms. ‘What are you going to do with it?’
‘It’s a toy. I’m going to play with it.’
The privacy field’s internal holographic projector was old but serviceable. It made them look like they were sitting at their table in deep space looking at a spiral galaxy. Vic liked it. It was retro but evocative.
Despite the Polyhedron’s security guarantees, Scab was still running his own checks. Privacy wasn’t as dead as people liked to claim. It was, however, very expensive.
‘I am disappointed.’ The words seemed to crawl across the blank’s features as a series of violent tics before they came rasping out of its mouth. Scab was mildly surprised that anyone would think he would care if they were disappointed.
‘So this is our mysterious employer then?’ Vic said largely for the sake of something to say.
‘What happened?’ the blank managed after a violent-looking facial spasm that made Vic sit back.
‘Doesn’t matter. It wasn’t viable,’ Scab told the blank.
The blank’s mouth opened wide. ‘I want it,’ it finally managed.
‘Whoever’s running the Monarchist systems these days wanted it more,’ Scab told the blank.
‘Two fucking Elites!’ Vic snapped, his mandibles clattering audibly.
‘Not one, because that would have been easy, but two fucking Elites.’
‘I want it,’ the blank repeated.
‘Elites are beyond my capabilities,’ Scab said. It sounded matter of fact, and only someone who knew him as well as Vic did could understand how much that admission cost him. ‘I would like to be able to kill them but I can’t.’
‘I want it,’ the blank repeated.
‘Well at least we finally have a reasonable employer,’ Vic said. The ’sect was never one to pass up an opportunity to practise his sarcasm. Only felines were better than humans at sarcasm.
The blank’s head slewed around violently to stare at Vic with the patches of skin over where its eyes should be. It turned back to look at Scab with an equally violent motion.
‘Fine. Give me back my armour and the rest of my capabilities, undo the neural surgery, but leave me free and I’ll get it for you,’ said Scab.
Vic turned to stare at Scab. His features weren’t designed to convey the horror he felt.
‘Tell me this isn’t what this is about?’ the ’sect demanded. Scab ignored him.
‘You would be a monster,’ the blank managed through a series of painful facial contortions.
‘Which is what you need now,’ Vic pointed out. The blank shook its head. It looked like it was trying to turn its neck all the way around.
‘Then I can’t get it for you,’ said Scab. ‘Once I had access to intelligence on the possible whereabouts of the aristos’ Citadel but not now.’
‘We . . . will . . . provide,’ the blank managed. A cold chill settled on Vic.
‘Even with the intelligence, the Citadel’s going to be high-end S-tech. It could be out of phase; it could even be in Red Space.’
‘We will provide.’ The repeat message seemed to be easier for the blank.
‘It doesn’t matter if you give us the tools and the intelligence; we can’t fight Elite.’ Scab was starting to sound exasperated.
‘Proliferation,’ the blank whispered. Scab stared at it for a moment, then it was Scab’s features’ turn to contort. Vic felt like moving away from him. He didn’t like Scab having emotions. Particularly negative ones like anger.
It happened quickly. Vic found himself wearing part of the blank. The top of the blank’s skull was missing. Scab was holding a smoking tumbler pistol. The sound of the shot inside the tiny privacy cage was deafening but both of their augmentations had coped easily with it. The privacy field that protected them from surveillance also protected them from the Polyhedron’s security systems. There was a reason that privacy cages were also called murder cages.
‘Impulse control! Impulse control!’ Vic screamed at him. Scab’s pale face was also spattered with bits of blank. ‘The S-tech in that guy would have cost the Cartel a fortune! Have you ever had a queen angry at you! It was just a fucking messenger!’
The ’sect was sure they would now have to fight both of the warriors waiting for them. Even as ex-Thunder Squad, starting life as a member of the worker caste had instilled in Vic a fear of the warrior caste on a genetic level. Vic drew both his double-barrelled laser pistols with his top set of arms. With his bottom right he drew the triple-barrelled shotgun pistol. Scab was placing a new round in the empty chamber of his archaic tumbler pistol. The blank was still opposite them, what was left of his head little more than a red bowl of bone and skin. Scab replaced the tumbler pistol in its holster.
‘I mean, what a fucking total waste of time!’ Vic continued ranting. The last time the ’sect had been this angry was when Scab had lobotomised the Basilisk’s AI because he hadn’t liked t
he ghost’s attitude. ‘Why aren’t you drawing weapons?’ Scab ignored him. ‘I mean, what is it with you?! You hear something you don’t like and someone, anyone has to pay! And I mean what the fuck?! The whereabouts of the aristos’ Citadel?! That’s either board-level consortium intel or one of the fucking royals turning on their own! A palace coup! Like the fucking Art War! Remember that?! What have you got us into?!’
