A Quantum Mythology

by Gavin G. Smith

  ‘He was wasting everyone’s time.’ St. John’s human body looked very nondescript – average build, average features, average haircut.

  ‘But now there’s not a lot of his brain left, and we don’t have the facilities to regrow it. We’ve wasted a body someone else could have inhabited.’

  St. John’s leadership challenge had been subtle. Benedict/Scab could tell by his first mate’s body language that he knew he’d been discovered.

  ‘I was going to kill him with a fork,’ Benedict/Scab said, holding one up. ‘Nobody gets killed by a fork these days.’

  When St. John started to raise the tumbler pistol, Benedict/Scab was already moving. He grabbed the wrist of the hand holding the gun, then neunonically hacked the slow bullets. He rammed the fork into St. John’s eye. His first mate screamed as vitreous humour and blood squirted out of the socket. Benedict/Scab locked up the hand with the pistol in it and then jerked it hard. The compound fracture of the radius and the ulna was violent enough to break through the hardening skin. Benedict/Scab took the tumbler pistol out of St. John’s limp hand, then reached between the first mate’s legs and shot him in the anus. Benedict/Scab stepped back. The reprogrammed slow bullet drilled up into St. John’s stomach cavity and then exploded. The force of the explosion severed the spine and sent legs and torso flying in different directions. The legs slipped off the catwalk and into the filthy dolphin tanks. The torso landed, wetly, on the catwalk. St. John was still alive, blood bubbling out of his mouth.

  ‘You can’t fix that, either,’ Benedict told the torso before he turned to his Lizard second mate. He could never pronounce the lizard’s tribal name, so he just called him Harold. Originally downloaded into a human, Harold had found one of the few Church militia lizards aboard, exorcised the original possessing personality and then re-downloaded himself. Benedict/Scab was so impressed he’d promoted him. The lizard was formerly a tribal warrior who had never quite understood that you weren’t supposed to hunt the talking sentient mammals nowadays. His clothes were made out of dyed human skin and tribal scarring covered his visible scales. ‘You’re first mate now,’ Benedict/Scab told Harold. The lizard just nodded. ‘Get rid of that.’ He kicked at St. John’s still living torso. ‘The next job, we take the security detail alive for possession, and I want some quality control on the souls we’re downloading. No more fantasists.’

  Benedict/Scab returned to his chair. The padding moulded around him and the chair’s AG motor lifted him up into the air. He was looking for the next target. Too many of them were paying ridiculous bribes to the Templar rather than fighting. He had to make an example of the next job. He opened the feed from the external sensors with a thought, then turned the smart-matter walls of C&C into screens and played the view from outside. They were bathed in red light.

  The Templar came out of the red wound into Real Space and the tear closed behind them. The light cruiser was a long, heavily armoured behemoth of a ship. The external Seeder Church religious iconography on the ship’s partially smart-matter hull had been reconfigured by the diseased minds of Scab’s crew. The ship was now truly disturbing to behold. A demon ship.

  The Templar emerged into light, close to a galactic core where space was filled with tightly packed stars clustered around a vast circle of blackness.

  They had timed it perfectly. The luxurious cruise ship, run for high-echelon execs and visiting aristocracy, was approaching the bridge point. The cruise ship’s smart-matter hull was already turning opaque as its carbon reservoirs pumped matter to the ship’s hull, adding a layer of thick armour. Weapon batteries were growing through the hull – cruise ship or not, its passengers demanded a degree of security, which the cruise line had the resources to provide. That was fine. After all, Benedict/Scab wanted to make an example.

  ‘Destroy their weapons, engines and the drive, then close with them and prepare to board,’ Benedict/Scab said as he stood up. Part of the tediousness of commanding such a group of people was that he was expected to lead from the front. ‘Remember what I said – I want combat-augmented flesh for possession, so take down the ship’s private security details with as little mess as possible.’ He was going to try and control the crew a little. Letting them indulge their own appetites was a thing to behold, but this time he wanted to send a message, he wanted an aesthetic for this job. He wondered how much of the cruise ship he could wallpaper with skin.

