A Quantum Mythology

by Gavin G. Smith

  To Tangwen’s ears, he almost sounded like a dryw pronouncing a curse. Crom Dhubh dropped the sword and then moved like a striking snake. Wriggling black tendrils extended from his fingers and he rammed them into Germelqart’s head. She could see them moving under the navigator’s skin.

  Kush was moving. He swung his axe at Bress, who was in his way. Bress parried the blow. Tangwen was running. Madawg was looking for an opening. Kush caught the blade of Bress’s sword on one of the blades of his axe and yanked hard, pulling the sword out of Bress’s hand. Bress continued moving forwards, ramming his long-fingered hand with its long, pointed nails into Kush’s chest cavity. Through armour, through hardening skin and bone, his fingers closed around Kush’s beating heart and he tore it out.

  ‘No!’ Tangwen cried and flew at Bress. He backhanded her, powdering the bone in her jaw, sending her spinning through the air. Kush toppled to the muddy rock.

  Madawg reached for the Dark Man’s fallen sword. Crom Dhubh tore the metallic tendrils out of Germelqart’s head and kicked Madawg. The sound of the frail-looking warrior’s ribs breaking echoed through the cavern. Madawg arced up high into the air from the force of the blow, landing in the cold water.

  Germelqart sank to his knees, staring at Kush’s body. The damage was too much for even the newly imbibed magics to overcome.

  Tangwen threw her hatchet from her crouched position. Bress batted it out of the air. When he turned to check on Crom Dhubh, Britha ran him through with her spear. Then she spat in his face.

  ‘At least I looked in your eyes!’ she told him.

  Bress spat blood down his chest as he looked at the haft of the spear sticking out of his body. ‘You have to promise me you’ll kill it,’ he said. It sounded like begging. He sank to his knees. Britha stared at him. She looked down at his left hand, but the bronze rod was gone.

  Tangwen ran past them, leaning down as she ran to grab Bress’s sword from the ground. She swung the sword two-handed at Crom Dhubh’s left arm as the Dark Man was turning to face her. The sword severed his arm. Crom Dhubh stared at her impassively. Tangwen had to resist the overwhelming urge to apologise.

  Guidgen stood on the arm and grabbed the Red Chalice. With some difficulty, he managed to wrench it free of the severed arm’s fingers. Crom Dhubh was still staring at Tangwen. She backed away, colliding with Germelqart.

  ‘We have to go,’ the hunter whispered to him. She was terrified. She had angered a god. Terrible things happened to mortals who dared to anger the gods. She dropped Bress’s sword.

  Guidgen dived into the cold lake with the Red Chalice. Crom Dhubh reached down and picked up his severed arm. Britha was staring at Kush’s body.

  ‘Germelqart! Britha! Please!’ Tangwen pleaded.

  Crom Dhubh held his severed arm to its stump and the black flesh started to knit together. Tangwen glanced around and saw Germelqart. Britha cast one last look at Bress, still coughing blood before turning and diving into the lake. Tangwen ran to the Carthaginian and dragged the navigator into the cold, black waters.

  Crom Dhubh reached down and grabbed the haft of the spear protruding from Bress’s chest. His will crushed the will of the demon in the spear. The head of the weapon re-formed and he slid it out of Bress’s chest without causing much more damage.

  Bress fell forwards onto all fours, spitting blood. Crom Dhubh went to stand on the island’s rocky shore and watched them swim away from him. Eventually Bress managed to stand up and stagger over to join the dark man.

  ‘Where is it?’ Crom Dhubh asked. Bress held up his left arm. The flesh distended and the control rod grew through Bress’s skin. ‘Send the hounds,’ he said, meaning the transformed children, ‘or the giants. Bring back the chalice. Leave the ones they call Germelqart and Britha alive.’

  Bress spat out more blood. ‘You need to decide which one of your machinations you care about most,’ Bress said. ‘Without the chalice, Britha will be consumed by the Muileartach’s spawn. That particular plan of yours will not come to fruition.’

  Crom Dhubh turned to look at Bress. Bress would not meet his eyes.

