A Quantum Mythology

by Gavin G. Smith

  ‘Which doesn’t make sense,’ du Bois said. ‘It’s not possible.’

  ‘Christ, Malcolm, if this job’s taught us nothing more, it’s that given enough technology, pretty much anything’s possible. Besides, it doesn’t have to work, he just has to think it does.’ Then it was as if a light went on behind her eyes. ‘He’s building a beacon, like—’

  ‘Hawksmoor,’ du Bois finished for her.

  Grace looked over at him. ‘I’m not—’ she started.

  ‘Transferring?’

  Grace was off the bed in a flash and marching across the room towards him. ‘Fuck you, Dad! What have you brought to this? He might be swimming in the canals? Great, we’ll look for bridges with billy goats clip-clopping across them, but that’s not been much use so far, has it? At least I’m trying to think it through!’

  ‘No,’ Malcolm said calmly. ‘You’re not. You’re wildly speculating in a bid to make the facts fit because you want revenge on someone who terrorised you, murdered your friends and family, and made you feel helpless. Except it doesn’t fit. Hawksmoor’s delusion was different. He was a driven man. A fanatic. He really believed in what he was doing. Silas is a sensualist and an egotist. He gets off on other people’s suffering, power and, frankly, attention. While you were speculating, did you actually read the profile put together by several very powerful AIs using programs specifically written to profile Silas? Hawksmoor thought of himself as performing a grand experiment, a ritual, even. Silas is interested in spectacle, grand gestures, like what he did at the Manufactory. He does these things for gratification, nothing more.’

  Grace opened her mouth to retort, then closed it again. She looked furious. Du Bois was pretty sure it was because she knew he was right. As she stormed out of the room, du Bois’ phone vibrated on the desk. Grace stopped and concentrated for a moment. She glanced over at him, then grabbed her bike jacket and helmet from the bed.

  ‘Why don’t you come in the Range Rover with me?’ du Bois managed to get out just as the door slammed behind her.

  Du Bois was already receiving information from Grace as he drove – as quickly as the narrow, busy road would allow – towards the Druids Heath Estate. A number of missing-person reports had been called in to the West Midlands police. All the disappearances centred on Demesne House, a name that didn’t really make sense to du Bois. Demesne House was one of the tower blocks on the estate. Two police officers had been sent to investigate. Only one of them had made it out. Beyond that, information was a little hazy as the police hadn’t really wanted to speak to Grace.

  He was driving through a basin on the Alcester Road lined with grass-covered verges, beyond which lay bland suburban housing. He could see the tower blocks of Druids Heath on a hill to the south. Through the haze of the cold but sunny spring morning, the tower blocks reminded him of megaliths. The haze was pierced here and there by blue flashing lights.

  Minutes later he was being flagged down by an armed police officer as he pulled up next to the cordon of emergency vehicles surrounding Demesne House. The tower block was a nearly featureless grey concrete high-rise. There were a number of identical tower blocks in close proximity. Like the other towers, a car park and large grassy expanse surrounded Demesne House.

  Druids Heath was obviously a run-down area. Many of the businesses, shops and what had once been quite a large pub had been boarded up and then vandalised. In addition to the tower blocks, the estate also contained rows of dilapidated terraced houses.

  The police were dealing with a number of locals who were visibly upset. Presumably they knew people in the tower block. Du Bois could feel a palpable anger in the crowd, but he wasn’t sure who it was aimed at yet. He suspected some of the local residents weren’t great fans of the authorities.

  He showed a Special Forces warrant card to the armed police officer who had flagged him down. He suspected it would be the quickest way to get what he wanted. He glanced over and saw a police armed-response team gathered near the tower block.

  ‘Are they getting ready to go in?’ du Bois asked. The officer he was dealing with didn’t reply, though his expression told du Bois everything he needed to know. Looking around for Grace, he saw her talking to the chief superintendent. He could see by her gestures that she was less than pleased. Du Bois started walking towards them.

