A Quantum Mythology

by Gavin G. Smith

  Over the infrasound link, Lodup was aware of Deane sending packets of information warning the base that they were incoming. As they got closer to the habitat, they could see batteries of torpedo launchers firing, while others regrew new payloads from the surrounding matter.

  They surfaced into the bright light and semi-organised chaos of the moon pool.

  The ADS dumped Lodup unceremoniously onto the pontoon jetty. Deane didn’t wait for one of the roof-mounted cranes to hoist the ADS out of the water. Instead, he grabbed the metal framework of the jetty, which buckled slightly as the ADS pulled itself awkwardly out of the water, its back already splitting open. As soon as it stopped moving, Deane’s hands appeared out of the dark, organic-looking matter that filled the ADS and he pulled himself from the exoskeleton.

  ‘C’mon!’ Despite his tall, wiry frame, Deane had no problems hoisting Lodup over his shoulder. The healing abilities of his augmented body could only do so much, and his foot was still just a stump.

  Lodup tried calling Siraja to find out what was going on and request access to the external camera feeds, but the AI wasn’t answering. He assumed Siraja was securing the habitat’s electronic systems from intrusion, which probably necessitated cutting off all comms access.

  Divers were surfacing constantly and clambering out of the moon pool alongside submersibles being hastily secured as their crews clambered out. ADSs were climbing or being lifted out of the water.

  ‘C’mon, move! Now!’ Yaroslav’s voice filled the moon pool chamber. He was changing the magazine in his weapon – a modified .45 calibre Vector sub-machine gun, standard issue for all members of the security teams. The guns were equipped with suppressors to deaden the noise from the weapons in a confined area, and Lodup noticed that most of the visible security personnel had removed the suppressors and were changing the magazines on their weapons. The majority of the SMGs had M26 Modular Accessory Shotgun Systems mounted on Picatinny rails under the barrels. They were also replacing the magazines on the shotguns. Yaroslav had an M320 40 millimetre grenade-launcher mounted beneath his SMG.

  ‘Each of you will empty the magazines from your primary and secondary weapons in an orderly and accurate manner, before falling back and switching to your sidearms!’ Yaroslav shouted, addressing his security personnel, who were staying out of the way as divers, submersible pilots and ADS jocks evacuated the moon pool chamber.

  Yaroslav was changing the magazine on his sidearm, a .45 calibre Heckler & Koch USP, as Deane carried Lodup past him.

  Above them, the multi-barrelled rotary weapons were moving back and forth under their inverted, tower-like ammunition drums.

  They were among the last out of the moon pool chamber. Deane stood by the door, his earlier hesitation, his earlier fear forgotten as he made sure all his personnel were clear of the chamber.

  The security detail formed up along the edge of the pool. They didn’t bother with cover. They knew there was no point. More security personnel lined the synthetic-grass-carpeted corridors beyond the moon pool chamber, leaving a narrow throughway should any retreating comrades need to pass.

  ‘Right, not much more we can do here – let’s go and hide,’ Deane suggested over the nearly constant thudding of repeated shock waves breaking against the diamondoid superstructure of the habitat.

  ‘C-and-C?’ Lodup said.

  The habitat shifted slightly underneath them from a particularly heavy impact. Then everything went quiet.

  ‘I’ll drop you off and then you’re on your own,’ Deane told him.

  Lodup had to hop into C&C. Deane left him propped up against the blast door, and he had to bang a few times before it finally opened just wide enough to admit him, then closed immediately behind him.

  Inside the dimly lit control area there was little sign of panic or chaos, with the exception of the images playing across the wall. The staff remained lying on their couches, presumably linked into the habitat’s systems. A blast door now covered the window that normally looked out over the moon pool. Siraja was standing motionless in front of the blast shield. It was difficult to tell with his draconic features, but Lodup was pretty sure he was concentrating intently.

  ‘I indulge you because you actually have real meat between your ears,’ Siska told him as she reloaded her twin .45 calibre Sig Sauer P220 automatic pistols. She chambered rounds and re-holstered them at her hips, safeties off. ‘However, if you want to stay here, you need to keep out of the way and remain fucking silent.’

