A Quantum Mythology (59 page)

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 the 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.

‘I’m going to fuck you to death with your own knives!’ Silas managed through a mouth gummed up with red liquid metal as it tried to repair the damage she’d done.

‘Go and f—’ Grace started, holding in her guts. Her own nanites were trying to heal her and fight off the ones attacking her. ‘Sick … fuck.’

The 40mm
HEAP
grenade caught Silas in the side and sent him spinning through the air. The grenade exploded, almost tearing him in two. It left a hole in his midriff, exposing his spine. Red filigree tendrils shot out from his stomach cavity and wrapped themselves around his vertebrae.

The recoil from firing the grenade had knocked the weakened du Bois off his feet. Grace looked over to where he lay. Blood bubbled around her partner’s mouth as he struggled to breathe. She managed to turn her head and look at Silas. He was still moving weakly. Silas opened his mouth and emitted an inhuman-sounding howl. She watched the filigree lashing out into the earth to use its matter to rebuild his body. Grace looked down at herself. The wound in her stomach had almost closed, although she was still a mess internally. Nanites were fighting a number of wars in her feverish flesh, but her innards probably weren’t going to fall out if she stood up.

Grace staggered over to du Bois. He looked up at her, his blue eyes full of pain but still alert. He was a mess. Multiple wounds, including a large one in his upper-right chest, weren’t closing. The wounds also looked dry. She reached down and grabbed his belt buckle, removing the concealed punch blade. The blade was designed to disintegrate into nanites on command after it was stabbed into flesh. Du Bois looked up at her and nodded. Grace staggered away from him.

Silas was clawing at the ground as Grace tottered towards him. A disturbing amount of his body had been regrown but he wasn’t able to move yet. He was still making noises like a wounded animal. Grace cut the palm of her right hand open with the punch dagger and then collapsed onto her knees next to Silas. Silas moved his head to look at her with pure hate.

‘It was nearly over …’ Silas managed. ‘I’m going to—’

Grace spat in his face. Then she rammed her hand into Silas’s rapidly healing wound. She felt the tendrils of living red filament wrap around her hand and wrist, piercing her flesh. She tried to ignore the pain as best she could. Silas was howling and writhing at the violation. Her fingers wrapped around its stem. She used the blood on her hand to hack his flesh. Then Grace tore the Red Chalice out of his stomach cavity, where Silas had crudely implanted it, along with the red, living filaments, which retracted into the chalice. Silas howled in agony again. Grace raised the punch knife, preparing to plunge it through his skull. The bullet blew her hand off. Crying out, she collapsed onto Silas.

The wiry man with weather-beaten skin advanced rapidly, keeping Grace covered with the suppressed M14 rifle. There was still smoke rising from the weapon’s barrel. The newcomer had a stubbly beard, and greying hair tied back in a ponytail.

‘Sorry, Grace,’ he said. He had an American accent, New England. ‘I had to stop you stabbing him.’ Holding the rifle at port with one hand, he reached down and dragged Grace off and away from Silas as gently as he could. She was still conscious, sobbing. The American then moved back to Silas. The serial killer was trying to push himself up on his arms. The American put a booted foot against his chest and forced him back to the ground. ‘You just stay put, you piece of shit,’ the American told Silas. He was standing where he could keep an eye on Grace and du Bois.

‘Josh, what the fuck?’ Grace spat through the pain. She was losing flesh as her systems fed on her matter to heal the extensive wounds she’d received. She was hungry. She saw du Bois trying to push himself into a sitting position with some difficulty.

‘Orders, Grace, you know that. I’m really sorry, but your blood was up. If I thought you’d have listened to me I’d have asked.’

Du Bois’ laughter was devoid of humour but had a horrible bubbly quality to it as he spat blood down his chest. ‘You shooting your own side is getting to be something of a habit, isn’t it, Josh?’ he asked weakly.

‘Once every two hundred or so years doesn’t sound like much of a habit to me,’ Josh said. ‘How are you doing, Malcolm? You don’t look good.’

‘Fuck this,’ Grace said, her voice still full of pain. She used her left hand to push herself to her feet, then cradled the stump of her right hand in her left. The Red Chalice was lying in the dirt at her feet, forgotten. She started walking towards Silas. Josh brought the M14 to his shoulder and levelled it at her.

‘Are you out of your fucking mind?’ Grace demanded.

‘Please, Grace, be reasonable.’

‘I
am
being fucking reasonable!’ Grace shouted at the American. ‘Have you any idea what that evil fucker’s done?’

‘Let us kill him,’ Malcolm managed.

‘I’m afraid not, Malcolm, and I’m sorry we keep having this conversation.’ The voice was incredibly deep. Mr Brown walked into the retort building. He glanced at the hole in the wall, looking through into the next building. He was wearing a finely tailored dark-coloured business suit and leaning on a thick stainless steel staff. Four IV-style bags hung from the top of the staff; tubes connected each bag to a main tube, which ran into the left arm of Mr Brown’s business suit. As they watched, one of the bags was deflating in front of them, its contents – a clear liquid – running down the tube and, presumably, into Mr Brown’s arm.

The Pennangalan was at Mr Brown’s side in her beaten-silver facemask, carrying a Sig Sauer 716 Patrol Rifle with an underslung grenade-launcher.

‘Why?’ du Bois asked, desperation and pain mingling in his voice. ‘The Circle has enough pet killers. Enough grotesques.’

‘Like Grace and yourself?’ Mr Brown asked.

Du Bois managed to glance over at Grace. She was still cradling the stump of her hand, but had started looking around for a weapon.

‘He will escape, do this again, you know that,’ du Bois said.

‘Malcolm, do you really think we have that much time?’ Mr Brown asked.