A Quantum Mythology (20 page)

The woman he’d seen earlier was standing on a raised level between the table and the window. She wore dark combat trousers and a simple T-shirt. Lodup guessed she was Cambodian, though she was surprisingly tall, and her spare frame suggested a lot of wiry muscle. Her skin was dark and weather-beaten; a scar ran down the left side of her face. Her long, black hair was tied back in a simple braid. What surprised Lodup the most were the holstered pistols, on each hip. Her belt had pouches for extra ammo and a pair of sheathed, curved knives.

Standing in the shadows provided by the subdued lighting was a squat, powerfully built man with a flat-top haircut. His eyes were bright blue, but Lodup didn’t like the look of them, too cold. His arms were crossed over a T-shirt that was just a little too tight for his muscular torso. A complicated-looking sub-machine gun with an underslung grenade-launcher hung across his chest. There was a sidearm at his hip and his utility belt held a selection of less lethal weaponry in various pouches attached to it. Lodup recognised the type. He’d worked with Special Forces operatives in the past.

‘My name is Siska, and I’m the overseer at this facility. This is Yaroslav, my head of security.’

‘Are you expecting trouble?’ Lodup asked.

Siska studied him for a moment. ‘As you might imagine, there’s a great deal we can’t tell you. That said, I will be as honest as I can be with what I’m allowed to divulge. There are external threats. There are other organisations with comparable technology who are interested in
Kanamwayso.
There are also certain environmental challenges, but the single biggest problem we face is that we are dealing with a population of over five hundred powerfully augmented humans and a significant number of augmented fauna. This place changes people. It affects them in ways we cannot predict.’

‘Are you saying this place will drive me mad?’ Lodup asked, thinking back to the disquiet, the fear, he had felt during the descent when he first saw the alien city.

‘I’m saying it will affect you, but it’s nothing that can’t be reversed when you return to the surface to receive your payment.’

Lodup looked over at Yaroslav. ‘What are you? Ex-Naval Spetsnaz?’ Lodup asked. Yaroslav said nothing. Lodup shook his head at the hard-man act.

‘And he fought in the Great Patriotic War,’ Siska said.

Lodup looked up at her sharply. ‘What is this place? That city out there?’

‘Does it look human to you?’

‘No, it looks … I don’t know … older.’

‘It is. Imagine a species, very advanced, whose technology and biology are indistinguishable.’

‘How long have you known about this? Had access to this knowledge?’

‘We call ourselves the Circle, and we have been in existence for more than two thousand years.’

Lodup just stared at her. He felt like sitting down on the grass/carpet and taking some time to process what he’d just been told. The fact that he’d seen the city on the way in made this information somewhat easier to believe.

‘But with this technology, think of everything you could …’ he managed after a few moments.

‘We have been responsible for many technological advances throughout history, but we can’t control human social evolution. Himmler had an inkling regarding the existence of this technology. He had units searching for it. Could you imagine what would have happened if he had got his hands on any of it?’

‘So what makes your Circle the guardians of this technology? Why do they get to make the decisions for the rest of us?’ Lodup demanded, but he could feel his anger diminishing. He felt rather than saw Yaroslav shift slightly.

Siska laughed. ‘Happenstance, or, if you prefer, sheer dumb luck,’ the scarred woman told him. Lodup couldn’t think of anything to say to that. ‘We are not perfect, we have made a lot of mistakes, but we try.’

‘You try what? To harvest the technology here for … yourselves?’

‘For the future of mankind. Some of the greatest minds in human history have been, or are, members of the Circle. We have weapons because those who would use this technology malevolently also have weapons.’

‘Why should I believe you?’

Siska stared at him for another moment, and Lodup could not make up his mind whether she was losing patience with him or not. Despite himself, he glanced over at the brooding presence of Yaroslav, but the Russian remained impassive.