  Lodup didn’t answer. He was looking at the feeds from various cameras being played across the wall: Yaroslav and the security detail in the pool below; the slow-motion rain of debris on the city; the wreckage and remains of the three Archies and the gutted corpses of several orcas; the damage done to the alien architecture; the destroyed submersibles, torpedo batteries and AUVs. Then finally he saw it, walking inexorably across the seabed, leaving a trail of silt in its wake. There was little left out there still attacking it.

  Lodup got a clearer look at the thing this time as it strode past one of the cameras. It was about fifteen feet tall and looked like it was made of granite. A series of small torpedoes detonated around it, staggering and buffeting it, but the rootlike stone structures growing from its legs anchored it firmly to the seabed. As it glowed with internal light, Lodup saw in more detail the spiral and knotwork patterns inscribed on it. They reminded him of the tattoos on some of his former Navy shipmates. It vomited the lava-like light from its hollow head and one of the few remaining AUVs was destroyed.

  It started walking up the ramp into the moon pool. On the local feed, Lodup watched the rotary weapons start firing hydrodynamic rounds into the water, the barrage audible even through the blast shield covering the window. The water frothed, but it continued walking up the ramp. There were so many impacts on the creature that Lodup couldn’t make out whether or not the weapons were doing any damage. Surely something in the centre of a firestorm that intense would be totally destroyed. He was appalled when the onslaught didn’t even slow the thing down. Then its head rose from the water.

  The security detail started firing their Vector SMGs and M26 shotguns. Lodup knew that the nanite-tipped ordnance they were now loaded with would eat through or otherwise break down any matter they came into contact with. As they fired measured, accurate bursts with the SMGs, Lodup wondered how many of the bullets collided in mid-air because the fire was so heavily concentrated. They didn’t slow the thing down, either.

  Lodup glanced over at Siska. She looked concerned, which worried him. In the three weeks he’d been working here, he’d never seen her look anything other than in complete control.

  Some of the cameras whited out. Lodup felt heat rise from the floor as C&C lurched and glanced at the moon pool feed as it came back online. The thing’s hollow head was still glowing white and there was a massive rent in the wall of the chamber where its beam had cut straight through it. Parts of the diamondoid structure were burning in a way he knew they shouldn’t. Little more than a few smoking chunks of flesh remained of the security detail. The few who had been on the edge of the staggered line were still alive, but horribly burned and screaming.

  Yaroslav was somehow still up, his left side and most of his back blackened and blistered with still-bubbling flesh. His face was a mask of agony as he tried to pull a member of the security detail back towards the moon pool’s exit, firing his Vector one-handed as he did so.

  ‘We have to do it now,’ Siraja said, an urgency in his voice that Lodup had never heard before.

  The ROV analogues tethered to the creature, which Lodup had thought looked a little like flowers, rose from the water, their thinner beams reaching out to burn the air and turn the rotary weapons into slag.

  ‘Request permission,’ Siska said. Lodup had no idea who she was talking to. He suspected it was a sign of her nervousness that she had even spoken the words out loud. ‘No, si
r, I cannot see another way. It’s either this or we lose the whole facility.’

  The granite-skinned thing was stepping out of the water now. Small-arms fire sparked off its granite body from the corridor, which it ignored. It knelt down, its massive hands growing, mimicking the rootlike structure of its legs, and reached into the floor of the habitat.

  Siraja opened his draconic maw to say something but it turned into an agonised electronic scream, then his image was burning, and then it was gone.

  ‘Sending the signal,’ Siska said, staring at the space where Siraja’s image had been.

  Agony shot through Lodup. He cried out and then vomited blood as it squirted out of his nose and ran out of his ears and eyes. The world went away and there was only the white light of agony filling his vision. He wasn’t aware of collapsing. As the pain faded, he was nearly overwhelmed by a primal, instinctive fear. He knew something utterly inimical to his very existence was out there. Moving.

