A Quantum Mythology (55 page)

Britha remembered the
riasterthae
taking Fachtna on the beach, close to the wicker man, where he had slain one of the Lochlannach’s giants. It had not looked like this twisted monstrosity, this abomination. Fachtna’s sword started to sing, flickering, almost ethereal, but the singing was wrong somehow.

Fachtna’s roar deafened Britha for a moment. Her horse reared, primal fear overwhelming the magics that had changed and controlled the creature. Britha struggled to regain control.

Fachtna charged Bress, who threw himself out of the path of the charge and rolled back up onto his feet. He spun around and ducked a blow that would have taken his head off. He parried another that nearly dashed his sword out of his hand. He ran backwards trying to avoid Fachtna’s furious, frenzied attacks.

Bress tried to put distance between himself and Fachtna, but the berserker warrior charged him. Bress leaped up, bringing his legs into the splits position as Fachtna ran underneath him. Bress slashed the blade of his sword down the berserker’s back, opening skin and revealing churning flesh and organs beneath. Fachtna continued running as Bress landed in a crouch behind him. Fachtna charged one of mounted Lochlannach and swung his sword. The shimmering blade clove through rider and horse. With a thought, Bress ordered the other Lochlannach to attack. They kicked their mounts forward.

‘No!’ Britha cried out.

Fachtna stopped and cocked his head, like a confused animal.

‘Does this feel fair to you?’ Bress demanded.

‘This is single combat!’ Britha shouted.

‘Who do you want to win this battle?’ Bress demanded, but the Lochlannach stopped moving towards the warrior caught in the
riasterthae
frenzy. Fachtna struck out again and again. Bress moved, dodging the blade when he could, parrying blows that sent him staggering and numbed his hands when he couldn’t. Fachtna was faster and stronger, but not as coordinated. Despite the berserker’s crazed attacks, Bress was just about able to anticipate them. His blade flicked out again and again, but he was too much on the defensive to land any powerful or killing blows. His sword opened horrible wounds in Fachtna’s flesh, but the flesh seethed and boiled beneath the wounds and then started to close. Bress was aware of Fachtna’s legs bulging as he sucked up more of the earth from beneath his feet to replace the damaged flesh.

Bress leaped over one of Fachtna’s sword-swings. The Goidel’s ghost blade sang its discordant song through the air beneath him. Then Bress felt Fachtna’s free hand close around his ankle and he knew it was over.

Fachtna yanked Bress out of the air and slammed him into the ground in an explosion of fungal-like earth. He stamped on Bress, the cracking of his bones echoing across the landscape. He battered Bress with his free hand before starting to slash at him with his shimmering ghost blade. The tendrils of red gold tried to close Bress’s wounds, knit the flesh together, but Fachtna was doing too much damage too quickly. Bress howled. He sounded less like a man and more like a wounded animal.

‘No!’ It was a cry of anguish. Fachtna stopped. He shook once and then the spearhead exploded out of his chest. He looked down at the living metal trying to tear apart his flesh from within. Then he turned around with some difficulty. He saw Britha standing there as if her hands still held the haft of the spear that had just been torn from her grip. There was fear in her eyes. Tears running down her face. Fachtna stared at her, his own tears running from a bulging eye in his deformed head. The heat pouring off him was blistering Britha’s skin. Bress was still screaming like a wounded animal. She staggered back away from Fachtna, and Fachtna merely watched her go. There was sadness in his many eyes. Then the dead flew at Britha.

Bress’s body was working enough to move again. He reached for the case, opened it. He used the magics Crom had given him to try and soothe the ancient and irrevocably insane demon in the spear. Even then it almost overwhelmed him, controlled him. There were moments when he wasn’t himself, when something old and malevolent possessed him, but that was all right, if he wanted to live. Then the spearhead grew, extending a long, thick haft which Bress grasped with all his strength.