‘I value these little talks,’ Scab said, lighting a cigarette. He took a long drag, the cigarette’s end glowing cherry-red. Vic stared at him. It was scarier because he knew that Scab wasn’t being sarcastic. He probably meant it. This was quality time with another carbon-based life form for Scab.
‘We’re doing it,’ he finally said. For a moment Vic was speechless.
‘You’re not a fucking Elite any more! We are way out of our league!’ Vic’s neunonics autonomously took the calm and informed decision to release massive amounts of sedative into his biological systems to calm him. Through the narcotic haze he started to wonder what the blank had meant by ‘proliferation’. ‘I’m not doing it. It’s suicide and since you murdered me I don’t have any clone insurance left. So die here, die there – makes no difference to me. This way it’s over quickly and I don’t have to put up with however many time units of shit-excreting fear.’
Scab nodded.
The warriors were waiting for them when the cage receded back into the Polyhedron’s subjective floor. Vic had holstered his weapons, but the ’sect was still seething with anger at Scab. However, he was no longer in control of his body. Scab had slaved him and hacked his neunonics, taking control of his body. Again. Vic was entertaining murder fantasies that he knew he would never have the courage to act out.
Scab ’faced his clean-up bid to the Polyhedron’s AI. It was accepted and the club’s security systems did not attack him.
‘Check with your queen,’ Scab told the two warriors. They were radiating impending high-order violence. The dancers and other clientele were looking for cover.
Nothing happened. Locked in his prison body, Vic was shocked. The killing would already be on Arclight’s newsfeed, which meant transmission to docked ships, who would send it to the transmitters on Red Space beacons the next time they bridged. The footage of the blank’s killing, visual, audio and possibly immersion from some of the witnesses would be available for sale throughout the Consortium as quickly as Red Space travel and light could carry it. Everyone would know that Scab, already a celebrity killer, had, for whatever reason, destroyed a very valuable Queen’s Cartel resource. If the cartel did not respond then they would look weak.
Vic experienced a sinking sensation when he realised that they would not respond. He badly wanted Scab dead right now. Instead this was just going to be another story in his partner’s legend.
Scab stood up. The micro-hooks in his brogues anchored him to the floor. His P-sat rose to hover over his left shoulder. Vic found himself following Scab as he slowly walked towards the exit.
Vic looked around the club. There seemed to be more people there now. A lot of them sat at the bar, ignoring the dancers, wearing long black coats that could cover a multitude of sins. They had the look of Church Militia. Brilliant, Vic thought.
Vic barely had a moment to think that the human male in the button-up black suit who landed in front of Scab looked familiar, before Scab stuck a metalforma blade in the guy’s face. It wasn’t so much the speed of the attack that appalled him, Vic reflected; he’d seen Scab fight before. It was how quickly he got his bid into the Polyhedron’s security systems so they didn’t blow him away. The metalforma blade grew inside the man’s head, branching out into a razor-sharp, root-like structure. The man swayed back on his anchored shoes, bobbing back and forth in the zero G.
Vic had a second to realise that the dead guy looked a little like his partner before the shaven-headed women landed in front of Scab. She was a monk. She wore brown armoured robes. She was powerfully built but all high-end soft-machine augmentation, S-tech as well if the rumours were true, moving tattoos based on Seeder symbols. She was not carrying any weapons; her hands were open. Scab levelled the tumbler pistol at her face.
‘It’s stupid to martyr yourself for a faith that doesn’t even have an afterlife,’ he told her.
‘We’re just here to talk,’ she said.
A Church monk was probably more than equal to dealing with Scab, particularly with all the backup she had. The militants he had noticed were now all turning to focus on them. Nobody had drawn weapons yet except for Scab. Vic was surprised that he hadn’t drawn any either. The problem for the Monk and her militants wasn’t so much Vic and Scab as the bidding war that would be required to act in the Polyhedron. In that, Scab already had the drop on them, and they would have to fight him and the club’s automated systems.
‘Stop cloning him,’ Scab told her, and with his gun levelled at her continued heading for the door, Vic following him. The Monk just watched them leave.
He had had been waiting for them as they left the Polyhedron. He had the look of home- and ship-less excess humanity. He was someone who had failed in the life of economic Darwinism but hadn’t yet got round to dying. The one resource that nobody ever seemed to run out of, the one resource that the Consortium didn’t seem to care enough about to control with artificial scarcity, was so-called sentient biological life. This was presumably why you couldn’t use human matter in assemblers, Vic mused. Then there’d be no shortage of raw material for the Consortium to control. However, most of what Vic termed human refuse tended to come with only two eyes. The ’sect was more than a little surprised when two wrinkles on the man’s head opened. Vic wasn’t sure if they were eyes or not. Each looked like a biotech collection of nerve endings forming sensory organs. Still Vic couldn’t shake the feeling that they were staring at him.