‘You have no reason to believe what I say. That can only be gained by you working with us, seeing what we do, and either coming to trust us – or not. You are here, however, because we are paying you, and paying you very well, to do a job. If you feel this is all too much, we can return you to the surface. The augments will be removed. You will not receive your payment. We will modify your memory …’ Lodup started to object but Siska held up her hand. ‘I’m sorry, but otherwise you would represent too big a security risk. More to the point, it would make you and those close to you targets. You would, however, still have the hundred thousand dollars you’ve already been paid.’ Lodup opened his mouth to speak again, but she shook her head. ‘Mr Satakano, I’m sure you have a great many questions, but I am afraid a lot of the answers will have to be found on the job. I appreciate that this is a great deal to take in, but I must press you for an answer.’

‘If I say no, it would be a lot easier to just have him put two in the back of my head,’ Lodup said, nodding at Yaroslav.

‘There are a great many things we could have done to make this easier for us, but that is not how we operate. Yaroslav is an exceptional soldier and a very capable guardian of this facility. He is not, despite his skill set, an assassin.’

‘Who is in command of the facility?’

‘As far as you are concerned, I am. If for some unlikely reason that proves insufficient, we will deal with the situation as required.’

Now Lodup could hear irritation in her voice. He took a good look around C&C. The lack of visible equipment and screens still didn’t feel right.

Answering his unspoken question, she said, ‘Our internal nano-tech translate all the information supplied by the systems and the feeds from various cameras and sensors and relays it directly to our minds.’ This time there was no irritation in her voice. ‘However, we can also do this.’

All over the walls and along the length of the elliptical table, images from various parts of the operation appeared – footage from the moon pool, from within the habitat and throughout the city, footage from submersibles, AUVs, ROVs and ADSs, and feeds from the alien corpse city. In one picture he thought he saw the wreck of a World War Two-era submarine. In the centre of C&C, an image was being created in light, and he found himself standing in a hologramatic representation of the base and the city, surrounded by all the divers, fauna, submersibles and other vehicles.

‘Programmable smart matter. Effectively, it can be whatever we want it to be,’ Siska said, gesturing at the images on the wall.

‘How does comms work?’ Lodup asked, his discomfort with the situation momentarily overwhelmed by technological awe.

‘We hardwire what we can – it’s the most reliable way. In addition we use ultrasound over short range – one hundred metres or less, and over greater distances we burst-send packets of low-frequency infrasound.’

Lodup knew that under normal circumstances the equipment required to achieve this would be quite large, but assumed they must have found a way to miniaturise it.

‘We also use ultrasonic pulse emitters as point-defence weapons, and to deal with hostile flora.’ Yaroslav’s voice was a deep rumble and his Russian accent very strong. ‘Mr Satakano, this environment is more difficult to survive in, long term, than space. We have had to become something other than human to do so. On top of that there are many other dangers intrinsic to the nature of our operation. This is, however, the single greatest challenge for any diver on the planet. Forgive me for using a crude American idiom, but you need to man-the-fuck-up.’

Siska said nothing, her hands still behind her back as she watched Lodup impassively. Lodup glanced at Yaroslav. The Russian was holding the same position he’d been in since Lodup entered the room, but his eyes looked more alive, somehow. Slowly, Lodup started to smile.

‘I think you’re right. Maybe you and I should have a drink sometime?’

‘Perhaps when you rotate out,’ Yaroslav replied. ‘I make it a policy not to get too friendly with people I may have to kill.’

Lodup didn’t think this was bravado on the Russian’s part, just a simple statement of fact.

‘Your first shift starts in twelve hours,’ Siska said. ‘You will want to get some food and then some sleep.’ It was obvious that the meeting was over, so Lodup picked up his kitbag as the screens disappeared, leaving bare walls and the table. The hologram erased itself line by line. He nodded at Siska, the door slid open behind him, and he walked out.

‘Well?’ Siska asked once the door had slid closed again.

‘He is a diver. This is the Grail for him.’

‘Is that a joke?’

Yaroslav’s slow laughter sounded like the rumble of distant thunder. ‘He complicates things, but then we always knew he would,’ the Russian said.

‘This was the most expedient solution.’

‘I’m less worried about him than I am about the city’s reaction to him. He is more like us than the other workers, only far less prepared and not nearly as well augmented.’

Siska gave this some thought. ‘We can’t predict the city’s reaction,’ she said eventually. ‘Keep an eye on him.’ Yaroslav nodded. ‘That means you as well, Siraja.’

