A Quantum Mythology

by Gavin G. Smith

  It was a good question, Vic conceded.

  Scab pointed the tumbler pistol at Jonas. Jonas shrank away. The spipod-mounted strobe guns swivelled to aim at Scab, and the arachnid automaton practically plummeted through the web to crouch just above the human killer.

  ‘Don’t make things harder on yourself,’ Scab told Jonas.

  ‘You need to listen to him, spider monkey,’ Vic added. He had straightened up as well. The big ’sect was a little insulted when only one of the strobe guns swivelled to cover him as he drew his triple-barrelled shotgun pistol with his lower-right hand, and both his double-barrelled laser pistols with his upper pair.

  ‘I didn’t do anything,’ Jonas said, absurdly raising four of his hands.

  Scab manually cocked the hammer on the tumbler pistol. It was an affectation, nothing more. The arachnid automaton tensed in its web and the strobe guns’ six barrels started spinning up to speed.

  ‘Oh, wait,’ Scab said. Then he ’faced the virus to Jonas’s systems. It was an expensive Pythian-made sequestration virus that had been extensively modified by Elodie. Jonas’s systems were excellent. He was an illegal cloner and soft-tech augmenter at the top of his game. He could afford excellent defences, both physical – like the airlock, the automaton, the strobe guns – and viral, nanite and electronic. The expense of the modified Pythian software virus effectively outbid Jonas’s electronic defences. In less than a heartbeat, Scab was in control of everything in the cloning facility. Vic still thought his partner/captor was being melodramatic when Scab had the strobe guns swivel to point at Jonas.

  ‘You can’t lie to me,’ Scab told the spider monkey. ‘There are only degrees of suffering now. You decide.’

  Scab ’faced access to the external feed from the clone facility to Vic. The ’sect saw featureless automatons in anachronistic pre-Loss dress walking along the terrace towards the shop, coming from both directions.

  ‘I’m sorry!’ Jonas said.

  ‘No. You got caught,’ Scab said and pulled the trigger. The recoil jerked his arm up as the spinning bullet drilled into Jonas’s head. The spider monkey fell, getting caught up in his own net. Scab ’faced a virus to scramble Jonas’s neunonics, so the spider monkey would have to be cloned from a backup. He sent orders to the systems that would poison the soft-tech vats, kill the cloned bodies – except Steve’s – and destroy any stored minds that were about to be downloaded into the bodies. He then modified the sequestration virus to utterly junk the facility’s systems. There had to be consequences for messing with Scab. Consequences and collateral damage.

  Steve, now in his new dolphin body, was thrashing around in his tank.

  ‘Guys! Guys! Why does it always come down to violence with you people?’

  Vic holstered both laser pistols as Scab made one of the strobe guns scamper over to the insect and leap up at him. Vic caught the heavy weapon. It would be a bit more unwieldy than his own as it didn’t have the miniaturised AG motors to offset its weight. Then Vic ’faced a courier service with the best reputation for speed, security and discretion on the planet. Finally he left instructions with the arachnid automaton to protect Steve and overrode the airlock, popping both doors.

  Even over the sound of the waterfall they could make out the sound of superheated air molecules exploding so rapidly that the noise of one detonation ran into the next. There was a near-constant red glow coming from outside where the exterior strobe gun was firing constantly. The one in the airlock was firing more intermittently as Scab and Vic marched through.

  Outside, the narrow terrace was filled with the burned body parts of the featureless automatons, many of them still glowing neon from their overloaded energy-dissipation grids. Scab sent one of the spipod-mounted strobe guns ahead of him. Almost immediately it was tracking targets and firing rapid bursts of thin red light. Energy-dissipation grids lit up on the remaining automatons, dressing them in neon. One overheated and exploded. Scab kicked another over the stone lip of the terrace and fired into a third, point-blank, with his tumbler pistol.

  Vic walked out behind Scab. His thorax and upper limbs rotated one way, his abdomen and lower limbs another. He started firing the strobe gun, concentrating the beams between two or three of the automatons at a time, overheating their energy-dissipation grids until they blew. A split-screen view from his neunonic targeting systems told him exactly where to place the shots, and he fired all three barrels of the shotgun he was still holding in his lower hands. All three tungsten solid shots hit one of the automatons and pierced its downgraded armour before the explosive charges blew. The automaton’s torso went spinning away from its legs.

