A Quantum Mythology

by Gavin G. Smith

  The garage did maintenance on the city’s black cabs.

  There was an empty space in the cramped environs of the garage big enough for a van. The mechanics were all underneath the platform lifts. The lifts had been lowered onto them, crushing them. Du Bois looked down at the mechanics. In many ways they were little people to him, unimportant, but all they’d been doing was trying to make a living, to look after themselves and their families. He found that he didn’t feel angry, just very sad.

  His blood-screen finished analysing a residue of something remaining in the garage. He turned slowly to look at Grace, who did look angry.

  ‘How can they not know where it is?’ Grace demanded. ‘Even if they’ve lost it, they should be able to pick up its energy signature from orbit.’

  They had found trace nanites that could only have come from the Red Chalice.

  ‘He’s here,’ du Bois said. They’d called the murders in to the police and were standing in a nearby alleyway close to where the Range Rover was parked. Both of them were leaning against the wall, smoking.

  Grace nodded. ‘I know,’ she said quietly. Around the corner they could see the glow of the flashing blue lights, hear the occasional siren and the raised voices of the police.

  Du Bois was mentally checking the various dead letter email accounts that he used around the world. It was for something to do more than anything else. He knew they were close, but he couldn’t see how to make the leap to actually finding Silas.

  ‘What are we going to do?’ Grace asked.

  ‘We’re going to find this bastard and kill him,’ du Bois said.

  ‘And if he has the Red Chalice … ?’

  Then du Bois found the anonymous email. He assimilated its contents, double- and triple-checked the information. He tried tracing it, but it had been occulted so effectively that it might as well have just blinked into existence in his protected account. He checked it for subtle viruses and found nothing. He shared its contents with Grace. Grace looked over at him.

  ‘Do we tell Control?’ she asked.

  ‘They either know already or don’t care,’ du Bois said. He walked to the Range Rover, unlocking it with a thought. He opened the tailgate and unlocked the concealed weapons locker.

  ‘What do you want?’ du Bois asked Grace.

  The Fazeley Street Gasworks had been touched by the gentrification of the Digbeth area. The huge red-brick Georgian edifice on the banks of the Grand Union Canal had been renovated and turned into a conference centre, complete with an upmarket café. The two brick outbuildings attached to the gasworks had been left to rot, however. Their walls were crumbling, and the wrought-iron arches which held up what was left of the roof looked extensively rusted. Du Bois and Grace entered stealthily through holes in the wall.

  Du Bois had the folding stock of his .45 calibre Heckler & Koch UMP against his shoulder as he checked his surroundings. He had attached the M320 grenade-launcher to the mounting rail beneath the SMG’s barrel and loaded his Accurised .45 pistol with his only magazine of nanite-tipped bullets. He knew that Grace had done the same with one of her Berettas. She had du Bois’ M1014 semi-automatic Benelli shotgun at the ready.

  The outbuilding was an old retort house where coal had once been heated to produce gas. They skirted piles of rubble, their weapons twitching up and down, left and right, barrels following their line of sight. The retort house felt empty and looked undisturbed. They could hear the sound of cars on Fazeley Street, which ran parallel with the canal on the other side of the gas works, and there were smokers chatting outside the conference facilities. It looked like a very normal day, in a very normal world. Even if all the overheard conversation was about the massacre at Druids Heath, the chase and the subsequent explosion in Victoria Square.

  Du Bois signalled a stop. He was beginning to wonder if he’d been set up as he glanced around the rubble-filled building. Then his blood-screen snagged something.

  Silas launched himself off a rusted iron arch, falling silently through the air and the nanites of du Bois’ and Grace’s blood-screens, his coat-tails flapping out behind him. He clutched a large, stylised, silver-bladed knife in each hand. Du Bois turned, bringing his SMG to bear smoothly, his right hand moving forwards. A hard kick into his shoulder. The popping noise of the underslung grenade-launcher firing. The flechettes from the forty-millimetre grenade barely had time to spread out as they tore through Silas’s flesh, shredding it, creating a cloud of blood behind the killer. Screaming and red, Silas landed on du Bois, knocking him to the ground, slashing wildly with both knives.

