‘Where’s that?’ Talia asked, more for something to say than actual interest.
‘The Solitude Hive,’ Scab said.
Talia was little the wiser, though she guessed by the use of the word ‘hive’, and by the way it looked, that it was a place where the insect people lived.
‘You have spider people as well?’ she asked, looking at the restrained eight-armed female. There was a long silence.
‘It’s an arachnid augment, she’s a princess ’sect. A worker-caste ’sect who’s had a gender change.’
Talia nodded, as if any of it made sense to her.
‘Have you seen Vic?’ she asked. The silence stretched out. ‘So what’s happening?’ she eventually asked when she realised he wasn’t going to answer her previous question. The ash fell off Scab’s cigarette and was absorbed by the carpet as he brought it to his mouth and took a long drag.
‘The two-headed guy is called Crabber. He’s a media whore who leads a bounty crew. The other ’sect is General Nix. He’s warrior caste, a war criminal. The princess ’sect is known as the Widow. She was Nix’s second-in-command, an immersion-warfare specialist. Crabber’s crew have just taken him down.’
She could tell that her questions were irritating him but something Scab had said struck her as strange.
‘In this day and age, how do you become a war criminal?’ she asked before she realised she didn’t want to hear the answer. Scab told her anyway.
The Amuser had come in with the Consortium naval squadron from one of the larger military contractor companies. There were two heavy cruisers, four light cruisers, a screen of eight destroyers and numerous smaller craft from corsairs down to fighters. Needless to say, Mr Hat had to ask permission to join them in Red Space. His employer’s influence must have been remarkable indeed as the naval squadron had allowed him to accompany them, although they kept multiple weapon locks on him at all times.
Mr Hat had wondered if this was all because of Scab. Had they come to the same conclusion? If so, what did they expect to accomplish with a naval squadron? It wasn’t how Scab worked.
He was further impressed by his employer’s influence when Suburbia agreed to his request to see one of the prisoners. He had been of the belief that mostly they didn’t do that kind of thing. There were too many secrets locked in too many heads in Suburbia.
Nolly Berger finished his breakfast and kissed his wife. She smiled at him, but she was distracted as she was getting the children ready. As he did every morning, Nolly wondered what they had done to end up here.
He went out of his front door, just like he always did, then walked down the drive to the ground car and climbed in. It was a bright, sunny day. It was always a bright, sunny day. All along his street of identical detached houses, his neighbours were doing exactly the same thing, though each was slightly staggered so they could make use of the transport network as efficiently as possible.
‘Where to today?’ the habitat’s AI asked, accompanied by the sound of canned laughter.
‘Work, please, Al,’ Nolly said cheerfully. Inside he was screaming, and he wanted to tear out his own tongue. There was more canned laughter. It was funny because it was where he always went, and the AI, who they all called Al, which was also funny, knew that.
The car slid out onto the road and drove itself towards work, along with the rest of the all-but-identical cars driven by the other inmates. He knew that on each of the three non-window segments of the cylinder habitat, a similar scene would be playing out in every residential street.
In many ways, that was the worst thing about the cylinder habitat – the three window sections, which let in sunlight or showed space. They revealed the darkness outside. Occasionally they would see a pulsing red slash in space as the prisoner transports bridged into the system. He was sure that Nolly wasn’t his real name, just as he was sure he hadn’t always been human. He glanced up through the windscreen and felt the familiar vertiginous sensation as he looked at the other two inhabited sections. Boring streets, set out in boring grids, each the same as the next. They had malls but no town centres. There were light-industrial and business parks where they all worked within neatly landscaped grounds.
The only break he ever got was when one member of the family was chosen to flip out and torture to death the rest of the family. Then they would be cloned and have to go back into the program still aware of the violence, feeling resentment towards whomever had done it. Last time it was little Suzy. He still remembered her sitting on top of him, playing with the kitchen knife. He would hate her if he didn’t fear her so much.
Suburbia was based on pre-Loss punishment media – twisted parodies of a perceived idyllic existence. There was no law-enforcement presence because none was needed, and if an inmate did manage to break their programming, there were incredibly efficient S-sats to deal with them. They were all good, law-abiding citizens until their houses were sealed and one family member was programmed to hunt the others. After their murders they were downloaded into newly cloned bodies the following morning, so they could wash the blood off the walls and pretend that everything was okay. More than that, he worried about when it would be his turn to brutalise his family. He didn’t think he’d been a violent criminal.
There was no attempt at rehabilitation. It wasn’t even incarceration. It was designed to do one thing, and one thing only: torture inmates who had pissed off the great and the good of Consortium space.
Nolly arrived at work praying for death. His mouth hurt so much from the fixed grin. He shared inanities with the unconvincing automaton-torso receptionist, which incurred more canned laughter that made him want to weep.
Seated at his desk, he pointlessly moved data around and talked to people just as inane as him on antiquated audio-communication devices. He accomplished nothing; he produced nothing. Initially he wondered if the work was modular, and all of them incarcerated on Suburbia were somehow parts of a greater whole – number-crunching some giant computation, perhaps. Now he was sure they were just going through the motions, doing busywork designed to remind them of the ultimate pointlessness of their existence. They were incapable of suicide.
