The Beauty of Destruction (19 page)

Beth moved, she reached for weapons she did not have in here, and then delivered a roundhouse kick to Azmodeus that looked like it could have felled a tree. She might as well have been kicking the wall. She bounced off him.

Du Bois staggered as copper lightning played across his features. He sat down hard. He visualised new software architecture growing within his neuralware. It looked like it was made of brass.

‘We can reveal what was hidden, we cannot return what has been taken,’ Azmodeus told him. The memory edit he had done himself in a street in Bloomsbury was undone. Yottabytes of information cascaded through his mind. Souls. Scientists, scholars, engineers, architects, philosophers, doctors, artists, poets, recorded by technology masquerading as magic over more than a thousand years. His face was wet. He could cry here.

Azmodeus turned from him and looked out over the city, folding his arms behind his back.

Beth knelt by him. ‘Du Bois?’ she asked softly.

‘I don’t understand—’ he started.

‘Yes you do,’ Azmodeus said quietly. ‘There is no room for the likes of these in Mr Brown’s world. He will continue his work, redesigning humanity and anyone else he encounters. Make them slaves to their own indolence, their own ignorance. Make it so they will not co-operate with each other, so they will turn against themselves rather than act in their own collective best interest. So he can manipulate them. So there will be no resistance to his will.’

‘Was Mr Brown the one you were talking to at my house?’ Beth asked. Du Bois could only nod numbly. ‘What does he want?’

‘We do not know. He may just be insane. The eldest among us, older even than Solomon – peace be upon him – believe he once touched something even more ancient than the Seeders, though younger than the Lloigor, and that shattered his mind. We believe that he is in a great deal of pain, but for all we know his thought patterns are now too different to our own for there to be understanding.’

‘Is this the same thing that drove the Seeders mad?’ du Bois asked. He was not sure he wished to hear the answer.

‘He was the conduit for that. It is destruction, utter destruction in denial of the laws of physics. It is the thing that your sister called with her blood, Miss Luckwicke.’

‘She always was a handful,’ Beth said weakly. ‘Can he be stopped?’

Azmodeus laughed. ‘Would you save the world? I have always enjoyed hubris,’ he said.

Du Bois could tell that Beth felt she was being mocked and wasn’t enjoying the experience.

‘We thought we had. We thought we had trapped him here on Earth, a danger in itself. This is why we murdered babies and our
Ifreet
burned the future. We attacked the Circle. We tried to cut the bloodline. We killed knowledge. It is considered a great crime here.’ Again it looked like Azmodeus was wrestling with a great sadness at the destruction wrought during their attack on the Circle.

‘But you could fight him?’ Beth said, desperation in her voice.

‘You are the last contact we will have with the outside world. We did what we could, now—’

‘You hide!’ Beth spat.

Azmodeus turned to look at her, the flash of anger somehow more genuine than the sadness had been. It was only there for a moment. ‘Perhaps. We must do what we can to assure our survival.’

‘Where is this place?’ Beth asked. ‘I mean you’ve got to have … I don’t know, servers or something.’ The words sounded unfamiliar coming from Beth.

‘We are diffuse. We exist deep beneath the Earth, in Atlantic trenches, a circle of stones in Iceland, an abandoned city in Jordan, the ruins of the snake kingdom in Cambodia …’

‘The diffuse part I believe,’ du Bois muttered, wiping the tears from his face as he ran diagnostics on the foreign software that had been uploaded into him. Now he knew how Beth had felt in Old Portsmouth. He climbed unsteadily to his feet. ‘He would never answer that truthfully.’

Azmodeus smiled indulgently.

‘This might sound like a stupid question, but are you connected to the internet?’ Beth asked.

‘They were the internet a long time before there was one,’ du Bois said.

‘When these Seeders attacked it, could you have stopped it?’ she asked.

Azmodeus’s face was very serious now. ‘Not and have been assured of success. Not without risk to this.’ His hand swept out over the city.

‘Cowards,’ Beth spat. She turned to du Bois. ‘I want to leave.’

‘As I said, this is your ark. You can stay here if you wish,’ Azmodeus told them.