  Grace swung around and started firing the Benelli rapidly as she moved towards Silas and du Bois. Silas jerked as the first cloud of buckshot hit him, then the second round knocked him off du Bois. Grace was shocked when Silas stood up. She continued firing. Liquid red metal was pouring out of his exposed flesh, knitting it together and sealing it. He was glowing with an inner red light. She had fired all eight rounds from the shotgun before the first ejected cartridge hit the ground. Silas turned and ran. In one smooth motion, Grace let the shotgun drop on its sling and drew the Berretta with the nanite-tipped bullets from her left-shoulder holster. She held the weapon two-handed, for accuracy, and fired. Silas dived into a pile of rubble. The shot missed. She holstered the pistol and drew the other Beretta, which contained conventional rounds in its magazine, with her left hand. She backed towards du Bois, looking all around for Silas while reloading the shotgun’s tubular magazine with her right hand.

  ‘Malcolm?’

  ‘Christ!’ Du Bois’ flesh looked in flux. As soon as his wounds healed they reopened as the nanites Silas had coated his blades with warred with du Bois’ own defences.

  Grace opened her mouth to say something, but instead spat blood all over du Bois. The tip of the blade pierced her chest as Silas grew out of the earth behind her. She dropped the shotgun cartridge she’d been trying to load into the Benelli. Silas opened his mouth to say something and Grace elbowed him in the face. Silas staggered back, more from surprise than anything else, and Grace back-kicked him with enough force to send him flying through the air. She continued turning, firing the Berretta with the conventional rounds at Silas. There was a little glint of red metal after each round hit. Du Bois managed to roll to his knees and bring up the UMP, firing rapid, short bursts at Silas. Grace drew the other Berretta and fired it once, but Silas was sucked into the earth again and her second nanite-tipped round missed. She collapsed into the dirt, dropping the conventionally loaded Beretta. She managed to reach behind and awkwardly pull the knife out of her back, crying out in pain, blood spraying from the wound. She felt the nanites from Silas’s blades attacking her defences, trying to consume her own nanites and kill her. Sweat beaded her skin, a sensation she hadn’t felt in years, as her body became a battlefield. Grace dropped Silas’s knife. She didn’t see the fingers that wrapped themselves around its hilt and pulled the weapon into the earth. Du Bois staggered to his feet, changed magazines on his UMP while standing over her.

  Then the screaming started. It wasn’t audible. Instead it tore through their heads. Blood filled their eyes and ran from their ears and noses. Du Bois staggered but managed to remain on his feet. Grace’s hands went to her ears, though she was still holding one of her pistols in her right hand. It felt as if something was tearing them apart at some fundamental level. Nausea threatened to overwhelm them. Insects made from shards of razor-sharp glass were eating their way out of their guts. Amongst the screaming they could hear horrific, discordant music, and the air in front of them was squirming as if it was alive. They felt more than heard the howls of agony coming from people outside the retort house.

  Silas grew out of earth next to them, holding his knives crossed over his chest. He was weeping tears of blood. More blood ran from his nose and ears.

  Du Bois staggered away from Silas, firing short burst after short burst from his SMG into the murd
erer.

  ‘Isn’t it beautiful?’ Silas said, barely staggering as round after round hit him.

  ‘You have to keep him occupied,’ Grace heard du Bois say in her mind. Her defences had just about won the battle against Silas’s blade-delivered nanites and she could almost move through the pain and nausea. She raised her Beretta and fired twice. One of the nanite-tipped rounds caught Silas in the leg, the other in the hip. He barely registered them, but then nanites in the hollow points immediately started to attack his systems. Silas kicked the Beretta out of Grace’s hand, shattering the weapon and every bone in her hand. She managed to grab the shotgun’s pistol grip somewhat awkwardly with her left hand. She jammed the shotgun barrel up into Silas’s stomach as he reached for her and fired again, and again. The nearly .70 calibre solid shot blew chunks of his flesh out through his back, but he reached through the muzzle flashes and grabbed the barrel of the weapon. Grace let go of the shotgun, drew the knuckleduster-hilted fighting knife from under her right shoulder and cut the sling that connected her to the shotgun as Silas yanked it towards himself. Grace kicked off backwards in a one-handed flip. She barely felt the pain of putting all her weight, for a moment, on her still rapidly healing right hand. As she flipped she grabbed the conventionally loaded Beretta and came to her feet with the gun in her right hand and the fighting knife in her left. Even through the pain and nausea she was wondering what the fuck du Bois was doing.

