The Age of Scorpio (61 page)

It could feel its avatar neunonically give instructions to the AG motors suspending the cocoon to return it to the secure lab, to the automated defences to open fire and to the S-sats to do the same. All of them were ignored.

The Absolute itself tried to take control of Zabilla and Dracup if for no other reason than to find out what was happening. Even if they had been meat-hacked it would make an example of them. Instead it found that the experiential link was simply missing.

The Absolute squirmed and splashed around in its tank. This was exciting but it couldn’t be allowed to lose. It wasn’t what the Game was about. It was about pleasuring itself. The Absolute used the experiential link to take control of ten thousand of the best electronic security and warfare specialists on Game and in orbit. It opened the most secure computer system on the planet to all of them and had them move in unison to retake control of the bunker’s automated systems.

All the while it was playing back one of Dracup’s hidden memories before the experiential link had been severed. It saw Dracup programming diagnostic routines into the lab’s equipment. Even deep in his subconscious Dracup hadn’t been aware of writing the code after he had examined the bunker’s electronic security, also subconsciously. The sophisticated security hack had been laced throughout the new diagnostic routines that Dracup had been developing consciously.

It was a shame they hadn’t been players, the Absolute thought. They played well. Just as long as they didn’t win. It had to win. That was the only rule of the Game.

Dracup took control of the automated weapon systems and the S-sats. The avatar became a prism of light as every strobe gun targeted it. The rotating barrels of the fast-cycling lasers filled the air with lines of red and threatened to overwhelm the avatar’s energy dissipation grid. Then every AG-driven smart munition hit the avatar. The powerful automaton ceased to exist and was replaced with a sizeable crater.

The force of the explosion knocked Dracup and Zabilla to the ground. It only staggered the nearby armoured and augmented Toy Soldiers.

The Absolute felt the excitement rising. This was the most alive it had felt in centuries. There was a genuine threat here to something it wanted, but it was going to win. It took control of every Toy Soldier in the bunker complex. All of them were now rushing towards the hangar area with the purpose of killing Dracup and Zabilla and securing the cocoon.

As one, the remaining Toy Soldiers turned to look at the prone forms of Zabilla and Dracup. The strobe guns and anti-personnel weapons from the S-sats were cutting swathes through them, but all the smart munitions had been used on the avatar. They would be vaccinated against the virals, their own nano-screens would be programmed to fend off the nano-swarms, and the infrasonic would do him and Zabilla more harm than good, Dracup thought.

It was sickening. What remained of Zabilla was only just starting to realise what she’d done, even as her personality started to recede, screaming in this new and alien mind. The Zabilla fragment remembered releasing the program into the system bit by bit. The intelligent program had been developed by the Living Cities from code sold to them by Pythia by way of the Consortium’s intelligence agencies. The idea was that it was nearly undetectable. Released in discrete parts, it then formed briefly to find and record information. It had been partially detected and part of it destroyed, but not before it had managed to record the genetic files of every person serving in the bunker. Zabilla had retrieved the information in a set of results from one of her apparently failed diagnostics. She had put it together in her deep subconscious. The information had then gone to the implanted targeted viral factory that ran through her small intestine.

Dracup grabbed one of the Toy Soldiers, its ornate armour giving him lot of purchase. He rammed the bone knife into the top of the soldier’s neck just below his jaw line. Neurotoxins flooded the soldier’s system. They probably wouldn’t be enough to kill an augmented soldier, but they wouldn’t help. He backed away, still holding on to the knife and the soldier, using him as a shield as the others all started firing at once. Dracup threw himself back over the cocoon as the Soldier he’d been using as a shield exploded into chunks of steaming superheated meat.

Dracup landed next to Zabilla behind the cocoon, finding he had the Toy Soldier’s aesthetically overdesigned, double-barrelled laser rifle in his hands. Dracup’s augmented hearing filtered sounds, so he could make out Zabilla farting very audibly, which explained the look of concentration on her face, he thought, as she released the virals into the air. Almost immediately the bunker ’faced viral warnings to their neunonics.

