The Beauty of Destruction

by Gavin G. Smith

  Tangwen stood up, spinning round. Calgacus had split the first attacker from hip to shoulder with his unpolished, blued iron blade, and had turned from him because none could survive such a blow.

  ‘No!’ Britha cried, running towards the first attacker, dagger in her hand. Tangwen was running as well but she knew she would not be there in time. More of the Cait warriors were sprinting towards the fight. Calgacus started to turn but he was just a man, and they were fighting those who had the blood of gods coursing through their veins. The first swordsman’s wound was closing. Tendrils of red metal were knitting the bloodless wound together again. Tangwen felt her body flush with fever as the magics of the chalice fought with the magics of the venom on the blade that had just slashed her.

  The first swordsman swung for Calgacus but as Britha reached the Cait rhi, the attacker changed the angle of his blow, aiming for her. Tangwen had already thrown her hatchet. The spinning axe flew between Calgacus and Britha, narrowly missing them both, and hit the swordsman just under his right shoulder. It was enough. A screaming Britha parried the longsword on her way in, then rammed her dagger into his chest before the force of her charge sent them both sprawling into the snow.

  Britha was sitting atop her attacker now, holding her dagger in both hands as she stabbed down again and again with all her strength, turning his chest cavity into a red ruin. She screamed, tears rolling down her face. Tangwen had seen this before. She knew that sometimes pregnant women had problems controlling themselves. It was one of a number of reasons that she had always preferred the tansy cake.

  She glanced back at Calgacus. He looked badly shaken. The Pecht rhi looked between the dead Cait warriors.

  ‘Those were two of my best men,’ he muttered in his own language. Then he looked at the two dead swordsmen. ‘I didn’t kill him.’ He sounded appalled. ‘That blow would have felled a boar.’

  ‘And I’m just a southron girl-child,’ Tangwen said, smiling. ‘Guess you’re not quite as tough up north as you like to boast,’ she couldn’t resist adding. Calgacus just stared at her.

  Britha stood up, using the sleeves of her robe to wipe the tears off her face, smearing her skin with blood as she did so.

  ‘He sent them to kill the baby,’ she said. Her voice was cold and hard once more.

  8

  Now

  The retrofitted Harrier Jump Jet was easier to fly than some console games were to play. They could have downloaded and assimilated instructions straight into their neuralware from the plane itself had they wanted to. Though cramped, the cockpit had been made more comfortable and behind their seats there was a secure, armoured storage compartment that could be ejected. The plane’s engine looked like something out of a 1960’s spy film. Du Bois had told her that this was probably because Gideon had grown it from some kind of L-tech nano-factory that just needed to be given design specs and fed matter. When du Bois had transferred knowledge straight into her neuralware he had provided her with a great deal of conventional knowledge, but he had kept much of his hidden world of secret organisations and alien technology to himself. She understood why. He had wanted a weapon to help him out of a fix. She had been that weapon. He hadn’t, however, wanted to betray his employers.

  They had kept low. Hugging the contours of the landscape, nap-of-the-Earth flying, she now knew this was called. The Harrier’s stealth systems were engaged. Du Bois hadn’t wanted to draw attention to them, though he had tried to re-establish contact with his employers several times, to no avail.

  Nap-of-the-Earth meant they got to see more of the country close-up as they headed north. They spent a lot of time flying through smoke. They saw mobs in the streets of suburbia, towns and villages; geometric arrangements of bodies in fields; and lots of wreckage. Sometimes the places they flew over looked deserted. There were quiet places, particularly in parts of the countryside, where she could imagine there was nothing wrong at all, then she would see piles of decapitated bodies or some other atrocity.

  Beth wanted to cry, but her body was now too efficient to waste liquid like that. She was pretty sure that she didn’t want to, couldn’t, live in this world. Du Bois had tried to talk her out of going to see her father, though he hadn’t tried very hard. She knew he was probably right. This wasn’t going to have a happy ending. The flight north had been very quiet. All of Beth’s friends had phones and access to the internet. If anything she had been the most Luddite of all of them. She tried not to think of what they would have become now. It was little consolation that they were too far from Portsmouth to be hosts for the spores of the monstrosity under the waters of the Solent.