  ‘… told you I’m an undercover operative, you’ve checked my credentials …’ Grace was saying to the chief superintendent as du Bois came into earshot. He noticed a white Mercedes Sprinter van parked close to Demesne House. It piqued his curiosity because of the heavy-duty winch mount on the front of it, which was far from standard on such a vehicle.

  ‘How old are you, anyway – eighteen? If that?’ the chief superintendent demanded. Grace just glared at the man. Du Bois quickened his pace. ‘Look, little girl, we’ve got over a hundred missing persons – and rising – and an estate on the edge of a riot. More than enough to handle, without whatever your undercover freak show is about.’

  Du Bois ran the last few steps and grabbed Grace’s arm just as she was about to hit the chief superintendent in the throat, very hard. Grace spun around to glare at him, but calmed down enough not to cripple or kill the high-ranking police officer.

  ‘Is the commissioner here yet?’ Du Bois asked the red-faced chief superintendent.

  ‘He’s running this from HQ. I’m in command on the ground,’ the chief superintendent told him.

  Brilliant, du Bois thought. A pompous fool in command with a boss who liked to lead from the rear.

  ‘Okay, you need to get the commissioner on the phone for me—’ du Bois started.

  ‘I need to do no such thing,’ the chief superintendent retorted. The armed-response team was now running across the grass towards Demesne House. Grace pointed at them, a worried expression on her face.

  ‘Look, I’m sorry we’ve pissed all over your jurisdiction,’ said du Bois, ‘but you need to let us handle this.’

  ‘How? By doing nothing? Or by mutilating corpses?’ the chief superintendent demanded.

  The armed-response team had reached the main door of Demesne House.

  There’s a blood-screen surrounding the tower block. Du Bois received Grace’s message direct to his mind.

  ‘Okay, you need to pull your men back right now,’ du Bois said, a trace of desperation in his voice. A shout of surprise from a member of the armed-response team drew his attention back to the building. They’d got the door open and a stream of blood was flowing out through the doorway. It looked as if the building was bleeding. The chief superintendent was staring at the blood, appalled.

  ‘Over a hundred tenants, nine pints each,’ Grace said.

  ‘Pull your men back, now!’ du Bois told the police officer. The armed-response team waded through the blood as they entered the tower block, weapons at the ready. The chief superintendent was still staring. He clearly had no idea what to do.

  Then the screaming started. The crowd, almost as one, ducked when they heard gunfire. Du Bois watched the inside of Demesne House light up with multiple muzzle flashes, then grabbed the chief superintendent by the face.

  ‘Listen to me – if any of your men fire on us, we’ll fire back, and then I’m going to kill you. Do you understand me?’ he demanded. The chief superintendent managed to nod despite the grip. Du Bois leaned closer. ‘Do you believe me?’ The chief superintendent didn’t say anything, but du Bois saw the answer he needed in his eyes. He let go of the man. The gunfire had stopped.

  Du Bois drew his Accurised .45 and checked the chamber for a round. There was still screaming coming from Demesne House. The sound echoed among the tower blocks. Grace drew one of her Beretta 92 FS Inox pistols, removed the fifteen-round 9mm magazine and replaced it with an extended twenty-round magazine from the ammo pouch on her belt. The screaming was cut off suddenly. Both of them knew that the armed-response team were all dead. Grace rep
laced the magazine on her other pistol as well.

  ‘There’s media here,’ she noted.

  Du Bois nodded. With a thought, he texted Control. They would have to D-notice the media, and probably hack or edit any footage that was shot as well. Control would not be happy with the public nature of what they were about to do. Grace checked that she had a round chambered in each pistol and that the safeties were off.

  ‘Plan?’ she asked.

  Maybe if we’d had any prep time, du Bois thought. ‘Can you think of anything more sophisticated than go in there, find Silas and shoot him a lot?’

  ‘Try not to get our brains eaten?’ Grace suggested. The chief superintendent was still staring at them, utterly lost for words.

