The Beauty of Destruction (39 page)

Du Bois opened his mouth.

‘What’s your name?’ Beth asked. The flayed man turned his head to look up at her. She could see the sadness in his eyes. She was pretty sure he knew what was coming next.

‘Arkady.’

‘I’m sorry, Arkady.’ He was nodding when she shot him in the head with the Colt
OHWS
.

Du Bois was moving away from her, bringing the carbine up. Alexia had the ARX-170 pointed into the freight car.

‘What did you do?’ du Bois asked as she holstered the pistol.

‘I’d rather he thought we were complete bastards than realised what had happened to the world and anyone he cared about in it,’ she told him as she jumped down from the freight car and started walking back towards the
ECV
. She felt the eyes of both the du Bois siblings on her back.

It was the most ridiculous of long shots. Beth could see it in du Bois’s eyes, hear it in Alexia’s voice. They were just going through the motions now. Bothering the dead. They were in a city of insane millions looking for sociopaths who were going to fit right in.

As they left the Long Beach area they had heard what sounded like a small war going on behind them. Artillery, tanks, helicopters, jets pounding the city to the south of them. Du Bois had guessed that the Marines at Camp Pendleton had decided to take the city in force.

It had taken them the better part of the day to make their way back north towards the west Los Angeles district of Sawtelle. This time they had to fight. They had to run roadblocks. Small arms fire had bounced off the vehicle’s armour. Du Bois had taken a round in the leg. Beth had also caught a ricochet in the arm. It had gone through her combats but not her hardened skin. It had still hurt.

She had known what the minigun’s capabilities were but there was a difference between knowledge, using it for suppressing fire – as they had when they had been looking for La Calavera – and witnessing what it could do to a human body first-hand. She’d fired controlled bursts. Trying to limit it to between fifty to a hundred rounds each time she had depressed the trigger. The rotating six-barrelled weapon’s rate of fire was horrific. It had filled the air with arcs of light from the tracers, chewing away at cars and
SUV
s in a shower of sparks. The people hit by the rounds looked like they had been disintegrated, they became smears on the concrete. Alexia and du Bois had popped smokes around the
ECV
to obscure the vehicle, though they could see through it themselves. Alexia used the weight of the armoured patrol vehicle to punch through the roadblocks. Du Bois and Beth fired at anyone, or anything, that looked like it posed a significant threat. It had happened more than once. It was as if the city had woken up to them. They were a disease and all the armed psychos were LA’s antibodies. Their grace period was over.

‘This is a fucking waste of time now,’ Alexia muttered, sucking hard on the cigarette she was smoking. They were parked on a footpath among some trees on a lawn surrounding the Wilshire Federal Building, an ugly, white concrete, nineteen-storey tribute to bad sixties government architecture, close to the corner of Wilshire and Veteran. South of them, on the other side of the Federal Building’s car park, was a real park. North of them, across the skyscraper-lined Wilshire Boulevard, were the neat rows of thousands of veterans’ graves in the Los Angeles National Cemetery. To their west, though obscured by the Federal Building, was the VA West Los Angeles Medical Center. ‘You’re just playing soldier boy because you don’t know what else to do.’

Du Bois and Beth were standing on either side of the
ECV
, weapons ready, keeping watch. Beth was starting to realise that despite her new physiology, despite the ability to stay awake for prolonged periods of time, the constant need to remain alert, the constant tension, was starting to take its toll. She was only half listening to Alexia, who was leaning against the
ECV
’s bullet-scored bonnet. The Federal Building looked strange, somehow. She was wondering if she was starting to hallucinate.

‘We’re just going to be fighting now, all the time. Eventually they’ll get us, and if they can’t kill us, then we’re looking at suffering for a very long time.’ She shivered, despite the temperature. The sun was going down but the evening was staying warm, low cloud and smog holding the heat in. Beth wasn’t sure the other woman was wrong, though she was planning to put a nanite-tipped bullet in her own head before it came to that. ‘We’ll run out of ammunition eventually.’ This was true. Beth had three cases of rounds left for the minigun, but she’d already burned through one case today alone.