Du Bois laughed. ‘I have been a puppet for
so long, but I can see the strings now. You
want to make sure we go after the
DAYP
. Get
Natalie’s genetic data from them.’

‘And destroy it,’ Azmodeus
said.

‘But that can be used—’ Beth started.

‘What did
the Circle order you to do with the souls in
your head?’ Azmodeus demanded.

‘Destroy them,’ du Bois said.

‘And
you didn’t, because you know we are right.’

‘No,
I didn’t because it was the wrong thing to
do. There’s a difference.’

‘Give us the souls. We
will keep them safe,’ Azmodeus said.

Du Bois wasn’t
sure why, but he turned to look at Beth. She
looked deep in thought.

‘You can take a copy, can’
t you?’ she finally asked. Azmodeus looked less than pleased. ‘
What fucking difference does it make if you’re just
going to lock yourselves in here?’ she demanded.

‘Yes,’ he
finally admitted.

Beth looked over at du Bois.

‘I’m
not sure I trust my own judgement any more.’

She
looked less than pleased at this response. ‘You take a
copy. You also take a copy of two other souls
inside his phone, but just a copy. They are fractured,
they might have been damaged …’

‘By the Seeder attack?’ Azmodeus
asked. Beth nodded. ‘We cannot risk contamination …’

‘Listen, arsehole, you
just said you might have won going toe-to-toe
with those things. I’m sure you can manage the
dodgy souls of two fucking students, okay? You heal them.
Then you give them the best lives your little computer
game can manage. Do you understand me?’

‘Do not speak
to me—’ Azmodeus started.

‘Do you want the souls or
not?’ du Bois snapped.

‘We’re not going to risk—’

‘
Can you even remember what it’s like to be
human?’ Beth demanded. ‘There’s fucking risk involved.’

‘It’s
not human,’ du Bois said. Beth frowned and concentrated for
a moment.

‘Azmodeus, the demon that Solomon controlled with his
magic ring,’ Beth said. ‘Isn’t that a myth, though?’

‘
He’s either a Lloigor AI, or more likely a
reverse-engineered
human creation using the L-tech. Aren’t you?’ du Bois said. He glanced at the tombs.

‘Oh no, Mr du Bois, I am one of the Lloigor AIs. Though I am a child of another mind and born after the birth of your universe.’

‘If he ever inhabited a human body,’ du Bois nodded towards the AI, ‘then he possessed it through the tech.’ Azmodeus grinned. ‘But there are rules. So we will have your agreement and we will have your oath.’ The grin went away.

Beth was staring at it. ‘It’s an alien computer?’ she asked.

‘Dataform, but yes.’ And then to Azmodeus: ‘What did you do to my head?’

‘We were always more masters of the L-tech than the S. We have upgraded your neuralware. It should protect you from direct control by your erstwhile employers, and help against any attacks. We also upgraded the systems in your aircraft. It should help hide you. Your best defence, however, remains that they have other things to worry about, but I still think you should stay with us.’

Both Beth and du Bois shook their heads.

‘Where can I find the Do As You Please clan?’ du Bois said tightly.

Azmodeus concentrated for a moment. ‘Right now, we do not know.’ Du Bois was aware of receiving information direct to his neuralware. He was less than pleased about this. ‘They were based in Boston.’ Du Bois checked the information. It looked like it contained a lot of information on the
DAYP
, including an address. ‘I think you should know that Hamad believed that it was Nethercott, the one who calls himself Inflictor Doorstep for reasons we cannot fathom, who released Silas Scab from his oubliette.’

Du Bois frowned. Azmodeus was referring to things he could not remember but had apparently been involved in. The picture of an insecure little boy, who had used the tech to burn out his humanity and dress himself as a demon, appeared in his mind’s eye. Du Bois couldn’t help but think that the
DAYP
were perfectly suited for this age.

‘What are you going to do?’ Azmodeus asked.

‘Fight,’ Beth told him.

He knew it was a woman despite the apparent heaviness of the boots falling on the stone stairs. He knew she could have been quiet if she had wanted to, just as he could have fought if he had wanted to, but he was old and he didn’t want to live in this world any longer. This was better than any of the alternatives he could think of. He couldn’t quite bring himself to regret his life of fear and hiding. He brought to mind all the humans he had known. In many ways the humans were the Seeders’ most flawed creation, and most interesting.

