The feeling of power was overwhelming, after his new systems made the pain go away. Now Vic knew what it was like to be one of the Elite. New-found senses made him aware of the city’s scurrying, parasitical life already fleeing. A moment of shock as he saw an Elite killed with what looked like an archaic weapon. He was aware of the other two Elite, but did not fear them. Whether that was from a new sense of power, new conditioning, or both, he wasn’t sure. He was aware of the woman in the raven-headed armour who had thrown the spear. She might not be on their side, but she didn’t seem to be a friend of the Elite, and had already killed one. Only Patron gave him pause.
Then came the orbital bombardment. Talia was kneeling on the ground. He moved to stand over her. Both of them were encased in amber light as they fell into the newly made crater. In the Thunder Squads he had worked with teammates to destroy cities. Now he could do it himself. Now he wanted to do it himself. One of the Elite was a female ’sect: a shrunken hive queen with an arachnid augment. Despite all the changes he had made to himself, despite the fact that he’d been a worker playing at being a warrior, his own deeply held prejudices made him disgusted at this violation of the insect form. The storm of accelerated particles and hard light passed. His ‘weapon’ was still in a shape he was comfortable with, that of a strobe gun. His coherent energy field flickered off and on to let the rotating weapon fire beams of fusion energy, black light mixed with the more discreet, exotic bandwidth lasers phasing in and out of this space, trying to confuse the scorpion Elite’s defences. Beams were refracted off the arachnid, more disappeared into the man-shaped screaming black hole that Patron had become. The beams scythed through twisted towers and spires started to fall. He was aware of vast, ancient, insane, somnambulant minds screaming out in pain through esoteric frequencies.
The scorpion Elite was in the air. Vic’s weapon followed her, leaving paths of destruction through the city as it did so. His awareness told him of discrete carrier beams containing a DNA hack striking him, which further enraged him. A de-coherence beam tried to loosen the molecular bonds in his reformed armour, sneaking through his coherent energy field while it flickered to allow his weapon to fire, but the armour’s matter was too clever for it. It pulled new matter from the ground, nanites transforming it into useful material. Vic was aware of Scab and the Innocent taking to the air after the burning, screaming spear that had killed one of the Consortium Elite.
The arachnid plunged though Vic’s barrage of energy and hit him in the chest, driving him into the earth. His bones were powdered and re-healed almost instantly, the pain momentary but overwhelming. He came to a halt. She was striking at him with her spear through the surrounding rock. Each blow was doing something to the coherent energy field, somehow sucking the energy from it. He could see root-like lines of light in the rock around him, conduits of energy for the stone circle. He thrust his hand through rock and grabbed one of the branches, then he dropped the energy field and grabbed the Elite. He was screaming as the energy coursed through him, his armour fusing with his flesh. His upgraded neunonics, too slow to switch off all his nerve endings, took his mind away somewhere else for a moment. The scorpion had gone. Vic was healed, his armour still smoking. He became aware of the arachnid hive queen’s location. He exploded out of the stone through a tower. Its geometry didn’t make sense, he was somewhere other than he should have been and he hit another building hard. He changed state, but the cold, old, living city tore at him. Screaming, he emerged, fantasies of godlike power somewhat tarnished, but he continued after the scorpion Elite at hypersonic speeds, towards the rising carrion sun, and the squirming parasites feeding on it.
Britha was knocked off her feet by the impact of the eight-limbed, black-armoured creature slamming one of the newcomers, this one with six limbs, deep into the ground. One of the other newcomers had taken off, following the one like Bress. Both of them chasing her spear as it flew towards the castle in the sky that kept on trying to harm them with its storm of light.
The third newcomer, who had the right number of limbs, and who wore armour like the other two, which had obviously been made in Ubh Blaosc, was lying in the centre of the deep crater made by the storm of light. Britha spared her a glance, feeling a strange kinship towards her. Then she looked back to Crom Dhubh.