  Beth wasn’t surprised that Bradford was burning. Racial tensions had spilled over into violence more than once in the city’s past. Removed of inhibitions, racially motivated violence was revealed for what it really was: a convenient excuse for base, primal behaviour. Culture and skin colour had nothing to do with the open street warfare they saw beneath them as du Bois banked over the town centre. In some ways it was nothing new for Beth.

  Du Bois brought the Harrier down smoothly in Peel Park. The park was in a basin on the hills just north of the city centre. There were a few lost souls wandering the area in various states of dress. A number of them looked like they had been attacked but they kept their distance.

  They secured the plane and headed up Harrogate Road. It was lined with sooty, grey stone Victorian terraces. Nobody bothered them, possibly because the weapons they were openly carrying put them off. Even the insane instinctively understood a zero sum game when they saw one.

  Her key still worked. Beth opened the door a crack and then leant against the doorframe, her eyes squeezed shut. Du Bois had his back to her, looking up and down the steep road. A badly beaten, naked man staggered past, leaving a trail of blood behind him.

  ‘You don’t have to go in,’ du Bois said quietly. Beth steeled herself and pushed her way into the house. It still smelled of stale cigarette smoke and the cold damp but there was something else there as well. That was when she knew.

  It could have been worse, she thought. It hadn’t been peaceful. Even through the cloud of flies Beth could see that he had been frightened when he had died. She wasn’t sure what she had expected but she was surprised he’d had the strength to cut his own wrists.

  Her neuralware was providing her with all sorts of information. Her father’s dead body reduced to data. She tried to shut down the process but it was like trying not to think. The lack of rigor mortis and other factors were suggesting a rough time of death. This had happened before the world had been driven mad. Her father had killed himself after her last visit. After she had taken the hope of seeing Talia from him.

  ‘I did this,’ she said, mostly to herself.

  ‘No,’ du Bois said quietly from the doorway. Beth glanced back at him. He looked troubled. ‘There’s nothing you can do here now. We need to go.’

  Beth turned back to look at her father. ‘Why?’ she asked quietly. She was trying to remember his smile. Trying to remember hearing laughter in this house. Even when her mother had been alive, even before they had known she was ill, she couldn’t remember laughter or smiles. Beth wondered how much of that had been fear of discovery at having effectively stolen Talia. She knew the sudden surge of anger she felt towards her ‘sister’ wasn’t fair but she didn’t try to suppress it.

  She turned to face du Bois; there was something in his expression that she couldn’t quite read. Her face hardened.

  ‘Let’s go. I’m done here,’ she told him. Du Bois nodded. Then the phone in the hallway started to ring.

  The orbital habitat looked like a cross between a modern office building and a petrified biomechanical egg. The material of the habitat looked like contoured black marble. Mr Brown was looking down through a clear, coherent energy field at the burning Earth. He smiled at his own hyperbole. He knew it for what it was: the reflexive, spasmodic, instinctive lashing out of idiot gods.

  As far as they could tell the dise
ased Seeder minds had accessed all the information on the internet. They had used data held by internet providers, social media, commercial data providers, marketing companies, blogs and used it to create information simulacra of people. Then the Seeders had created intuitive information entities to plot the simulacra’s worst fears and driven them mad. Finally they had played humanity’s dark electronic soul back to itself. That and vast, insane, alien intelligences trying to communicate had done the damage.

  The developing countries and poorer parts of the world, places with less sophisticated communications infrastructure, had weathered this storm the best, but the insane part of humanity was reacting to years of blame and fear politics. The military-industrial complex had just had its inhibitions removed.

  Mr Brown found himself unmoved. He was leaning on his opiate staff. The bags were depleting faster every day. He would never run out of the synthetic morphine while he had access to matter but even the vast amounts he was now consuming barely took the edge off his agony.

