The Beauty of Destruction (13 page)

‘It’s like the introductory film in
Demon Seed
!’ Dracimus couldn’t keep the excitement out of his voice. Jeremy turned back to look at the phone he’d left lying on the floor. Another one closer to him started to ring.

9

A Long Time After the Loss

Privacy. There were many benefits to being a member of the Church but the Monk had often reflected that privacy, physical and mental, so unusual in the Consortium and Monarchist systems, was chief among them. The Cathedral was high security. It was protected by secrecy, and then a lot of firepower. All public areas, particularly work areas, were subject to surveillance. Domiciles were only put under surveillance if it was requested by their inhabitants, or the militia made a convincing argument to the legal aspect of the Cathedral’s supposedly objective governing AI.

To the Monk’s mind, Church conditioning wasn’t a breach of privacy. Yes, you had to agree to the conditioning if you wished to remain in the Church when you came to your majority, and most did, but it didn’t allow Church AIs, Churchman, or the militia to spy on your mind or your biology. Instead it wiped any sensitive information from your mind if you left, or were taken from, the Church. More seriously, it could damage and ultimately kill anyone who either tried to reverse engineer the information out of themselves, or were subject to such reverse engineering. Again, this was due to security rather than thought policing. Everyone was free to think and say what they wanted and once the door to your domicile was closed you were on your own and unmonitored physically and mentally. It was bliss. Even so, many thousands of years later she still appreciated it. More so after she had been away from the Cathedral for any length of time.

The information from the surveillance sensors in the public areas, however, was constantly analysed by some very powerful AIs. This was why, as the Monk made her way towards a bridge-capable telescope array on one of the flying buttresses, the Cathedral’s AI was politely requesting access to the medical diagnostic systems in her neunonics. It seemed that the visual and heat sensors had detected signs that she was running a fever. She looked flushed, sweat beaded her skin in a way that it really wasn’t supposed to for someone as heavily augmented as she was. This was almost certainly the sign of some kind of nanite infection and a tricky and subtle one to have avoided detection so far.

Churchman appeared in the corridor next to the Monk as she stepped out of the express traveltube. He was a hologram emitted from a projector the smart matter wall had just grown. She wasn’t receiving direct neunonic ’faces right now.

‘Beth, are you okay?’ Churchman asked. There was no panel or control centre for the array. It was run by the Cathedral’s distributed systems, which ran throughout the smart matter of the entire habitat. Everything could be neunonically accessed with the correct clearance, which the Monk had. It really made no sense for her to be walking towards what was effectively a wall. It seemed to take real effort for the Monk to turn and look at Churchman’s hologram. Her face was beetroot red, her mouth a rictus grin as she tried to speak. Churchman triggered the alarm with a thought.

Limbs extruded from the floor, walls and ceiling and reached for her. Seconds later powerful, non-lethal weapon barrels were grown from the corridor wall and fed power and/or ammunition, nano-swarms spored from the wall, security satellites and militia personnel were scrambled.

Churchman’s armoured form was running. He was just over forty-two miles away from the Monk. It could have been worse. The direct sensor ‘face from the corridor next to the buttress showed him everything, audio, visual, heat, electrochemical, nanoscopic. It seemed to be happening in slow motion. She was in the air, extruded limbs reaching for her, taking hits from the weapons.

With a thought, Churchman opened the wall in front of him and leapt through it. He was seven miles above the ground level of the Cathedral. He triggered his AG drive.

Through his ’face sensor feed Churchman saw the Monk curled up into a somersault. A smart matter tentacle reached from the wall, snagging her leg. A thermal blade lashed out and the limb was severed. Beth hit the ground as stunners and EM-projected baton rounds hit her, barely staggering her.