  ‘If only you knew what a mockery you truly are,’ Crom Dhubh told him. ‘Very well, let them go. It makes no difference to me.’

  Crom Dhubh turned and walked away, leaving Bress standing alone by the edge of the dark waters.

  43

  Close to the Oceanic Pole

  of Inaccessibility, Now

  The images were coming faster now. Cold, murky, dark water. A modern coastal city viewed through the mud. He suspected it was in the UK somewhere. It looked familiar. Something was alive in the mud. Something ancient and—

  He was stalking back and forth in his room. Features contorted, the ends of his fingers covered in blood, turning to look at the wall, except he was the reflection watching himself scream, his throat moving unnaturally as if the cries had a physical presence and was trying to get out. Then he turned away from the wall and picked up the diamond-bladed dive knife from the bed. He sank to his knees. His eyes rolled up into his head. He looked as if he was praying, or speaking in tongues. He brought the knife up to his temple.

  He was standing on a blackened plain. The sky was red.

  Everything was light, and agony.

  Coldness, and nothing.

  Lodup opened his eyes. He was breathing fast and hard, gulping down air. He was on the bed in his room. The lights were flickering, sometimes leaving him in total darkness. His eyes were trying to compensate. Geothermal power and backup fusion reactors meant that this was not supposed to happen.

  The room smelled funky. He had been confined there for two weeks, ever since Germelqart was shot, and had left the room only to be interrogated. Not verbally. He was sedated and given what they called a neural audit. Other than the nurses and a doctor in the medical centre, the only people he’d seen were Yaroslav and Siska. Siska was distant, Yaroslav angry. There was a sense of despair about them that neither had been able to hide, however. It was as if they were just going through the motions. Even Siraja had been strange with him.

  It had been a frightening two weeks. He heard shouting, screams and gunfire more than once. Nobody told him anything, but listening at the door he guessed that the suicides and the number of people going thatch were increasing. He spent most of the time watching junk media on his wall screen and doing what exercise he could, though his body didn’t really appear to need it these days. He had been trying to deaden the fear by numbing his mind. It hadn’t worked.

  There was dried blood on his pillow. He touched it, and then touched his head and his ears. He found more on his temples and in both ears, and on his T-shirt, but no sign of a wound. He assumed that the nano-technology running through his body had repaired any wounds. He half-remembered the sickening crack of a skull being pierced.

  His dive knife was lying on the floor. There was dried blood on the blade and still-wet blood in a pool on the floor around it. He climbed off his bed and got down on all fours to inspect the knife and the blood, his vision still trying to compensate for the flickering light. There was something else there – a clear, viscous liquid. Just a tiny drop of it among the blood, but not mixing with it in any way. Lodup gingerly picked up his dive knife and poked the clear liquid with the diamond tip of the blade. It moved like mercury.

  ‘Siraja?’ Lodup said out loud. There was no answer. Then he realised he was receiving no information at all from the habitat. He tried turning on the media library. Nothing. He appeared to be completely cut off.

  Then he noticed the door. There were bloody fingermarks all over it. It looked as if he’d been clawing at it. He checked his fingers – more dried blood but no wounds. He realised he felt hungry. Then he remembered what happened yesterday when he ordered food. It had appeared crawling with maggots, something that categorically shouldn’t happen when your food was entirely synthetic and assembled at a molec
ular level.

  Lodup realised he wasn’t alone. He turned and threw himself at the bed in shock, but the figure was there behind him as well. Siraja, pointing at him in the flickering light, his draconic maw wide open. Suddenly the noise was deafening. It sounded like a million agonised voices but there was a strange electronic quality to the sound. Lodup saw faces growing through the AI’s skin, all of them talking in a language Lodup had never heard which hurt his head to hear. It was formed of sounds he didn’t think he could make. Then he realised that Siraja wasn’t subjectively in the room with him. He was on the screens, an image of him on each wall as if he was trapped in there. Then the image was gone. He felt as if he could still hear the voices, and the obscene language.