  Through the blood in his eyes and the white-light pain, he was barely able to make out one of the feeds. It showed the black lake, the cold seep consisting of salty brine much thicker than the surrounding water, with its beach of mussels. Something was climbing out of the black lake. It looked like a living oil slick. It filled Lodup with terror that sprang from something hardwired and ancient within him, a racial memory.

  He became aware of Siska nearby. She was crying tears of blood as more leaked from her ears and nose. She spat red on the carpet as she looked down at him.

  The thing stretched from the black lake, moving across the seabed rapidly, forming pseudopods and tendrils of a black, viscous material that appeared plastic and liquid at the same time. Sluggish initially, its pace increased as it seeped through the streets of the sunken city towards the light, energy and life of the habitat. Whatever it was, it absorbed the glow of the city’s floodlights, only noticeable by its movement.

  ‘We’re sealing the moon pool. Anyone not through the blast door is dead,’ Siska said quietly, her voice amplified throughout the habitat.

  Lodup glanced at the moon pool feed. There was nobody left alive there. The stone thing was still growing roots into the habitat’s superstructure.

  ‘What is it?’ Lodup managed, meaning the thing from the black lake.

  ‘Programmable biomass,’ Siska answered.

  ‘You didn’t make that thing.’

  ‘No, it’s much, much older than us.’

  The lights went out in the moon pool. Lodup looked at one of the feeds and saw inky black tendrils and pseudopods wrap around the stone thing. The living-oil-slick-thing pulled part of its mass up and out of the water. The stone thing’s head turned a hundred and eighty degrees and started to glow. Where the oily pseudopods touched it, the granite-skinned creature started to dissolve. Lodup watched its roots withering. The stone thing was torn off the habitat and pulled into the water, engulfed by the black oil, which started to seep away from the habitat, but slowly, as if reluctantly.

  Lodup glanced up at Siska. She had a look of great concentration on her face.

  Lodup was not, and had never been, a fearful man. He was not a great risk-taker or an adrenalin junkie, which were factors that made him such a good diver. He could think on his feet and hold it together in difficult situations. After it was over, he sat against the wall of the C&C and wept. A shadow fell across him. He looked up at Siska.

  ‘You wanted to see,’ she said, but not unkindly.

  ‘What…?’ he started.

  She knelt down next to him. ‘You’re a curious fellow, aren’t you?’ she said, smiling slightly. ‘And no.’

  ‘It won’t make any difference—’ he started. Then he realised that things would never be the same knowing he shared a planet with the ‘programmable biomass’. The worst thing was that he still didn’t want to leave.

  ‘We’re never going to tell you everything. I don’t know everything. We have enemies. The more you know, the more of a risk you are.’

  ‘What enemies? Who did that?’ he asked, desperation in his voice. Siska shook her head. ‘Why don’t I want to go home?’

  ‘That’s not our conditioning any more,’ she said. ‘You’re not a clone, you’re real meat, and you don’t have quite the level of protection that lifers like myself, Yaroslav and Deane have. Siraja thinks something in the city is reaching out to you. Trying to communicate.’

  ‘I want to leave.’

  ‘That’s the thing, Lodup – you really don’t.’

  And he knew she was right.

  Half of Yaroslav’s face was a flaking, blackened mess. He had lost body mass and was eating energy bar after energy bar as his flesh healed itself and shed large scabs of skin like burned dandruff. He was running through the footage as he healed.

  It started at the stone circle with the ground shaking. Then a light began to fill the stones from within, rising up from the seabed and into the stones, until the pictograms carved into them burned brightly with the internal glow. The water was boiling all around them. Then a sphere of pulsing blue light appeared in the centre of the stones and became a sucking vortex. Water poured through it into apparent nothingness. Then it was gone, leaving in its place a large, egg-shaped granite boulder. Initially it looked as if the granite egg was hatching, but it was growing limbs, then a hollow head, transforming into the thing that had attacked the base.

  ‘He does not think it was the Brass City,’ Siska said quietly to Yaroslav.

