The Beauty of Destruction (23 page)

She removed the suppressor from the SA58 carbine, cleared the jam, checked the weapon, and then reloaded it with a clip of armour-piercing rounds. The images from the projector appeared to be the graphics of some military simulation first-person shooter game. It was like a horrible mirror.
That
thought had come from the borderline-hysterical part of her partitioned mind. The
DAYP
clearly had all the toys.

As she checked her weapons she tried to work through a few things that hadn’t quite made sense. Her internal systems had identified a couple of the gunners. One was an ex-Ranger, the other an ex-Marine, both of whom had worked as civilian military contractors. They had still seemed able to work coherently as a team, yet one of them had possibly been masturbating over a car and she suspected that the two in here had been doing coke and playing computer games, which didn’t seem normal. The one she had tried to get to surrender had obviously been overwhelmed with hate, enough so that any sense of self-preservation had abandoned him. All of which could be explained by a significant lapse in military discipline in the civilian world, compounded with drug use, but it still seemed a little odd to her.

She heard a noise outside. It sounded like a whimpering moan. She glanced out through the partially open sliding door. She couldn’t see anyone moving out there. Carbine at the ready, she moved swiftly out, heading up the stairs to the mezzanine floor. She went to the SAW gunner first. His face reminded her, queasily, of raw hamburger. She stood over him and put two in his head to be sure.

The other gunman, the one with the carbine, the one she hadn’t hit with the flechette grenade, also looked dead. The spike had hit him in the jaw, gone through his head, and the point had burst out of the top of his skull. It looked like a huge insect sting. She looked down over the open area. She saw the big cat again. She realised why it looked strange. Big cats didn’t have bat-like wings. There was blood dripping from the cage. There were shell casings and what looked like bloody pitchforks scattered around it. Judging by its wounds the creature had been extensively tortured. It had a segmented, chitinous looking tail that ended in multiple stings like the one embedded in the gunman’s skull. The creature had a human face. The face of an attractive woman. Its chest moved.

She double-checked and then double-tapped the contractors’ bodies in the garage. One of them had indeed had his cock out. On a whim she had flipped open her Balisong knife and cut him, making sure there was some of his blood on the blade before folding it away again.

Now she was standing in front of the manticore’s cage, because it was a manticore, a creature from Persian myth. Except this didn’t look something from a medieval bestiary – few of those had bat wings. This looked like something from a role-playing game. Someone had done this with human and animal flesh to mimic a fucking computer game. Then the soldiers had come here and tortured the thing near to death. She still staggered back and nearly killed the thing when it spoke.

‘Kill me …’ it managed weakly. The pained woman’s face had rows of shark-like teeth.

‘Shit,’ Beth hissed. She couldn’t believe they had left it sentient, still able to talk.

‘Please …’ the creature begged.

Beth raised the carbine. The
DAYP
weren’t here. This had all been for nothing.

‘Who were … are you?’ she asked.

‘My name was Elizabeth,’ the manticore said. Despite the pain etched on her face, despite the abomination that was her body, Beth could see that she had once been beautiful. This had been an act of spite.

‘My name’s Elizabeth as well,’ Beth said quietly. Beth was somehow appalled when she saw the other woman smile.

‘What are the chances …’ According to her neuralware the accent was from New York.

‘What happened?’ Beth asked.

‘Will you kill me?’ Elizabeth asked. Beth nodded and the manticore continued. ‘Oh, y’know, it’s the usual story: girl meets alpha male wannabe, girl rejects said man-child, girl gets turned into a monster.’

‘This was because you said no to him?’ Beth asked incredulously. Elizabeth’s answering laughter was bitter. ‘Who?’

‘He calls himself King Jeremy. There’s four of them. Jeremy, Dracimus and Inflictor Doorstep.’

Beth raised an eyebrow at the name. ‘You said four.’

‘I think one of them got killed in England.’

‘That was us.’

