A Quantum Mythology

by Gavin G. Smith

  ‘Surely the offer we have made is more than sufficient,’ said one of the representatives from the Monarchist Regent’s Pleasure system, the dummy in his mouth disappearing as Scab neunonically allowed him to speak. ‘Overlord of an entire planet. Total control of a billion-strong sentient biomass.’ The man was grotesquely fat. Scab had allowed him to retain his make-up and wig. Vic was staring at the fat man. He was still behaving with a kind of pompous arrogance; they all were, despite their humiliation. Vic assumed they must have extensive conditioning which allowed them to act like pricks regardless of the circumstances. It was fascinating, Vic thought, from an anthropological perspective.

  ‘A seat on the board is a much more valuable commodity,’ Goldfish Bowl Head said, then his dummy appeared again.

  ‘Your own subsidiary would provide effective control over a number of planets and influence over many more. Not to mention the resources you would have at your disposal …’ This from a feline exec, the representative of Karnak Industries, one of the most powerful companies in the Consortium. Whatever sex the exec had started off as, she was now very feminine. Vic had to admit they’d done their research well. She was just Scab’s type, though the nappy and bonnet spoiled the allure somewhat. At least, the ’sect hoped it did.

  ‘But still not nearly as prestigious as a seat on the board,’ Goldfish Bowl Head said in exasperation.

  The feline was unable to prevent a slight hiss escaping her lips. ‘You and I both know that’s a hollow offer. There’s no way the board would allow free rein to someone of Mr Woodbine’s persuasion—’

  ‘And what persuasion would that be?’ Scab asked.

  The feline turned and held his dead stare. She was good, Vic thought.

  ‘That of a prolific murderer.’

  Scab nodded. Vic was impressed. Either the feline or those who had sent her had done their research well. Scab respected that sort of honesty.

  ‘Would you reverse my psychosurgery? Provide me with a fleet? Legion? Ground forces?’

  Suddenly nobody would look at him, not even the feline.

  ‘I don’t think you understand why you’re here,’ Scab told them. ‘This is an auction. This isn’t about you having to find increasingly more extravagant ways to try and control me. It won’t work. You must see that by now.’

  Vic couldn’t be sure, but he was starting to think that Scab was amused despite himself.

  ‘Did I mention that the world would come with the title of emperor?’ the fat, wig-wearing blue-blood asked.

  Scab shook his head and glanced over at Vic with an expression of bemusement.

  ‘How many people get to see themselves auctioned?’ Talia wondered.

  ‘Most slaves, I would imagine,’ Vic suggested

  The attendees had started arguing among themselves again. This had been going on for some hours now.

  ‘This is a farce,’ Talia said. ‘He’s not going to get what he wants because he’s a psycho, and nobody wants to give a psycho power.’

  Scab turned to look at the nat pre-Loss human woman. Talia smiled at him with venomous mock-sweetness.

  ‘That’s really not true,’ Vic said. ‘It doesn’t matter if he’s a psycho. They just want to give away the smallest amount of their power they can to get what they want. But you’re right, they don’t want to hand him that much power.’

  ‘Yeah, but I mean, why bother with it? Why would any of them live up to their offers?’

  Because, Vic thought, they’ve all paid a lot of debit just to be here. Part of the expense had resulted from Pythia agreeing to host the auction within the planet’s atmosphere. The immersion had been created within the infoscape of the nano-civilisation’s hive mind, and as a result was probably the single most secure immersion in the history of the uplifted races. What remained of the vast sums paid for admission had all gone into secure, occulted Pythian black accounts. Scab was now one of very few people in Known Space who was in credit.

  Despite Pythia’s security assurances, and assurances that Scab would deliver Talia upon the successful conclusion of the auction, they had still come in force. Consortium battle fleets, capital ships, entire Monarchist fiefdom navies. The visiting dignitaries, their entourages and their heavily armed security forces had hired out entire habitats. Pythia’s orbital defences and their – now extensively augmented – fleet of military contractors watched the visiting ships nervously.