He raised his serpent head to look at her. ‘You don’t know how sad it is that he sent you,’ he said.

‘Where is he?’ He could hear the hate in her voice.

‘You know we were friends once? We could talk. I could make us tea.’

She raised the suppressed Beretta. ‘Where is he?’ she demanded again.

‘You know he would never tell me.’

The first bullet caught him in the chest. The world seemed to tip sideways and he collapsed against the couch. He could see her soaked, leather clad legs walking towards him. He could feel the bullet eating him from inside. She was standing over him now, the pistol pointed at his head. He wished he could close his eyes but nictitating membranes didn’t work that way. He remembered the city. Fire filled his vision.

12

A Long Time After the Loss

The Monk’s senses desperately tried to compensate for the light and noise above. There were so many different spectrums of destructive energy on display. Successive concussive waves trying to batter them to the ground. She unclipped the coherent field generator from her belt and attached it to Talia’s, set a timer on the mechanism, and triggered it with a ’faced instruction. Her younger sister was still mostly blind and working by touch. A protective amber light surrounded Talia.

‘The ship.’ The ’face had come from Churchman. It took a moment for her to understand what he was trying to say. Something hit her, driving her to the ground. Bones in her shoulder broke and almost immediately started to heal. She’d been hit by a piece of the Cathedral, she realised as her sight returned, a piece of ornate masonry melting into the floor, being reabsorbed. She was appalled to feel the Cathedral shake around her.

‘No P-sat!’ Vic’s ’face was practically a shout. Churchman picked up Talia. She was difficult to hold in the force field but Churchman’s arms were big enough to cradle her. The Monk had her P-sat clip itself to Vic’s shoulder and she grabbed hold of him. Scab was holding onto Churchman, heading towards the
Basilisk II
overhead. It looked like they were rising into pure light and noise. She was receiving no tactical data from the Cathedral, she assumed her clearances had been pulled after Elodie had meat-hacked her.

The yacht’s forward ramp was open like a mouth as Vic landed on it. She hadn’t dared to look into the light but she was aware of a focus for the Cathedral and the Church ships’ weapons, something that was acting like a prism for all that destructive energy, something shaped like a person. It made her nauseous that the Elite couldn’t be destroyed by all this fury.

Her sight started to return. She could see her sister was lying down in the cargo bay, still encased in the amber light. Churchman was holding a struggling Scab against his neck.

‘Don’t kill the AI! Do you fucking understand me!’ Churchman’s amplified voice boomed. The thunder outside was dampened in part by the
Basilisk II
’s hull. Churchman let Scab go. The bounty killer scuttled away from him like an injured animal, his face painted in hatred.

She couldn’t understand what was happening. The large, golden exoskeleton stood up and turned to look at her. ‘Find the Ubh Blaosc,’ he ’faced her. She felt her eyes start to hurt.

‘Come with us!’ Her voice was lost in the noise from outside the ship but she had ’faced him as well.

‘You know I can’t,’ he told her as he walked past. He went down the ramp and stepped off it, his AG motors slowing his fall. The ramp closed and it went quiet.

The timer on the coherent energy field ran down and the amber light seeped away. Talia was trying to crawl, making a horrible moaning noise as she did. Blood was pouring from blind eyes and deaf ears. Nothing looked life threatening but her sister needed medical attention.

‘We need to get out of here,’ she snapped as she moved towards Talia. The tumbler round caught her in the shoulder. Her
gi
hardened, her skin hardened, but she felt the bullet drilling, chewing up flesh and technology, the explosion nearly tearing off her arm. She heard more reports from the tumbler pistol as she stumbled back and hit the floor. Suddenly there was a big, solid shape over her. Vic was staggering as round after round impacted into him.

‘Scab!’ Vic shouted.

‘I’m going to fucking kill her! Kill them all!’ Scab roared. Beth grabbed at the hilt of one of her bayonet-shaped thermal blades with her remaining working hand. Her medical systems were trying to repair the internal damage but she didn’t have enough spare matter for the external damage.

