Beth appeared in the back of the ECV’s cab, slamming the turret’s hatch closed as the air-bursting smart grenade exploded above the vehicle, the wave of force pushing it down on its suspension, flames rolling over the vehicle. The final two grenades exploded all but next to du Bois. Force battered him back into the ECV, only the seatbelt stopping him from flying into Alexia. The overpressure hit his augmented – but still mostly liquid – body. Waves coursed through his frame, hydrostatic shock breaking bones, rupturing organs. His body shielded Alexia from the worst of it, but the cab’s armoured frame guided the shockwave, bouncing her and Beth around. Flame filled the cab for a moment. Everything went black.
Du Bois came to screaming and in pain. His overtaxed internal medical systems were desperately trying to return him to something resembling functional, using his body’s fat reserves so quickly he was practically deflating. Alexia was unconscious. Beth had leant in between brother and sister to steer the ECV. She was blackened, and had a compound fracture of the cheekbone, but seemed the best off of the three of them. As he lolled about in the passenger seat, feeling like a sack of water filled with broken twigs, he could see Beth’s cheekbone sucked back through her skin, and the wound close.
They were speeding towards the Cougar and the smoking Escalade. The DShK was now just so much mangled wreckage. Grace was hanging off the Escalade’s tailgate, being dragged behind the pickup. She was firing one of her Berettas, short burst after short burst, at La Calavera as he clambered over the pickup’s cab towards her. These wounds weren’t closing as quickly. She had reloaded her pistol with a magazine of nanite-tipped rounds. How she had the presence of mind to keep firing as she was dragged along, du Bois had no idea. He supposed her armoured bike leathers helped, and she hadn’t been caught in an enclosed area by the explosions, but he wasn’t sure he could have done the same.
Du Bois found himself able to speak again. ‘Alexia!’ Brilliant, du Bois thought, nothing brings round the unconscious like shouting, but his sister was stirring. Suddenly she sat bolt upright and screamed, flailing around in her seat. Beth nearly lost control of the ECV. It shot across the road, and was heading towards a surf shop. Du Bois managed to move and drag the wheel towards him so sharply he thought for a minute the vehicle might turn over.
‘We need to get Grace!’ Beth shouted, trying to restrain Alexia as du Bois steered badly. La Calavera reached through the gunfire and grabbed Grace, one hugely muscled arm lifting her, easily, up off the road. She fired the last of her pistol’s rounds into him at point-blank range. Du Bois could see the nanites doing their work. It looked like parts of his flesh were being eaten from within.
‘I’ve got it!’ Alexia shouted. She had calmed down and had the steering wheel again. The ECV was accelerating towards the back of the Escalade.
With her free hand Grace drew one of her knuckleduster-hilted fighting knives. Du Bois was able to move enough to reload the SA58 carbine with the magazine of nanite-tipped bullets. La Calavera punched Grace in the face hard enough to make her whole body shake. She looked dazed but she managed to hold on to her weapons. She rammed the fighting knife into his mouth, yanked it out, and then stabbed him in the throat. The ECV was catching up. Grace pulled the blade out of his throat, and then rammed it up into his arm and started sawing. He let go of her. She landed on the truck bed, tore her blade free, bent her legs and threw herself backwards into a somersault. Alexia dropped a gear, and the ECV’s engine screamed as she accelerated, the patrol vehicle surging forwards. La Calavera swung his OICW up to his shoulder. Du Bois leaned out of the ECV, sighting past the mangled remains of the door gun. The ECV was under Grace now. La Calavera fired the OICW’s underslung assault rifle. Rounds impacted into Grace. Du Bois fired a three-round burst. The bullets hit La Calavera’s central mass. The huge two-headed figure stumbled back. Grace landed on her back, hard, on the ECV’s bonnet. Du Bois fired another three-round burst. La Calavera sat down in the truck bed. Grace started to slip off the bonnet. Du Bois dropped his carbine into the footwell onto the other discarded weapons, and grabbed for her. Outstretched fingers got the neck of her leather jacket. Then he screamed as the road caught her, and she was yanked back. Du Bois’s arm was all but pulled out of its socket. He found himself looking down at her. She was looking up. Hate gone. Replaced by fear, and something else. He was aware of movement inside the ECV, then the sound of Beth firing her Model 0 LMG from the turret. The armoured patrol vehicle was dragging Grace along now. Du Bois knew she could survive if he let go, but somehow that felt like a betrayal. She was kicking out with leather-armoured legs, trying to stop herself from going under the rear wheel. Du Bois screamed out again as, at an awkward angle, he pulled her close to him. She grabbed the edge of the doorway, and he helped her into the cab until she was practically sat in his lap.