  Raised voices were silenced as dummies appeared in the mouths of all the attendees again. Many of them looked less than happy about this, though Vic had noticed that a number of them were really taking advantage of having a dummy in their mouth and seemed to be enjoying it. The odd calm that spread over the nursery immersion felt very fragile.

  ‘I don’t think they really know you,’ Vic said in an attempt to console his ‘partner’. Scab just shook his head. He made the dummy disappear from one of the attendees’ mouths. So far this attendee had said nothing.

  ‘And what does the Church have to offer?’ Scab asked.

  The Monk tried to suppress a strong urge to kill. Benedict/Scab managed to get his laughter under control and looked around the Lazerene’s bridge. No longer able to neunonically interface with the ship, he had to make do with the parts of the smart-matter superstructure that had turned into screens showing feeds from the damage-control parties, the med bay, and the ongoing struggle to regain control of the automated weapon systems, weaponised nano-swarms, security satellites and hacked automatons.

  ‘Was it worth it?’

  ‘Bye.’ The Monk started drawing her knife.

  ‘Send a sacrifice,’ the Scab possession told her. ‘This isn’t real.’

  Nobody had the ability to wear a nappy and sit on a rocking horse with a dummy in their mouth and manage to look dignified. The elderly lizard, probably a cardinal, Vic guessed, came the closest.

  ‘I think,’ the lizard started, ‘that the best way to win the game is not to play it.’

  Scab said nothing, just looked at him, his expression unreadable.

  ‘Well, how fucking profound,’ Vic muttered.

  ‘No threat?’ Scab asked.

  ‘I would reason with you if I could, bargain with you, threaten you, but you are insane, Mr Woodbine. What difference would it make?’ the Church representative said. Talia laughed. The old lizard looked at her. She shrank away slightly, still not used to non-humans. Vic’s facial-recognition software was pretty sure he saw sympathy on the lizard’s face. He wondered where the Monk was. She must have been cloned by now. ‘I don’t suppose we could have the backups for the crew of the St. Brendan’s Fire, could we?’

  ‘You don’t want the ship?’ Scab asked. The elderly lizard shrugged. ‘Offer me something.’

  ‘There are already more than enough people here who would pander to you, and you are not a greedy man. This is a farce.’

  Vic thought he saw the ghost of a smile on Scab’s face. The ’sect saw the other attendees struggling to speak through their dummies.

  ‘So nothing, no offers, no threats for me?’

  ‘Not for you,’ the lizard said. He turned to the other attendees. ‘If this auction is successful, there will be one winner and many losers. As well as a placing a full embargo on bridge- and Seeder-derived tech on the winner, we will offer technical, spiritual and military aid to the losers in ensuring the utter destruction of the winner.’ He turned back to Scab. ‘You may put the dummy back in now.’

  Vic was pretty sure a number of the attendees were going to give themselves embolisms back in their bodies if the dummies weren’t removed soon. Scab removed all the dummies simultaneously and there was chaos in the nursery as everyone started screaming and shouting, except for the elderly lizard, who began rocking backwards and forwards on his hobby horse.

  Threats and counterthreats were bandied around. The offerings made to Scab became increasingl
y ridiculous. Finally Scab held up his hands for quiet, though Vic noted that he hadn’t replaced their dummies.

  ‘None of you is prepared to meet my price. I’m afraid we’re wasting time here.’ Then the screaming really began. Shrieking mouths appeared, pressing through the walls of the nursery. The noise was agonising, triggering various immersion overrides in Vic’s and Scab’s neunonics. Talia was simply lying on the floor, blood pouring from her eyes, ears, nose and mouth even though this was only her immersion form.

  Vic couldn’t believe it. Someone was actually attempting a data raid on Pythia. The nursery ceased to exist as if it had been cut into ribbons. They found themselves in a blue sky, fast-moving clouds shooting by them. The attendees started to disappear. The feline executive began to scream and then fell, disintegrating as she did so. Vic knew that some kind of Pythian killer program had traced her immersion form back to her neunonics and killed her meat. That meant Karnak was responsible.

  Then the sky disappeared.

  ‘Why?’ Vic asked, opening his eyes. He was lying on the couch that had been looking after his body whilst he was immersed. ‘They must have known it wasn’t going to work.’

