The Beauty of Destruction

by Gavin G. Smith

  ‘Where are we?’ Beth asked.

  ‘Home,’ du Bois grunted. Despite the L-tech retrofitting, the wind was still buffeting the aircraft and du Bois had to wrestle with it. As they rose past the walls, Beth could see that the small castle required some work but for the most part had been well maintained. ‘Given to the family by Robert the Bruce for some … considerations.’

  They were up over the castle, and Beth could see there was a keep built against the sea wall and then a small courtyard. Du Bois kept the plane hovering over the courtyard, though the wind was knocking it around. He seemed to be concentrating intently.

  ‘Aren’t we landing?’ Beth asked.

  ‘I’m just checking the castle’s security systems.’

  ‘Oh, isn’t that dangerous?’

  ‘It’s an isolated system and I’m using a direct link, a tight-beam transmission from the plane.’ The plane dipped forwards and then started to sink towards the courtyard. ‘It’s safe.’ He sounded somehow disappointed as the Harrier’s wheeled undercarriage touched down on the courtyard’s cobbles.

  ‘Everything okay?’ Beth asked. If anything, du Bois had seemed more preoccupied than she had been during the trip.

  ‘My Black Shadow is gone,’ du Bois said. Beth assumed he was talking about a vintage motorcycle. The cockpit opened and both of them climbed out of the aircraft.

  ‘Alexia!’ du Bois shouted as he pushed the sturdy, metal-studded door to the main keep open. They were in a stone-floored hallway decorated with armour, weapons and large oil paintings of landscapes. Beth had half been expecting to see stuffed animals and family portraits. A grand staircase with dark, hardwood banisters led to the first floor and rain battered against the window over the landing. The weather notwithstanding, Beth was pretty sure this building was dark at the best of times.

  ‘Must have been as cheery as my place to grow up in,’ Beth muttered.

  ‘I didn’t grow up here. The only people who grew up here were servants’ children and they weren’t allowed in this part of the house,’ du Bois said, sounding distracted. He’d slung the carbine across his back.

  ‘Servants? Really?’ Beth muttered but du Bois was ignoring her.

  ‘Alexia!’ du Bois shouted again.

  ‘I thought you’d checked the security. Wouldn’t you know if there was someone else in here?’

  Du Bois had mounted the stairs and was running up them two at a time.

  ‘There’s a chance that she could have circumvented the security,’ he answered distractedly. ‘Make yourself at home.’

  Beth had found the kitchen. It was already quite warm, presumably because of the Aga, and she’d managed to get a fire going in the large hearth. She had also decided it was the homeliest room in the house, the most lived in, probably because of the servants. The fridge and the pantry had been well stocked and with a lot of fresh food, so it must have been done recently. She wondered where the servants were now, as the castle would have been a good place for them to hide if they were still sane.

  She had intended on having a snack. It had turned into a feast of bread, cheese, pickles, cold meats and a cold roast chicken. She felt like a pig but her body had apparently needed the energy and was going about efficiently converting it. She had also found an excellent bottle of Scotch. Now all she had to do was not think about her dad. She hadn’t seemed to be able to program her neuralware not to do that.

  ‘She not here, then?’ Beth asked through a mouthful of bread and cheese as du Bois walked into the kitchen and put the carbine on the long oak table she was sitting at. He shook his head.

  ‘Girlfriend? Wife?’ It suddenly occurred to her that she didn’t know anything normal about du Bois.

  ‘Br … sister,’ du Bois said. Beth decided not to push further. Du Bois sat down and started helping himself to food. She’d all but emptied the huge fridge.

  ‘They’re a pain in the arse, aren’t they?’

  Du Bois smiled. ‘You’ve no idea.’

  ‘We could look for her,’ Beth suggested. ‘I may not have had much luck …’

  ‘I wouldn’t even know where to start. She was in Brighton some days ago … Now? I just don’t know. Besides, it won’t make any difference unless we have an out.’

  ‘What is that out? There are other things happening, aren’t there? You said this wasn’t all done by that thing in the Solent.’

  ‘No, there are more of those things on the other side of the world, in the Pacific, and they are considerably less benevolent.’