‘Get your fuckin’ hands off me!’ she screamed, and clambered off him, seething, into the back of the ECV. Du Bois turned back to focus on the vehicles ahead. La Calavera, his flesh being eaten from within, was clambering over the Escalade’s cab and onto its bonnet. His back was blossoming in little plumes of blood which closed a moment later, as Beth put round after useless round into his rotting body from the turret above. He leapt from the Escalade as Alexia drew level with the vehicle. Beth started firing at the pickup truck’s engine block. La Calavera caught the rungs on the ladder on the back of the Cougar. Du Bois had his carbine in his hands again. He leaned out of the ECV, the asphalt shooting past underneath him. In the distance he could see the ocean. It looked wrong, much darker than it should be for the clear blue skies above it. Alexia sideswiped the Escalade, pushing it across four lanes and into the edge of a building. La Calavera had reached the top of the ladder. Du Bois put another nanite-tipped round into his back, aimed, and did the same again. La Calavera sprawled face-first on the roof of the truck, but then managed to pull himself out of view.
It was just a chase now. They had nothing that could go through the Cougar’s armour, and the Cougar’s HMG was out of action. All the weight was on the side of the 6×6 armoured truck, so they couldn’t try forcing it off the road either. Du Bois picked the various weapons out of the footwell, cleaned and sheathed the knives, checked and reloaded the pistols, returning his sister’s Beretta to the holster riding her hip.
There were hotels on either side of them. One hotel had all its windows open, curtains billowing in the wind coming off the Pacific. Another had bloody smears down its whitewashed walls, multiple bungee cords hanging from the roof. The road snaked through a park, people wandering through it in a daze, a number of them looking like they had been the victims of something horrific. The road dipped under Ocean Avenue, where hanged bodies scraped across the roof of their vehicles, swastikas painted in blood on the tunnel walls along with the words ‘surfing is for whites’. Out of the tunnel and into the bright sunlight, then they were on the beachfront running parallel with the ocean.
It seemed quiet, all they could hear were the odd gunshots and a few screams over their engines. Behind them was Santa Monica Pier. The big wheel was burning, but still going round; bodies hung off it in a way that reminded du Bois of a child’s mobile.
The Cougar cut across the car park, its armoured bulk knocking vehicles out of the way. Du Bois had reloaded his carbine with normal rounds, but put a magazine of nanite-tipped .45 calibre rounds into his pistol. Beth had done something similar. Grace was ready with her weapon. Alexia just looked pale and sick.
Surfboards stood up in the sand like gravestones as far as they could see, all along the beach, bodies strapped to them, swastikas carved into their flesh. There was a moderate swell in the water. A lot of surfers were sitting out on their boards looking to the east. Du Bois thought he could hear chanting. The water still didn’t look right, too dark.
The Cougar had stopped dead down by the water. Du Bois could see the strange demon-headed member of the DAYP, the one called Inflictor Doorstep for some odd reason. He had on a wetsuit and he was jumping dow
n from the back of the armoured truck. A number of aggressively blond and tanned surfer types with swastika, SS, and death’s head tattoos were running towards him. One of them had on a spiked World War One German helmet. Du Bois guessed that they were surf Nazis, surfing-regionalism taken to a ridiculous degree. The apocalypse seemed a little literal in Los Angeles. The surf Nazis skidded to a halt when they got a good look at Inflictor as he pulled a surfboard out of the back of the Cougar. He walked to the water, and started paddling out as Alexia brought the ECV to a halt next to the Cougar, just in the water line.
