A Quantum Mythology (15 page)

One of the G-carriers dropped in front of her and she used the AG to change course again. Her arm was almost pulled out of its socket and she hit the top of the G-carrier a lot harder than she wanted. The G-carrier stopped. The four roof-mounted strobe guns turned towards her, but she ignored them. When one of the roof hatches opened, she started to run. The militiaman was climbing out of the hatch when she punted him in the head, cracking the visor on his helmet and breaking even his reinforced neck. As he started to slip back into the G-carrier, Elodie let go of the P-sat and caught him. She pulled him out of the hatch. A different hack to a different part of the militiaman’s kit activated the four thermal grenades on his webbing. The Monk landed on the G-carrier behind her just as Elodie dropped the militiaman back into the vehicle, cartwheeled to one side and then somersaulted off the side. Above her the G-carrier lurched and then started to drop, smoke pouring from the open hatch. The Monk had thrown herself off the vehicle and was diving after Elodie.

As the P-sat struggled to stop her momentum, Elodie felt something rip in her arm and screamed. She hit the roof of a shanty-town structure messy and hard and staggered to her feet. She didn’t like how easy the Monk made her landing look. G-carriers swooped in level with her. The militia started dropping in, keeping their distance, landing on other structures nearby, covering her with their advanced combat rifles.

The downpour intensified. She flinched as rain turned to steam in the red laser light as one of the strobe guns on the closest G-carrier took out her P-sat.

‘Finished?’ the Monk asked.

‘I think I’ll force you to kill me. See if you can find me, and then we’ll play chase again, on my terms.’

‘You understand who we are, right?’ the Monk asked, obviously struggling to control her temper. ‘The amount we’ll pay for you? Whoever your black-market clone insurance is with will offer you up gladly. Cost us money, but frankly save us the hassle.’

‘Fine. You still have to come and get me.’

‘Oh, for Christ’s sake.’ The Monk shook her head. ‘Realise it’s over.’

‘Was it worth it?’ Elodie asked.

‘They’ll be cloned! We could stop that happening to you!’

‘Why are you so angry?’ Elodie wondered out loud. ‘You know him, don’t you?’ The Monk didn’t answer but it was written all over her face. She knew Scab and hated him.

‘I could try and explain this to you,’ the Monk replied, ‘the importance of finding him, but you wouldn’t understand. You see, it involves being able to look beyond your own gratification, your own selfishness, and I just don’t think any of you people would get it.’ She sounded genuinely exasperated. Elodie thought about her words and dismissed them. They were just people trying to grab what they could. Scab had clearly got in the way of something the Church wanted.

‘You know he’ll kill you, don’t you? I mean
properly
kill you.’

‘What for? Messing with his girl?’ the Monk mocked. Elodie was surprised, and a little concerned, that the Monk wasn’t using the conversation as an opportunity to close with her. ‘Is it love?’ she asked sarcastically.

Elodie’s laugh was humourless. ‘Never.’
Not with Scab.
‘Ready?’

The Monk just shook her head. The burst from the ACR hit Elodie in the knee. The armour-piercing tips of the caseless rounds tore through her armoured boots and her armoured skin. The rounds exploded when the smart bullets sensed flesh around them and the bottom part of Elodie’s left leg spun off. She cried out and collapsed onto the roof as pain shot through her. Her internal augments flooded her system with analgesics, shutting off the pain reaction in her brain.

Controlling herself, Elodie stared at the Monk, shaking with a rage born of helplessness. The Monk kept her distance, but knelt down so she was level with Elodie.

‘What is it with you people? Does sociopathy so heavily outweigh common sense? You’re coming with me. I’ll take you apart piece by piece if I have to. You won’t be the only fucking self-inflicted quadriplegic helping us with our fucking enquiries, believe me.’

‘One day we’re going to revisit this.’

‘I don’t care who’s harder. It can be you. Can we just get going, or do you need to lose more limbs fir—’ There was a rush of air, Elodie’s mask was torn off her face and it became hard to breathe. Everything was bathed in red. Incredible heat bubbled and blistered the skin of the feline’s neck and the Monk disappeared, replaced by a cloud of red steam.

Something tried to suck Elodie off the roof. She dug her claws in, panels of the composite roofing material tearing off and tumbling past her. She watched as a lizard-made power disc cut the face off the nearest militiaman to her. Over the roaring from the powerful sucking wind she heard the sound of firearms and superheated air exploding so rapidly it became a constant noise, one bang running into the next.