‘Good.’ The manticore was already in a great deal of pain. Beth didn’t wish to draw it out but there were things she had to know. She glanced about, checking her surroundings. There was no gunfire coming from outside. Given du Bois’s capabilities she assumed it was because he had killed the other sniper.

‘Elizabeth, do you know where they’ve gone?’

The manticore’s eyes closed as she took several ragged breaths. Beth was sure she was going to die right there.

‘I think they’ve gone to LA,’ Elizabeth told her. ‘Something’s happened, hasn’t it? Outside. My family …’

‘I’ve got nothing good to tell you,’ Beth said. She wanted to cry. ‘Where in LA?’

Sadness warred with pain on the manticore’s face. ‘I don’t know. King Jeremy’s made a deal with someone but he doesn’t trust them. He was talking about all sorts of crazy things, like submarines, nonsense, but he has some contact in LA.’

‘Do you know who?’

‘I’m sorry …’ Hearing Elizabeth apologise was heartbreaking. ‘I think they were looking for an aircraft. They mentioned Boston Logan and some air force base.’

It wasn’t much but maybe du Bois knew more.

‘The soldiers, why …’ Beth asked, and then realised she didn’t have a way to ask the question. They had tortured her.

‘I dated a soldier once. He was troubled … but he was sweet. These weren’t soldiers. They were junior league sadists.’

‘Why didn’t you …’ she started. ‘Your tail?’ she finished weakly.

Elizabeth swallowed. ‘I … I wasn’t supposed to … not in here … I got punished …’ There were tears on her still-beautiful face. ‘Please … I’ve had enough.’

Two more shots rang out. As she felt the carbine kick back into her shoulder the urge to sob was gone. A much colder feeling replaced it. She knew why she was in this now. What she had to do.

The ceiling of the warehouse was ripped open, concrete and expensive toys torn apart as they were thrown into the air. Beth dived out of the line of fire. Her neuralware analysed the sound as that of twin 25mm
ADEN
cannons firing. Like those mounted on the Harrier.

The air was filled with powdered concrete. There was more firing, but none aimed at the warehouse, fortunately. Beth ran to the door.

Outside in the warehouse’s yard she looked up. She could hear the Harrier nearby. It sounded like it was hovering. There was more cannon fire. Beth moved quickly out onto the street, weapon at the ready.

She could see the Harrier now. Muzzle flashes were coming from the twin cannon pods mounted underneath the fuselage. She couldn’t make out what it was firing at. She hoped it was du Bois flying it, though that certainly hadn’t been the plan. There was movement at the Massachusetts Avenue end of the street. There was a crowd of people, most of them carrying improvised weapons, some of them with burning brands, sprinting down the street towards her. Presumably they’d been attracted by the sounds of violence. They were probably screaming and shouting but she couldn’t hear them over the cannon fire.

Beth darted across the road and into the alley that ran down the side of the building that du Bois had fired from. She reached the external fire escape she had seen earlier, jumped for the raised ladder and pulled herself up. The cannon fire had stopped. Now she could hear the mob. She clambered up the fire escape as quickly as she could. The first of the mob rounded the corner of the alley. She didn’t want to kill them unless she had to.

Beth reached the top of the building. The psychedelically-painted Harrier was hovering over a building across the street. As she watched, fires ignited under the aircraft’s wings in the crayon-shaped rocket pods, and 68mm
SNEB
air-to-ground rockets shot into the top of an apartment building. A cascade of explosions lit up the roofline. Beth wasn’t sure, but she thought she might have seen a figure leap from the apartment building, just a shadow backlit against the explosions.

Wishing she had a flare, Beth fired a long burst into the air, moving forwards as she did so, trying to get du Bois’s attention. At least she hoped it was du Bois. She could hear people climbing the fire escape now. She let the carbine drop on its sling and pulled out the other stun grenade she had been carrying. She pulled the pin, let the spoon flip off, and held it. She cooked the grenade and then threw it at the Harrier and turned her head away. The grenade exploded in mid-air. The Harrier veered slightly and then turned towards her. Beth fired another long burst in the air and then quickly reloaded the carbine and turned to face the fire escape.