‘Get the fuck off our beach!’ the surf Nazi with the helmet snapped. Du Bois glanced at them as he climbed out of the vehicle. They were both armed but weren’t bringing their weapons up.
‘Alexia!’ du Bois called. His sister climbed out of the ECV and levelled her ARX-170 rifle at them. Du Bois, Grace and Beth – with the Benelli shotgun, rather than her LMG, he noticed – made straight for the Cougar. Inflictor was paddling out to sea.
Inflictor had left the side door to the armoured truck open. The back was filled with all sorts of detritus. La Calavera, still clutching the OICW, lay among the detritus, rotting away. Grace covered as Beth climbed into the rear of the vehicle. A shotgun blast put La Calavera’s most recent victim, his second head, out of her misery. Then Grace drew her pistol, and put two nanite-tipped rounds into La Calavera’s actual head. Du Bois, carbine at the ready, moved to the truck’s cab. The door was unlocked. He yanked it open. It was empty. No Dracimus, no King Jeremy.
‘Is the nuke in the back?’ du Bois demanded, but he knew the answer before Beth told him.
‘Where was the Mustang that left with them?’ Grace asked.
‘Fuck!’ du Bois screamed. He stalked back to the ECV.
‘This was for fucking nothing?’ Alexia sounded broken.
‘Get out of here!’ du Bois ordered the two surf Nazis.
‘This is our beach, motherf—’
Du Bois shot them both. He glared out at Inflictor lying on his board, paddling out into the swell. He needed to eat soon. Replace some mass. He was emaciated, and it felt like his body was about to cave in on itself. Beth had followed him round to his side of the ECV.
‘Are you having fun?’ she asked, looking at the two dead surfers. ‘Is that what we just did all that for?’ Du Bois ignored her. He reached into the ECV and pulled out the Purdey. He worked the bolt mechanism on the custom rifle to eject all the rounds in it, and then took the magazine for the SA58 with the nanite-tipped rounds in it. He pushed five of them out of the magazine and loaded them quickly into the Purdey, as Inflictor got further away. He heard Alexia retch. There was a dune buggy and two quad bikes speeding towards the ECV, leaving a cloud of sand behind them. The vehicles were all decorated with severed heads hanging from chains.
‘Were we just playing war for the sake of it?’ Beth demanded. Du Bois removed the scope from the top of the rifle. Multiple explosions had rendered it so much broken glass. Grace was kneeling down, using the ECV as cover, bringing her carbine up to aim at the incoming vehicles. Du Bois took aim at Inflictor. The rifle was yanked from his grip.
‘What the fuck?’ he demanded, rounding on Beth.
‘He is the last person who might know where King Jeremy and Mr Brown are.’
‘He’s not a person!’ du Bois screamed.
‘Oh right, are we the cleansing fire here to punish the infidel, or are we trying to accomplish something with this … mass murder?’
‘It’s a battle,’ du Bois managed, the anger slowly leaking out of him, his words sounding hollow in his own ears. ‘He won’t speak to you.’
‘What did we do?’ he heard his sister howl.
‘Shut the fuck up please, Alexia,’ Grace said through gritted teeth.
‘We’ve got to try,’ Beth said.
Inflictor Doorstep had gone surfing.
36
A Long Time After the Loss
It was the colour that had driven the xeno-archaeologist mad. Doubtless Dr Josef Ertl had felt trapped in the blood-coloured space, but it was red that had pushed him over the edge and nothing else. There had been just too much of it. It had been inescapable. The ship that the doctor and his crew had used had been quite primitive. They hadn’t been able to tint the fixed transparent parts of the hull. Scab smiled as he thought about this. Red would have been all they could see. They would have bathed in it. They would have felt it outside the ship, pressing against the hull. He could understand that. Red Space had a palpable presence. Many people felt it. He felt it. Ertl’s cannibalism of his fellow crewmembers made sense. The cannibalism of the ship, programming small parts of the smart matter hull to turn into beetles he could hunt and eat, less so. The doctor’s mind had turned in on itself, cycled through fantasy to cope. Scab felt Ertl had taken the coward’s way out. He’d tried to hide from Red Space rather than embrace it. Known Space was the skin, Red Space was the blood underneath.