  Scab opened his mouth to reply.

  ‘The scorpion and the fox,’ Talia said, taking off the trodes she’d used to immerse. They had to use the assembler to manufacture them because she lacked neunonics. ‘They can’t help themselves.’ She was wiping the blood from her nose on the back of her wrist and examining it. Vic noticed that Scab was looking at her. There was something guarded in his expression.

  ‘Karnak are primarily a software house, and a good one, but they’re feline owned and operated. They could never understand software like a machine intelligence can,’ Scab said quietly.

  ‘Seeders’ sake,’ Vic muttered. The smart matter of the hull went split-screen at a neunonic command from Scab, showing feed from different parts of Pythian orbital space.

  ‘Are we safe?’ Talia asked.

  ‘They’ll be looking for us,’ Scab told her. ‘Pythia guaranteed they would maintain our privacy as long as they could.’

  ‘A lot of resources out there,’ Vic observed. They had leaked their presence in Pythian space to various intelligence agencies, which had also proved quite lucrative, otherwise nobody would have come to the auction.

  ‘That’s the Bubastis,’ Scab said and increased the view of a truly massive ship, its manoeuvring engines burning whilst it was still attached to an orbital habitat only slightly larger than it was. ‘It’s Karnak’s headquarters.’

  The enormous armoured behemoth was actually dragging the habitat out of its orbit, and every weapon on the habitat was pouring fire into the Bubastis. Reactive armour exploded outwards, lessening the impact of kinetic harpoons and AG-driven submunitions. The side of the massive craft looked as if it was bubbling as the carbon reservoirs struggled to regrow the ship’s armour. The orbital space around the capital ship was filled with light as every Pythian defence platform capable of doing so fired on the ship. The Bubastis became a ghostly silhouette in the bright light of the craft’s energy-dissipation grid as it tried to bleed off the torrent of fire.

  The Bubastis’s own batteries fired. AG smart munitions were launched, and small ships and defence platforms caught in the lines of energy exploded. One side of the orbital habitat was shrouded in light and destruction as it fell away from the capital ship. Explosions existed momentarily before being snuffed in the vacuum. The habitat, a luxury hotel by the looks of it, started falling slowly, almost gracefully, towards the cold, grey planet, towards dark thunderclouds of a civilisation-sized, angry nano-swarm.

  The manoeuvring engines on the Pythian military contractors’ ships burned as they made for an orbit that would provide them with favourable firing positions. Fingers of light reached from the Bubastis to blister and burst their ships as AG smart munitions burst into more submunitions; counter-submunitions blossomed to meet them in almost pointless explosive displays.

  Swarms of smaller craft flew out of the Bubastis, many of them exploding as they left the dubious safety of their mother ship, but more made it out than were destroyed. The smaller craft attacked defence platforms and got into dogfights with military contractors.

  At the same time, the other auction attendees were leaving. Any resistance on the part of the Pythian authorities to their departure was being met with violence.

  More than one of the more recently employed military contractors fired on the leaving ships. Whether accidentally or because another party had bought their loyalties, it didn’t matter. Pythia was wreathed in violent light.

  Church, Consortium and Monarchist ships that weren’t heavily involved in the battle fled to high orbit, fighting off rivals and Pythian forces where they had to. They ran aggressively active scans and diverted processing power to analysis routines as they searched for the St. Brendan’s Fire. They offered ridiculous sums to Pythia for information as to Talia and Scab’s whereabouts, but the planet’s nanite populace was too angry to accept bids.

  Fire spread across about a fifth of the planet’s sky as the falling habitat hit the atmosphere and nano-swarm thunderheads surged up to consume the burning matter. The clouds glowed with inner fire as the tiny machines converted the habitat’s matter at a molecular level, using it to make more of themselves.

  ‘Now,’ Scab whispered.

  They spent some time analysing the local conflict around the station where the St. Brendan’s Fire was docked in high orbit, looking for the path of least resistance and then taking it, engines burning bright. They didn’t pick any fights and went out of their way to avoid existing ones. They ran.