  Beth tried to think about this for a moment. She decided to take it at face value. It was just too far removed from being a con, or working the doors in Bradford, the things she was used to.

  ‘Why does everyone want Talia?’ Beth asked.

  ‘She was the descendant of a bloodline infused with living S-tech. She is connected to the thing you saw in the Solent. It was a Seeder, though I suspect you were in the seedpod rather than the actual Seeder itself. To cut a long story short, the Seeders were corrupted but they hid some of their genetic secrets in a human bloodline thousands of years ago.’ Du Bois took a mouthful of whisky. Beth was staring at him. ‘I’m no scientist but it seems that the information required to utilise Seeder technology to escape our current situation is encoded in Natalie’s DNA.’

  ‘Why the fuck did you put all your eggs in one irrational, goth basket?’ Beth finally asked.

  Du Bois sighed, leant back in the chair, and spent some time chewing and swallowing a large piece of gammon.

  ‘We didn’t. She was one of a great number of children grown from the genetic information we had. We tried very hard to find her but it was difficult because your parents kept their heads down and maintained a low-tech lifestyle.’

  ‘The other children?’

  ‘Well, this generation would have all been young adults now, same age as Talia, though another generation was about to be born …’

  ‘Something bad happened, didn’t it?’ Beth asked.

  ‘A terrorist organisation called the Brass City attacked all of our facilities. They’re masters of electronic warfare, they were able to wipe out all the related information on the bloodline.’

  ‘The children?’

  ‘A tailored virus specifically designed to kill the bloodline and junk their DNA. The attack was so total, so successful, they must have thoroughly infiltrated the Circle.’

  ‘That’s you lot, right? The guy who ordered my death?’

  ‘Yes. That was Mr Brown, he runs operations for the Circle.’ Du Bois wouldn’t look at her. Instead he poured himself a generous measure of whisky and drank a large mouthful.

  ‘And finding my sister suddenly became a priority again?’ Beth said.

  ‘Indeed.’ Du Bois raised his glass to her and then took another drink.

  ‘So with my sister gone …’

  ‘Our greatest hope for survival lies with the samples I took from Natalie when we found her in the lockup, which is in the hands of a group of entitled, psychopathic nerds. Assuming, that is, they haven’t ditched in the Atlantic. Which I suspect is the most likely result.’

  ‘But you’re going to look anyway?’

  Du Bois stared at the dark, peaty whisky in his tumbler, giving the question some thought.

  ‘I want to live. I want my sister to live,’ he said at last.

  ‘Will the Circle let you in on their evacuation plan?’ Beth asked.

  Du Bois shrugged. ‘Probably not.’

  ‘So we’re just going through the motions?’ Beth asked. The whole thing still seemed too ridiculous, despite her recent experiences.

  ‘Pretty much.’ Du Bois sagged in his chair. ‘Look, you don’t have to do this. You’re welcome to stay here. Wait for Alexia, if she’s in the UK she’ll be making her way here. If I can find an out I’ll come back.’

  ‘The planet’s fucked, isn’t it?’ Beth said.

  ‘It’s not ours any more and it’s going to become exponentially more hazardous to human life
.’

  ‘You’re going after those Do As You Please bastards?’ Beth asked. She remembered tourist after tourist that she had been forced to kill on the streets of Old Portsmouth after the DAYP clan had enslaved them, turned them into zombies. She remembered the gunfight. They had acted like it was a computer game. Like they hadn’t been shooting at real people. She remembered them taking her sister. She was just a ‘thing’ to them, though perhaps they were no different to the Circle in that. And she remembered what it felt like to get shot, to die.

  ‘I still don’t have anything better to do,’ she said. She thought of her dad. Blinked back non-existent tears and tried to smile before taking a mouthful of the whisky.

  It had just been pure chance that none of them had been using the satellite phone at the time. There had been screaming from the cockpit and then the executive jet had nosedived towards the Atlantic. King Jeremy and the demon-headed Inflictor Doorstep had climbed out of their seats and dropped down the centre aisle towards the cockpit. Dracimus had curled up in a ball and screamed. The door to the cockpit was open. The pilot had blood pouring from his ears and blind red eyes. The co-pilot looked like he was trying to chew through his own cheek.