‘So will everyone else,’ du Bois said. They could hear nearly constant gunfire now. If they watched then they could make out the distant flickering of muzzle flashes. They could still hear police sirens as well. Further east on Wilshire they had seen a mass battle going on between two forces in skyscrapers on opposite sides of the road, a spontaneous waste of ammunition, a battle thrown like it was a barbecue. ‘This isn’t going to end like this, Alexia,’ he continued, gently. ‘It’s going to get worse.’

‘How?’ Beth was surprised to find that she’d asked the question. She couldn’t imagine anything worse than this. There was something very wrong with the Federal Building.

‘Imagine the thing you saw in the Solent. The Seeder. Many more of them, but more malign and insane.’

‘So let’s go somewhere better, somewhere isolated, and live out the time left as best we can,’ Alexia said. There were tears in her eyes. ‘I can’t do this any more. There are exclusive resorts in the mountains, the desert, we could …’

‘Go there, clear them out?’ Beth asked. Everything was stained with blood now.

‘Oh God,’ Alexia said and looked down.

‘Maybe you should take the
ECV
, take Beth with you if she wants to go,’ du Bois suggested. ‘Let me know where you’ll be and I’ll come for …’

‘You bastard!’ Alexia thumped him on the shoulder, staggering him a little. ‘You know I won’t leave you! Not now! We should both go! All go!’ She turned to Beth. ‘Will you tell him?’

Beth looked at Alexia and then used the excuse of being on watch to turn away from her. She wasn’t sure what she wanted to do. Alexia’s plan sounded attractive, no doubt, but she remembered the dead tourists in Portsmouth, the freaks who had taken her sister, the other Elizabeth in the warehouse in Cambridge. It might all be meaningless against the backdrop of all this insanity, but dealing with the
DAYP
was
her
part of the insanity, the small thing that she could put right.

‘We’re going to run out of places to look soon,’ she said, still not looking at Alexia. ‘We might as well check this out.’

‘Christ, you’re no better than he is!’ Alexia spat. Now Beth turned to look at the other woman.

‘Fuck off!’ Beth snapped.

‘Alexia,’ du Bois cautioned.

‘No! Because this isn’t the last place you’ll look, because if you don’t get what you want here, you’ll go back and fight that Calavera arsehole! And you might not know it yet, but you want to do it! You’ve got a taste for it. You don’t know how many soldiers’ eyes I’ve seen that look in.’

‘You can go if you want,’ Beth said as she passed Alexia, angry that the other woman had compared her to her father’s murderer.

Beth wasn’t sure who they were – employees, passers-by, maybe protestors. There were a few placards scattered around the plaza in front of the Federal Building. Whoever they were, they had fused with the concrete and glass of the building.

Du Bois was standing with his back to her as she stared at the building. The people trapped in the walls reminded her of the gargoyles that she had seen on old churches, except they were still moving, still somehow alive.

‘Fuck this!’ Beth said. Anger. Anger was better. The Model 0
LMG
was up against her shoulder. She moved into the shadows, heading towards the door.

The glass was broken. The reception area had the coat of arms of the American government painted on the marble floor. The area didn’t look too badly damaged, but the screaming and nausea-inducing flickering coming from the computer monitors reflecting off the marble was making it hard for her to concentrate. Du Bois moved forwards quickly and leapt over the reception desk, Beth covering him as he smashed the computers. Blood was running from his nose by the time he had finished.

They had taken the stairs, trying to ignore the begging, sobbing and muttered glossolalia of the unfortunates fused with the building. She wasn’t sure, but she suspected some of them were whispering classified information. There was a moment of near hysteria where she thought about asking them what they knew. Du Bois had turned around to see what she was laughing at. The disapproving look on his face made it even more difficult not to laugh.

They had found the FBI’s office. Beth and du Bois just stared. They were still at their desks in their suits, still working, though their monitors showed little but interference. Beth didn’t like the things she was seeing in the corner of her eye in the interference, however. Skin had grown over the workers’ eyes, ears and noses. Their skin moved as if breathing for them and they were wasting away.