Ordnance hit the militia around her, destroying sections of their armour and exploding the flesh beneath it, leaving behind messy red cavities. Others were lit up, dressed in the neon of heavy laser fire, the energy-dissipation grids on their armour rapidly overwhelmed, the flesh beneath superheated and cooked inside the fused armour.

Parts of the arcology were scorched or burst open as militia and the structures they’d been standing on ceased to exist in bursts of red light. An explosion bounced Elodie into the side of the arcology and she dropped back onto the roof of the shanty-town structure. Her neunonics were telling her all the ways she was hurt now. The sucking wind started dragging her across the roof again and her claws made deep rents in the composite material. She watched militia torn off the roof and then shot or lasered in the air.

Everything had happened so quickly, it was only now that she turned to look behind her. She was bathed in the blood-coloured light of Red Space and her mind struggled to deal with the concept of the rent in space inside Ubaste’s atmosphere. A ship was coming through the rent. She didn’t recognise the configuration – it looked custom, expensive. Its smart-matter hull was flexing and changing the ship’s configuration, presumably for atmospheric operations. A yacht, she guessed, but a heavily armed one. Its laser batteries raked the side of the arcology, seeking out and utterly destroying the fleeing militia. One of the G-carriers was already superheated wreckage tumbling into the darkness. The other two had dived, all eight of their top and bottom strobe guns rotating at full speed, pouring laser fire onto the ship but barely making its energy-dissipation grid glow.

A ramp was open at the front of the ship. There were two figures on it. One of them was just short of seven feet tall and had four arms. His lower limbs were firing a strobe gun. His upper limbs were firing an ACR. The other figure was shorter, only two arms. He was clipping an empty automatic shotgun to the back of his servo-assisted combat armour with one hand whilst smoothly drawing a double-barrelled laser rifle with an underslung disc gun over the other shoulder. He started firing short, rapid double bursts, killing the remaining militia as efficiently as he could. The ship was moving ever closer to her.

Elodie heard panicked screams from within as the shanty town structure started to fall away from the starscraper. The nose of the ship dipped as it surged forwards, the open hatch closing on her like an open mouth, tearing up the roof as it approached. She tried to fall into it and felt power-assisted hard-tech hands grab her armoured bodice, crushing it as they gripped and yanked her inside the craft. She fell against someone as the ramp closed and the craft reared up, rose and banked hard. There was a disconcerting moment before the ship’s G-field kicked in and she was able to tell which way was down.

She looked up at the big four-limbed ’sect holding her. ‘Hey, Vic.’

‘Hi, Elodie.’

‘You guys have really fucked up this time, haven’t you?’

‘You have no idea, darling. I’m going to put you down. Hold on to my P-sat, okay?’

Elodie nodded. The big ’sect lowered her to the deck and his P-sat – handgrip already extruded – zipped around to hover by her head. She reached for it and took a quick glance around. She was in a well-equipped loading bay.

‘What happened to the
Basilisk
?’

‘Scab sacrificed it to the Church.’

‘Yeah, they really want to speak to him.’

On the other side of the airlock/loading bay, Scab was already taking off his combat armour’s helmet.

‘You making their life difficult?’ Vic asked, following her gaze to Scab.

‘Well, they didn’t ask nice. I really don’t like that bald bitch, and she seems really angry with Scab. What’d he do, fuck her?’ she asked absently, still looking at Scab, who was ignoring her as he unclipped his armour.

‘No,’ Vic said. ‘Yes.’ He thought for a moment. ‘Not really. It was complicated. They weren’t themselves.’

‘Vic,’ Scab said. ‘Shut up.’

Elodie turned back to Vic, put her arm around his head and pulled him down to her level to kiss the armoured chitin.

‘Thanks,’ she said.

‘Sorry we bought trouble your way,’ the ’sect replied.

Elodie started to hop towards Scab with the P-sat’s help. Her internal drug supply meant she was feeling no pain now and her knee had healed into a stump.

‘I don’t like your new girlfriend,’ Elodie told him. Scab ignored her. He was almost naked now. ‘How’d we get away? Are we in Red Space?’ Scab still didn’t say anything.

‘Yeah,’ Vic said from behind her.