  ‘Have we established contact? With anyone at all?’ Mr Brown said out loud. They were keeping electronic contact to a minimum now. They had isolated and then purged their systems. The Control AI, corrupted, had been taken off-line and erased. Now they had to do the work the hard way. Augmented immortals plugged into ancient machinery.

  ‘We have established communication with several of our operatives via tight-beam communication when we have been able to find them,’ one of the immortals said from his contoured, organic-looking couch. The man had been a genius once. He had worked with electrical currents, magnetism and radio. Now his pale, hairless body was little more than the human drone component of a greater biomechanical machine.

  ‘Du Bois?’ Mr Brown’s question was practically a sigh. Du Bois was a very capable agent but he was also a lot more trouble than he was worth. Du Bois was more than eight hundred years old. Mr Brown couldn’t understand why the man hadn’t outgrown rank sentimentality.

  ‘There is an eighty-seven-point-three recurring per cent chance that du Bois was destroyed in Portsmouth. We have modelled a few predictions of his possible whereabouts, if he yet exists, and we are trying to sneak carrier signals through to the most likely locations,’ the drone told him.

  The Seeders had gone after the Circle’s communications network first, presumably due to proximity and access. Kanamwayso had proven their weak point. They had lost the race against time. It was just a case of whether or not they could salvage anything at all, because this wasn’t enough, not nearly enough.

  ‘Attempting to establish contact now,’ the drone told him. Mr Brown heard the sound of a phone ringing. He mused for a moment on how the machinations of the godlike could be turned on their head by the actions of a few spoilt brats and a young woman from the anus of Britain.

  Du Bois and Beth stared at the old-fashioned, rotary dial phone as it rang. Beth walked out into the street and listened. She couldn’t hear any other phones ringing with her augmented senses. She walked back into the house.

  ‘It’s for you,’ she said grimly. Du Bois just stared at the phone. ‘Can you … we survive what happened to the others who answered their phones?’

  ‘I don’t know …’ du Bois said slowly. Beth was pretty sure it was the first time he had seemed unsure of himself, possibly even frightened. Then the frequency of the ringing changed. Beth’s neuralware recognised it as Morse code. Slowly the rings spelled out the word Control. Du Bois picked up the phone and immediately both of them winced as something howled at them from the receiver. It sounded like millions of souls in agony, undercut with horrific, unknowable noises in the infra- and ultrasound frequencies normally unheard by humans.

  ‘Hang up!’ Beth shouted.

  ‘Malcolm, can you hear me?’ a voice asked.

  Even over the screaming Beth could tell the voice was deep, resonant, cultured. She could see from du Bois’s expression that he recognised the speaker.

  ‘I can hear you,’ du Bois said.

  ‘Where is Natalie?’ The voice on the other end of the phone had to shout.

  ‘She has gone. The cult took her. Retrieval is not an option.’

  The voice didn’t answer. Beth didn’t think she could take the screaming for much longer, and then: ‘So it is over?’

  Du Bois said nothing. Beth could see him struggling with something.

  ‘Tell him about the clan!’ she shouted at him. She wasn’t sure why. Perhaps it was the closest thing they had to hope.

  ‘Is that Elizabeth Luckwicke?’ the voice asked.

  ‘Yes,’ du Bois answered. Beth could tell he was less than happy about admitting this.

  ‘The clan?’

  ‘We managed to take some genetic material from Tal … Natalie but the DAYP have control of it.’

  ‘I see. And in the unlikely event that they survived the awakening, do you have any idea where they would be?’

  ‘I would imagine somewhere over the Atlantic making for their base in America. Can you provide us with transport?’

  Beth frowned. They had transport. She opened her mouth to say something but du Bois motioned her to be quiet.

  ‘We are struggling with resources at the moment,’ the voice answered. ‘I think you’ve done all you can from there. You should stand down, or whatever it is you military types do.’