Beth started laughing again. She turned to look at du Bois, grinning. ‘Well, this was worth it.’

‘It’s an information network,’ du Bois said. Beth’s smile disappeared.

‘You can’t be fucking serious?’ she said, but he had already put his .45, the carbine, the Purdey, his tanto and the belt buckle knife on a table and then stepped away from it. Beth actually jumped as all the phones in the room started ringing.

‘Put the magazine of nanite rounds into your sidearm. If I come back wrong …’ he told her. She was shaking her head. He picked up the phone and held the screaming receiver to his head. His eyes filled with blood and then her vision was filled with light.

27

A Long time After the Loss

Benedict/Scab was now in his hacked Church-issue body armour, wishing he had access to something a bit bigger than an
ACR
and two tumbler pistols. He was watching the fight. He supposed he should have known it would come down to this. He had a good idea of Vic and Scab’s capability, but he had underestimated both the Monk and the resources they had brought to bear on the
Templar
. They had been tactically clever, using bottlenecked corridors to their advantage, but even so, three people shouldn’t be able to hold off his crew like that. The pirates’ main advantage, however, was the nano-swarm slowly eating the intruders’ equipment. All of the boarding party were wounded now, their armour next to useless, their weapons about to fall apart, their own protective nano-screens overwhelmed by the weaponised Church swarm.

The electronic war in the ship’s systems wasn’t really going Benedict/Scab’s way either. The crew of the
Templar
were mostly trying to deal with the overwhelming initial onslaught, which meant that Scab and the Monk got to sneak around causing trouble.

And then he’d been locked out of the
Templar
’s systems. That was when Benedict/Scab knew it was over. He was standing still on the walkway over the fouled dolphin pool in C&C as the S-sats turned on the rest of his crew. He was aware of the C&C nano-screen being weaponised and starting to eat the pirates as well, whether the hunting S-sats had caught them yet or not. The holography died, the various visual and telemetry feeds on the smart matter walls died. Benedict/Scab was aware of his own personal nano-screen, his armour and his weapons being eaten, but somehow he knew that neither the S-sats nor the nano-swarm would be what killed him. Beams, flechettes, EM-driven shotgun rounds fired by the S-sats impacted all around him but he stayed stock-still.

The door to C&C opened. He raised the
ACR
and fired. The first few rounds hit the Monk’s coherent energy field before the weapon came apart in his hands. He was backing away. Harold threw himself at her, taking an EM shotgun blast in the back as he did so. She extruded blades from the field and trisected his lizard first mate in mid-air.

Scab leapt over the Monk. He was all but naked now, the nano-swarm having eaten his armour, though he still had his rotting tumbler pistol in one hand. Where the swarm had reached his skin it looked like he had contracted a flesh-eating virus. There was a hole in his cheek. His jaw and teeth were exposed. Another of the possessed pirates in C&C charged him. Scab rammed his metalforma knife into the visor of the pirate’s rotting armour. The blade pierced the visor, stabbed into flesh and started to grow. Scab left it there.

Benedict/Scab drew both the tumbler pistols and fired them at his father/older self. They fired a bullet each before rotting away. Scab was cutting someone in two with his energy javelin just because they hadn’t got out of his way quickly enough. The bullets impacted him, spinning through armoured skin and blowing out chunks of flesh. Scab barely seemed to notice. He was obviously being kept going by medical systems, narcotics, hatred and anger.

Benedict/Scab was aware of Vic running and leaping from one of the suspended catwalks to another over the fouled dolphin pool. The ’sect landed and started tearing apart any of the remaining crew with his power-assisted limbs. The Monk was moving around C&C with purpose, slicing up anyone she found with the L-tech energy blades she had extruded from her field.

The elder Scab stalked towards Benedict/Scab. The rotting flesh of his right arm glowed as the E-javelin was sucked back into its housing. His father/older self still held the, presumably useless, tumbler pistol in his right hand. Benedict/Scab had a metalforma knife in each hand now. The robust weapons would be the last to fall prey to the swarm that had been turned against them. He darted forwards to ram one into Scab. Scab blocked the arm and then broke his son/younger self’s elbow through the rotting armour. Benedict/Scab howled as his internal medical systems attempted to deal with the damage and pain. He stabbed at his father/older self with the other blade. Scab did the same thing to the other elbow. It was obviously no effort for the elder Scab at all. He was staring at his son/younger self.