Scab had the large, empty, smoking revolver in one hand and a straight-edge razor in the other, tears of rage in his eyes. He was moving towards Talia. The Monk was aware of waves of force battering the
Basilisk II
around but its internal gravity was keeping them steady.

Vic stepped over Talia, all four arms held up in as un-threatening a posture as possible.

‘Please, Scab,’ Vic said quietly. ‘Is this the way you want to die?’

Scab stopped. He stared at Vic. The rage had transformed him. He didn’t look human. It had been a long time since Beth had felt afraid like this. Scab was shaking. He screamed. It sounded like an animal in pain. Then he grinned at Vic and lifted the razor to his face. He made his smile wider and redder. Then he stormed out of the cargo area.

The dolphin sea boiled. Some of them had made it to their cryogenic escape pods, bridge projectors opening the way for them out of the Red and into the Real. Many more were cooked.

They had sent the Elite first. Churchman had only seen the one. He was sure it was the sleeping clone of Scab, the one that Patron had called the Innocent. The Elite had almost made it to the Cathedral undetected, moving in an exotic physical state, but there was enough L-tech in the Cathedral’s systems that they had found him. Shifting physical state again, the Innocent had tried to move through the Cathedral’s walls. The semiconductor quantum dots – effectively programmable atoms – that the smart matter was constructed of made the walls seethe. They acted like piranha on an atomic level. Impregnated coherent energy fields had torn at flesh and matter, regardless of how exotic, as the Innocent tried to push through. Ancient alien signals tried to introduce viruses to technology derived from the same ancient sources, while similarly ancient and similarly alien diseases attempted to infect modified biology. The Innocent, caught in the grips of a tailored, violence-inducing nightmare, had pulled itself free of the Cathedral’s walls and into a storm of light and force. Churchman knew that coming through the walls would have cost it. The Cathedral’s internal weapons searched for a spectrum of energy, a physical state for the bullets to sneak their ordnance through. This was not a Monarchist habitat. The Church’s access to S- and L-tech made them far from helpless.

Then the Consortium fleets started to arrive. Patron must have had some idea of the Cathedral’s position after searching for it for all those millennia, for the naval contractor’s ships to have got there so soon after Beth had broadcast the signal.

The Church’s fleet had already been moving into position, though many of the smaller craft were inside the Cathedral, concentrating their fire on the Innocent. Their ships were vastly superior to the Consortium’s. The Cathedral’s external weapons were brought to bear as well. It seemed like every inch of Red Space around the Cathedral was filled with beams, EM-driven projectiles, or AG-powered smart munitions.

So much firepower had been unleashed that the first Consortium capital ship to reach the Cathedral had been destroyed in moments, its ponderous bulk silently coming apart.

Mass drivers fired meteorites full of servitors at the Consortium vessels. Each servitor was an armoured, wedge-headed, six-limbed predator that the Seeders had created for their own defence. Their crucified image appeared on Church ships, and in Church facilities all across Known Space. Lasers and particle beam weapons cleared a path for the meteorites, and the rain of kinetic harpoons and AG-driven smart munitions that preceded them. The harpoons and fusion warheads penetrated armoured hulls. The meteorites followed and the servitors were unleashed on Consortium military contractor crews.

It didn’t matter. The Cathedral’s vast energy dissipation grid was already close to being overwhelmed. The massive habitat glowed like a neon sign, smart matter bubbling in the heat, rupturing when fusion-headed AG smart munitions made it through the defensive laser batteries. Churchman knew the Cathedral’s fall, the Church’s fall, was only a matter of time.

He hid. He found somewhere unobtrusive to do the things he had to. Ordering the evacuation, wiping all knowledge of bridge technology from systems and minds, triggering self-destruct sequences on artefacts that just could not be allowed to fall into Consortium hands, destroying those AIs that could not escape, and murdering key personnel who knew too much – all done with a thought.