  The other spipod-mounted strobe came scuttling out after Vic, spinning on its pintle, firing, covering Vic’s back as more automatons scrambled up the rock face and onto the terrace.

  Scab and Vic had done their homework. Any decent automaton would give even the most augmented bounty killer a run for their money unless they were in full military-spec combat gear. Mr Hat owned a small army of them, but other than his automaton deification fetish, Mr Hat prided himself on doing things by the book. Scab and Vic had been forced to downgrade their capabilities when they came planetside, and similar laws existed for automatons. Even so, Vic hadn’t expected Mr Hat to risk so many of them as, expense aside, the automatons apparently worshipped the diminutive lizard.

  Vic reloaded the shotgun pistol and flicked it closed. He spun his thorax around and fired the shotgun at the chest and head that was chasing after him using its arms as legs.

  An automaton leaped over the lip of the terrace and landed on Scab, ramming him into the rock wall. Scab spat his cigarette into its eyeless face. The automaton grabbed the wrist of the hand holding the tumbler pistol and forced it down. Scab’s metalforma knife appeared in his left hand and he rammed it up through the automaton’s chin. Strands of the smart-metal blade, fed by the small assembler in the hilt, grew through the automaton’s head as it staggered back. His wrist now free, Scab shot his attacker twice in the chest and kicked it away from him. He fired the last two rounds in the tumbler pistol’s cylindrical magazine, then raised his left hand and fired the mini-disc launcher strapped to his forearm. The electromagnetically guided monomolecular discs flew out, cutting into the heads of the automatons and spinning around inside them. It wasn’t enough to stop them, but it would give them pause. He flicked open the tumbler pistol’s cylindrical magazine, slid in new rounds from a speed loader and snapped it shut with a flick of his wrist. He tore his metalforma knife from the head of the automaton as it fell to the ground and kept walking. The strobe guns were firing nearly constantly now. The automatons charging them looked like bright neon ghosts.

  The bikes were surrounded by a number of people, some of them dead from laser fire, others just stunned, concussed or diseased. One of them, a male feline, his fur shaved and dyed in what Vic assumed were gang colours, was moaning and trying to stand. Scab shot him as he walked by, then ordered one of the slaved strobe guns to deliver the coup de grâce to the other still-living would-be bike thieves. They were likely too poor to have clone insurance, Vic thought.

  All the strobe guns were running low on juice now. The automatons had ceased their attack. Vic wasn’t sure if they had destroyed them all, or if Mr Hat had pulled them back because too many of his worshippers were dying. One of the strobe guns stood guard and Vic dropped the one he’d been using. It extended its spipod and scampered across the ground, then leaped up onto the bike. The remaining strobe gun attached itself to Scab’s bike. With a ’faced instruction, the bikes allowed the strobe guns to connect to the universal hardpoint on their roofs, next to the P-sats. The bikes’ miniature fusion reactors started recharging the rotary laser weapons.

  The armour slid back. Vic and Scab lay face down inside the bikes, manoeuvred them around and made for the Great Rift Road’s on-ramp. There were other ways they could have chosen – tunnels that would hav
e taken them to other shuttle stations – but that wasn’t the point of the exercise.

  They hit the road doing speeds in excess of two hundred and fifty miles an hour, weaving in and out of the cradled traffic. Travelling vertically up the road, Vic felt like he was in a rocket.

  The Amuser was on them the moment they left the on-ramp. Accurate fire from the oddly shaped ship’s short-range anti-personnel weaponry lit them up. Vic was impressed at Mr Hat’s pull, or perhaps his employer’s influence. Probably the latter. The authorities had allowed the bounty killer to bring his ship not only into the atmosphere, but into the road system. Vic was just pleased that it looked as if the lizard wasn’t permitted to use any of his heavy ordnance. Either that or he wanted them alive. That also made sense. They were the only link to Talia, after all, and it would explain why the automatons had appeared to go easy on them.