The first of the mob appeared. Reluctantly Beth raised the carbine to her shoulder, still backing away. The edge of the building disappeared, phosphorus drew laser-like lights in the night as tracer-tipped cannon rounds disintegrated concrete, brick and fragile human flesh. Beth sagged.

She felt the downdraught from the L-tech modified aircraft as du Bois brought it down to hover close to the roof. The cockpit hatch was open. Beth slung the carbine and leapt onto the wing, making the aircraft veer slightly towards the building. She crawled across the wing. She was pretty sure that she couldn’t have done this with an unmodified version of the aircraft. In the street below, the people in the mob were throwing things at the Harrier. Beth climbed into her seat, the cockpit sealing after her, and the Harrier started to climb.

‘What happened?’ Beth asked. Du Bois had looked thin and haggard in the momentary glimpse she had caught of him. He had been injured and had healed himself.

‘The sniper,’ du Bois said.

‘Cannon fire, rockets, you don’t think that was overkill, do you?’

‘Perhaps you can judge after you’ve taken a hit from a fifty calibre sniper rifle,’ du Bois said a little testily. ‘He’s one of us, like me.’

‘He works for your old boss?’ Beth asked. She knew it would make him difficult to kill.

‘Yes, his name is Josh Ezard. The older of us used to call him the American. He served with Rogers’ Rangers during the Seven Years War, and then formed a particularly effective colonial militia to fight against the British during the War of Independence. He is an extremely good shot.’ Du Bois sounded angry. The Harrier dipped forwards and then G-force pushed her back as the aircraft accelerated.

‘So your old employer sent the contractors?’ Beth asked. Du Bois didn’t immediately answer.

‘Contractors? Were they insane?’

‘Maybe, but they were able to function if they were. I got some of their blood.’

Du Bois passed his phone back to her. It was not worth risking in terms of communication, but isolated it was still a useful tool.

‘Just wipe the blood across the bottom of it,’ he told her. Beth reached for her Balisong knife. When the base of the phone touched the blade it absorbed some of the blood and the display lit up.

‘S-tech, some kind of puppeteer nanites,’ Beth said. ‘They were arseholes, though, nasty, cruel.’

‘Just controlled enough to harness their insanity. Are you okay?’

Beth didn’t answer his question. Instead she told him about the deal King Jeremy had made and where the
DAYP
clan were going.

‘It sounds like they’ve made a deal with Mr Brown, but he’ll double cross them. They’re amateurs in this.’

‘Do you know who their contact in LA could be?’ Beth asked. There was another pause.

‘I can’t think of anyone, I didn’t operate there much. I always hated the place. I might know somebody who can help, however, if he’s still alive.’ The Harrier was already heading west. ‘If King Jeremy, I mean young Mr Rush,’ du Bois corrected himself, she knew he disliked using the
DAYP
’s assumed names, ‘is after a submarine,’ du Bois mused, ‘he must think he wants to go to Kanamwayso.’

‘Kanamwayso?’

‘Where I think all this madness came from.’

15

A Long Time After the Loss

It had got very quiet in the
Basilisk II
’s lounge/C&C, in part because Scab was nowhere to be seen. This would normally have made Vic very nervous but he was beyond that now. The Cathedral was gone. His chance at peace was gone. He looked over at Talia. The Monk had fabricated electrodes and managed to get signals to the cortical language areas of her sister’s brain. Of course it had terrified the girl, but the Monk had managed to soothe her and run medical extensions from the ship’s assembler to Talia’s eyes and ears. She had also administered a gentle sedative. Talia was still conscious but she was calmer now.