  He actually flinched at the sound of a crack appearing and running all the way around the four walls of his room and his door. The door juddered open a little. Lodup knew that the synthetic diamond-analogue from which the habitat had been grown shouldn’t crack like that. He stood up and moved over to the door and peeked through the small gap. The lights were flickering, a few of them hanging down from the ceiling. Outside, the dormitory plaza looked as if it had been extensively trashed and he saw smears of blood, a lot of it, on the walls and the floor. He couldn’t get much of an angle to see properly, but he was sure there was a body lying on the ground just out of sight.

  He backed away from the door and sat down on his bed. He could feel a strange kind of pressure building in his head and the flickering light was starting to get to him. Judging by what he had seen outside, calling for help wasn’t a good idea. He might be safest in his room, but with no food he wouldn’t last long. He stood up and walked into the shower cubicle/wet room and tried the tap. What came out of it was thick, and black, and viscous, and there was no way he was drinking it. He returned to the bed. He reached for the dive knife.

  He used the knife to jemmy the door open far enough to squeeze through it.

  Outside on the balcony overlooking the plaza, he saw that the damage was extensive. Apparently he’d slept through a very violent riot. A number of the light strips weren’t working, and in the flickering gloom he could see four bodies, three clustered around a fourth – one of Yaroslav’s security detail.

  Lodup listened hard but heard nothing except a steady dripping noise, which he hoped wasn’t blood. The crack in the wall worried him. If the structural integrity of the habitat was failing, there was only so much time left before it was crushed. He didn’t want to be inside if that happened. Then he realised he no longer felt the strong compulsion to stay that he’d experienced before. He’d always known it was some kind of conditioning, and now it was gone. Now he desperately wanted to get out.

  He moved over as quietly as he could to the four bodies. Three were worker clones – he recognised one of them as the clone of someone he’d worked with in the Kwajalein Atoll. It looked like they’d charged the security guard and he’d shot them, then shot himself.

  Lodup pushed the clones aside and, with some difficulty, took the security guard’s integrated webbing and body armour off and put it on. The webbing/body armour held a sidearm, ammunition and non-lethal weapons in various pouches and holsters. Lodup then picked up the suppressed .45 calibre Vector SMG and checked the magazine. Some of the rounds had obviously been fired, so he pocketed the magazine and loaded a fresh one. He checked the underslung M26 Modular Accessory Shotgun System. There was one cartridge missing from the five-round box magazine. He decided he could live with that. It looked like the shotgun was loaded with solid shot. He’d had basic weapons training when he’d joined the Navy, but his knowledge of the sub-machine gun was something that had been programmed into him.

  Lodup moved forwards, SMG at the ready, checking all around him as he went. He would make for the moon pool, and then make his decision.

  They were just standing there, about two hundred of the clones, their backs to him, staring straight ahead. They were in the destroyed plaza of the dormitory block next to Lodup’s. He had to go through the block to get to the moon pool.

  They hadn’t given any indication they knew he was there. He was crouched behind an overturned genetically modified palm tree, staring at their backs, trying to remember to check around him as well. His heart felt like it was trying to beat its way out of his chest. This was the same plaza where he’d seen a number of them congregated around a stone effigy taken from the Kanamwayso. The effigy was still there, but they didn’t appear to be praying to it any more.

  He knew there were other ways to get to the moon pool aside from through this dormitory block, but he wasn’t sure of them. He realised he had become too reliant on Siraja doing things for him.

  He knew that if they turned on him, despite the fact they appeared to be unarmed, he wouldn’t stand a chance. Also, he didn’t relish the idea of shooting a lot of people, whether they were clones or not. He’d noticed a number of bodies scattered around the upper levels of the balcony. More than a few of them were security guards, and they showed the signs of having been subjected to significant violence.

  Lodup swallowed hard and glanced behind him. The way back through to his own dormitory block was still open. He couldn’t sneak past them without being noticed.

  Gun levelled at the clones, he moved back through the jammed-open doors into his dormitory block, then used one of the doors for partial cover. He swallowed hard. He knew he should be sweating, but the modifications had made his body a lot more efficient.