‘What the fuck?’ Vic said, wondering when his capacity for surprise would wear out. The man reached up with a small-bladed, but obviously very sharp, anachronistically-steel-bladed scalpel and cut the two eye-like organs out of his head. Blood poured down out of the wounds into the man’s real eyes. All the while he stared at Scab and Scab watched the self-mutilation. ‘Street art?’ Vic wondered out loud.
Scab looked at the man expectantly as he drew an archaic-looking syringe from his jacket and stabbed it into Vic’s armour. The vibrating power-driven needle drove itself through to original flesh.
‘What are you doing?!’ Vic cried, mandibles clattering together, the panic in his voice belied by his calm, combat-ready stance.
‘It’s a vaccine. Relax,’ Scab said. Vic felt like an animal wanting to bolt but trapped in a cage.
‘I’ve been waiting,’ the man said. ‘They told me you would come and I was to do nothing but wait.’ The ragged, gaunt, dirty nobody finished cutting out the two eye-like organs and handed them to Scab. Scab continued to watch him as he slipped the organs into the pocket of his raincoat.
‘I am nothing now,’ the man said.
Scab nodded. ‘Few people fulfil their dharma,’ he said after a moment’s reflection.
Vic watched the man collapse to the ground, his flesh slowly being eaten away. Then his virus warning went off, and he turned to look at Scab as Arclight started broadcasting a viral contamination warning. Vic knew if the virus was powerful and new enough to defeat Arclight’s countermeasures and most people’s personal defences then it would have to have been very expensive.
Scab grabbed the extruded handle of his P-sat and allowed it to pull him quickly towards the ship. Vic found himself doing the same while covering their retreat.
The expressway sealed as Arclight tried to keep some of its wealthier denizens safe. The P-sat dragged them through the lower passageways. They were still quite crowded, but it was easy to push through corpses in zero G, particularly as a lot of their flesh was missing thanks to the nano-enhanced necrotic nature of the virus radiating from Scab like a bad smell.
‘They won’t let you get away with this,’ Vi
c said. He knew the cartel could not leave this unanswered. ‘We’re dead the moment we set foot on the Basilisk.’ The ’sect was quite looking forward to his death. More than anything else, ’sects were about efficiency. They wouldn’t make him suffer, just snuff him out. It would be a release, swimming through corpses as a virus ate their flesh was not his idea of fun.
However, Scab had already allowed for this. The Basilisk’s recently upgraded sensors had thoroughly mapped their path into Arclight, and Scab had uploaded it into his neunonics. Since they had landed he had been planting the seeds of escape just in case things turned out bad. He had sent out stealth AI programs of his own devising to burrow quietly into the various weapons and security systems that could give him problems on the way out, be they on the station or on other ships.
‘You just killed a Church Militiaman,’ Vic said. ‘They have a frigate here.’ He had seen the craft on the way in – sleek, violent-looking, a minimum of statuary on it, the armour engraved with the fall of the Naga. Frigates were fast. The Basilisk was faster, but the frigate horribly outgunned them and would be manoeuvring into position at this very moment.
‘The Saint Brendan’s Fire. I saw it,’ Vic said as he concentrated on the virtual map in his mind, cracking systems that were readying to fire on the Basilisk.
‘Fear and desire,’ Scab said over the interface. It took a moment for Vic to realise that his partner was talking to the security force where the Basilisk was docked. They would be under a lot of pressure from the cartel to ambush Vic. ‘Leave now and you have cartel trouble. Stay now and we’ll take you down and take you with us. Your suffering can be my hobby for a week and then I’ll turn you over to a house of pain. You won’t die so your clone insurance won’t be valid.’ And he would do it too, Vic thought. He would have to, otherwise people would not take his threats seriously in the future.
When they got to the dock the door was open and the place was empty.
The pair of them strode onto the ship. Scab had left both airlock irises wide open. He closed them with a thought and the Basilisk began to scrub out the virals, its powerful nano-screen hunting down all the new guests. The Basilisk’s skin was hardening so the external feed was coming straight through the interface along with all the sensor data. Sure enough, most of Arclight’s batteries capable of a firing solution on the Basilisk were aiming at the small craft. The St Brendan’s Fire was manoeuvring into firing position, its thrusters glowing against a background of black and neon.