Britha knew she should be afraid, and even after everything she had seen she was still appalled. She perceived him as a hole in space, crackling with black lightning. She felt him take energy from somewhere else, dark places, and feed it to his remaining black-clad warriors. Britha reached out through the tendrils to stop this, to sour the milk of an already poisoned teat. A whip-like tendril lashed out from within the man-shaped hole in a blur, the crystal cracked, the entities feeding off her screamed, and she echoed their scream. He began pulling down the crystalline branches growing out of her. The tendrils receded into her head, and back through holes to unseen places that it hurt to look towards.
The eight-limbed, black-clad, insectile warrior burst from the earth. Moments later the six-limbed newcomer followed, careening through the odd geometry of the city. The six-limbed creature was taken elsewhere for a moment, vanishing even from the awareness of the crystalline entities.
Crom Dhubh glided through the air towards the last armoured newcomer as she rolled to her feet. Britha reached down, pulling at the new strings of dark energy he was trying to set up to feed the magics to his warriors, and with a thought she rearranged the arm reaching for the girl in as painful and debilitating a way as she could manage. The crystalline parasites surged down through her head, consuming more of her, and she screamed. The girl was in the air, bouncing off useless buildings as she sought to get away. Britha heard Crom Dhubh’s scream in her head, it made the crystal vibrate. Then the Dark Man showed the ban draoi what he really looked like. He unfolded into different places, displayed the impossibility of his form. He wanted her to see all of him in the knowledge that she could not understand his shape and all of its possibilities.
Quicksilver and blood burst from her eyes, ears, and nose. She almost shut down, the parasites pushing through her head as they tried to translate what he, it, was to a human mind. More of the crystal tendrils growing from her were torn away. The parasites were frightened now. He reached for her with limbs and appendages unseen and impossible, and rearranged her through her armour. Her shield of light did not even activate, as it did not seem to be aware of the existence of parts of Crom Dhubh’s form. No time to cry out. He left her alive so she could appreciate pain as he reached for her with his other arm. She hadn’t even been aware of him moving in front of her, as he healed the damage she had done to him. Her armour carried her into one of the buildings, and ran for a shadowed corner that seemed to stretch away forever.
Britha came to on a balcony high above the crater. She had no idea how she had got there. She knew only that there were things in the dark places between the city’s strange geometry. She knew now that she could not kill Crom Dhubh. The Dark Man was a god. His human form was just a disguise. She was not sure that even the Spear of Lug could kill him. The crystalline entities knew her mind and whimpered. Already wounded, some of them dead, they curled away from the direction of Crom Dhubh’s presence. Crystalline branches grew through what was left of the meat of her brain. She was little more than a wilful, living memory held in crystal now, forcing the parasites to do her bidding.
It was sword and shield. The Innocent broadcast his most sophisticated hacks at the spear. They were L-tech-derived programs and viruses that had been further developed by Pythia. Scab then tried to block the electronic warfare, upgrading his own bag of tricks on the fly with newly uploaded L-tech software. So far Scab and the spear’s own not-inconsiderable defences were winning out. Occasionally either the Innocent or Scab would risk an attack, but energy was at a premium for both of them.
The city was far below them now. It was a huge, black, fragmented scar in a vast rift valley. It spread out like a parasitical starfish, growing onto
the two continent-sized plateaus to the east and west.
They left the atmosphere. The small, orbital habitat looked like a petrified biomechanical egg to Scab. He understood the lines of energy within. It was getting ready to rain down more hard light, though it was sluggish, and newly awakened. His senses made him aware of a diminishing reservoir of qubits within. Presumably it was communicating via quantum entanglement with other orbital weapon platforms that remained in orbit. Soon the network would concentrate fire on Patron’s enemies.
The spear reached the habitat, burst into it, and began its destruction. The Innocent looked almost graceful as it reached the exterior of the orbital and started to fling pieces of it at Scab using a mixture of brute strength and manipulated gravity. They were easy to avoid. It felt like a childish tantrum in some ways.