  ‘I like it,’ du Bois said. Her earlier anger with him was forgotten. They had something to do now. Du Bois started running across the grass towards Demesne House, half-expecting to get shot as he ran. He wasn’t sure if it would be by Silas or the police at his back, but as he ran, he heard the chief superintendent speaking to his men over the radio.

  It wasn’t quiet or subtle. Du Bois hit the door with his shoulder at a run. Safety glass cracked and metal bent enough to knock the door out of its frame. Du Bois went flying through into a small foyer and slipped over on the blood covering the floor.

  Grace hurdled him and charged through the foyer into the base of the stairwell, where it was raining blood. She had both her pistols pointing upwards as the gore covered her.

  Du Bois pushed himself to his feet, blood dripping off him. He moved quickly to the stairwell, his .45 at the ready, checking along the other corridors on the ground floor. He saw the bodies of a number of the armed-response team on the stairs. A quick glance told him they’d all been killed with a single well-aimed knife slash, and then their arteries had been cut. There were shell casings lying in the blood. The butcher-shop smell was overwhelming, a metallic tang of blood mixed with the stench of evacuated bowels. It could have been his first battlefield all over again. Looking up at the constant deluge of blood still pouring down, he saw bodies cable-tied to the railings all the way up the stairwell. Their arteries had all been opened, too. Silas had painted the interior of the building red.

  Du Bois could feel the mass murderer’s blood-screen interacting with his own like an itch, a cold war being fought at a molecular level as du Bois attempted to find Silas, and Silas sought to hide.

  Where do we start? Grace asked in his mind.

  ‘Malcolm, is that you?’ The voice came from above, echoing down the blood-soaked stairwell. The accent was still there, but Silas’s voice was deeper now. It had a rasp to it, as though he’d damaged it somehow in the last two hundred years or so.

  Grace glanced over at du Bois and then looked straight back up the stairwell, trying to catch a glimpse of the speaker. Du Bois indicated that she should start moving up the stairs. She nodded and began climbing, both weapons at the ready. Du Bois followed.

  ‘I was so pleased when I saw you outside. Tell me, who’s the girl? When I consume her, will I find that she hates you as much as the archer did?’

  Du Bois didn’t answer. He just continued moving up the stairs, weapon at the ready, trying to use all his augmented capabilities to pinpoint where the sound of the voice was coming from.

  ‘I don’t really understand why you’re here. Nobody cared about these people before I started killing them.’

  They reached the second floor, and suddenly something was falling down the stairwell towards them. Both of them tensed, but neither fired. The armed-response-officer’s corpse plummeted past them, bouncing off the guard rails and the bodies strapped to them. It hit the concrete at the base of the stairs with a wet thump and a splash of blood. Du Bois glanced down. Grace continued looking up the stairwell, watching for movement. Du Bois noticed that the pins and spoons were missing from several of the stun grenades on the police officer’s body.

  ‘Grenade!’

  Both du Bois and Grace moved to the wall, crouched down and turned away from the stairwell. Du Bois closed his eyes, but even then the bright phosphorescent light still leaked through his lids. The noise was deafening, like thunder running up and down the stairwell, rattling doors and shaking the bodies tied to the railings. Augmented eyes and ears compensated for the light and the deafening noise almost immediately. Du Bois couldn’t quite understand the play. He ran the last few moments back in his head. Then he realised the filtering effect on his hearing had allowed him to pick up something interesting, even under all that noise: glass breaking somewhere above him.

  He ran past a startled Grace and pushed his way through one of the doors into a corridor with flats on either side. He heard the throaty roar of a powerful engine starting up. The Mercedes Sprinter. He reached the window at the end of the corridor, which looked out over the same side of the building where the unusual van had been. Grace was right behind him. He smashed the window and leaned out – the van was moving beneath him now. He aimed the .45 and started firing it rapidly, expecting to be taken out by an overzealous police marksman at any moment. The bullets sparked off the top of the van as it sped across the grass. The van was armoured. The slide flew back on the .45, its magazine empty.

  ‘Coming through!’

