The Beauty of Destruction

by Gavin G. Smith

  Beth had the N6 carbine up. She was kneeling beside the corner of the cramped passage she had shoved them into. Alexia was struggling to her feet, trying to pull her brother’s difficult, shifting form further down the passage. Beth risked glancing out into the main corridor. Almost immediately she was taking fire. The Pennangalan was marching towards them, firing short bursts from her carbine. Beth took one in the shoulder. The armour-piercing round, slowed by her armour, lodged in her hardening flesh. The force knocked her back. The wound started to heal almost immediately. In the momentary glance she had seen Yaroslav lying face-first on the floor of the corridor, his back a bloody, blackened, smoking mess. It had been a 40mm fragmentation grenade. It must have exploded behind Yaroslav and thrown him forwards. Beth leaned round the corner and fired the N6’s grenade launcher directly at the Pennangalan. The silver-masked woman threw herself into another branching passage further ahead. Beth was up, holding the N6 one-handed as she marched towards the corridor intersection. The fragmentation grenade exploded in the distance; shockwaves buffeted her, shrapnel embedded itself in her hardening clothing and opened up the skin on her flesh, which, again, healed almost immediately. Another three-round burst caught her in the chest as the Pennangalan appeared around the corner, crouched down low. Beth fired the N6 rapidly and clumsily with one hand, bullets sparking off the metal as she opened the grenade launcher, ejecting the case of the previous grenade, loaded it with a high-explosive, armour-piercing grenade, and clicked the launcher shut. The Pennangalan was firing bursts so rapid they were almost full automatic. Beth felt round after round hit her. Some were stopped by her armour, her hardening flesh, some grazed off her armoured skull, tore into her jaw. Others beat her armour and tore hot channels through her body. Each one was like getting hit by a hammer. The worst beating you could ever receive in a high velocity instant. She staggered, almost went down, but forced herself forwards, still firing. More than a few of her rounds hit home, staggering the silver-masked killer. Both of them ran out of ammunition. The Pennangalan disappeared from the corner, back into the other passage. Beth threw herself into the air past the intersection. The Pennangalan was backing away, a Sig P220 pistol in each hand, firing the moment she saw Beth, hitting the Yorkshirewoman as she fell through the air. Beth fired the grenade launcher. The HEAP grenade caught the Pennangalan in the stomach, she flew backwards into the air, and the grenade exploded. The concussion wave hit Beth, bounced her off some of the metal-coated organic machinery, and she hit the ground, a wounded, bleeding mess. She let out a primal scream of pain before forcing herself to her feet. She let the N6 hang from its sling and drew the OHWS, still loaded with nanite-tipped rounds. She limped slowly down the corridor towards the Pennangalan. The silver-masked killer looked like she had been hollowed out. Beth could see her spine, but somehow the other woman was still moving. Still trying to reload one of her Sig pistols with her own magazine of nanite-tipped rounds. Beth raised her pistol and put two rounds into what remained of the Pennangalan’s chest. The nanites started to eat away at flesh. It looked like she was being slowly dissolved. Beth continued to limp towards her, covering her with the pistol. She had a perverse need to see the face under the silver mask.

  Alexia struggled to drag her brother along the corridor away from the sounds of gunfire. She looked up as she sensed movement. Yaroslav was standing there. There was smoke coming from his back, but he looked more together. He was holding his SMG as though it was an actual weapon now.

  ‘Piotr, help me!’ she pleaded. He looked down at du Bois’s protean form, seemed to come to a decision, and walked towards her, sweeping his Vector to one side, letting it hang down on its sling. Too late Alexia realised there was something wrong, too late she recognised the look in his eyes. She let go of du Bois, and grabbed for her rifle, but Piotr had already reached for it and taken hold of it himself. She heard an explosion from further down the corridor, the shockwave buffeting them as a huge, calloused fist hit her hard in the face, slamming her back into the steel-covered organic machinery.