  Steve the Alchemist had partitioned the pool. About a quarter of it was a plant-choked environment for the serpentine dream dragons. They spent most of their time submerged, coming up only occasionally for air, making ripples, their electrical display sparking across the surface of the water.

  The Alchemist had been hard at work extracting and refining their gland secretions with the help of his custom P-sat, which was equipped with waldos ending in very delicate manipulators. At the moment, however, the dolphin had his head out of the water and was watching various media streams on the pool room’s smart matter walls.

  Vic and Elodie were both sitting on sunloungers on the edge of the pool watching the footage of the attack on the Boredom, a cruise ship operating out of one of the Consortium core worlds.

  ‘He’s hit too close to home,’ Vic muttered. ‘They’ve got to do something now.’

  Because Scab had dropped out of view on the bounty killing scene and his recent exploits weren’t common knowledge, there was speculation that Benedict and Scab were one and the same person. Vic knew that under normal circumstances Scab would track down some of the people doing the speculating and make examples of them.

  ‘It’s just one desperate bid for attention after another,’ Elodie said.

  ‘Daddy issues, anyone?’ Vic said, his mandibles clattering together in his approximation of laughter.

  ‘Oh, hi, Scab,’ Steve said through his P-sat.

  Vic looked around, assuming it was the dolphin’s idea of a joke as he’d picked up nothing from his antennae, but Scab was standing in the entrance to the pool room in his shirtsleeves, suit jacket folded over his arms, staring at the smart-matter screens, shaking.

  Vic released a cloud of pheromones so strongly redolent of the terror he felt at seeing Scab this angry that Elodie glanced over at him, eyebrows raised. Steve sank into his pool. The P-sat sank into the water with him.

  ‘Why?’ Scab managed. Vic didn’t have the courage to speak at the moment. ‘Elite … ? Fleet? The Church?’

  It was a good question. Benedict/Scab had access to an excellent warship and a crew of killers, but his hit-and-run tactics aside, the Templar was no match for a concerted effort from a Consortium, Monarchist or Church naval squadron, and one Elite could have dealt with the problem some time ago. Instead, the Templar mainly had to handle second-rate naval contractors or competent ships of roughly the same size and class. There had been talk of a group of bounty killers going after the Templar, but Vic couldn’t see them getting that many different hunters to work together well enough to take it down.

  ‘They’re trying to draw you out,’ Elodie said.

  Vic was pretty sure Scab was eventually going to lose it and wondered if that would provide him with release. He concentrated and ’faced himself into Talia’s immersion. He figured if he was going to die, he might as well do it there.

  ‘We’re going back to the monastery,’ Scab said through gritted teeth.

  ‘Why?’ Elodie asked. There was no answer. When she turned back he had gone.

  It was a strange place, too small for him even in his six-limbed, compound-eyed human form. It was filled with one-function devices that had to be operated manually. Everything looked either brown or grey, the colour washed out. It was covered with a patina of ash and it smelled worse than Scab after he’d been chain-smoking.

  Vic had given Talia control of an immersion environment, but without neunonics she had to program it the hard way via the voice interface.

  She
was sobbing again, curled up in the hallway of the strange little domicile. In the lounge, a badly rendered facsimile of a human male was sitting in a seat, smoking a cigarette.

  Vic stared down at Talia with concern. She looked up at him through her tear-stained eyes.

  ‘I can’t get the smell of stale cigarettes right,’ she told him.

  ‘Please let me take you somewhere nice?’ Vic begged.

  That just made her sob twice as hard. ‘I … I … I … can’t remember what my mum’s face looks like,’ she finally managed to say.

  Vic knelt down next to her. ‘Let me show you some immersions of nice places, please. This just upsets you.’

  ‘Ask Scab if I can come out. I’ll be good. I promise I won’t hurt myself. I’ll do whatever he wants,’ she begged.

