by Gavin Smith
Thick fingers of light reached out for him, bending slightly due to the gravity well. Kinetic projectiles burned as they were shot through the bubble of the atmosphere. According to his suit’s scanners, or rather its instinctual understanding of space and the information contained in his neunonics, the capital ship had just fired every one of its AG-driven smart munitions. The munitions were accelerating to the limit of material science.
He knew the ship. It was called the Necronaught, a childish name to Elite Scab’s mind. A powerful AI helped run it. The AI had bonded with the crew, making the ship almost alive to them. They had a relationship with it. The Necronaught had wreaked havoc on the Pangean fleet during the Art Wars. It had been among the first ships through the planetary blockade and the ship most significantly responsible for the death of one of the Living Cities.
What a waste, Elite Scab thought. He was in a different physical state by the time the first beams reached him, too different for them to harm him. He took his time making his way towards the craft. He wanted to appreciate the display of firepower. He could make out the burn of other smaller faster ships making their way towards him.
He remembered the last time that he had seen a display of the Necronaught’s firepower, huddled in a crowded mercenary carrier broadcasting constant cries of surrender and pleas of clemency for independent contractors. He saw the bright lances reaching down from high orbit. Watched the sky become a canopy of fire as the kinetic payloads hit the atmosphere. Slowed down in his neunonics, he watched the AG smart munitions blossom into multiple sub-munitions and the wreckage of escaping craft start to rain down on the scarred rock surface. Scab, as he’d been then, had picked his escape craft based on the strength of its defences.
At some level all of them had felt the death of the Living City. Scab had disliked the violation, the suggestion that at some fundamental level there was an empathic connection between all living things. Instead he wondered if the crew of the Necronaught felt like gods. He wanted what they had.
He was not going to take revenge on the Necronaught. Those memories belonged to a different person, who should have been long dead. His ghost had been resurrected in the pathetic clone copy that even now he knew was down on the surface.
Some of the more exotic payloads tugged at him, harmed him, he supposed, as he made his way towards the ship. The shields, what most people thought were S-tech but what Elite Scab knew were L-tech, were more problematic. There was actual pain and loss. He was diminished, but he did not scream as he pulled his way through them. He was breathing hard, covered in sweat as he fell through the armour and hit the ship’s cold hard deck.
With less than a thought he sucked the sweat back into his skin. He would use the salt and water for something more useful. He stood up. To the terrified-looking crewman standing in front of him, it looked like he was clothed in black liquid glass. The crewman, a tall human, base male in gender, had seen the Elite in a moment of weakness. He died immediately.
Elite Scab released the virals and the nano-swarms, all Sand L-tech derivatives. They would be too much for the Necronaught’s countermeasures. He gained access to the ship’s systems through the dead crewman’s neunonics and downloaded multiple crack and control AI programs based on a template of his own personality. Each of them had an inbuilt self-destruct code but they would overwhelm the Necronaught’s security, possess the host AI and effectively sequester the ship.
While this happened, Elite Scab walked through the ship killing the old-fashioned way. Every time he ran an extruded blade through a crew member or legionnaire, he thought about their souls. He knew that the soul did not exist. It was an ancient idea from before the Loss that he had come across. So much more information was available to you when you became an Elite. He knew that ultimately they were all little more than biological automatons created by the Seeders, but as he watched the screaming faces of his victims appear momentarily in the animated exotic matter of his armour, it was difficult not to think that the living material of the armour was consuming their souls. What he felt sure of was that the exotic matter wanted to consume life.
He took control of the ship. He ’faced with the ship’s nano-field for an external view. The Necronaught was belying its dark name. It looked like it was made of light as every other ship in the vicinity fired on it. The carbon reservoirs struggled to remake the ship’s reactive armour quickly enough to cope with the multiple impacts of sub-munitions and kinetic shots. In the centre of the ship, as faces screamed out from all over his armour, Elite Scab was barely feeling the hits.