  Du Bois sank to his knees, praying to a god he knew didn’t exist. He grabbed the tanto from its sheath and cut down the artery on his wrist. He was finding it difficult to concentrate through the screaming in his head and the pain, which he heard and felt at some level more fundamental than the physical. He managed to force his body to increase the flow to the artery, the pace of his heartbeat picking up as he started to spray blood in pulses onto the dirt. It was a quick, dirty, nasty matter-hack. He told the nanites coursing through his blood to do one simple thing. He told them to do it over and over again. It became part of his prayer. An invocation.

  Grace backed away rapidly from Silas, firing burst after burst from the fully automatic Beretta. Silas stalked after her, the wounds healing almost as quickly as the bullets hit him. His flesh looked like a cascade of molten metal, a bizarre, living, internal lava flow. The slide locked back on the Beretta – the extended magazine was empty. Silas swung the Benelli shotgun that he was still holding by the barrel. The weapon’s pistol grip caught Grace in the side of her head with enough force to knock her off her feet. She hit the ground, hard. Silas dropped the shotgun. Grace’s vision was blurred – there was more than one Silas reaching for her, and it hurt too much to focus. Despite the screaming that tore through her mind she was aware of the earth moving. The piles of rubble became landslides.

  Du Bois was wasting away. So much of his vitality, so much of his constituent matter, was spurting in weakening crimson arcs onto the dirt in the retort house. It was working, though. He could feel it moving in the dirt beneath him, the dirt that had been its womb. It had worked because du Bois’ blood incantation had been an order, a summoning, rather than an attack. It was growing through the dirt. It was made of brass, wood and glass bell-jar-like protrusions, displaying a design ethos from an earlier time, showing the insane but skilled craftsmanship of its creator. The bell jars contained slide-mounted slices of brain, an unintentional mockery of circuit boards, stemming from Silas’s failure to understand the world into which he had been freed. The transmitters looked like Tesla coils. The body was that of a mechanical, armoured brass scorpion, presumably to protect the transmitter. Silas’s signature design.

  Du Bois stopped bleeding into the earth with a thought. The brass scorpion took a step towards him. It was easily the size of the Range Rover. Brass pincers snapped together as a sting-tipped tail curved over its back. Weakly Du Bois reached for his UMP. He pushed open the grenade-launcher, ejecting the spent flechette grenade as the scorpion’s sting arced down towards him.

  Grace was aware that something had risen from the earth behind her. She kicked up from the ground. Her motorcycle boot caught Silas in the face as he reached for her. The blow, with augmented leg muscles behind it, was strong enough to powder even reinforced bone. Silas staggered back as his ‘demons’ raced to rebuild the front of his skull. Grace kicked out at Silas’s knee and broke it. He staggered again but somehow didn’t go down, balancing on one leg. Grace slashed at his face with her fighting knife, opening the flesh down to the still re-forming bone. She slashed again and again. Each time the wound closed as quickly as she made it. Her own systems appeared to have just about beaten the invading nanites. The knife wound in her chest had closed, but she was still weak.

  The sting caught du Bois in the upper chest and drove straight through and out at the small of his back, destroying his right lung, stomach and one kidney, but missing his spine. The sting injected its nanite venom into him on its way through. Du Bois’ head shot back and he vomited what little blood he had left as he cried out. The scorpion lifted him up off the ground with its tail, du Bois still howling in pain, impaled on its sting. The tail moved him towards one of the pincers, which reached for his head. It started to get dark. Behind the scorpion, du Bois could see the air blackening and squirming like multiplying bacteria. Cracks appeared in the bricks, stress fractures expanding along the wall, the result of the matter of parts of the wall simply ceasing to exist. Through the pain du Bois still, somehow, had the presence of mind to be afraid. He managed to drop the forty-millimetre high-explosive armour-piercing grenade into the open breech of the underslung grenade-launcher and shut the weapon.