‘I thought you couldn’t do that,’ she said.

‘Church secret, and the
Basilisk II
here is rocking one of their stolen bridge drives.’

Elodie glared at Scab, fear and anger warring within her. Engines weren’t transferable. Any messing with bridge tech usually junked it, and then you got a visit from the Church. Anyone capable of successfully swapping engines had to have Church knowledge. That was heresy. And the Church hunted down and exterminated heretics, destroying their ships and anyone even remotely connected to them. At best. There hadn’t been a heresy capable of manipulating bridge tech in over a thousand standard years.

‘Is that why my life is being disturbed? Is that why I’m half a leg short?’

‘Not even close,’ Vic said.

‘Vic,’ Scab began, just the trace of a warning in his dead voice.

‘Fuck, and you, Scab,’ Vic said quietly.

Elodie stared at Vic. Nobody spoke to Scab like that. Certainly the Vic she knew wouldn’t have dared. Scab, naked now, straightened up to look at his ’sect partner.

‘What?’ Vic demanded over Elodie’s head. ‘Threats getting a little redundant now?’

‘Which means I have to start acting on them.’

‘Fine. I’ll go and plug myself into a torture immersion.’

Scab opened his mouth but Elodie got in first.

‘Hey,’ she said. ‘Why am I here? That wasn’t a rescue – you don’t do that.’

‘I need you,’ Scab said simply.

‘Of course you do,’ she said angrily. ‘Getting in somewhere, or getting something out?’

‘Getting someone out.’

‘Where?’

‘Suburbia.’

Vic started muttering angrily behind her.

‘It can’t be done,’ Elodie said.

‘You had contingencies in case you ever got caught.’

‘No, I had ideas.’

‘I’ll take ideas.’

‘You’re like a meat-grinder, aren’t you?’ Elodie demanded. ‘Unrelenting.’

Scab crossed the deck to her. She grabbed his face. Envenomed nails pierced armoured skin and smoking, poisoned blood scored a line in his make-up.

‘I will kill you,’ she told him, and meant it.

She heard mandibles clatter together behind her and detected a release of pheromones. It was what passed for a ’sect chuckling. Scab just shook his head.

‘That’s not the way I’ll be going out.’ He ’faced a command to the ship and the airlock/loading bay opened into the plush interior of the yacht. Elodie saw a terrified-looking, attractive, young human woman dressed in black, gauzy clothing. She was staring at Elodie. Scab picked the feline up and carried her past the other human.

‘Who the fuck is she?’ the woman demanded.

‘Fuck you, monkey girl,’ Elodie told her. She was doubtless another one of Scab’s victims.

‘Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!’

The
Templar
’s AI, dressed in full knightly regalia, watched the recently cloned human rage. There was little in the clone lab to destroy but soft-machine-augmented muscles were denting panels. The phrase was bandied about, but few people ever saw a genuinely murderous rage.

They’d had to reconstruct the last moments of her memory from footage of the confrontation with Elodie on Ubaste. She’d died too quickly, and there had been too little of her left to upload.

With a sigh, the AI overrode the Monk’s internal systems and flooded them with enough sedative to calm her down. He was only able to do this because she was so recently cloned that the medical systems still had access to her neunonics. Even so, it took a while for her to calm down. A couch grew out of the smart matter for her to slump into.

‘I need you composed.’

‘Fucking twice,’ she spat. ‘The same way both times.’

‘Which suggests that he doesn’t want to take you down personally.’

‘Don’t fucking placate me,’ she snapped. The image of the AI stared at her. AI copy or not, he wouldn’t tolerate being spoken to like that. ‘Sorry,’ she said, calming herself with difficulty. ‘It didn’t stop him in the Living Cities.’

‘I think that was a test. He hides shrewdness behind psychosis, but he’s more calculating than he appears.’

‘Benedict/Scab was right. He took the drive out of the
St. Brendan’s Fire
so he could bridge into atmosphere.’

‘So where did he acquire the expertise to do that?’ the AI asked.

‘The Church,’ the Monk said. ‘A breakaway heretical sect? But we wiped out any with that knowledge millennia ago.’

‘And yet …’

‘I thought you were supposed to be an angrier, more warlike and less irritating version of him.’ The
Templar
was the fastest light cruiser in the Church fleet. As a warship its AI was based on a younger, more aggressive version of Churchman.