There was a moment when Vic looked at her, the girl from before the Loss who said and did such strange things, and he resented how she had complicated things. Or he tried to. Sure, Scab had always been a psycho, but they’d been doing all right before they’d got embroiled in this nonsense. They’d been rich, well, less in debt; successful, in terms of killing people with money on their heads; and respected, well, feared, though that had mostly been Scab.
No
, he decided,
things hadn’t been good, just slightly less shit
.
Well
, perhaps significantly less shit
.

She looked so fragile.

Bitch!
he tried to convince himself.

‘Beth?’ Talia asked weakly.

She
can hear!
‘I helped save you!’ Vic blurted out. The Monk and Talia turned to look at him and then turned back to each other.

‘It’s gone, isn’t it?’ There were tears in Talia’s eyes. The Monk nodded. ‘It was your home?’

‘Yes, it was,’ the Monk said quietly, taking her sister’s hand.

‘I’m sorry.’ Vic wasn’t surprised to see Talia’s face dissolve into tears. He looked at the Monk. She leant down and stroked her sister’s face, tucking some of her long hair away.

Vic didn’t understand. It was the Monk who had lost her home of so many thousands of years, her friends, Churchman, and yet she was comforting Talia. Humans made no sense to Vic.

‘Where’s Scab?’ Talia asked some time later. Both her eyes and ears were fully healed now. ‘Now there’s a question I’d never thought I’d ask.’

Vic had been draining the pool, converting the water into carbon for the ship’s reservoir, making the lounge more lounge-like and once again trying, unsuccessfully, to program the smart furniture to be comfortable for ’sects.

‘Did he die?’

Vic looked over at the girl. He was pretty sure she had been trying to keep her voice neutral. He wasn’t sure if she wanted Scab to be dead or not.

‘He’s merged with the ship’s smart matter,’ Vic said. ‘Probably. He might just be in his room.’

‘Can we assume he can hear us?’ the Monk asked. Vic nodded. Talia looked like she was concentrating.

‘Elodie said something,’ Talia said. ‘About Scab.’

Vic saw the Monk tense at the mention of the feline’s name. For all that she had done, Vic was pretty sure that the feline would be cloned on Ubaste, sans memory, and get on with her life. Nobody here had the time or the resources to go after her. He found he couldn’t even get angry about it. They hadn’t been neurally audited, or denuded of dangerous nanites, virals, software etc when they had arrived at the Cathedral. Apparently this was because of one of those strange social mores called courtesy. As far as Vic was concerned, and despite the Cathedral’s otherwise excellent security, the Church had destroyed itself. What had they thought was going to happen, inviting them on board?

‘Anything Elodie said would have been part of her plan to manipulate us,’ Vic told her.

‘That’s the thing, it didn’t really make any sense. She said that Scab was in love with the ghost of the ship.’

Vic’s mandibles clattered together and he emitted a sound that he thought approximated a human giggle. He didn’t think he’d got it right because both the women were giving him odd looks.

‘This ship?’ Vic asked. Talia shrugged.

‘I don’t know, maybe she liked him more than she was willing to admit,’ the Monk said dismissively. Talia frowned at her sister. ‘I think we’ve got more important things to talk about than Scab’s love life.’ Talia opened her mouth to say something but then seemed to think the better of it.

‘Do you want to go and have sex in an immersion? I can make myself look more human.’ He had just blurted it out. Vic cringed internally and wondered if there was some routine he could add to his neunonics that would stop him from saying things like this when he was tense. He wanted to meat puppet himself.

Talia’s hand shot to her mouth as she tried to suppress laughter. The Monk was staring at him.

‘Vic! She’s my sister,’ the Monk pointed out.

‘That’s terribly sweet but not right now,’ Talia said. The Monk turned to look at her. ‘What?’

‘The Elite!’ Vic cried, desperate to change the subject. Though he didn’t really want to think about it. Ludwig, the Monarchist’s automaton Elite, had killed him before. ‘Was it trying to protect us from the Innocent?’

‘It looked that way, didn’t it?’ the Monk said, somewhat grimly.

‘Because the Monarchists still want Talia?’