He was wondering why the
Basilisk II
had still not left. Then the prism of light that was the Innocent moved. Black energy lashed out from inside the light surrounding the Elite. Where it touched the wall of the Cathedral it fed on the smart matter to create a reaction. The front wall of the Cathedral, fifteen miles high, twenty miles wide, blew out. The force of the explosion destroyed Consortium and Church ships alike. The atmosphere remaining in the Cathedral became a superstorm rushing to get out. The dolphin seas stopped bubbling, immediately froze and became icebergs hurling themselves towards the cold red light outside. Manoeuvring engines burned brightly as the ships in the Cathedral were thrown around by the storm. Some were bounced off the walls, some collided with each other and a number of the smaller craft were destroyed by the flying icebergs.

Molecular hooks anchored Churchman to the floor. Among the chaos of information he was receiving he had lost visual contact with the
Basilisk II
and the Innocent. There was a moment of panic but just a moment, then he found them. The
Basilisk II
was on heavy burn, flying against the storm, weaving in and out of huge chunks of ice and other ships, staying close to the floor of the Cathedral where most of the ice was concentrated. The Innocent was chasing them.

‘All ships fire on the Innocent!’ Churchman ’faced, dooming himself.

The Monk carried Talia into the lounge/command and control of the
Basilisk II
. The pool was still there but the dead dolphin had been removed. Her internal systems clamped down on a surge of vertiginous nausea. Every surface of the room was either transparent or showing visual feed from the heavily modified yacht’s sensors. The fall of the Cathedral was playing out all around them. Scab stood in the centre of the room, a fixed, red, maniacal grin on his bloodied face. He still held the straight-edge razor, but the tumbler pistol had been put away, and there was a smouldering cigarette in his other hand now. He was listening to reggae, loudly. The Monk’s neunonics identified it as ‘Steppin’ Razor’ by Peter Tosh.

The
Basilisk II
dropped under a newly formed ice asteroid big enough to have destroyed the ship. The storm of escaping atmosphere buffeted the
Basilisk II
but the AG field kept them in place as if they were standing on level ground.

The Monk put her sister down on one of the poolside loungers. Talia was panicking, trying to flail around. She tried to calm her younger sister with touch but it was having no effect, not surprisingly. She tried ’facing a command to the ship for a sedative but found herself locked out of the systems.

Scab brought them out of, and above, the flying ice field, sending the ship back into a dive underneath a light cruiser that was firing all its weapons at something behind them. They made it past the cruiser and then it split apart as their pursuer flew through it. Something made of light, something that all the Cathedral’s internal weapons seemed to be targeting.

‘There’s a fucking Elite chasing
us!’ Vic screamed, the air filling with the pheromonic equivalent
of the insect shitting himself.

No,
the Monk thought,
it’s not chasing us. It’s playing with us.
It could finish us any time it wants.

Then the
Basilisk II
banked hard towards one of the enormous stained-
glass windows. The Elite chasing them drew a line of
destruction with its weapon, never quite touching the yacht. More
of the Church ships died. They seemed intent on getting
between the Elite and the
Basilisk II
. The Elite burst
through a frigate just as the stained-glass window opened
for the yacht. They shot out into Red Space, light
and destruction.

‘He’s trying to destroy me.’ The Monk
actually jumped as Churchman appeared in the lounge/C&C.
He looked as he had when she had first met
him. Perhaps his hair was a little longer, but he
was dressed as a Catholic priest. Vic let out a
little squeal and drew his shotgun pistol and shot the
holographic representation of the
Basilisk II
’s new AI. The
shotgun loads impacted the wall, but the smart matter quickly
repaired the cosmetic damage. The hologram glanced irritably at the
on-edge insect. ‘I have information you need. Scab is
trying to wipe me and the construct containing Maude and
Uday. I uploaded it into the
Basilisk II
’s systems.’
Then the hologram started screaming. Scab was staring at the
Elite chasing them. It looked like a ghost drawn in
violent energy.

The Monk was moving. She ’faced the hack
to one of Vic’s double-barrelled laser pistols, there
was resistance but her hack had won out by the
time she’d reached the ’sect.

‘Hey!’ Vic started but
she’d unlocked the laser’s clip and gained neunonic
access to the weapon. ‘He’s the p—’ The Monk
got Scab’s attention by repeatedly firing the pistol at
his right shoulder. His suit jacket’s energy dissipation grid
lit up but was quickly overwhelmed and she blew a
lump of steaming flesh out of his upper torso, staggering
him.