  Assault-cannon fire chipped away at the bike. New armour was being regrown, but the carbon reservoirs were quite limited on a vehicle this size. The cannon fire sounded like someone beating on the bodyglove with jackhammers, every impact shaking the bike, the effects worsened because they were moving so quickly.

  Strobe fire lit up the bike’s energy grid, making it glow brightly, the speed of its movement leaving fractal lines of light behind it as it wove in and out of the vertical traffic. The Amuser’s odd, flattened-octopus shape kept pace with them, pouring down constant fire. At the same time, the bike’s electronic defences were fighting off hacks from Mr Hat as he tried to control their systems.

  The strobe guns and the P-sats’ lasers were firing constantly. There was no point firing at the Amuser; the strobe guns wouldn’t even score it – ships were just too heavily armoured. Instead they were using the lasers as point-defence weapons against the assault-cannon fire. The lasers drew red lines to the incoming rounds, trying to take the pressure off the bikes’ armour. They were, however, trying to intercept electromagnetically driven hypersonic rounds over short range, with mixed results.

  Vic rode under an ore carrier and braked hard to match its speed. Scab joined him moments later. The Amuser moved up and over, then down and under the ore carrier, trying to get an angle of fire, but couldn’t.

  ‘So we just stay here, right?’ Vic asked over the ’face link, hopefully.

  ‘Sure,’ Scab said. It was one of the most reasonable things Vic could ever remember his partner saying. They cruised along vertically at a hundred miles an hour, the bikes’ armour re-growing from the badly depleted carbon reservoirs, the strobe guns and energy-dissipation grids cooling.

  Then Vic saw them: the eyeless automatons crawling hand-over-hand on the ore hauler like insects, from above and below. Vic gunned the bike, feeding targeting solutions from his neunonics to the strobe gun as both he and Scab accelerated. The strobe guns spun in their mounts, firing rapid burst after rapid burst as the automatons leaped for them. They targeted the automatons closest to the bikes first, pouring fire into them at close range. The automatons turned neon, leaving fractal patterns of light in the air as they leaped and fell towards the bikes. Their energy-dissipation grids overheated and they exploded in mid-air. The explosions buffeted the bikes, and gyroscopes fought to keep them upright as they wobbled in the blast.

  One of the automatons hit Vic’s bike before exploding and the bike skidded. Suddenly it was on its side, spinning. Vic was losing momentum and starting to fall away from the road as the three bubble wheels spun, trying to get traction with the vertical roadway.

  Scab slewed his bike left and right as the automatons leaped for him. Those that didn’t explode in the sustained fire from the rotary strobe gun went tumbling into the rift below. He cut the bike hard to the right, causing other drivers to brake and swerve.

  The wheels caught and Vic was upright again. He accelerated hard. The strobe gun was still firing, hitting automatons and other traffic alike. As he shot out from under the ore crawler, the automatons leaped for him, some missing, some hitting the road to be run over, others falling, bouncing off other traffic on the way down. They tried chasing both bikes, leaping from vehicle to vehicle, and they were fast, but not nearly fast enough to keep up. Vic was vaguely aware of the fight having caused a crash below him. Multiple vehicles smashed into each other, some of them spinning out into the air before gravity pulled them back down into the rift. One or two of the lighter, faster vehicles flew as far as the waterfall, only to be yanked downwards by billions of tonnes of water. Whomever Hat’s employer was, he must have a lot of influence to keep the traffic authorities out of this mess.

  As soon as they emerged from under the ore hauler, the Amuser resumed its attack. Vic tasked the strobe gun and the P-sat’s laser to intercept the incoming assault-cannon fire, again with varying degrees of success. The cannon hits battered the bike around on the road, making it difficult to control. He could feel the heat from the overloading energy-dissipation grid even through the armour and insulating padding. He looked for another large vehicle to take cover under. Then he saw more of the automatons coming from above, leaping from vehicle to vehicle.

  ‘Give me a break,’ Vic muttered.