Talia was looking between the two of them as they talked but otherwise remained quiet.

The Monk shrugged. ‘That would make sense, I guess.’

‘But?’

‘Even fighting the Innocent, Ludwig could have taken her. I mean, either of them would have walked through us. The Innocent would have killed us all if he wasn’t as fucked in the head as Scab.’

‘The Innocent is asleep and living through a tailored nightmare,’ Vic pointed out.

‘Which makes him slow for a death god, largely due to a penchant for the dramatic.’

‘Penchant?’ Talia asked.

‘I’ve had millennia to develop a vocabulary.’

‘Okay, try and remember you’re from Yorkshire though, and not the Harrogate part of it.’

Vic had no idea what they were talking about. The Monk smiled but it was obvious to Vic’s facial recognition routines the woman was still in an awful lot of pain.

‘Ludwig was supposed to be a found weapon, right?’ the Monk said to Vic, all business now.

‘I believe so,’ Vic said.

‘It’s an L-tech automaton,’ the Monk said. Vic nodded as if he knew what she was talking about. ‘Augmented by Elite-tech, which is itself mostly reverse engineered S- and L-tech.’ Vic nodded thoughtfully. ‘You’ve no idea what I’m talking about, do you?’

‘Well, I know what Churchman told us,’ Vic said. There was a momentary change in the Monk’s face at the sound of her friend’s name. ‘These Lloigor. I don’t really get why you called it all S-tech.’

‘Because they were trying to create a religion,’ Talia said. The Monk looked at her younger sister, clearly surprised.

‘She’s quite intelligent, you know?’ Vic said, trying to curry favour and somehow irritating both of them instead.

‘A true religion,’ the Monk told them. ‘One based on science.’ Even she didn’t sound convinced.

‘Not so true that you didn’t want your origin myth to get all confused with those tricksy Lloigor,’ Talia pointed out.

‘Ludwig?’ Vic asked. He was developing a sense of when the sisters were going to start arguing.

‘We’ve found things like it before, but inert,’ the Monk told him.

‘What are they?’ Talia asked.

‘As far as we can tell they were part of an autonomous defence network that protected Lloigor facilities.’

Vic gave this some thought. Then he decided that he still didn’t understand anything. He pointed at Talia. ‘She’s S-tech, right?’

‘No,’ the Monk said tightly. ‘She’s my sister. She is from a biological line that had S-tech spliced into it.’

‘When?’ Talia asked.

‘The Iron Age,’ the Monk told her.

‘Oh.’

‘So what did the Seeders have to do with the Lloigor?’ Vic asked.

‘Well, nothing as far as we know,’ said the Monk, ‘but like I said, Ludwig might not have come for Talia.’

‘I have a question,’ her sister said. ‘If the Church controlled the secret of bridge travel, which was connected to me somehow, why did you sell it to the Consortium?’

Vic had to concede it was a very good point. He turned to look at the Monk.

‘Originally the Monarchist systems and the Consortium had it as well. We managed to get organised first, however, after the Loss. Removing their bridge production capabilities was our first Crusade.’ She said this with more than a little distaste. ‘Very exciting. The thing is, by that point the Consortium had enough bridge-capable craft to be a threat to us, as well as the fledgling Elite, and we also needed to operate within the Consortium-held systems for access to S- and L-tech, and for social engineering and intelligence gathering purposes. We also needed the resources that the Consortium paid us to continue with our research and our operations. So we came to an uneasy agreement. We sold to the Monarchist systems to act as a counterbalance against the Consortium, and believe me they are not pleasant people either.’

‘Looks like it came back to bite you,’ Vic said. The Monk looked away and Talia glared at him.

‘Churchm—’ the Monk started. ‘Do I really have to call you the
Basilisk
?’ She seemed to be talking to the air. The
Basilisk II
’s
newly uploaded AI, the one that Scab had tried to kill, appeared. His holographic presence was for Talia’s benefit.