‘Britha!’ Bress cried in a moment of control and threw her his sword. She caught it and started cutting down the earthen dead even as they charged her. Fachtna started to turn. Bress stood and rammed the sunspear into Fachtna’s body. The flesh burned, melted, flowed, hissed and boiled. Fachtna’s head split in two in a shower of dirty steam and bubbling flesh. His two separate halves fell to the fungal ground. Then Bress let go of the spear.

The Lochlannach had moved to engage the earthen dead, though Britha was hacking her way through them without too much trouble. The spear flew through the dead, the Lochlannach and their horses almost too quickly to see. Bress was no longer possessed. He was in control again. Britha screamed. With a thought, Bress cast the final part of the magics Crom had taught him regarding the spear. The spear stopped just as it was about to pass through Britha’s head. It fell to the ground, and the ground caught fire. Bress redoubled the wards that protected him and ran to the spear. The spear fought him, the strange metal flexing, the heat blistering his skin. Its demonic mind tried to push its way into Bress’s head, but he fought it back into its case, where it became still.

Bress managed to stumble to his feet and walk over to Fachtna’s bubbling corpse. Deformed insect-like creatures were growing from the warped flesh and crawling away. He stared at the two halves of Fachtna until he saw what he was looking for – metal glinting within the flesh. He reached down and grabbed the two halves of the brass six-pointed cross which had wrapped itself around Fachtna’s ribs. Bress concentrated and the metal unwrapped itself. He held the two uneven parts together and they fused seamlessly.

‘That’s it, isn’t it?’ Britha asked. The six arms sank into the body of the cross and it became a rod. Bress nodded. ‘We could take it, go now,’ Britha said, eagerness in her voice. ‘Get my child.’

Bress turned to look at her. ‘You know it has to go back to him, don’t you?’

‘No,’ Britha said, shaking her head. ‘I don’t know that. I don’t know why you have to serve that dark spirit.’

‘He made me the way I am.’

‘He’ – she nodded towards Fachtna’s bisected body, though she tried not to look at it – ‘defied his
dryw
for our child.’

Bress swallowed hard. ‘For your child, Britha, yours and his.’

‘And if it was ours?’ Britha demanded.

Bress looked up at her. He crossed the distance to her quickly and grabbed her arm. ‘That can never be – do you understand me?’ It was the angriest she had ever seen him. Then she realised it was fear disguised as anger. ‘It would be the greatest crime. You must promise – if there is ever any child, you’ll kill it!’ Britha shook off his arm and backed away from him, appalled. ‘There shouldn’t be, it shouldn’t be possible, but he plays his games.’ There was a manic quality to Bress’s voice. Britha wasn’t sure if he was talking to her or himself.

‘Give it to me,’ she said evenly.

Bress fell silent and looked up, his eyes wide now. ‘Tell me, did you come to me because you wanted me, or because you wanted power – and this?’ he asked, holding up the control rod.

Britha forced herself to look at Fachtna’s body. She was shaking with anger. ‘I did this for you,’ she said.

‘
I
did this!’ Bress roared at her. His voice carried across the poisoned, fungal land, causing strange misshapen creatures to take flight from living trees made of stone and insects.

‘You would be dead if I hadn’t … if I hadn’t …’ Britha’s face crumpled. ‘I killed Fachtna!’ She sank to her knees, sobbing.

‘Would you rather he had killed me?’ Bress asked quietly.

Britha looked up at him. ‘Of course I would! He was a friend, a lover, the father of my child. You are a monster, you murdered my people, but I—’ She stopped and looked down again. ‘Give me the rod, please.’

Bress turned and walked away from her.

37

Close to the Oceanic Pole of

Inaccessibility, 2 Weeks Ago

More dreams. He used drugs to numb himself. He was becoming more like the clones, a zombie trudging through his day. Kneeling in the silt, every movement sending up little clouds of particulate matter, he was backlit by the lamps of an
ADS
as he used a handheld fusion torch to cut into the organic-looking basalt-like stone.