Dr Ertl had found the artefact many years after he had become lost. He had made marionettes of his fellow crewmembers’ bones; both the ship and the doctor were little more than husks by this point. That was why, other than a few cursory expeditions, nobody had ever truly believed his story. Except the entity that Ertl had allegedly spoken to claimed to have been from the ‘Ubh Blaosc’. That was what had caught Scab’s intelligent search program’s attention. It was slim. Nobody else had ever been able to substantiate Dr Ertl’s claims, though another ship, some five hundred years later, had claimed to have seen four black suns arranged in some kind of regular pattern within Red Space. It was the only corroborating information.
It was thin. Really thin. Ertl’s reverse-calculated coordinates had been vague, even by Red Space standards, and had borne no fruit for the few speculative expeditions that had taken Ertl semi-seriously in the past. This had caused yet another argument among the crew of the Basilisk II, but their choices were to become lost in Red Space, or be hunted down and killed, at best, by the Consortium.
Being lost in Red Space wouldn’t be that bad, though he would probably have to kill some of the others. He wasn’t sure that he would kill the Monk. He feared what she had said about him being a vulnerable child. He was self-aware. He had few delusions about who and what he was, but if he feared what she said then there was probably more truth in her words than he was prepared to admit. He couldn’t kill her until he had investigated what had been said, and either discounted it or come to terms with it. Anything else would be petty.
He wasn’t sure what to make of Ludwig. The Elite had remained silent and still since he had come on board the Basilisk II. The others feared the Monarchist Elite, which made sense. Scab was mostly angry that it was yet another thing that he couldn’t control. That said, it wasn’t doing anything, other than slightly affecting very local gravity.
Vic had to go.
He wasn’t sure what to do with Talia. There was no denying that she was very annoying, but she looked so much like his ghost. He wondered what would happen if he reduced Talia to a more primal state, perhaps if he peeled her? Though he suspected it would lead to shrillness. People seemed to lack self-awareness in the face of a straight-edge razor. It was depressing. If only he could take her physical form and have her possessed by the entity that haunted the bridge drive. It was probably this fantasy that had kept Talia alive for so long.
He was watching her now, his senses neunonically ’faced with the ship, spread through the molecularly-bonded dense smart matter surrounding the glowing blue drive. She lived as a flickering image, so much less real than a hologram, little more than a discharge of energy, but with definite shape and form. She had a simpler, more childlike nature than Talia, Scab could tell. There was something pure about her, not the façade of purity like the Innocent. This was real. Or a story you have told to comfort yourself because all the compromise has weakened you.
The ghost’s image started to distort, as if something had snagged her and pulled, a silent scream. He felt it like
a cold knife made of panic slipped between his ribs. Ludwig, was his first thought, but ’faced information from the ship’s sensors reached him faster than the thought blaming their Elite stowaway. Significant gravitic forces acting on the Basilisk II. Far more gravity than was usual anywhere in Red Space. He had the ship’s smart matter squeeze him through it like live food travelling down a gullet. With a thought he disconnected his life support connections to the ship as it extruded him into the yacht’s lounge/command and control. The other three were already there, staring through the magnified, transparent smart matter hull at visual information that was probably minutes old now. Ludwig was still where he had last seen him. Something about the alien automaton made Scab think of a miniature singularity, and not just because the machine’s Elite-tech was powered by a network of entangled micro black holes.
‘I think we’ve found your black suns,’ Vic said. The ’sect still sounded scared, presumably despite drugs and neunonic control of his physiology. Scab realised that he must have been slipping in recent decades. He should have known, perhaps after New Coventry, that his ’sect partner had become too human to be of use to him. He should have started looking for a new partner then. Something tugged just at the back of his mind, some doubt, watered and fed by the Monk. Perhaps it was sentimentality. Perhaps he did need Vic in some unknown way. It was another thought he didn’t want to have right now.
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