‘Nolly, old buddy.’ Geoff’s plump and affable head appeared over the office partitioning. Nolly was sure he could see the look of desperation on his boss’s face under the painfully fixed smile. He wondered who Geoff had been before and what he had done to piss the Consortium off this badly. ‘Hey, how about that local sporting fixture?’ Geoff asked. There was more canned laughter. It was funny because, unlike all the other ‘men’ in the office, Geoff didn’t really like sport. He was a little effeminate, because that was funny, too, but when the time came he still had a wife and two kids to murder, just like the rest of them.
‘Uh, which one, Geoff?’ Nolly asked. Nolly eyed the stapler and wondered if he could get it to his eye before the control protocols took over, but he knew the answer. He didn’t think this was a normal thought that normal people had. Geoff’s painful-looking smile grew wider and more painful-looking. There was more canned laughter. Nolly suspected that parts of this nightmare were viewed in some kind of media format within Consortium space.
‘There’s somebody here to see you, in the back office,’ Geoff told him. Even through the rictus smile, Nolly could see the jealousy. He could practically hear Geoff’s thoughts. He was thinking that he’d worked hard to get promoted, to find himself the butt of everyone’s jokes. Why couldn’t he go to the back office? Why couldn’t he be destroyed, or released?
‘Okay, Geoff.’ Nolly stood up and headed towards the nondescript door that led to the back office. Beads of sweat appeared all over his face. Is this it? he prayed. His hand gripped the handle and turned it.
The door opened into a long corridor with another door at the end of it. He had a strange feeling that the walls had just finished shifting in his peripheral vision. He stepped forwards and closed the door afte
r him. The corridor smelled of some kind of cleaning product. He started walking. Excitement and hope building in him, he began to increase his pace. Pain lanced through his skull and the corridor tipped. He tried to grab the wall but failed and found himself on the floor. He could taste vomit in the back of his throat, the pain was so extreme. The pain didn’t go, just subsided enough that he was functional again. He tried to stand up, but he wasn’t supposed to have legs. He turned to one side and threw up the nutritional breakfast that had been lovingly prepared by the prisoner locked inside his ‘wife’. He managed not to throw up on himself. He started pulling himself along the floor, avoiding the vomit, towards the other door.
He could remember who he was, what he was and what he’d done. He reached for the door handle.
Nolly half-crawled, half-flopped into the room, looking up at the odd figure sitting on the other side of the table in the utterly nondescript room. It was a diminutive lizard in a very tall hat, body tucked under itchy-looking blankets in a strange wheeled chair made from a material Nolly didn’t recognise.
Nolly managed to pull himself up into a chair on the near side of the table as the small lizard watched. Nolly could imagine few things more alien and uncomfortable than sitting in the hard plastic moulded chair.
‘Would you prefer I call you Mr Berger, or the Alchemist?’ the lizard asked. Nolly reached for him but the small lizard recoiled, hissing in distaste, forked tongue flicking out between his teeth.
‘Please,’ Nolly begged with an unfamiliar larynx. ‘You have to get me out of here.’ His tears dripped down onto the pitted surface of the plastic table.
‘If you help me with my inquiries, that is a distinct possibility. What can you tell me about Woodbine Scab?’
Nolly stared at the lizard. Slowly, pleading desperation was replaced by a look of anger bordering on fury.
‘That fucking vicious, vile cunt!’ Nolly spat. ‘He did this to me. He caught me! It’s his fault I got sent here! We weren’t doing much harm. It was the people’s own choice.’
‘I am, of course, familiar with your crimes—’
‘Crimes! Crimes? I wasn’t doing anything different from what everyone else was doing. Know why the debt relief on my bounty was so high?’
‘Because you used to be part of the Church?’
‘Because I used to be part of the Church!’ Nolly slammed unfamiliar hands down on the table and almost slid off the chair. He recovered himself and pointed at the lizard. ‘I’m in this … fucking hell to deny me to the Church, and all because the Consortium can’t break Church conditioning!’
‘Indeed.’
‘See, I probably knows what they want to knows, but they can’t get it.’ He tapped the side of his head and slid off the chair, the lizard’s eyes following him as he did so. He continued watching as Nolly pulled himself back up into the chair. ‘I shouldn’t be in this body, it’s not right,’ he muttered.
‘Why would Mr Scab wish to break you out?’
Nolly stared at the lizard. ‘It’ll be for some cuntish reason,’ Nolly eventually answered.
‘Could you be more specific?’
‘I don’t know. He wouldn’t.’ Then a look of horror crossed his face. ‘Maybe the Church has hired him.’
‘That sounds unlikely. He wants you for his own purposes.’
‘Then I don’t know. You’re one of them, ain’t you? A bounty killer.’
‘I am a hunter. If you want to get out of here, Mr Berger, then you need to cooperate. You were a bridge drive engineer, is that correct?’
Nolly looked exasperated. To Mr Hat, the expression was exaggerated, as if he was trying it out for the first time.
‘Yes, but even if they hadn’t mindfucked me in here, I couldn’t get at what I know, and neither can he, because the Church mindfucked me first. The conditioning can’t be broken.’