  ‘This really isn’t a good time to be around Scab,’ Vic told her. ‘Even less so than normal.’

  Talia stood and ran up the stairs into a room, slamming the door behind her.

  It was the third time that some incarnation of Scab had killed her. She had awoken in one of the Cathedral’s clone vats, and it had taken Churchman some time to calm her down. She wanted to deal with Benedict/Scab and then go straight back to hunting his father. She was furious. Churchman had talked her into doing something else.

  This is better, she thought.

  She was desperate to know how Church security, particularly electronic security, had been so thoroughly breached. She wondered initially if it had been a beyond-black op run by the Church itself to draw Scab out. If that was the case then she was unaware of it, which was unlikely, unless Churchman was somehow unaware of it as well.

  Without any current insight and the trail going dead after Cascade, the Monk had instead turned to chasing down the heretical sect lead, though she knew it could be a red herring.

  The cults tended to revolve around the use of S-tech and breaking the monopoly on bridge technology. Frequently they involved slavish devotion to the Seeders or other entities. Most of the time it was a load of rubbish, but some cults got disturbingly close to the truth.

  The Church militant, aided by a substantial mercenary army, had wiped the majority of the serious and sizeable heretical cults out over a thousand years ago. Those that still existed tended to be small street sects or lone insane individuals. The Church had interviewed a number of the fringe lunatics in the past, seeking insight, and their ramblings were usually a mix of nonsense and, sometimes, surprising accuracy.

  Woodbine Scab had run a street sect on Cyst. The cult had become large enough that the Consortium, with Church support, had put Legion troops down on the ground to suppress it.

  What worried the Monk most about Scab’s connection to a heretical cult was that they’d successfully transplanted a bridge drive, which meant the cult must have been Church once themselves. Ex-Church members always made the most dangerous heretics because their heresy was often the result of contact with S- or L-tech, or remnants of their servitors. Truth and knowledge had driven them insane.

  One of their assets in the Monarchist systems had implied that Scab had somehow managed to break into the Monarchist Citadel. This would have required S- or L-tech, and even then she was quite surprised he was still alive. It happened shortly after the first time she and Benedict tried to contact Scab on Arclight.

  She had managed to find a tiny bit of AV footage from a sensor outside the Polyhedron Club on Arclight, where she and Benedict had met Scab. The footage was grainy, indistinct, as if suffering from interference. It showed an old-looking baseline human male, waiting. The Monk zoomed in on the man’s face and cleaned up the image. There was something wrong with the wrinkles on his head. She ran the image through several intelligent filters and was surprised by what she saw. She’d seen this sort of thing before, but not for a long time. Like everything in Known Space, S- and L-tech had become devalued. This, however, was godsware, a Marduk implant.

  The man looked shipless and homeless – what the Consortium considered ‘excess biomass’. She ran a search for him and came up with nothing. This was unusual in itself – there was something on everyone if you knew where to look or had debt relief to spend. She used an AI program to set up a false persona as a mid-level bounty killer and had that persona spread debt relief around Arclight.

  She finally found a couple of ships’ crewmembers who had been approached by the same man. From different ships, both provided AV data to prove it was the man she was looking for. He’d been looking to work passage to the New Coventry system. Both had refused him. Which meant that unless someone else had let him work passage and refused her fake bounty killer’s debt relief – and she couldn’t think of a reason why anyone would do that – then the man was still on Arclight. The Marduk implant, however, was not.

  The later AV footage showed him with bloodied bandages around his head. He also looked more ill than he had in the original footage, as if he’d been ravaged by a virus and not completely healed yet. The Monk knew Scab had virus-bombed the habitat just after he’d killed the blank, but the virus he used was quite potent. If the man’s surgical scars hadn’t healed, it was unlikely that his nano-screen and internal systems could have fought off a virus as potent as the one Scab had used. Looking diseased was one of the reasons why he’d been refused a berth. She was also surprised that Scab hadn’t killed him, mainly because he killed everyone else.