  Du Bois stepped back and away from the window as Grace hurtled past him and smashed through the remaining glass, dropping forty feet to the ground below. He heard her cry out in pain as she landed on the grass, but she rolled and came up firing short bursts from each of the converted, fully automatic Berettas. She was limping after the van as she fired, but the bullets were sparking off the speeding vehicle’s armour.

  Du Bois steeled himself and then leaped out of the window. While he was in mid-air the police woke up and started firing at the van as well. They were pouring bullets onto the vehicle, but none of the rounds penetrated the armoured body.

  Du Bois hit the ground hard, a jarring impact that rattled his teeth and momentarily knocked the air out of him. He tried to roll but felt something give in his leg. Pain shot up the right side of his body. Grace dived and rolled back to her feet, moving close to the wall as rounds fired by the police chewed up the ground where she’d been standing a moment before. Du Bois was trying to get to his feet as his systems attempted to heal whatever the fall had done to his leg. A solid impact to his right side spun him around even as his clothes hardened sufficiently to stop the bullet penetrating.

  He managed to stagger over to the wall next to Grace, who was busy reloading both of her pistols. Du Bois ejected the magazine on his .45, pocketed it and replaced it with a new one, working the slide to chamber the first round.

  ‘I’m ready to start shooting police officers now,’ Grace muttered through gritted teeth.

  ‘Maybe not with so many cameras here,’ du Bois suggested, though he agreed with the sentiment. There was shouting from the police lines, more gunfire, screams from the crowd, then a crashing noise and the unmistakable sound of panic, followed by the cries of the injured.

  Du Bois’ leg had repaired itself by now, and he risked running across the grass towards the Range Rover. Grace followed. She wasn’t limping anymore either. The police didn’t fire on them. They had other things to worry about – the Sprinter van had just crashed into the police cordon. The power of its obviously modified engine and the weight of the vehicle had sent a police van and a police car hurtling backwards into the assembled crowd.

  Du Bois watched the Sprinter heading east along Druids Lane towards Alcester Road South.

  ‘Security services. Don’t fire!’ du Bois shouted as he and Grace sprinted for their respective vehicles. At the same time he was requesting a direct satellite feed to be downloaded straight to his head from Control.

  By the time du Bois reached the Range Rover, hauled the door open and scrambled in, the van was already out of sight. Grace sped by him on her Triumph Speed Triple, accelerating so hard that
the front wheel had come off the ground. She was pushing her weight forwards, wrestling the bike back down.

  Grace was also receiving the satellite feed direct from Control, which amounted to grainy footage of the Sprinter as it cut across the roundabout at the junction with Alcester Road South. It looked like the van had collided with a number of vehicles and just kept going.

  Grace rode at speed through a tangled warren of streets, trying to cut ahead of the Sprinter, leaning low into the corners.

  The Mercedes van drove through the rest of the traffic on the road as if it wasn’t there, the vehicle’s weight and power easily shunting the other vehicles out of the way as it used the heavy-duty winch mounted on the front like a battering ram.

  Grace wove in and out of the carnage the van was leaving in its wake as it headed north, back towards the city centre. She slewed the bike onto one of the streets that ran alongside Alcester Road South, pulled parallel with the van and glanced over the grassy bank towards it. The cab’s windscreen and windows were tinted.

  Grace didn’t notice the hatch in the van’s side window drop open until she saw the muzzle flash from the three-round burst and felt the impact on her helmet, shoulder and side. Her clothes and helmet hardened, but she wobbled. Realising she was losing it, she tried to steer the bike towards the grass verge. Grace and the bike parted company. The bike slid across the grass. Grace did a half-tumble and landed high on her back, then followed her bike across the wet grass.

  Du Bois mounted the pavement as he cut the wrong way across the roundabout. Both sides of the road were lined with dented or wrecked cars. He realised that unless he took a similarly blasé approach to human life, there was no way he was going to catch up with the van.

  He saw Grace go down on the satellite feed. She would be fine unless the bullets being fired at her had a nanite payload.

  ‘Do you need picking up?’ he asked as the first flashing blue lights appeared behind him and he heard sirens.