Lodup wasn’t sure what made him look around. The light fixed to his mask caught the shape of the figure standing less than six feet from him, a human shape. Lodup jumped and scrambled back, ungainly in the mud. He dropped the fusion torch. It went out the moment it left his grip.

It emerged from the silt and was all over Lodup. It had dark, rubbery skin, eyespots and two comb-like cartilaginous protuberances protruding from its gaping mouth. Eight small, tendril-like barbels surrounded the mouth. The thing had only one nostril and its skull was misshapen, but as it grabbed for Lodup, its mouth open in what looked like a silent scream, Lodup realised it was Hideo.

The Hideo-thing held Lodup’s face next to his, its proto-mouth opening and closing as if it was trying to say something. Its hands were all over Lodup. He realised that the hands had mouths on them that looked more human than the one in its face. They were opening and closing as well. Lodup grabbed for his dive knife, wrestling it out of its sheath. Then he realised the thing wasn’t attacking him, and suddenly it was yanked off him. He started to subvocalize, to warn the
ADS
pilot not to hurt it.

It had touched their minds through the human-shaped hole in the world.

Overwhelming pain. She was looking down on the city, lashing out despite herself, destroying, killing with every movement, every spasm, as consciousness was replaced by the searing cold, the indescribable agony, the fury and the unthinking hate. She could hear her sisters screaming, too. Across the blue world, those who heard their cries either dropped dead or were driven irrevocably mad.

In the streets the weak minds simply died, blood shooting from their ears and eyes. The guardians killed in a frenzy. Even the oldest, the serpents, were succumbing to the madness, though not all of them.

Her sisters were sporing uncontrollably, and every spore carried the physical corruption born of their pain-induced madness. Diseased, nightmare forms grew from the fruiting bodies of the dead and the insane living alike.

One of her eggs flew into the air. Thunder echoed across the clear blue sky as it shot straight upwards.

One of her last conscious thoughts was recognition that her form had been diseased. A servitor, one of the serpents, had done this as it tried to cling to rational thought against the agony of its link with his mothers. She crushed its mind. Punished its betrayal. The disease coursed through the living city and all connected to it. Destroying their ability to enter the other place. The red place.

Then thought was gone. Instinctively she was aware that she was hardening, her skin, her flesh transforming. The cold, blue ocean washed over her. Even as she petrified, she knew she would not die. Instead she would be locked in the living stone.

Lodup was lying in the silt. The
ADS
stood over him. Bits of the Hideo-thing, which the
ADS
had just crushed, were raining down on him. Indescribable pain lanced through his skull and blood filled his vision. He opened his mouth and tried to scream into the sub-freezing water.

‘To all intents and purposes, it is – was – a hagfish,’ Siraja said.

Lodup was looking through the window into a sealed operating theatre where the bits and pieces of the Hideo-thing were being examined. Sprinklers kept the room wet, and it looked pretty miserable for the doctor and the two nurses into whose neural systems the skills of a medical examiner and marine biologist had just been downloaded.

Lodup had the mother of all migraines despite the vast quantities of painkillers they had pumped into him. His throat was raw and red – he’d only stopped screaming half an hour ago. The pain he had felt during his blackout was indescribable. Most of the blood vessels in his eyes had burst, making his eyes nearly all red, and scabs blocked his tear ducts.

Even though Lodup knew Siraja wasn’t actually there, the
Mwoakilloan still turned to look at the dragon-headed representation of the habitat’s AI.

‘No shit?’

‘It just happens to look like Hideo.’

‘Oh, well, that’s a
lot
more reasonable,’ Lodup said. ‘What the fuck is going on?’

‘You had another blackout. What did you see?’ Siraja asked.

‘Can’t you monitor my dreams?’ Lodup asked. Siraja shook his reptilian head. ‘The city. I think I saw its fall.’

It was difficult to gauge the expression of something with the head of a dragon, but Lodup thought he saw an eagerness there.

‘How did it fall? Was it attacked?’