  Under the mask the Pennangalan looked like her sister, but she was younger, her face softer, more innocent, except for the vertical slits of her reptilian eyes. Beth really wanted to just sit down and bleed. She was so badly damaged, had so many injuries, that she was amazed she could still move, let alone function. The alien nanotech in her body was killing the pain signals to her brain, auto-cannibalising her flesh to synthesise endorphins to help kill the pain. There was an odd vinegary smell coming from the body. Through the lessening pain she remembered that she was supposed to double tap. She raised the pistol to shoot the body twice in the head. Something wasn’t right. The acrid vinegar smell was nearly overwhelming. The physiology of the corpse, even allowing for the grenade that had gone off inside it, didn’t seem right. Something slithered inside the body. Beth’s eyes widened, her finger tightening on the pistol’s trigger. An intestine-like tendril whipped out through the dissolving chest cavity and around her wrist. Beth screamed as acid burned her skin. She lost her grip on the pistol and it tumbled to the floor. Another tendril wrapped around her neck, then another around her face, acid burning her screaming mouth. Hissing, a long serpent tongue flickered past rows of serpent teeth as the head separated itself from the body, dragging healing organs that emitted a phosphorescent glow, like fireflies, behind it. The head leapt on intestinal tendrils towards Beth’s face.

  Alexia had been hit before, but it had been a while since she had been hit that hard. She almost blacked out. A feeling of nausea was suppressed by her augmented biology. She shook off the effects of the blow as she felt rough fingers around her throat, choking her. Then she was hit again.

  ‘Got to get it back, get it back,’ Yaroslav was muttering in Russian over and over again.

  ‘Piotr,’ she managed. He hit her again. The third time he hit her she did black out.

  She came to on the ground as Yaroslav was replacing the magazine in his pistol. A cry of pain echoed through the metal corridors.

  ‘Beth,’ she tried to call out weakly, climbing unsteadily onto all fours. Yaroslav kicked her in the stomach. The force of the kick sent her flying into the machinery. Hands around her neck again, picking her up onto her feet, and slamming her into the metal. ‘What are you doing, Piotr?’ she said, trying to recover her breath. He just hit her again.

  ‘I am not the victim. I’m not the fucking victim!’ He let go of her neck and she felt him undoing her jeans.

  ‘No, Piotr! No!’ He jammed the barrel of his pistol into her face.

  ‘Shut up!’ he screamed. Then he yanked her jeans and panties down.

  It was like being strangled at the same time as someone tried to burn your head off. She had managed to get her left hand in between the Pennangalan’s head and her own. Needle-like serpent teeth sank into her flesh, emptying their venom into her body. She could feel herself weakening, her neuralware making her aware of just how fucked she was. The thing was making a keening, hissing noise, despite having a mouthful of her flesh. The Pennangalan’s jaw dislocated, her mouth distending, trying to swallow Beth’s hand. In a blind panic, Beth managed to tear her smoking right hand free of the acidic, intestinal tendril that had wrapped itself around her arm. Her leather jacket was melting away where the acid was dripping onto it. She reached into a hole in the nanite-reinforced leather. The Balisong blade clicked open, and she rammed it again and again into the screaming thing’s separated head. She dropped the blade and pushed against the burning tendril, bringing her foot up and levering it in between herself and the separated head and organs. She pushed with her foot with all her might. The tendrils left smoking welts on her flesh. She rammed the head against the organic machinery on the other side of the narrow corridor, leant forwards, and dragged the shotgun from its back scabbard. Beth jammed the weapon through the flailing tendrils, against the thing’s head and pulled the trigger, and again, and again, and again. Shells ejected from the shotgun as the head came apart in a spray of buckshot.
Beth screamed as she blew half of her own foot off. The tendrils stopped whipping around. Beth crawled away from it and grabbed for her dropped pistol. She rolled over and fired three rounds into the already healing head. It stopped healing. The nanite loads started to eat away at the Pennangalan. Beth lay down, pain overwhelming what her systems could cope with. She wanted to sob. Then she heard an inhuman scream.

  Yaroslav was staring at her genitalia, shaking his head.

  ‘I’m not gay,’ he said.