‘Why do you hate me?’ the Innocent asked in a reasonably innocuous transmission. Scab didn’t have an immediate answer. He wasn’t sure it mattered here, now, but he wanted his clone dead anyway.
‘Self loathing,’ he transmitted back. It wasn’t entirely a lie.
‘I’m sorry,’ the Innocent said. ‘I can’t wake up.’
Below them the bits of the habitat burned as they hit the fragile atmosphere. The spear passed him, veering a little as though it wanted to attack, but then continuing its flight back towards the city.
Scab’s energy feed was diminishing rapidly. The Innocent was using the wreckage of the ancient S-tech satellite to try and hide from him. The planetary horizon was lit up as other awakening habitats started to fire down on the city. He had to stop them.
Why? he asked himself. Did he want to see Patron fail, destroyed? Did he want to kill the closest thing to God Known Space had ever seen, just to say he had? Did he care?
He audited his neunonic memory to see what the Lloigor’s violation of his technological and biological privacy had left him. His memory capacity was still there. The Monk’s, Beth’s, construct was still there, a worrying symptom of sentimentality. The snippet he had taken of the Yig virus from the Basilisk II’s systems had to be gone. It had been a tiny piece. It had been imprisoned with the best Pythian software, but he had known it would slither through in the end. Why had he done it? He knew that eventually it would make him something else. It wasn’t even suicide. In taking the sample he had given himself up to eventual sequestration, eventual slavery.
He thought back to his mother on Cyst, the Church’s manipulations, Patron’s manipulations. Were you ever anything other than a slave, a puppet? Perhaps the honesty of the Naga’s wish to consume remained the only pure thing left.
Surely Lug would have destroyed the sample of the Yig virus? Suffer not a serpent to live. But it was still there in his upgraded neunonics. It was represented as a serpent beast, in a tower, on an island. The beast was swathed in chains of cold iron. It looked like a secure L-tech program had reinforced Scab’s own Pythian prison. Scab knew that the virus couldn’t be controlled or defeated by anything they had available, but he wondered if it could be lied to, spoofed.
Scab shifted physical state as he phased through the mostly intact top of the S-tech satellite. He felt its barely-awake living defences tear at him, try to strip away his own defences, diminish him. It was like the Marduk implant all over again, he saw with a god’s eyes. He was an embodiment of godsware. Who would give something like me this sort of power? His voice was incredulous in his own head.
The smooth organic interior flashed past him, and he was out the other side of the habitat. The Innocent was standing on the skin of the habitat’s hull, both of them at right angles to the dead planet far below. The Innocent held his sword. Scab saw his own face encased in the black liquid glass. For once he didn’t see a monster. He shook his head. It didn’t matter. He used his own software to create a virus that told as convincing a lie as he was capable of, and sent that and the Yig virus to half the satellites in the defence network. He told the Yig virus that the remaining satellites were Lloigor in design. Then he sent transmissions to the uninfected satellites, telling them that the rest of their network was infected.
‘I don’t want to fight,’ the Innocent said, high above the dead planet. Scab just shook his head. He had access to precious little energy. He was going to have to do this the old-fashioned way, the nasty way. Once that thought would have given him pleasure. He ran at the Innocent and tackled him. He warped gravity, tilting the wreckage of the habitat, and they plummeted back towards the city. He was going to kill this clone imposter, and then Patron. There was just a nagging moment of doubt in the back of his mind. They were wreathed in fire as they hit the atmosphere. Above them the red clouds were lit up in various spectrums as the satellites started to fire at each other.
The city kept on wrong-footing him. Vic’s godsware awareness wasn’t all that it was cracked up to be. The strange geometry had him colliding with buildings, sending rubble tumbling through the levels below, sending the strange creatures that inhabited this place scurrying, or just crushing them. He disappeared into what he had thought was an optical illusion, which should have been impossible at his level of awareness. He travelled through a screaming total darkness, another thing that should have been impossible, full of shapes and noises. It had almost been a relief to come back out in the city.