  She checked on the New Coventry system. During its industrial heyday, the system had been the home of one of the three heretical cults capable of modifying, though not creating, bridge technology, until that cult had supposedly been destroyed by the Church militant.

  The Monk piloted the modified bridge-capable long-range Trident fighter through the sprawling superstructure of the unregulated habitat. She wove in and out of the various tethered domiciles and docked ships, making for the centre of the habitat – a hollowed-out asteroid ’sect Hive run by the Queen’s Cartel. The last time she’d been there, Scab had made his escape by hacking the habitat’s defences, and those of the surrounding ships, to fire on the Church frigate she’d been aboard. It had not endeared the Church to the criminal syndicate that ran Arclight and the matter-mining refinery and S-tech prospecting operations in the system. That said, it didn’t pay to ignore a polite request from the Church if you enjoyed the benefits of bridge technology.

  She’d run facial-recognition searches through all the available sensor feeds on Arclight that she could buy access to but had found nothing. That was okay – it simply meant she would have to do it the old-fashioned way, by looking. She was used to that.

  The Monk paid for a secure berth for the fighter and was met by a representative of the Queen’s Cartel. She wasn’t sure that the word dapper should apply to a worker ’sect, but it was apropos for this one. He was courteous but cold. Whether this was just his nature, or the result of the Cartel’s displeasure at the Church’s last visit, she wasn’t terribly sure. She was provided with a guide: a spindly – the result of living in a zero-G environment – lizard hatchling of indeterminate gender with soft-tech compound insect eye implants. Her guide was called Fruitfly. She asked him/her where the shipless could be found in a place like Arclight, somewhere beyond the view of the sensors.

  They located him in the third place they looked, in the cargo bay of a gutted old bulk hauler. Left to rot decades, if not centuries, before the tethered detritus of the habitat stretching out from its asteroid core had effectively grown over it. Someone had hooked up rudimentary life support, and a worn concertina umbilical that was not for the fainthearted connected it to the rest of the habitat. It was cold, the atmosphere thin and not properly scrubbed, and nothing could remove the stench of the unwashed, supposedly excess uplifts who called the place home. The zero-G environment allowed them to adhere shelters and ragged sleeping cocoons to all four of the cargo bay’s walls. They’d also added a mezzanine cube structure, constructed from salvaged m
aterial, to create more living space. It never ceased to amaze the Monk that even though the uplifted races could create habitats like Arclight and giant spaceships, people were forced to live this way.

  The man still looked diseased, partially consumed, his flesh mottled and necrotised. His neighbours gave him a wide berth, and those closest to him were the most wretched of the unfortunate living down there. He was wearing layers of filthy clothing and an old coat. The ragged wounds on his head, which to the Monk looked self-inflicted, still hadn’t healed and were badly infected. She took one look at him and told Fruitfly that he – or she – could go. The strange spindly lizard child cocked his/her head at the Monk quizzically, then threw himself/herself towards the umbilical.

  The molecular hooks on the Monk’s tabi adhered her to the surface of the cargo bay wall and she knelt down next to the man.

  ‘You don’t look well,’ she said. A number of advertising slogans were growing on his flesh, one of them weakly animated.

  ‘I don’t understand why,’ the man said weakly.

  ‘Why you’re unwell?’ the Monk asked.

  ‘Why I am. I should not exist. I was a vessel. I saw such things, such wonders. Now I am nothing.’

  ‘Who did you give the godsware to?’ she asked. He stared at her blindly. His eyes were filled with cataracts. ‘The eyes – who did you give the eyes to?’

  ‘I have no eyes.’

  ‘But you did. You would have been able to see fields, understand them.’

  ‘I gave them to the harbinger.’

  The Monk stared at the sickly man. Does he mean Scab? she asked herself. Everything they had on Scab suggested that being a street sect leader on Cyst was just a phase he went through. He had shown no interest in religion when he served in the Legions. There was little information regarding his time in the Elite, but certainly since becoming a bounty killer he had, if anything, demonstrated contempt for religion.