‘Where the fuck is Woodbine Scab?’ Churchman snapped out loud. It had been a while since he had been this angry, or, if he was honest, this frightened. He had his answer before he had finished asking it. Scab was overseeing the upgrades to the
Basilisk II
. With a thought Scab was wrapped in extruded smart matter limbs. The bounty hunter immediately started to fight: bleeding acid, using his nano-screen, and spitting liquid hardware to try to matter-hack the material holding him. Pythian attack programs and viruses were attacking the Cathedral’s local systems. Militia and S-sats were speeding towards him.

In his ’face sensor feed the Monk bounced off one wall, the floor, then another wall. Churchman would have admired the balletic grace of her movements if the situation hadn’t been so serious. She’d had millennia to hone her skills.

Churchman landed on the hull of a banking fast-attack frigate. Tiny molecular hooks on his exoskeleton’s feet adhered to the craft’s hull as its engines burned hard, scorching a mile of the Cathedral’s internal smart matter wall. The craft shot forwards.

‘Locate and secure all of Scab’s crew,’ Churchman ’faced.

The frigate was fast but not fast enough. Subconsciously he analysed the flight paths and capabilities of all the craft speeding to help him. The local area was illuminated with the harsh burn of engines all making for him or the Monk. He leapt. The Cathedral’s AI requested permission to take lethal measures against the Monk. Even though she would be cloned, again, he hesitated.
But it’
s Beth
, some impractical, sentimental part of him thought. It was just a moment’s hesitation.

On the ’face sensor feed Churchman saw an extruded smart matter tentacle grab her arm and slam her to the ground. Her right arm reached for the wall. A red flash. Red steam. The limb fell to the ground. The Monk didn’t even scream. Restraints grew from the floor, encircling her body. Her bloody left palm shot forwards and she smeared blood against the wall. An EM-driven cannon round blew the limb off.

‘No!’ Churchman screamed and leapt again. He landed on a fighter that had just passed under the frigate. His boots adhered to the craft but its speed meant he had to grip a handle that had just extruded from the craft’s hull.

Beth’s blood carried an ugly matter-hack. Ridiculously expensive tech designed specifically to beat Church defences with one order.
Transmit
. The telescopic array opened a bridge and did just that.

The fighter’s forward-manoeuvring engines burned, braking the craft to stop it crashing into the wall that even now was opening for Churchman. Churchman leapt from the fighter, the twin AG motors attached to his exoskeleton carrying him through the hole in the smart matter wall. As he landed in the corridor he could already hear the screaming.

‘Let me go! I’m going to fucking kill him! You hear me, Scab! You’re fucking dead!’ The Monk was writhing against her restraints. Both her arms ended in bloody stumps. All the extruded weapons, several S-sats and a squad of nervous militia were covering her. She had already opened her neunonics to the Cathedral’s AI. Her internal systems had been fighting the sophisticated meat-hack the entire time. It had worked because it had sequestered her, controlled her, rather than attempting to root out the Church’s secrets, which would have triggered the conditioning. Her clearance and reputation had done the rest, allowed her to get as far as she had.

‘I’m calm,’ Beth said. Churchman was receiving her medical telemetry, she was anything but, though he couldn’t see any remaining trace of the meat-hack. Her own, not inconsiderable, internal systems had tracked it down and destroyed it.

‘Let her up,’ Churchman ordered, ’facing instructions to the Cathedral to do the same. The AI, which irritatingly had facets of his own personality, protested, as did the militia squad leader. ‘Now! And get medical assemblers on her arms.’

The smart matter released her as two of the militia affixed assemblers with graft attachments to the Monk’s severed limbs. As soon as they had done that, Churchman picked up the protesting Beth and tucked her under his arm. Another AG-motor-assisted leap carried him out of the corridor and back onto the fighter, which was turning even as they landed on it. They would have to go slower this time. Beth had less protection than he did.

‘I’m going to kill him this time,’ the Monk ’faced him.

If he was being honest he had been more than a little disappointed in Beth for her liaison with Scab. It had seemed like the sort of self-destructive thing her sister would do. If, however, sex had been the vector for the meat-hack then he could understand the violation. Even if he had wanted to stop Beth from killing him, he wasn’t sure he could. Except that it wasn’t Scab who was missing.