Mr Hat knew that the Alchemist was one of the few bridge techs ever to escape from the Church, which had to be significant. He wondered if Miss Negrinotti actually thought she had found a way to break Church conditioning.
‘You were apprehended for selling psychotropic drugs, is that correct?’
‘No, for cooking them, and I mean – who gets done for drugs? I didn’t even realise I was breaking any laws until they came through the skylight.’
Mr Hat had to concede he had a point. He could not recall ever hearing of a bounty on a drug chemist before. It seemed highly unlikely that Scab was interested in the Alchemist’s ability to make drugs. Scab was insane and as much of a junkie as everyone else in Known Space, but there was a definite method to his madness, even if it was nothing more than a psychopath’s requirement to get what he wanted regardless of the cost. It was only problematic when the psychopath in question was ex-Elite. What an Elite thought an acceptable cost was scaled far above what a normal criminal would consider as such.
‘Please,’ Nolly begged. ‘Can I go now?’
‘Of course,’ Mr Hat said, and then realised his mistake as he saw pathetic hope spread unconvincingly across the Alchemist’s now-human face. ‘I mean back to your job.’
‘Then kill me! Please!’ Nolly started to beg. The room began to distend. It looked like the lizard in the strange wheeled chair was moving further and further away from him.
‘Why would I do that?’ Mr Hat asked, genuinely confused.
‘Are you okay, Nolly, old fella’?’ Geoff asked. Nolly looked up at his boss and friend to the sound of canned laughter as his identity and memories melted away. He could see the smugness behind Geoff’s smiling facade. Nolly wanted to tear at Geoff’s face, he wanted to weep and scream. Instead he smiled until it hurt.
‘Yes, I’m fine, thank you, Geoff. Will you be watching the local sporting fixture tonight?’ he asked in a gently mocking manner to the sound of yet more canned laughter.
As the AI drove Nolly back to his fake, loving family, he saw something very odd. Two building custodians were trying to clean writing off the side of the mall. Someone had scrawled the words THE EMPIRE NEVER ENDED on the wall. Nolly was mortified.
‘Who on earth would do such a thing?’ he muttered disapprovingly.
18
Ancient Britain
The water had washed much of the blood off her but left her freezing. The wounds that should have killed her were just fading scar-tissue reminders now. As she walked the cold left her. She stopped staggering and her stride became more purposeful. She felt the familiar, gluttonous hunger threaten to overwhelm her, but she felt something else, too – she felt the old power in her blood. She wasn’t as strong as she had been, perhaps, but then she didn’t have demons screaming in her head, either, and Crom Dhubh wasn’t whispering to her any more. She felt strong, fast and aware again. She had stolen Fachtna’s strength.
She heard them first: the sound of hoofbeats across the plain she had found herself on. She glanced behind her, knowing instinctively they had come from the south-west. They didn’t have to get much closer for her to recognise their ill-used steeds as the white-coated and red-eyed horses of the Otherworld. It took her longer to recognise the five riders as equally ill-used-looking Corpse People, their lime long since washed off by their trials. She placed her hands on her hips and waited for them to approach.
‘You!’ Ysgawyn spat at her. Britha understood the language like she understood her own.
The five riders circled her. Their mounts’ coats were covered in foamy sweat, their red eyes rolling, and more than one of them snapped at her with their wolf-like teeth. They used the horses to knock her around a bit. She understood it for what it was: intimidation, an attempt to establish dominance. She held her ground as best she could. She noticed Ysgawyn looking back the way he had come.
‘You should consider yourself lucky,’ he said, eyeing her naked body, ‘that we don’t have the time to take turns with you.’ He drew his sword. Notched,
bloodstained and patchy with rust, the blade had obviously not seen much care recently. ‘We will just have to kill you instead.’
‘A choice all women would take rather than receive the ministrations of your cock, I suspect.’
He swung at her. Britha bent so the blade whistled over her, then straightened and grabbed his arm as he tried to pull it back for another blow. She yanked the arm hard, easily pulling Ysgawyn from his saddle and throwing him to the ground. The other Corpse People began to draw their swords. All of them appeared to have lost their spears.
‘I am a dryw!’ she all but shrieked at them in the voice of anger. She watched them shrink back and wondered how much of it was just nonsense, if what Fachtna had told her was true – that she’d had no magic. She did now, though, with his blood in her body. She pointed at Ysgawyn. ‘This one has already been punished for threatening a dryw. Who wishes to join him? Who would have woman, man and beast turn their backs on him?’
The other riders looked less sure, though they still had naked blades in their hands. Ysgawyn struggled to his feet, his fatigue self-evident. Every movement was a significant effort for him, but that effort was fuelled by his hatred. He swung the heavy blade at her two-handed. It was an easy matter for Britha to step to one side and he lurched forwards, off balance. Britha struck both his arms and he dropped his sword. She punched him to the ground and then reached down to pick up his sword.
‘You do not look after this as a warrior should,’ she said, examining the rusted, pitted blade.
Ysgawyn looked up at her. His animating anger was fading, but the burning hatred remained.
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