‘Yes … no … I don’t know. There was something there, something from … somewhere else. No, it wasn’t a
thing
. It was just coldness and pain … I think their children, the things it made, the snakes … They did something. Some kind of viral self-destruct.’ Lodup felt as if his skull was about to burst. The pain was making him feel dizzy and sick. He staggered.

‘Perhaps you should sit down, drink some more water, and then we can go through your dream in detail,’ the draconic AI suggested.

‘Why?’ Lodup finally managed, meaning the Hideo/hagfish thing.

Siraja looked up and concentrated for a moment. ‘I could make an educated guess, but I dislike guessing.’

‘Do it anyway.’

‘I think something – or someone – in the city was trying to contact you. Perhaps this Lidakika entity.’

‘But it’s already contacting me,’ he said, tapping the side of his head and then wishing he hadn’t.

‘But are you listening, Mr Satakano, are you understanding? We found rudimentary larynxes in the creature’s throat, wrists and ankles. I think something was trying to communicate with you in a more direct fashion. It used the material it had to hand and formed it into the shape of Hideo to make it more familiar to you.’

‘There have to be easier ways.’

‘Indeed,’ Siraja said. ‘And that is what worries us. We have had contact before. In fact, we believe that when people go “thatch” down here, it is in part due to contact of some kind with entities in the city. It is almost as if there is an attempt at subterfuge here, but who is fooling whom, we have no idea. That is why we have to fully debrief you now. If necessary, we might have to—’

‘Who’s in charge, Siraja?’ Lodup asked.

Siraja regarded Lodup with his oddly expressive reptilian eyes. ‘Mr Satakano—’

‘Someone gave the order to call that thing from the black lake. There’s someone above Siska. Who?’ Lodup demanded.

‘We have been very indulgent with you, Mr Satakano. Yes, we have done things that perhaps we shouldn’t. We have taken liberties with your physical form, and with your mind, but you have been – and will be – generously rewarded for your services—’

‘What happens if they wake up?’ Lodup asked. He was looking down at the grass-like carpet being stirred by the warm, humid wind that blew through the habitat when it breathed.

‘Do you feel that’s likely?’ Siraja asked.

Lodup looked up at the AI.
You’re frightened
, Lodup realised. Aloud, he asked, ‘You want to debrief me?’ Siraja nodded. ‘I’ll only speak to the person who’s in charge.’ He wasn’t sure but it looked as if Siraja was trying to master irritation.

‘We have a great deal going on today—’ Siraja started.

‘Like what?’ Lodup asked.

‘A delivery of supplies,’ Siraja said.

Lodup’s eyes narrowed. ‘I thought you were self-sufficient down here. If you can manipulate matter at a molecular level, then what do you need delivered?’

Siraja’s sigh had a definite hissing quality to it. ‘Curiosity is an admirable human quality, but you know that we cannot, and will not, tell you everything.’

‘It’s to do with the increasing number of suicides and people going thatch, isn’t it? Something’s about to happen.’

‘Mr Satakano, that is enough,’ Siraja said quietly.

‘Are you going to threaten me now?’

Siraja glanced away from Lodup and rubbed the bridge of his snout with clawed fingers. It was a peculiarly human gesture that looked out of place.

‘No, Mr Satakano. We would like to think that our relationship remains one of employer and employee.’

‘Fire me, then,’ Lodup said, looking straight at the dragon-headed AI’s image. They stared at each other for a few moments longer.

‘Go to the northernmost wet dock.’

‘The floating-shed things?’

Siraja nodded. ‘He will meet you there,’ the AI told him.

Lodup still felt woozy and sick. Under normal circumstances he would never have considered diving in a state like this, but now it appeared
that he was just as adapted, technologically, to life at this depth as he was physically adapted to live on the surface.

He left the biomed area and made his way through the carpeted corridors towards the moon pool. He saw Yaroslav heading towards him. With him were two other men, both solidly built and heavily armed. Like Yaroslav, they reminded Lodup of the Special Forces operators he had met.