The Previous Night

She could understand how it had happened. She knew when
it had happened. It had been while Scab, Vic and
that insipid human bitch had been on their Key trip.
The Elite had come through the wall of the Monastery.
A moment later special forces contractors were levelling weapons at
them, and the tall, thin man with the deep voice
and skin so pitch black it seemed to absorb light,
was standing over her. He had touched her. Just laid
a hand on her head. It had been creepy. It
had also been a contact transfer for what she had
assumed was liquidware with a nanite carrier.

She didn’t
want to think about how easily it had bypassed her
internal security. The liquidware had assembled itself and integrated with
her own. Basically it was information and a small, limited
capability AI. The AI projected an image straight into her
neunonics, overlaying what she could see in the real world.
It was how she could still remember what Patron looked
like because, subjectively, in her darkened room, he was standing
at the bottom of the bed looking at her.

It
didn’t matter who she was, her capabilities, what she’
d done; she still found herself clutching her legs to
her chest against the wall as far away from where
she perceived the AI projection of Patron to be. Despite
the fear, her neunonics were running through the data on
the rest of the liquidware that had invaded her system.
It was information gathered by Consortium intelligence contractors, everything they
knew about Church systems.

‘I have a proposition for you,’
Patron said, his deep, resonant voice making her feel part
aroused, part nauseous. ‘Would you like to be richer than
Croesus?’

‘Who’s Croesus?’ she asked. The AI projection of
Patron sighed.

Her flesh itched like crazy but the assemblers had not fully regrown the missing parts of her limbs. As Churchman leapt from the fighter to the landing pad, where the sleek
Basilisk II
was berthed, the Monk made the considered and mature decision that she was going to kick Woodbine Scab to death.

Churchman put her down and both of them strode towards where Scab was struggling with his smart matter restraints. Security satellites, the heavily armed version of P-sats controlled by the Cathedral’s AI, were so thick in the air above him it looked like the microcosm of a planetary blockade.

‘Move!’ Churchman snapped at the militia surrounding Scab.

Beth assumed that the tiny bits of smoking wreckage were all that remained of Scab’s P-sat. The militia cleared the way. Scab was frothing at the mouth, toxic saliva making his make-up smoke. He looked like a rabid animal. There was nothing in his eyes that Beth recognised as human, let alone sane. He was surrounded by inert, in some cases warped, smart matter. His left arm was free. As they approached there was a glow from the tentacle holding his right arm. It was cut apart as the energy javelin cut through the smart matter as though it wasn’t there.

Churchman moved first, with surprising speed for his metal bulk. A golden foot stamped down on Scab’s right arm. The Monk heard the bone snap. Churchman was in the way, she couldn’t get close enough to Scab. She suspected this was what he had intended. Churchman reached down and plucked the E-javelin from Scab’s hand as the smart matter restraints released him. Scab started to move. Beth triggered her coherent energy field as spit gun needles and monomolecular discs ricocheted off Churchman’s armour. Some of the militia backed away, taking hits on their armour. Churchman reached down for a struggling Scab and picked him up by his skull.

‘This is what it feels like to be helpless!’ Churchman’s amplified voice shouted. He slammed Scab back into the ground, then picked him up again. The Monk heard Scab’s armoured skull start to crack as Churchman squeezed. She was worried that Churchman was going to kill him before she could. ‘Where is Negrinotti?’ Churchman demanded. It was written all over Scab’s face. He didn’t have the slightest idea what Churchman was talking about. She accessed the Cathedral’s systems. Negrinotti was nowhere to be found. She wasn’t the only one.

Some Minutes Ago

It was almost a physical difference. Vic was still cautious but he could see an end in sight. Freedom from Scab, though he would need to survive the inevitable assassination attempt that would come from the severing of their partnership, as well as the booby traps that Scab had installed in his personal systems over the years.