  Grace skipped up onto her feet. She threw the empty Beretta towards the wreckage of her other pistol and drew the other fighting knife. Silas staggered towards her, slashing at her face. She parried with the knife in her left hand, punched Silas in the face with the knuckledusters on the hilt of the right-hand knife, and slashed him with the blade of the same weapon. She kicked him in the knee again, hearing something crack. Brought her leg up and side-kicked him. Grace cut at his face, he parried, she slashed repeatedly at the arm wielding the parrying knife before going after his face with both blades, cutting it again and again, keeping blood pouring into his eyes regardless of how quickly he healed. She felt herself getting weaker. She saw her skin necrotising. It started to flake away, to be sucked into something horrible behind her. Silas was laughing.

  Du Bois was watching himself rot, his desiccated flesh being sucked towards the squirming black space behind the scorpion. It had been called by the slices of the minds in the bell jars, which were transmitting the worst images imagined by the city’s sickest minds. Du Bois managed to weakly aim the grenade-launcher at the bell jars on the scorpion’s back. He squeezed the trigger. The scorpion bucked under the impact of the grenade as it pierced its armour. Then the grenade exploded inside the scorpion, damaging the jars with their slices of brain and the tesla coils. The scorpion flicked its tail instinctively and du Bois flew through the air.

  The concussion wave from the explosion knocked Grace forward into Silas. She head-butted his nose, slashed at his face with both blades and plunged them into his chest. Then she let go and ran.

  Du Bois hit the wall and slid down it. He was surprised that he was still, somehow, able to function. His own nanites were just about holding their own against the scorpion’s nanite venom, though his flesh was bubbling and writhing. He managed to draw his Accurised .45 and aim it at the scorpion as it turned towards him. The writhing blackness consumed the wall and everything beyond it like rapidly replicating hungry maggots.

  Grace threw herself to the ground and grabbed at the remains of the Beretta Silas had shattered. She yanked the magazine from what was left of the pistol’s grip, grabbed the other Beretta she’d thrown down earlier, ejected the empty magazine and slid in the magazine filled with the nanite-tipped bullets. She spun around. Silas was almost upon her.

  ‘Put all th
e nanite rounds into the Scorpion,’ she heard du Bois’ weak voice beg her in her head. She had a moment to take in the scene – the brass scorpion, the squirming, consuming absence of light behind it, du Bois weakly trying to lift his arm.

  He managed to raise his .45 and squeeze the trigger. He fired again, and again, until the slide came back empty and the pistol was just making clicking noises. The nanite-filled hollow points exploded against the scorpion’s armour and began eating.

  Grace put two rounds into Silas, then shifted aim and put the remaining nine rounds into the scorpion.

  ‘No!’ Silas reached down for Grace. Long fingers wrapped around her neck and yanked her up into the air.

  Du Bois tried to stand but collapsed to the ground.

  Silas rammed his remaining knife into Grace’s guts, trying to push the blade up into her chest cavity.

  Du Bois pawed weakly at his UMP, which was still hanging off its sling.

  Grace cried out in agony. It was a barely conscious action: she grabbed at the two knives she’d left sticking in Silas and wrenched them out. She rammed the right-hand blade into his mouth, breaking teeth, the point of the nine-inch blade exploding out through the back of his skull. The left-hand blade she stabbed into the arm holding her. Silas staggered back, dropping Grace into a pool of her own viscera. He tried to howl out of a mouth filled with tempered steel, clawing at the hilt.

  The black squirming thing was gone. Some of the wall adjoining the conference centre next door collapsed but there was little rubble – parts of the two buildings had simply been consumed. The scorpion collapsed to the ground. It looked as if it was melting as the nanites ate at it, converting its matter at a molecular level into more nanites, which further consumed it.

  Silas, still staggering backwards, wrenched the knife out of his bloody mouth, then howled again as he yanked the knife out of his arm.