‘Psychologically I think it would be better for you,’ the AI told her sympathetically, and then with a pained expression on his face said: ‘And strictly speaking, I am the second of that name.’

‘I’m not calling you
Basilisk II
. You … Churchman told me to find the Ubh Blaosc? I’ve heard the name before. I think that they were another faction with access to the tech before the Fall. What have you got on them?’

‘Beyond it being the Irish word for egg shell, nothing, I’m afraid,’ the AI said apologetically.

‘Fuck’s sake! Did that wanker erase it when he attacked?’ the Monk demanded.

‘It is possible, but I do not know.’ The AI’s hologram seemed to be looking past the Monk and Talia.

Vic followed his eyes and then jumped and almost reached for his pistols. Scab was standing close to the wall. The Monk and Talia turned and looked as well. The Monk tensed. Vic couldn’t read Talia’s response.

‘If there’s going to be more petty tantrums, let’s just get it over and done with now,’ the Monk said.

Scab walked over to the well-upholstered chair close to the sofa that Talia was lying on and the Monk was sitting on. Everyone’s eyes followed him. He sat down, took out his cigarette case, put one of the pointless drug sticks between his lips, lit it and then exhaled. He regarded the Monk carefully and then leant forwards. ‘So what do you want to do next?’ he asked.

The Monk’s eyes narrowed but it was obvious that she had no answers. They were still hunted, there was still money on their heads, they appeared to have once again garnered the attention of the Elite, and any allies had either betrayed them, or been destroyed.

‘If I may make a suggestion,’ the
Basilisk II
’s newly integrated AI said. Scab’s face twitched. ‘I think Mr Scab should visit his mother.’

Vic couldn’t have been more surprised if Steven the Dolphin had spontaneously reincarnated in the lounge/C&C and started fellating Scab, not least because he knew Scab had been gestated in a Cyst exo-womb.

‘I don’t have a mother,’ Scab said quietly. Vic could hear the tension in the human killer’s voice.

Cyst was on the cusp of extinction in celestial terms, and it had been for a very long time. The cold gas giant’s magnetosphere, which should have been stripped away millions of years ago, had been kept in place artificially. Most of its volatiles had been vampirically consumed by the megastructure that caged it. The planet was a huge sphere of sparse clouds of hydrogen and helium, with mega weather systems creeping slowly across it. The reflected light of its fading star made the gas clouds look white against a pale blue. It was a husk, a corpse world, it looked like the ghost of a gas giant and it should have been torn apart by gravitic forces a long time ago.

Initially thought to have been the site of the single greatest find of S-tech during the colonial era, Vic now knew that the hard-tech of Cyst’s Cage meant that it was actually an L-tech structure. He was still getting his head round it not having been created by the Seeders.

The Cage was basically a massive network of broad walkways and ziggurat-style buildings at evenly spaced junctions, all of which were made of some kind of smart matter. The Cage moved counter to the spin of the planet in a way that seemed to contradict physics and meant that it should have been torn apart by centrifugal forces. Somehow this allowed the walkways to generate a gravity field of roughly 1 G.

The Cage harvested energy from Cyst’s volatiles like a leech, and presumably had once done the same from the cooling of the planet causing compression, which in turn heated it up, allowing it to radiate more heat than it received from its star. It was theorised that Cyst had been some kind of fuelling station. Now there was just enough fuel left, apparently, for the Cage to continue functioning. Sooner or later that fuel would run out.

Such a feat of engineering had, of course, required a great deal of matter. The initial xeno-archaeologist expedition had theorised that rings and a number of moons, mostly system-invading planetoids trapped by the gas giant’s gravity, had once surrounded Cyst, and that their matter had been used in the construction of the Cage.

None of which meant very much to Vic. What he did know was that the existence of the mega engineering artefact had naturally led to war between the fledgling Monarchist systems, the fledgling Consortium, and of course the Church, all of whom wanted it. This was despite the Cage pretty much defying all attempts at scientific analysis.