  Technology had overridden panicked responses. The Atlantic was a flat grey plain interspersed with flecks of white rushing up to greet them. King Jeremy lowered himself down to stand on the plane’s windscreen. It held. He’d never even seen this in an action film. It would be cool if they weren’t about to die. Inflictor reached down and dug his fingers into the flesh of the pilot’s arm. King Jeremy reached up and unbuckled the pilot’s seatbelt. Inflictor dragged the pilot out of his seat and up into the passenger compartment one-handed.

  With difficulty King Jeremy wedged himself between the seat and the instrument panel, grabbed the stick and began pulling it back. The strength of his sculpted body, designed after the muscle-bound characters he saw in his computer games, meant he was slowly able to level out the aircraft and he sat down in the pilot’s seat.

  Some hours later King Jeremy had put the autopilot on and bullied Dracimus into sitting in the pilot’s seat to keep an eye on it. Jeremy had heard the wet tearing and snapping sounds but even so he was still impressed with the mess that Inflictor had made in the forward part of the passenger compartment, with the bodies of the pilot and the co-pilot. Somehow it hadn’t sounded like they minded.

  He had unplugged the pilot’s and co-pilot’s headsets when he heard the screaming coming from the earpieces. Dracimus had whined to know what was happening but Jeremy had no idea. As far as he could tell they had been subject to some kind of weird sonic-based electronic attack.

  There were a number of satellite phone handsets in sockets built into the passenger compartment’s furnishings. One of them started to ring, then it stopped as King Jeremy passed it, then another started to ring as he came level with that one, then as he moved on that one stopped and the next one rang. Inflictor snapped a bone and looked up at Jeremy.

  ‘Don’t answer it!’ Dracimus squealed from the cockpit. It was this more than anything else that made King Jeremy pick up the phone. He heard the screaming. It would have been cool, like a horror film, if it hadn’t grated so much. He moved to hang up when he heard the voice.

  ‘Mr Rush?’ a deep, resonant voice asked over the screaming.

  ‘Don’t call me that!’ Jeremy snapped. He didn’t want to be reminded of that boy. That loser.

  ‘My apologies. Should I call you King Jeremy?’

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘To discuss a deal, but first I think you need to understand the gravity of the situation.’

  ‘KJ!’ Dracimus’s panicked voice was like nails on a chalkboard.

  ‘Busy,’ King Jeremy spat.

  ‘You need to see this!’

  Jeremy fantasised about ways to hurt Dracimus as he dropped the phone and stalked through the gore back to the cockpit. Inflictor stood up to join him.

  Jeremy found himself looking down at the broken fingers of the ruined, smoking Boston skyline.

  ‘It’s like the introductory film in Demon Seed!’ Dracimus couldn’t keep the excitement out of his voice. Jeremy turned back to look at the phone he’d left lying on the floor. Another one closer to him started to ring.

  9

  A Long Time After the Loss

  Privacy. There were many benefits to being a member of the Church but the Monk had often reflected that privacy, physical and mental, so unusual in the Consortium and Monarchist systems, was chief among them. The Cathedral was high security. It was protected by secrecy, and then a lot of firepower. All public areas, particularly work areas, were subject to surveillance. Domiciles were only put under surveillance if it was requested by their inhabitants, or the militia made a convincing argument to the legal aspect of the Cathedral’s supposedly objective governing AI.

  To the Monk’s mind, Church conditioning wasn’t a breach of privacy. Yes, you had to agree to the conditioning if you wished to remain in the Church when you came to your majority, and most did, but it didn’t allow Church AIs, Churchman, or the militia to spy on your mind or your biology. Instead it wiped any sensitive information from your mind if you left, or were taken from, the Church. More seriously, it could damage and ultimately kill anyone who either tried to reverse engineer the information out of themselves, or were subject to such reverse engineering. Again, this was due to security rather than thought policing. Everyone was free to think and say what they wanted and once the door to your domicile was closed you were on your own and unmonitored physically and mentally. It was bliss. Even so, many thousands of years later she still appreciated it. More so after she had been away from the Cathedral for any length of time.