  Beth could see du Bois wrestling with something else. ‘Alexia?’ he finally asked.

  ‘We do not know where she is. I am afraid she cannot be a priority. In other circumstances she would have been more than welcome. I am sorry,’ the voice said. Du Bois sagged. ‘You have been a good soldier, Malcolm. We, humanity, thank you for all of your service. There is just one more service we would ask of you, one more loose end. Do you understand?’

  Beth frowned. She understood when du Bois looked at her.

  ‘Yes,’ he finally said and hung up. The screaming stopped. Slowly, du Bois raised his hands. Beth had stepped out of reach and had the suppressed barrel of the UMP levelled at his head.

  ‘I’m not going to kill you,’ du Bois said. Beth knew that she would be shaking if the tech inside her body hadn’t been so efficient.

  ‘He said it,’ Beth growled. ‘You’re a good soldier.’

  ‘We’re in no different a position to when I upgraded your neuralware in Old Portsmouth. There are standing instructions to execute anyone we had to use in that way as a possible security breach,’ he explained.

  ‘So why didn’t you?’ she demanded. The SMG hadn’t wavered even slightly, her finger curled around a partially depressed trigger.

  ‘You didn’t deserve it. If everything hadn’t gone to shit I would have purged you of tech, modified your memory and then made the argument to Control.’

  ‘But you’ve been given a direct order now, haven’t you, soldier?’

  ‘You’re no threat, the war’s effectively over. You don’t deserve this. It’s nice to see you want to live, though.’

  As Beth looked into his very blue eyes, she knew that he had to be a very accomplished liar. As far as she could tell he was some kind of immortal super spy. Spies had to lie. They lived in deception, but everything told her to believe him. Perhaps that was just a result of du Bois’s tradecraft.

  ‘If you want to walk, just walk, take the weapons. The tech will give you a considerable edge, the skills you need. Go up onto the moors, there will be other survivors.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell him about the plane?’ Beth asked, lowering the weapon. She knew he would have taken considerable killing anyway.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he admitted. ‘Things … perhaps things haven’t been right for a while.’

  ‘Is there any hope?’ she asked, looking down.

  ‘Not much,’ du Bois admitted. Beth looked back up at him.

  ‘I’ve got nothing better to do right now.’

  Du Bois started to laugh.

  Mr Brown rubbed the bridge of his nose with thumb and forefinger.

  ‘He’s going to disob
ey me again,’ he muttered to himself. ‘That man! I really don’t have time for this.’ Mr Brown sounded genuinely aggrieved. He was cursing himself inwardly for not having more fully reprogrammed du Bois, but he had known it would have made him a less effective operative. His ability to improvise, his free thinking, had been his most valuable asset, but also his most troublesome.

  ‘Find me someone on the British mainland and assets on the eastern seaboard of the US. I want to know what, if anything, is still up in the air over the Atlantic. If it’s still up, I want a way to contact it. If not, I want an excellent prediction of where it went down.’

  He hated that he still felt hope. The possibility of release.

  It hadn’t been as bad in Scotland, purely because it was less populated, and du Bois had taken the Harrier out low over the Irish Sea as he headed up the west coast between the islands. The glow in the east had been Glasgow. The entire city must have been burning.

  They had caught a glimpse of a destroyer among the islands. It was enough for Beth to see the hull was blood-stained, festooned with bodies, and the ship had been flying a black flag with an hourglass on it. The destroyer had launched a missile at them but the Harrier’s systems and du Bois’s piloting had meant they had avoided it easily.

  The weather had turned as it had grown dark. Beth was only just starting to realise how tired she was, fatigued and hungry. Despite the tech, physiology had its limits.

  Beth felt the aircraft slowing. Her eyes cut through the darkness and she could see cliffs just ahead of them, white-topped waves breaking against the rocks. She arched her neck, looking up through the cockpit at the castle perched on the edge of it. She felt the armoured airframe flex as the Harrier ceased forwards momentum and started to rise through the spray.