  ‘Okay, okay.’ Alexia tried to reason with him. ‘You’re not gay, so why don’t we just …’ Both of the long knives that her brother had brought back from Japan were in a horizontal double sheath on her webbing. She drew them quickly while he was distracted. The first blade opened up Yaroslav’s arm, the one holding the gun, down to the bone. He dropped the weapon. The second she rammed into his groin with as much force as she could muster. She felt resistance from his armoured clothes, from his hardening skin, but they were no match for the five-hundred-year-old folded steel. She buried the blade in his crotch. His scream sounded inhuman. Somehow he still had the presence of mind to backhand her hard enough to knock her off her feet. She landed next to her brother’s protean form. His clothes and webbing acting as an ineffectual bag for his bubbling flesh, she grabbed his pistol from its holster, and rolled back to face Yaroslav. The Russian was just looking down at the hilt of the blade protruding from his groin. The targeting symbols in her vision told her where to aim. She fired again, and again, and again until the slide locked back on the pistol, the magazine empty. Yaroslav stood there for a few more moments, staring at her, uncomprehending, then he collapsed to the ground. The nanite-tipped bullets were already starting to break his body down. Alexia dragged her jeans up and curled up against the metal-covered machinery.

  ‘You fucking bastard!’ she screamed at the corpse. She had made herself different. It had been a choice. It had been done on her terms. It wasn’t his place to make her feel like a freak. She had liked him, he had looked muscle-bound, big and dumb, she went for that sort of thing sometimes, though she knew he couldn’t have been unintelligent working for the Circle. She had wanted to look after him. He had seemed so frightened, and then this. She burst into tears.

  Beth appeared at the end of the narrow corridor. She was bleeding, burned, leaning against the machinery to stay upright. Her pistol was held in both hands. Alexia looked up at the other woman through her tears. Beth just nodded, and then slid down the metal covering to sit on the floor. Alexia looked at her brother’s constantly transforming body as it struggled to cope with powerful biotechnology from a previously female line.

  ‘Transitions are always difficult,’ Alexia said quietly.

  They were watching the mutated submersible surface in the moon pool.

  ‘You’re not going to put the DNA into us, are you?’ Siska asked.

  ‘No,’ Mr Brown said. She tried not to flinch at the sound of his beautiful voice. ‘The Naga-tech would reject it and probably kill you. The seed ships can leave the atmosphere. We have time to grow a clone to sufficient maturity. It amused me not to tell Malcolm the truth. I wanted to see what he would do.’

  ‘And the boy?’ Siska asked.

  ‘We will suggest the same thing to Mr Rush. The ship’s systems themselves will guide him in the cloning process. Unless he kills himself I expect great things of him. He has the potential to make kingdoms of madness, sublime entertainment.’

  ‘And you knew that Yaroslav was about to go thatch?’

  ‘Long overdue.’

  ‘But why did you send my sister?’ Siska asked. A terrified-looking King Jeremy was climbing out of the submersible. She did flinch as Mr Brown reached out to stroke her head.

  ‘Because you wouldn’t have killed them. Malcolm is out of the picture. It’s left to fate now, though I rather doubt that Alexia and Miss Luckwicke are a match for your sister. Besides she was so servile, so slavish in her obedience. It becomes boring.’ Siska tried desperately not to show any reaction, though her breathing sounded ragged to her own ears.

  ‘I can’t go out there again,’ King Jeremy said from the door. He was weeping. Siska suspected the only reason he had been able to tolerate as much exposure as he had was because of the S- and L-tech augments the ridiculously dressed boy had managed to get hold of somehow. Mr Brown was striding across the room towards King Jeremy, a hand outstretched. The boy’s expression was one of abject terror. He held up the dead man’s switch. Mr Brown reached for it. Siska turned away as the air between Mr Brown and King Jeremy’s hand became nauseating and painful to look at. Silas yelped and ran whimpering for a corner. There were multiple wet cracking noises. King Jeremy howled in agony. Siska looked back. Bones stuck out of the flesh of his arm in multiple places. His hand and the dead man’s switch had fused. Mr Brown stroked the boy’s face with his two long-fingered, obsidian-skinned hands.

  ‘Shhh!’ Mr Brown said gently. ‘Don’t you scream, don’t you ever scream. You know nothing about pain and never will.’ King Jeremy managed to make do with just whimpering. ‘I find you repellent, Mr Rush, in so many ways. You are an abject lesson in what happens when the weak and the frightened gain power. I should extinguish you, but I suspect you will serve a purpose. I think that you will make things worse.’ Silas padded up to King Jeremy, and nuzzled against him.