‘Isn’t this what you wanted?’ Benedict/Scab managed through gritted teeth when his internal narcotics had taken the edge off the worst of the pain.

‘Who do you think you are?’ Scab asked, shaking his head. Benedict/Scab realised that the
Templar
had stopped moving. Through the open blast door he could hear screaming, and the sound of renewed fighting. The smart matter wall lit up again. His father/older self and the Monk were in charge of the ship now. He could see the
Basilisk II
had docked with the light cruiser. The Cystians, living weapons, once his – no, his father’s – followers, had entered the ship. The nano-swarm had removed the possessed pirates’ technological advantage. In close quarters m
ê
l
é
e the Cystians had the upper hand. It was just a slaughter now.

Benedict/Scab had allowed himself to be distracted by what the smart matter was showing him. His father/older self made him aware of this mistake by breaking his kneecap, and then hacking his neunonics to lock out his medical systems and internal drug supply. He lay on the catwalk over the fouled, empty dolphin pool, in a lot of pain. His cheek against the floor, he got to see the first of the Cystians reach C&C. They were red from head to foot.

Now he felt like one of the air-swimming avian cloud hunters from one of the low-G lizard worlds, pre-exploitation. Mr Hat had the
Amuser
just under the clouds, moving slowly and quietly, trying to minimise his signature, using the web of nanites he’d spread out across the clouds to backscatter and/or confuse any active scans coming from the stationary
Templar
and the docked
Basilisk II
. He was feeding passive scan information to the
Amuser
’s
targeting systems, hoping it would be enough.

The automatons had already moved to the airlocks, which had been expanded to capacity. He was going to drop about a quarter of them through each of the airlocks. He doubted he would have time to do a second drop. The only way the initial drop would work was if the crews of both ships were too busy dealing with each other to notice him.

He was impressed, despite himself. He was not sure what they had done, or how they had done it, but Scab and his cohorts had disabled and successfully boarded the
Templar
.

The
Amuser
was within a mile of the other two ships now. Mr Hat accelerated. The ship rose out of the cloud cover, dragging vapour with it, forming eddies in the hydrogen and helium. He launched two AG smart munitions, one of them travelling a lot faster than the other. He triggered the lasers and kinetic harpoons. They were travelling so quickly now it was practically point-blank range.

Submunitions blossomed but kept in tight together, multiple fusion warheads impacting against the rear of the
Basilisk II
, and for a moment there was only light. Then the yacht was gone. There was a very brief moment when Mr Hat thought he’d overdone it, destroyed his quarry, but the nano-web he’d sewn told him the yacht was heading down into the clouds again. He bombarded it with active scans, keen to remain aware of the other ship. He decelerated, manoeuvring engines burning brightly. He came around the
Templar
. The second AG-driven smart munition impacted exactly where the
Basilisk
II
had been docked. The airlock. Waves of force battered into the
Amuser,
rocking it back, actually causing some damage, but he had to be this close for the plan to work. Mr Hat was firing almost blind into the light of multiple fusion explosions. The
Amuser
launched kinetic harpoon after kinetic harpoon, impacting the molten side of the light cruiser.

The first explosion rocked the
Templar
and the second impact sent the Monk flying. She switched off the coherent energy field with a thought, it didn’t have much juice left in it anyway, and grabbed the edge of a catwalk as she fell towards the foul smelling, empty dolphin pool. The external feed playing on the smart matter walls was showing an odd ship. It looked like an up-ended squashed spider made of wrought iron and stained glass. It was firing on the
Templar
at very close range.

There was only a moment of panic when she noticed the
Basilisk II
was gone; then she was aware of it, damaged but fleeing down into the clouds. They had managed to lock Benedict/Scab and the others out of the
Templar
’s systems but they didn’t have total control of the ship, and after airlocks, weapons systems were often the hardest to hack, for obvious reasons.