‘Send the signal,’ Dracup ’faced to her.

‘Not yet. We need a diversion,’ she replied.

Dracup popped up from behind the cocoon and fired several double-barrelled bursts of red light at the closest Toy Soldiers. The pitiful energy dissipation grid on his armoured clothing went neon and threatened to overload. Half the flesh on his face superheated and blew off down to the bone from a hit, but it gave the tactical software in his neunonics the time it needed to assess the situation. He started firing grenades from the underslung launcher, shifting aim, firing again. Each grenade was programmed with timed air-burst commands fed from the tactical software to explode where they would cause the most damage. Another moment’s glance showed the automated strobe guns cutting swathes through the Toy Soldiers.

Dracup ducked back behind the cocoon next to Zabilla. Half his face was just hot armoured bone now and still smoking. The problem with virals was that they took too long to kill. Dracup put together a fast and messy hack. The idea was to use the bunker’s defence nano-swarms as carriers for the targeted virals to speed things up. He wasn’t sure how useful they would be but it was worth a try.

When his Toy Soldiers started to die, the Absolute decided that he didn’t like this any more. They might well be trapped but perhaps they would be content with simply destroying the cocoon. Particularly if they were working for – or had been co-opted by – the Church. He sent one of his favourite toys. He sent Fallen Angel.

They were mostly cowering behind the cocoon now. They had kept low, crawled towards a wall and sandwiched themselves there. The Absolute didn’t dare fire on the cocoon, though Zabilla was reasonably sure it was more than capable of taking laser fire. The beams from the strobe guns looked like a near-solid wall of red as they repeatedly stabbed down into the Toy Soldiers. Dracup had S-sats firing from concealed locations at any Toy Soldiers that tried to charge their position. Zabilla had a thorn pistol in each hand; Dracup still had the laser rifle; now all they had to do was watch either side of the cocoon for Toy Soldiers trying to flank them. They were helped by visual feeds from the S-sat and the bunker’s systems. The feeds also showed that the Toy Soldiers were starting to fall. The virals were taking effect as Dracup and Zabilla started to remember who they really were.

Scab and the Monk had smuggled themselves onto Game in the stomach of an imported piece of livestock, some kind of large grazing lizard from a Rakshasa-held feline park world. They had then spent two days completely still, clinging to a mostly deserted part of one of the arcology trees close to where their targets lived, waiting for the results of some very subtle and well-programmed trace nanites.

They had already had themselves modified to look like their prey, and copies of the Game’s experiential ware had been implanted into them. They had also had some very interesting subconscious neunonics routines put into their systems. These were designed to be very well hidden, as the Absolute, by its nature, had some of the most sophisticated mental auditing systems in Known Space. All of this had been provided by the Living Cities, who had a lot of experience in finding ways to infiltrate the Game.

Sophisticated trace nanites had allowed Monk and Scab to plot a time when their targets would be most vulnerable and – more importantly – when they would be relatively lightly monitored.

The targets had put up a fight. Both might well have been experienced duellists, but neither were born killers or Church-trained monks. Their virals had caused a bit more trouble, however. Scab and the Monk had wiped them and junked their DNA. Their personal belongings had either been taken or disassembled. Scab and the Monk had then used a customised anti-forensic nano-swarm to destroy other traces of their identity. They had downloaded all the information from Zabilla and Dracup’s neunonics and then wiped them as well.

Then came the really clever stuff, the stuff that the Living Cities had been working on. Using a highly illegal application of S-tech, Scab and the Monk rewrote their own genetic codes to not only resemble Dracup and Zabilla’s, respectively, but at a given chemical signal to mutate back to their original forms. Then, using an intuitive AI program, they overwrote the information on their own neunonics with the information from Dracup and Zabilla’s neunonics. The intuitive program filled in the blanks as best it could and then, based on that information, used an adapted meat-hack program to overwrite Scab and the Monk’s personality. To all extents and purposes they had become Zabilla and Dracup.

Scab had liked none of this, but he hadn’t seen another way. Their subconscious minds had subtly been doing all the work during their infiltration, waiting for the correct set of circumstances to signal their resurgent personalities.