  ‘P … p … please …’ King Jeremy managed.

  ‘Please what?’

  ‘I don’t want to be on my own …’

  ‘We all have to live with the consequences of our actions.’

  Du Bois wasn’t sure how he got there. Presumably his sister and Beth had carried him to one of the couches in what was supposed to be the seed ship’s cockpit, but which was, in fact, little more than a place for humans to try and monitor the organism. The ship had known what to do. It had wrapped in him in a cocoon of metallic, intelligent matter. It had injected him with more S-tech in a bid to control the biological flux his body was held in. It had helped his mind dissociate from his body, and instead associate with the now rudimentary intelligence of the biomechanical craft.

  They were rising through the Pacific. Something about the ocean made him think of amniotic fluid. He shared awareness with the ship. The bodies of the Pennangalan and Yaroslav were significantly less disturbing than what he saw through the lenses on the exterior of the seed ship. Huge, twisting empty spires, reaching for and breaching the surface of the ocean, screaming human faces as a skin disease on the living basalt. Vast charnel buttresses, each one a contradictory living necropolis, crawling across the ocean floor. Twisted simulacra of existing cities growing, fruiting, and bursting; feedback from the inflicted insanity as alien minds failed to understand, or even fully acknowledge, the fading human presence on their planet. From the matter of the city vast, screaming effigies grew and, like the cities, fruited and burst into infectious spores: a piscine Christ, a piscine Buddha, a piscine Krishna, more that were less familiar to du Bois’s already overwhelmed mind.

  The ship rose from the clinging ocean, between the towers of the sunken city, and into a dawn of strange light. The ring of bright, flickering blue fire was a terminator. Before it was blue sky, behind it all was red and gaseous. The Seeders were taking their world somewhere else. The sun was turning black, being eaten by what looked like vast, squirming bacteria. The seed lurched as du Bois’s battered mind was overwhelmed by religious terror. After all, the God he claimed as his own was a solar deity.

  He took the seed ship, with its cargo of human clones, and the minds he carried in his own head, away from the diseased and lost planet.

  Lodup was in total darkness now, but it wasn’t frightening. He felt safe for the first time in a long while. There was light, like a spotlight on an empty stage. Sal was standing next to him. She turned to look at him with her black eyes.

  ‘Thank you,’ she told him. ‘We wished to spread.’ Then she disappeared with the light.

  42

  The City
/>   Ludwig was home. Except that wasn’t his name. His name had been Ibic ÓLug, a raven, a weapon, one of many, created to hate and kill his enemy. They had failed and his home had fallen. The Ubh Blaosc was now the home of serpents. Oz had broken the false programming that the Monarchists had given him when he had become an Elite. He was free, but not for long. He felt the pain of the Yig virus he had contracted from Oz eating away at him, at what he was, at what he had tried so hard to remember. He no longer had a home, but he could still hear his grand-creator’s mindsong.

  One of the uplifts was dead. He did not think he liked any of them, but then he was a weapon, it was not his purpose to like. Hovering just outside the huge head of the sun god, Ibic knew that it was only a matter of time before even he would be overwhelmed. The Naga did not fight like the other uplifts. They swarmed until their enemy was overcome. There was no false concern for the lives of their warriors – only victory, consumption mattered. They bathed him in their plasma fire. Any Elite would struggle in the heart of a sun. Still their ships fell like rain, sundered, diseased, controlled so they turned on one another. Phased bullets sought crucial system organs.

  Grandfather Lug told the raven his plan. The remaining uplifts staggered as the sun god had spikes, filled with the seeds of Lloigor technology, grow through the serpent’s extruded crust of resin and inject their bounty into Scab, Vic and Talia’s otherwise mundane armour. It would be the sun god’s final gift. Through the mindsong Ibic saw the three remaining uplifts about to fall. The Forge, the dying red sun, started to flicker, creating arcs of weak coronal ejection. He saw and felt the particle spray flow around him, a vast fountain of sparks in inhuman vision.