  ‘It was a data raid,’ Yaroslav said in his thick accent as he took another bite of energy bar.

  ‘It was a data attack, and it wasn’t their style. Besides, how would they hack the stones? The Brass City are subtler, more thorough. He thinks it was the Egg Shell.’

  Yaroslav stared at her. ‘Because it was L-tech?’ he asked. ‘The Brass City use L-tech. They specialise in infoscapes—’

  ‘It was a fetch. Geothermal-powered or not, its weapon was the sun. It was a thing of Lug’s.’

  ‘How long?’ Yaroslav asked.

  ‘Thousands of years.’

  Yaroslav just nodded.

  32

  A Long Time after the Loss

  The Basilisk II might have been an elegant yacht designed for speed and augmented for stealth and combat, but as it sank into the meteorite to harvest matter for raw materials, she looked like a parasitical insect.

  The window tint had been removed and the pool room was bathed in the unsettling crimson glow of Red Space. Talia was wearing plastic polarised glasses as she stared out through the ornate circular window, watching the pool fill with water. She had a smouldering inhalable narcotic in one hand and a bottle of red wine in the other.

  ‘You consume everything,’ she said quietly, her voice full of sad awe. Vic hoped she wasn’t going to start crying again. He’d been waiting for a quiet time to review some footage taken from the mind of his possessed copy, the one who had been imprisoned on Suburbia. He interrogated the neunonics in the human form before he let the ship absorb and claim the body’s matter as raw material. He absently wondered if the carbon that had been harvested would eventually end up in one of his meals.

  He wasn’t sure why he hadn’t told Scab about what he’d done. He guessed it was a false sense of independence.

  He recognised the featureless automatons in the strange pre-Loss clothes. They belonged to a bounty killer called Mr Hat, a diminutive lizard with an enormous hat who had inadvertently saved them when he attacked the Dead-Skin Masks. According to the bounty killer ratings, Mr Hat was as good as – if not better than – Scab and Vic had been before they became fugitives. He had an impressive record, but was dogged by persistent rumours that his automatons were programmed with highly illegal deification routines. Vic had a feeling he’d met the lizard bounty killer before, but that was one of the periods Scab had edited out of his memory during his frequent neural audits. It may eve
n have been the first time Scab killed him.

  Vic felt strangely calm. He had known that someone they had angered would send people after them. This was confirmation. That was all.

  ‘Are you going to tell him?’ Elodie asked. Even with the augmented aural abilities of his skin, Vic had struggled to hear the feline enter the pool area, though he picked up her disturbance of the air particles via the passive motion detectors in his antennae. Talia, on the other hand, jumped when she heard Elodie’s voice. She turned and glared at the feline and then stormed out.

  Vic did pick up the quiet hiss as Talia walked past Elodie. After all, it had to be loud enough for the human nat to hear, too.

  ‘You should be nicer to her,’ Vic said. Elodie just shrugged. ‘And tell him what?’

  ‘About the automatons and their boss?’

  Vic swivelled his head around just over two hundred degrees in a way that most non-’sects found disconcerting and stared at Elodie.

  ‘I’ve got enough problems with Scab mind-fucking me.’ Vic tapped his head. ‘I can live without you hacking my neunonics as well. Besides, there’s some insect-on-sentient-mammal porn in here that I think you’d find very distasteful.’

  Elodie raised an eyebrow. ‘You never know,’ she said salaciously. Vic put it down to standard feline flirting. ‘I’ve not hacked your neunonics, and if I had I certainly wouldn’t admit it over something so trivial. I did the same thing you did – interrogated the neunonics on your hairless-monkey copy before the body was destroyed. I wanted to know what happened to my copy. You’re a coward without neurosurgery, augmentations and drugs, by the way.’

  Vic attempted a human shrug. He came to the conclusion that shrugging looked odd when you had as many limbs as he did.

  ‘I assumed you’d do the same,’ Elodie said, ‘and you had that slack-mandibled look you always have when you’re concentrating. It was a deductive guess, nothing more. So will you tell him?’ she asked again.