There was no feed from the bunker. Fallen Angel couldn’t be bothered to hack his way in to find out the tactical situation as he dropped through the branches of the arcology trees. He was feeling lazy today, not at all creative, positively bored. He was just going to turn up and destroy everything that wasn’t a cocoon. The Absolute might command him, but even it would never dare put experiential ware in an Elite so the phallic slug would have to find another way to enjoy the experience.

Targeting information on the ware told the Monk where to aim the thorn pistols, going for the exposed flesh in the Toy Soldiers’ ridiculously impractical armour. Even so, it was taking too long for the virals on the splinter bullets to kill the soldiers. Things were getting more and more hairy. She played her penultimate trick.

One of the things about players was that they never paid any attention to morlocks. The Monk didn’t control them, though Zabilla had had the biotechnical know-how to do so. She just released them from their programmed bonds. They didn’t need any encouragement to fall upon the Toy Soldiers from where they had previously been cowering. Their rage was a thing to behold.

Scab continued to fire at the Toy Soldiers with the laser even as they were dying. He just liked shooting people.

‘Now?’ Scab ’faced. He was unable to talk as half his face was still a red smoking mess.

The Monk shook her head. Scab was beginning to wonder if all the talk of getting them out was just nonsense. He was pretty sure that any moment now Ludwig or one of the Angels was going to turn up and destroy them at a fundamental level.

It was a melancholy act of destruction. Not his best, but he was looking at destruction himself. Still, it was more than enough to herald his arrival after his coffin had bridged in all but unnoticed.

The focused particle beam cut through the entirety of the top of the arcology tree. It was one of the smaller ones: only thirty or so storeys breached the atmosphere. Then he hit it like a meteorite. The force destroyed about half of it but sent the rest tumbling through the branches of other arcology trees towards the surface of Game far below.

‘Look upon my works,’ he muttered to himself as he watched the wreckage tumble down through the thick branches of the arboreal cities. It was carnage, but only abstract to him. It was so quiet where he was. He liked it up here in orbit. He liked looking down on the planet, seeing the branches spread out below him like a spider’s web.

He shot up into high orbit. The beam stabbing out from his weapon – it was in a rifle configuration at the moment – was almost an afterthought as he cut one of the planetary defence battle cruisers in two. High above Game, the two halves of the cruiser slowly drifted apart.

‘Notice me,’ Elite Scab whispered to himself.

He set the weapon to a wide-burst D-beam and played it up and down the top branches of one of the taller atmosphere-piercing arcology trees. The network of primordial black holes fed the weapon power via a form of complex entanglement. The D-beam rewrote the genetic codes of anything the signal hit and cancerous mutations appeared all over the outside of the tree. Inside, the inhabitants were reduced to protoplasmic slime or mutated into forms that weren’t conducive to survival in this reality. Some became super-efficient alien predatory life forms. Others might even have evolved into higher forms, though they were probably destroyed by destructive slimes and super-predators before they had time to appreciate their enlightened nature.

The Absolute flopped around violently in its nutrient bath. Ludwig was still out drinking suns, whatever that meant. Both the Angels were close but a Consortium Elite had just attacked them. He would need both of them to protect the Game. He sent the order to Fallen Angel. The attacking Elite was the priority.

Planetary attack warnings appeared in their neunonics. Scab and the Monk stood up from behind the cocoon. The hangar area was carnage. Scab sent an instruction to the AG motors on each corner of the cocoon. The cocoon rose unsteadily into the air as one of the motors had been destroyed. They made their way quickly through the carnage and red steam, shooting anything that moved, though they tried to leave the morlocks alone as they were finishing off the wounded Toy Soldiers.

The hatch to the Rapier fighter/bomber opened at a neunonic command as they approached. The Monk reached in and ferreted around for a bit. She came back with two rather vintage-looking emergency spacesuits.

‘Really?’ Scab asked, becoming more and more suspicious of the escape plan.

‘You don’t have to wear it if you don’t want to.’