  ‘Hey!’ he hissed. There was no response. He knew he’d been too quiet. ‘Hey!’ he said a bit louder, his heart hammering as he did so. He knew this was a profoundly stupid thing to do. ‘Hey!’ he shouted. His human voice sounded out of place here, a violation, somehow. There was no way they couldn’t have heard him. He had the strong urge to look behind him. He spun round, Vector at the ready, but there was nothing to see. He turned back to the plaza full of drones. They hadn’t moved.

  ‘Shit, shit, shit, shit,’ he muttered quietly to himself. He didn’t feel as if he could move. He had to force himself to take a step over the lip of the hatch back into the plaza. He moved forward as quietly as he could, hating every tiny jingle or rattle his gear made. As quietly as he could, he made his way towards the closest stairway that led up to the balcony levels. He had to pass quite close to one of the clones. On the one hand, he wanted to look away. On the other, he knew he had to cover them. He did it quickly. He felt close to panic. He was breathing hard again, but not from the exertion.

  He went up the stairs quickly and moved along the first balcony. The balconies felt like the safest option – he didn’t want to walk through the clones. He couldn’t bring himself to look down at them, but he could still see them in his peripheral vision, standing stock still, and their presence was a palpable pressure.

  Something about the image wasn’t right. He found his head slowly turning to look at them. Their eyes. They were black. No pupil, iris or sclera. They looked like black pools. Something about the eyes reminded him of the thing that had come from the black brine sump.

  He returned his attention to the balcony. Sal was standing in front of him. She hadn’t been there the moment before, and he hadn’t registered any movement. Her eyes were the same as all the others’. Despite her eyes, it was still quite difficult for him to point the gun at her.

  ‘Sal?’

  She did not reply but she was definitely looking at him. He glanced down into the plaza. Now all the other black-eyed clones were facing the balcony, staring up at him. He swallowed again, tried to control his breathing. He felt rooted to the spot.

  ‘Sal …’ His voice was cracking. ‘Please, I don’t want to hurt you.’

  He forced himself to take a step forward. She did nothing. Then another, and another, until he was standing right in front of her. She still hadn’t done or said anything, but she was watching him intently.

  ‘You’re not Sal.’ Because Sal wa
s dead. Hideo told you she was dead, he thought, and he hadn’t seen her since he was presented with her scalp.

  There was no response. He stepped to one side and moved past her. Nothing happened. He tried to resist the urge to flee. He failed.

  He finally managed to gather the courage to stop running in the corridor that led to the moon pool. He checked behind him, and then remembered to bring the Vector up as he did so. He had felt their eyes on him as he ran along the balcony, down the stairs and out of that dorm block. The other dorm blocks were empty. Although he’d found more dead bodies, more blood and signs of violence, a lot of the clone workforce was still unaccounted for.

  A number of bodies lay on the grass-like carpet of the corridor. He had come out with nothing on his feet. It was foolish, he realised, but force of habit. He rarely wore shoes, or boots unless he knew he needed them. There was, in theory, no glass in the habitat for him to stand on. He noticed that the warm, grass-like material of the carpet was longer. If he stood in one place for more than a couple of seconds, he felt the grass adhering to the soles of his feet, and there was a sucking sensation as he moved away.

  He heard whale song. Just for a moment. It sounded wrong, warped somehow, twisted.

  The bodies in the corridor were mainly members of the security contingent. They all appeared to have been the victims of violence, but it was difficult to tell for sure because they looked partially melted, or eaten, and there was a white, weblike growth over them. In horror, Lodup realised that that the weblike growth was coming from the carpet. It was consuming the bodies, recycling them.

  The habitat shifted under him and then lurched violently.

  He looked up and saw a wave of water rolling down the corridor towards him. He fought the urge to panic, again. If this was the habitat depressurising due to loss of structural integrity, for whatever reason, it would collapse in on itself like an aluminium can run over by a truck. If it was just the habitat shifting position, he might still be in with a chance. The freezing-cold, clear water rolled over his feet, came up to his ankles and then started to recede. Lodup breathed a sigh of relief and pulled his feet free of the disconcerting carpet. He brought the SMG up and continued to move cautiously towards the moon pool.