Scab ignored the rest of the fleet; instead he aimed the Necronaught at the surface of Game and fired all its beam weapons and the kinetic shots that the carbon reservoirs had managed to regrow at the planet’s surface.
‘Notice me,’ he whispered.
He felt the rip in time/space. I should feel exalted, he told himself. Angels were coming especially for him.
It was quite tranquil floating upwards in the red light through what looked like the roots of the arcology trees, except here everything, all matter, was black and skeletal with oddly exaggerated angles. The frameworks of the arcology trees looked like expressionist sculptures rendered in blackened bone. The only matter here was the trees. It seemed that you had to be of a certain size to be remembered in this red-world copy. None of the smaller details – G-vehicles, piles of assembler debris, extraneous buildings – seemed to be present, and there were certainly no other life forms, not even ghosts. With the exception of the two of them riding the cocoon, their flight capability provided by the three working AG motors, everything was still. It was like a dead world. Scab found himself liking it.
They were sitting opposite each other on the cocoon. Scab’s end was listing a little, as it was the end with the destroyed AG motor on one of the corners. He had held on to the ornate double-barrelled laser rifle he’d taken off the Toy Soldier. The Monk still had a thorn pistol in each hand.
‘So, should we be pointing guns at each other in some extended Mexican stand-off?’ she asked.
Scab gave this some thought. ‘I know what a stand-off is. What’s a Mexican?’
‘Never mind.’
‘If it helps, I’ll kill you with a blade when the time comes.’
‘Thanks.’
‘No thanks needed.’ He turned and looked her up and down. ‘It just seems like it would suit you more.’
The Monk resisted the urge to thank him again. Sardonic just didn’t seem to register with him. ‘So your double-cross is in place then?’ she asked instead. Scab looked at her. He’d left the visor of the spacesuit clear but his expression was unreadable.
‘The Game exists here,’ Scab said, meaning the planet. This was after a period of silence as they rose through the red light towards the black leaf canopy covering the lower levels – or that’s what they would be in Real Space anyway. ‘There’s gravity?’
‘We don’t know why. It’s some kind of simulacra, a smaller echo of our universe with different physical laws and coterminous points. Perhaps the ghost planets exist as navigation aids.’
‘Navigation aids?’
‘Red Space is constructed space – it’s artificial.’
It took a long time for what she had said to sink in. Scab’s view of Red Space had just been radically altered, if he chose to believe what she had said.
‘Constructed by who?’ he finally asked.
The Monk shrugged. Scab resisted the urge to kill her for making a gesture so significantly lacking in grandeur after what she had just told him. Later he would come to the conclusion that he did not cope well with having his universe altered at such a radical level.
‘We’re not sure, Seeders would be our best guess. Perhaps the Lloigor.’
‘Who’re the Lloigor?’
There was no answer. Instead the Monk smiled in a way that infuriated Scab so much his finger inched towards the bone blade still at his hip.
‘These are Church secrets, right?’ Scab
asked suspiciously. The Monk nodded. ‘Why are you telling me this? You must be pretty confident that you’re going to come out on top of our double-cross.’
‘How are you going to get out?’ the Monk asked, meaning from Red Space. She had a good point. She gave him some time to think on this. ‘Churchman likes you,’ she finally said.
So that’s it, Scab thought. He was being given a taste. It was an obvious manipulation but it still angered him. ‘The Consortium thought I could be used as well, when I was Elite.’
‘You still are,’ the Monk said.
‘A copy is.’
‘I don’t mean to be offensive, Mr Scab, but on the other hand I’m not afraid of you, so fuck it, right? But it seems a lot more likely that you’re the clone.’ She caught his face hardening. He wasn’t a tolerant man, and she’d pushed what little tolerance he had beyond his normal limits. ‘Now you can try and kill me, maybe even succeed, but I assure you it’s mutually assured destruction. Or you can listen to me.’