The scorpion Elite was above and behind him. She was in the best possible position for a dogfight. The further they got away from the stones, the more crumbling and ruined the city was. At hypersonic speeds the constant thunder of their passing sounded off, oddly muted amid the strange architecture. Buildings tumbled in their wake as accelerated particles and de-coherence beams cut through once-living basalt, and broke molecular bonds. Vic rolled and retaliated with fusion beams and exotic lasers. The arachnid banked and the destructive beams scythed through the tops of towers. They passed over vast buttresses, their destructive forces creating huge rents in them, revealing layer after layer of skeletons fused with the sculpted rock.
Behind them, Vic was aware of the fury of another orbital bombardment, much more destructive than the first. He heard, felt, alien screaming on strange bandwidths. There could be little left of the centre of the city now.
The city left behind, they were over the eastern continent-sized plateau. Quadruped herd creatures with a passing resemblance to humans fled in their wake, though Vic saw little else in the way of life on the dead planet as they sped over a vast mountain range, the spine of the plateau.
There were craters and smaller valleys that Vic suspected might once have been lakes, or seas. Neither of them could risk using their own matter for ordnance while they were separated from the earth in flight, and Vic found himself using his weapon sparingly, conserving energy. The arachnid was doing likewise, though every barrage gouged blackened trenches in the dead world’s surface, sending tonnes of dirt and debris flying into the sky. Energy was at a premium on this strange world. In order to deal with the scorpion Elite, Vic knew he was going to have to close with her.
Neither of them were firing now. The arachnid was transmitting various electronic warfare attacks, but Vic’s L-tech defences were more than a match for them. They were over another huge rift valley between the two major continental plateaus. Vic was flying with his back to the ground, looking up at the scorpion Elite as he propelled himself with the powerful AG field. There was a moment of realisation. As deeply ingrained as his hatred of arachnid augments was, he had no idea what had led the Elite to transfigure herself in this way, just as the warrior-caste ’sects that hated him had no idea what had made Vic the way he was. Though, Vic reflected, that had mostly been the desire to embrace behaviour deemed deviant by his staid society. He knew that it was thoughts like this, and the hesitation they caused, that led to inevitable death, but for all his apparent power, nothing was happening in this titanic battle. It was kind of pointless. Then he remembered Talia. He had got carried away with his new-found power. He had to kill the abomination to protect her.
The red sky lit up
in a coronal display, as accelerated particles played across the magnetosphere accompanied by flashes of X-rays and deep UV. The orbital weapons platforms were duelling with each other. The atmosphere flared as wreckage started to fall to earth in various parts of the sky. Vic’s weapon turned to a double-ended spear – he’d seen his namesake use one in an immersion – and he closed with the scorpion Elite in the sky. She exuded blades from the black, liquid glass armour, and they collided violently.
Britha’s body hadn’t so much healed itself as rebuilt itself. As the sky lit up again she stepped back into an odd angle where the balcony met the tower and found herself in pitch, living darkness. There were things there, tearing at her. She cried silent screams as she tumbled out of another shadowed corner. The building, and much of the city surrounding the stones, simply ceased to exist in another rain of the hard light. She heard the vast minds in the city, malevolent siblings of the Muileartach, scream in their half-asleep state. She knew that Crom Dhubh was searching for her, reaching out for her. His senses and his strange, unfolding, fragmented form were one and the same now. The only place she could hide from him was in the screaming darkness, and she could not bring herself to go back there.
There was a black lake. Her new-found senses had made her aware of it. There was something in that lake, something that the crystal parasites curled away from, whimpering, something that even the minds of the city’s sleeping gods seemed to fear as they whispered to her that it could kill Crom Dhubh if she would but call to it. She closed her eyes, and in the single moment before she sang the mindsong to the thing in the lake, she wondered how all had come to this madness. The thing’s answering mindsong was like a disease among the crystal, turning it to blackened dust. She collapsed, her body spasming and cramping, her guts feeling like they were crammed full of rusty and broken blades. The pain somehow still less damaging than the fear that the thing in the lake was aware of her existence.
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