  The frigate wove between rapidly firing defence platforms and dogfighting ships from various factions, and steered clear of a garishly decorated heavy cruiser from one of the Monarchist systems. The heavy cruiser’s beam batteries broadsided and tore apart two squadrons of military contractor corsairs and a patrol ship.

  The St. Brendan’s Fire got a close look at the underside of a fast-moving Consortium light cruiser glowing with the fire it had taken from pursuing mercenary frigates. Moments later, it exploded. Beams of light shot out from the St. Brendan’s Fire, destroying the debris now tumbling towards it.

  A military contractor cruiser de-cohered in front of them, taking hit after hit from one of the Bubastis’s massive D-cannons as the enormous capital ship hove into view over the planetary horizon, still wreathed in light. The ex-Church frigate fired all its weapons systems. Submunitions exploded, beams cut and kinetic harpoons destroyed as the craft attempted to carve a path through the disintegrating cruiser’s wreckage. It came out of the other side badly damaged, carbon reservoirs flowing as the self-repair systems went to work.

  On the bridge of the Stigmata, Cardinal Hak received the active scan-sensor data in his neunonics.

  ‘It’s the St. Brendan’s Fire,’ announced Crazy Fish, his dolphin navigator. The old lizard smiled, inasmuch as lizards smiled. It was more of a baring of his teeth, truth be told.

  ‘I can see that, old friend.’

  ‘Well?’ the dolphin asked in a series of clicks which the creature’s customised P-sat translated with negligible delay. Today, the dolphin was using the voice of some saccharine teenage musical-immersion artist. The cardinal had long ago stopped letting such things annoy him. The elderly lizard sighed.

  ‘Set an intercept course, tell the rest of the squadron to join us. We fire only in defence.’

  The cardinal knew it wouldn’t matter, they would have to fight. As the Church ships peeled away from Pythia towards the bridge point, chasing the St. Brendan’s Fire, others would realise what they were doing and follow. They would be prepared to fight to capture Scab’s ship.

  ‘Here we go,’ Scab said. He watched the Church squadron head away from Pythia, fighting their way free of orbital space when they had to. More and more realised what the Chur
ch squadron was doing and followed, engaging AG-driven smart weapons and other long-range weapon systems such as particle-beam cannons in an attempt to slow the pursuing Church ships.

  ‘How many people have you just killed?’ Talia asked, staring at the battle playing across the smart-matter screens. Vic glanced at the young human woman. He wasn’t quite sure what he’d heard in her voice.

  Orbital space was still carnage as the Bubastis tried to fight off Pythia’s punitive attempts to destroy it.

  Pythia used the burning matter it had consumed to form a massive shape, miles across, made from quintillions of constituent parts. It wasn’t exactly a hand. It had eight digits, four on either side. Then it reached.

  ‘Holy mother of…’ Talia muttered. She watched as what looked like the hand of God reached up, wreathed in atmospheric fire.

  ‘Seeders preserve us,’ Cardinal Hak said as he received the feed from Pythian orbital space. Every Pythian orbital defence platform turned its attention to the treaty-breaking nanites that had just breached Pythia’s atmosphere. Untold trillions of nanites died as fire rained down from the platforms, the military contractors, the remaining Karnak Industries craft and any other nearby panicking ships. Pythia fed more matter to the ‘hand’, which was constantly being destroyed and regrown.

  The cardinal knew that signals would be transmitted all over Known Space, and that both the Consortium and the Church would scramble fleets when they received news of Pythia breaking the agreement that it would never leave its own sparse atmosphere.

  The fingers clasped around the Bubastis. Pythia’s ‘arm’ was tethered to the planet below. It pulled as generation after generation of its constituent nanites were destroyed. It pulled as the Bubastis’s engines glowed bright, trying to resist, but it was dragged inexorably down. As the massive craft hit the atmosphere its back broke, and Pythia’s sky was filled with fire again. The capital craft started to disintegrate and rain down on the planet. Angry, roiling black clouds consumed the wreckage before any of it reached the ground. Lightning played through the angry nano-swarms. One word was transmitted to every craft in the Pythian system.