  Mr Hat was receiving sensor feed from the Amuser as well as all the ship’s active weapons systems and all his automatons. He could also see the ensuing chaos on the vertical Great Rift Road through the circular webbed window in the smart matter of the ship’s gothic Command and Control centre. He was on his throne-like seat atop the extruded column that dominated the chamber. Mr Hat did not like the way things were going. He was losing far too many of his automatons. This was a wasteful way to treat them – ridiculous expense account aside, he was invested in them. He watched as they leaped from vehicle to vehicle, always heading downwards as the traffic was coming up. They landed on the vehicles with sufficient force to significantly dent bodywork.

  Then he felt something press against the side of his face.

  ‘The load in this needler is designed specifically to pull its way through your armoured skin. The neurotoxin will overcome your internal defences and you will die painfully.’ As the female spoke, Mr Hat received warning messages that his neunonics were being hacked, successfully. ‘You’ll see the virus we uploaded into you. It will hide in your personality upload and aggressively pursue your backups. Maybe your insurance company will catch it, but me hacking your neunonics should be proof enough that it’s a serious bit of code. I’m telling you this to try and stop you from doing something really stupid in response to my presence. I’m assuming your automatons are programmed for martyrdom if anything happens to you, but bear in mind that I just want to talk.’

  ‘You have my attention, Miss Negrinotti,’ Mr Hat told the feline. He was less than happy, and more than a little surprised, that both his and the Amuser’s defences had been circumvented. He was, however, also intrigued to hear what she had to say. She looked a mess – what little was left of her fur was falling out in charred clumps. Whatever she’d been wearing – it looked like a lightweight spacesuit – had fused with her burned skin. She was obviously in agony and only being kept upright by her internal medical systems and an awful lot of drugs.

  The automaton hit the road just in front of Vic. He braked hard, sliding under a heavy-cargo vehicle. The automaton bounced off the cargo vehicle and tumbled down into the rift. Vic braked and let the cargo vehicle pass over him before accelerating and steering around it. There were seven more automatons above, all making towards him. The strobe started firing again, trying to engage them all. Three of them leaped for him. Vic disengaged the electromagnetic locks on the bike’s bubble wheels and the road pushed the bike away from it. The bike started plummeting down into the rift, wheels spinning. Two of the automatons fell past. Something heavy hit the bike in mid-air and Vic tasked the P-sat to fire at whatever was on the bike. Then he used the AG motor on the P-sat to try and guide the free-fall. The AG motor pushed the bike back towards the road and Vic reengaged the electromagnetic
locks on the wheels. Vehicles seeing the bike falling towards them tried desperately to get out of its way, causing more collisions. More vehicles tumbled off the vertical road.

  There was a shrieking noise as the automaton riding the falling bike tore the armour open. Vic hacked the bike’s padding so he could move as the automaton reached for him. He spun his head around a hundred and eighty degrees to face the featureless automaton and reached under his thorax. He managed to draw his triple-barrelled shotgun pistol and push it between his body and the automaton’s. The automaton grabbed Vic’s head and started to squeeze. Vic fired all three barrels. The solid rounds penetrated the automaton’s body and exploded, and it went spinning into the Great Rift. The AG motor managed to guide the bike back onto the road and the wheels hit the surface hard. Without the padding, all Vic’s weight came down on his arm, which broke despite the armour and the reinforcement from his hard-tech augments. The bike spun downwards and across the road on its side. It bounced off a personal shuttle vehicle. Then a cargo vehicle ran over it. The bike’s armour buckled but held up, crushing the body of the vehicle around Vic. Finally the bubble wheels got purchase and the bike righted itself, but it continued skidding as the wheels tried to get traction. He was heading towards another ore hauler. Finally the wheels caught, and a panicked, partially crushed Vic accelerated away from the oncoming traffic.

  It was over now, Vic realised. With the bike’s armour torn open, all Mr Hat had to do was fire on him. Above him he could see more of the automatons leaping towards him.

  ‘I suspect the first thing we should do is call off the attack. I think the boys have had enough,’ Elodie said.

  ‘Agreed,’ Mr Hat said, and with a thought he had the automatons cease what they were doing and stay where they were. He was aware of Scab having reached the lip of the Great Rift Road. ‘However, you must tell me how you gained entry to the Amuser. You really shouldn’t have been able to do that. I’m assuming EVA? Whilst I was docked at the Tricorn?’