The smaller, more wiry of the two had several days’ worth of stubble, chiselled features and long brown, greying hair tied into a ponytail. His eyes were blue and his weathered skin suggested an outdoor life. The other had much blunter features and was more heavily built. His head was shaved, his eyes were cold and grey, and a patchwork of scars covered his face and head.

A number of Yaroslav’s security detail followed the three men. They were escorting three carts with rubber caterpillar tracks, all of them loaded with glass-fronted medical freezers. Lodup couldn’t make out what was inside the freezers through the swirling gases.

Lodup stepped to the side of the corridor to let them pass. He nodded at Yaroslav as he walked by, but the Russian ignored him.

Further on, Lodup found a similar scene. This time the caterpillar-tracked carts were moving things that looked like a weird cross between a standing stone and a server. Lodup glanced up the corridor along which the strange, guarded convoy was moving. He could see Siska talking to another woman. Like the other two newcomers he’d just seen with Yaroslav, the woman was armed. She was wearing combat trousers, combat boots and a sleeveless black T-shirt. Her long black hair had been braided into a ponytail, which had then been arranged into a noose, as he had seen Siska wear her hair sometimes. By far the strangest thing about the woman was the beaten-silver facemask she wore.

It felt obvious to Lodup that the woman was somehow related to Siska. As he watched them, Siska looked down the corridor towards Lodup. He couldn’t quite make out the expression on her face.

Lodup walked into the moon pool chamber. The habitat had repaired itself since the granite construct’s attack and showed little sign of ever having been damaged.

Lodup sealed his thermal sheath and pulled the hood over his head. Ignoring the hive of activity around him, he dived into the water. He experienced the now-familiar rushing sensation of water coursing through his chest as his internal cavities were flushed with liquid.
He brought his feet together. The individual fins melded and grew to form a rippling monofin.

He dived down and out of the moon pool, then headed north. Out in open water, he glanced behind him. He hadn’t seen any new submersibles in the moon pool, certainly nothing big enough to carry the cargo he’d seen trundling through the habitat’s corridors. The submarine docked to the side of the habitat was a surprise, however, particularly as it was docked at an airlock not present in the habitat several hours earlier.

The sub looked like a Virginia-Class nuclear-powered fast-attack boat. Except airlocks didn’t come standard on them, either, and this one would be more than three thousand metres deeper than its maximum depth capability. Yet another question for the habitat’s mysterious boss.

From the outside, the wet dock looked like a rectangular open shed made of thick, black metal. The odd angles suggested that the wet docks had some kind of stealth characteristics designed to shield them from surface detection. They were buoyant, and tethered to the seabed twenty five metres below by thick chains.

Inside the wet dock he saw one of piscean-shaped seed-pods. He remembered that the agonised thing he’d been when he blacked out had thought of it as an egg. It was, or had been, some kind of dormant offspring.

Its petrified skin was smooth to the touch with a number of ridged indents. Something about them made Lodup think they were sensory organs. The seed-pod was elegant and somehow beautiful, but also disturbing.

The wet dock was empty, though Lodup had noticed the dark form of one of the orcas – Marvin, he suspected – swimming lazily some distance from the tethered structure. A number of
AUV
s were patrolling nearby, but most of the security appeared to be concentrated around the habitat and the newly arrived sub.

There was a jarring piece of technology sticking out of the seed-pod’s flesh which did not look like it belonged there. It appeared to have grown through the petrified seed-pod’s flesh like a cybernetic cyst. As he watched, the airlock portal opened like an iris, the lock itself already filled with water. Lodup regarded it for a moment, uncertainty and a degree of fear creeping into him. But he had come this far, he decided. He finned into the airlock and arranged himself in an upright position as the water started cycling out. The thermal sheath shed excess moisture as the water level dropped until he was standing in a dry airlock. He pulled the hood off his head as the inner iris opened.