‘Everybody wants their own pet psychopath, someone to frighten the other children with. It’s a sad state of affairs for Known Space,’ Scab said through gritted teeth, controlling his anger, barely.
‘We don’t want you because you have a head full of rabid squirrels, and frankly if the Church Militia and the monks don’t scare people then our ability to embargo bridge technology should. Churchman wants you because you have an enquiring mind. You question. Have you any idea how rare that is?’
‘A head full of what?’
‘See?’
‘Who is Churchman? Your leader?’ The Monk didn’t answer, but Scab knew the name-drop had been carefully calculated. ‘So let me see if I understand you properly. You’re trying to avoid the double-cross by recruiting me?’ Very few people had ever heard Scab laugh. There was genuine humour in the laughter, but no warmth. The Monk found the noise grated on her. She didn’t like it.
Suddenly they were in the shade. They looked up to see huge chunks of wreckage plummeting towards them from high above. Both tried to neunonically order the AG motors to take what was going to be very languid evasive action. Eventually the Monk desisted, realising that Scab was stubborn enough to get them both killed if he didn’t have his way.
The wreckage rained down around them. Where it hit, the tree broke like delicate ceramic. The wreckage that hit them just seemed to shatter, causing the cocoon to bob slightly on its motors.
‘What’s happening?’ Scab asked, though he was beginning to guess.
‘I think it’s your diversion. The Game is being attacked.’
‘That’s happening in Real Space?’
‘I would imagine it’s considerably worse in Real Space.’
‘And it has an effect here?’
The Monk didn’t bother to answer.
You had to understand things on a quantum level to see the particle beam cutting through the Necronaught. Elite Scab knew that to penetrate the heavily armoured hull of a capital ship, even as it was breaking its back as it hit the atmosphere belly up, would be taking the Monarchist Elite’s weapon close to the exotic material’s tolerance levels, as it drew energy from a network of micro-black holes. A network harnessed by civilisations long dead.
Elite Scab closed his eyes, savouring this, standing on the lip of the split in the ship as impacts made the two parts of the ship fall away from each other. There was fire all around. Beneath, he knew there would be lightning as the atmosphere ionised around the debris. He had created an extinction-level event plummeting towards the day side of the planet. Is this the diversion I want? Elite Scab wondered.
He felt rather than saw the black wings. Heard the screaming. There would be no electronic warfare. This was no silent duel of nanites and biologicals. Elite Scab smiled. They would light up the skies.
He lifted his feet and flew down through the ship, wreathing himself in flames as he pierced the atmosphere. He was sure it was Horrible Angel after him. She was always the furious one. Tearing through burning wreckage after him, Fallen Angel would be setting an ambush, calculating trillions of possibilities to make the best shot and then leaving it to chance and chaos.
Down through the branches of the arcology trees at hypersonic speeds. Through the black leaves. Pulling up and flying through dark canyons of massive roots. Angel’s wings spread out wide high above him, the particle beam a near-constant lance stabbing through branch and leaf, creating waves of destruction running parallel with his erratic flight path as he wove in and out of the city-sized trees, wishing he had time to play genocidal lumberjack.
Far behind them the sky went black as the first wreckage hit the ground and thousands of tonnes of debris were thrown into the air. Through the black cloud the fires were almost invisible. The ground shook, Elite Scab only registering this through the shaking of the massive arcology trees.
He turned corkscrew at speed, letting his own particle beam lash out, carving scars on trees, cutting chunks out of them. He knew that Horrible Angel would be running a completely randomised set of evasive manoeuvres designed to not be where any sane mind would assume she was.
Crystalline receivers embedded deep inside Elite Scab detected the first attempts at sorcery. Imported higher-dimensional physics designed to block the complex entanglement effect, or in other words cut him off from his energy and ammunition.
It angered him. He wanted the Game as his funeral pyre. This was not how it should be done, but he knew she would be concentrating on the higher-dimensional physics. He used his own sorcery, rode the carrier beam back to find her. Angling all coherent energy shields forward, he aimed for her and accelerated. He went straight through one of the arcology trees, exploded out the other side and hit Horrible Angel. Materials that probably shouldn’t touch, touched, and physics struggled to catch up.