  The information from the surveillance sensors in the public areas, however, was constantly analysed by some very powerful AIs. This was why, as the Monk made her way towards a bridge-capable telescope array on one of the flying buttresses, the Cathedral’s AI was politely requesting access to the medical diagnostic systems in her neunonics. It seemed that the visual and heat sensors had detected signs that she was running a fever. She looked flushed, sweat beaded her skin in a way that it really wasn’t supposed to for someone as heavily augmented as she was. This was almost certainly the sign of some kind of nanite infection and a tricky and subtle one to have avoided detection so far.

  Churchman appeared in the corridor next to the Monk as she stepped out of the express traveltube. He was a hologram emitted from a projector the smart matter wall had just grown. She wasn’t receiving direct neunonic ’faces right now.

  ‘Beth, are you okay?’ Churchman asked. There was no panel or control centre for the array. It was run by the Cathedral’s distributed systems, which ran throughout the smart matter of the entire habitat. Everything could be neunonically accessed with the correct clearance, which the Monk had. It really made no sense for her to be walking towards what was effectively a wall. It seemed to take real effort for the Monk to turn and look at Churchman’s hologram. Her face was beetroot red, her mouth a rictus grin as she tried to speak. Churchman triggered the alarm with a thought.

  Limbs extruded from the floor, walls and ceiling and reached for her. Seconds later powerful, non-lethal weapon barrels were grown from the corridor wall and fed power and/or ammunition, nano-swarms spored from the wall, security satellites and militia personnel were scrambled.

  Churchman’s armoured form was running. He was just over forty-two miles away from the Monk. It could have been worse. The direct sensor ‘face from the corridor next to the buttress showed him everything, audio, visual, heat, electrochemical, nanoscopic. It seemed to be happening in slow motion. She was in the air, extruded limbs reaching for her, taking hits from the weapons.

  With a thought, Churchman opened the wall in front of him and leapt through it. He was seven miles above the ground level of the Cathedral. He triggered his AG drive.

  Through his ’face sensor feed Churchman saw the Monk curled up into a so
mersault. A smart matter tentacle reached from the wall, snagging her leg. A thermal blade lashed out and the limb was severed. Beth hit the ground as stunners and EM-projected baton rounds hit her, barely staggering her.

  ‘Where the fuck is Woodbine Scab?’ Churchman snapped out loud. It had been a while since he had been this angry, or, if he was honest, this frightened. He had his answer before he had finished asking it. Scab was overseeing the upgrades to the Basilisk II. With a thought Scab was wrapped in extruded smart matter limbs. The bounty hunter immediately started to fight: bleeding acid, using his nano-screen, and spitting liquid hardware to try to matter-hack the material holding him. Pythian attack programs and viruses were attacking the Cathedral’s local systems. Militia and S-sats were speeding towards him.

  In his ’face sensor feed the Monk bounced off one wall, the floor, then another wall. Churchman would have admired the balletic grace of her movements if the situation hadn’t been so serious. She’d had millennia to hone her skills.

  Churchman landed on the hull of a banking fast-attack frigate. Tiny molecular hooks on his exoskeleton’s feet adhered to the craft’s hull as its engines burned hard, scorching a mile of the Cathedral’s internal smart matter wall. The craft shot forwards.

  ‘Locate and secure all of Scab’s crew,’ Churchman ’faced.

  The frigate was fast but not fast enough. Subconsciously he analysed the flight paths and capabilities of all the craft speeding to help him. The local area was illuminated with the harsh burn of engines all making for him or the Monk. He leapt. The Cathedral’s AI requested permission to take lethal measures against the Monk. Even though she would be cloned, again, he hesitated. But it’s Beth, some impractical, sentimental part of him thought. It was just a moment’s hesitation.

  On the ’face sensor feed Churchman saw an extruded smart matter tentacle grab her arm and slam her to the ground. Her right arm reached for the wall. A red flash. Red steam. The limb fell to the ground. The Monk didn’t even scream. Restraints grew from the floor, encircling her body. Her bloody left palm shot forwards and she smeared blood against the wall. An EM-driven cannon round blew the limb off.