They felt warm air blowing through the entrance to C&C as the blast doors started to close. The Monk swung back up onto the catwalk. Vic had dug his taloned feet into the composite materials underfoot. Scab had just dropped down onto all fours like an animal.

The Monk’s audio systems filtered down the deafening percussion of multiple kinetic harpoon hits. The internal feed showed the harpoons breaching the ship. One moment there was a corridor full of Cystians, the next moment they had ceased to exist.

The door to C&C stopped closing. The Monk heard horrible rasping laughter. She looked over to where Benedict/Scab was lying. His father/older self kicked the pirate leader hard in the head, cracking the rotting helmet of his son/younger self’s combat armour, rendering him senseless.

‘Just kill him!’ the Monk snapped. She was trying to gain access to the weapon systems.

Mr Hat partitioned his mind. He could receive tactical audio-visual feeds from all his automatons if he chose to, and his neunonics could cope with the traffic, but he tended to choose one or two ‘hero’ automatons from each operations area. The
Amuser
was over the light cruiser now, both airlocks were open and his worshippers were dropping onto the
Templar
, scrambling for the breach the fusion warheads and the kinetic harpoons had made. The hull of the stolen light cruiser ran with liquid carbon from its reservoirs as the
Templar
attempted to seal the breach. His automatons looked like four-legged insects crawling over the grotesquely decorated ship.

None of the main weapons had fired but a few autonomous anti-personnel/boarder weapons had, mainly rail cannons and smaller lasers. Mr Hat was targeting the weapons systems, taking them out as quickly as he could, while continually firing at the breach to try and keep it open. The anti-personnel weapons destroyed more than a few of the automatons. Mr Hat stopped firing at the breach as the first of his worshippers, almost swimming vertically down through liquid carbon, made it into the
Templar
.

Without the coherent energy field the closest thing the Monk had to armour was the tattered remnants of her
gi
. She still had her two thermal blades, both a pitted mess, but her neunonics had run a diagnostic and they were functioning, though not optimally.

Someone had to get control of the
Templar
’s weapons systems, at the very least, to try and deal with the ship outside. She knew Scab would be trying as well. She would have to help him if they were to have a chance. She was also trying to find a way to undo Benedict/Scab’s final ‘fuck you’, and get the blast doors closed. All of which meant she couldn’t use the nearly exhausted coherent energy field. So she was finding a place to hide. She was too soft and squishy for this fight. Arguably Scab was too squishy as well, but he at least had the E-javelin. Vic was their best bet against automatons. The ’sect had ’faced her the information on who was attacking them: a fellow bounty killer, top of the league tables, a rather weird diminutive lizard who wore a ridiculous stovepipe and went by the name Mr Hat.

‘These will be full spec,’ Vic ’faced to them both. ‘Not as fragile as the ones on Cascade.’

They hadn’t yet risked a direct feed from the
Templar
to their neunonics, but the smart matter walls were showing the automatons wading through the blood in the corridors, crawling along walls, the ceilings, creepy things dressed like male and female Victorian dolls, with featureless faces.

The Cystians had swarmed the automatons, but weapons of sharp, sculpted bone were of no use against armoured machines. The best they could do was slow them briefly before their broken bodies were cast aside. Their best hope was the
Templar
’s internal security systems. The remaining S-sats were using hit and run tactics on the blank-faced automatons. They couldn’t risk losing too many more of the S-sats by committing them fully. The weaponised nano-swarm was now targeted specifically on the automatons. They were starting to rot, robotic lepers, but it wasn’t even slowing them down.

She was suddenly aware of operating without a safety net for the first time in a long time. If something mechanical came in here and pulled her head off, that was it for her. She would not be cloned this time. She grinned savagely.

Still, it’s
been a good innings,
she thought.

In her head the Monk was aware of the defences the possessing psychos had added to the
Templar
’s weapon systems. They looked like a seething, wriggling mass of maggots. Her sword, the attack program she was using, burned with righteous fire.