The other Elite recovered instantly. Blades extruded from both their armours, appearing and disappearing where they needed them as they fought at bewildering speeds. The debris cloud engulfed them, but it meant less than nothing to these people, with their heightened senses and their instinctive understanding of everything around them.
Horrible Angel broke contact first. She was vulnerable for a moment. Elite Scab risked a shot. His weapon became a rifle in an instant in his hands, and he fired a subtle DNA beam, hoping the low-energy beam on the strange frequency would sneak past her shield and armour to rewrite her genetic code into something less god-like.
It was a fire-and-hope because he knew what was going to happen next. He had felt Fallen Angel take control of the orbital defence platforms above Elite Scab’s area. He knew they had been fired.
The wing display made Horrible Angel’s flight look almost graceful. The orbital weapons platforms fired, reaching into the atmosphere, destroying anything in their line of fire as, like angry gods, they reached for Elite Scab.
Elite Scab had a moment to think that it had been perfectly timed. Then the force of many impacts drove him deep into the crust of the planet beneath him. And he remembered pain again.
The Red Space echo of Game seemed to be coming down all around them. They tried to avoid the worst of the falling debris as the expressionistic simulacra trees crumbled, but much of the debris had the consistency of ash by the time it reached them.
‘I don’t suppose you want to share your exfiltration plan with me?’ Scab asked. The Monk didn’t dignify the question with an answer. Instead she watched him almost curiously as it rained ash out of a red sky.
‘You know that Vic’s dead by now, don’t you? I’m sorry, but he was probably your best weapon,’ she told him with the same searching expression. Scab just nodded. ‘Will you even miss him?’
‘Who are you to ask me that?’ He wasn’t angry. It was another question he didn’t quite understand. It was almost as if he expected her to answer it somehow.
‘I was just curious, I guess. Vic was the only life form you regularly and closely associated with. I just wondered if you’d developed some kind of connection to him.
’
‘Do you want me to take revenge now?’
The Monk looked down at the small cocoon they were riding.
‘If you want. Or you could mourn.’
‘Do you find emotions help being a killer?’ This time there was genuine interest in his voice.
‘No. No, I really don’t.’ The Monk seemed lost in thought for a while. ‘Having something to believe in does.’
There was more laughter, and the Monk didn’t like it any better this time.
‘I think that makes you more dangerous than me, certainly madder.’
‘Maybe just less cynical.’
They rode up again for a while, watching the echo of a world being destroyed by unseen forces. Scab was wondering if there was an exfiltration plan. Perhaps she was hoping to fly the thing all the way to the H-space beacon. After all, she had said that Red Space was smaller and governed by different physical laws.
‘While we’re sharing, where’s the Cathedral?’ Scab asked. The Monk ignored him yet again.
Scab looked around. He was starting to get bored. The slow ascent. Nothing to see but crumbling black skeletal trees and ashen-rain-obscured red sky. It took a while, but then he realised there was movement among the branches. There were indeterminate forms that seemed to be made out of some kind of deeper blackness than their surroundings. Faceless and roughly humanoid in shape, they had large bat-like wings and what looked like stinger-tipped tails. They crawled over the trees in a way that looked less like a flock and more like a swarm. They seemed somehow parasitical to him.
The other movement was more difficult to pin down: a suggestion of a quadruped, an off-kilter, almost canine lope to it, but whatever it was – or they were – it seemed to come from places where there shouldn’t be anything. It hurt Scab when he caught the movement and actually tried to look at it. He had the idea that it was formed of tiny multifaceted crystals that moved together like a machine doing an impression of biological life.
Scab brought the laser rifle up to bear. Targeting graphics appeared in his vision as he tried to understand what he was seeing through the cross hairs. The Monk was watching him with an expression of bemusement on her face.