The dragon-headed image of the AI appeared in Siska’s and Yaroslav’s vision.

‘Of course,’ the AI said, bowing to Siska.

14

A long Time After the Loss

The Monk opened the airlock door, then crossed to the other side of the corridor and sat down, leaning against the opposite bulkhead. When she saw the smug expression on Benedict/Scab’s face, she actually had to instruct her systems to release a reasonably strong sedative to calm her.

The harness he was hanging from was an old-fashioned sling molecularly bonded to the ceiling. They had decided against providing him with an AG motor of any description. He was limbless. Her previous self had spayed his neunonics and internal liquid software, but even though he looked helpless in his sling, he still gave the impression of being in total control of the situation.
Who knows
, the Monk thought bitterly,
maybe he is.

‘There’s something different about you,’ Benedict/Scab started.

‘Fuck off,’ the Monk muttered.

‘Is that a whole new body? Did I kill you again?’

‘No, you didn’t, the one with limbs—’

‘And one of your bridge drives, and the secret to bridge technology—’

‘… did,’ the Monk finished.

‘Outside of Vic, the closest person I have to someone remotely useful is Elodie. If I went to get her, that means I want her skills. She is an excellent kick-murder specialist—’

‘She’s not that good.’

‘She got you.’

‘A fucking spaceship shot me!’

‘But as far as violence goes, there’s nothing she can do that Vic and I couldn’t cover.’

‘Are you referring to him as “I” just to annoy me?’

‘Yes. I’ll stop if you give me my limbs back.’

‘You’d best keep doing it, then. She’s an intrusion specialist.’

‘Physical, electronic and personal.’

The Monk sat up straighter. ‘How could we have missed that?’

‘Simple – it’s not something she advertises, she never does it for clients, only for herself, and she’s very careful to dispose of any evidence.’

She kept the secret the old-fashioned way
, the Monk thought.
She didn’t tell anyone. And here’s me thinking privacy was dead.

‘She’s another class-A psycho, then?’

‘Who isn’t?’

‘How do you know this?’

‘I can only assume that the Psycho Bank who sold you my possessing personality was very good.’

‘Okay, how did proper Scab work it out?’

‘Motivate me.’

‘I could use you as a kick bag?’

‘I’ll try not to sport an erection whilst you do it.’

‘You’re different from him. More talkative, and you’ve modified your personality to be more … irritating,’ the Monk said. Benedict/Scab said nothing, just looked at her, his expression unreadable. ‘You don’t do anything without a reason. You’re talking more because it’s the only means of communication you have left. Still desperately jockeying for position. How sad.’

He started to laugh. There was no humour in it whatsoever. The Monk was surprised that, even after all this, it chilled her.

‘What astonishing insight. I talk more when my limbs have been cut off. Yes, if I still had my limbs, our communication would be of a
much
more physical nature. Speaking of which, the “real” me has been inside you, hasn’t he?’

The Monk knew she’d given herself away before she even started to lie. ‘Not in any way that matters,’ she said. She barely had memories of the time she’d spent disguised as Zabilla Haq, biophysicist and player on Game, with Scab masquerading as her paramour Dracup.

‘Oh, I think it
does
matter. Are you more angry that he killed you, or that he fucked you? Do you hate Elodie because you’re jealous?’

The Monk stared at him. For a moment his words felt like a heated blade shoved into her guts, and then she started laughing.

‘Is that the best you’ve got? Yes, the idea of him touching me repels me, but it may as well have happened to another person, and frankly I think it bothered him a lot more than it bothered me. In fact, let’s put that to the test.’

She rolled onto her feet and quickly crossed the distance between them. She knelt down next to the sling and leaned in close to him.

‘See, there’s more than just you helping us. We’ve got some of the best minds, AI and otherwise, working on this. Scab’s profile is exhaustive. The attention to detail is incredible, and the one thing it says again and again is that control is
very
important to Scab. So I think control would be important to a fifth-rate third-generation carbon copy like yourself.’

She pulled back and looked at him. His features were expressionless but there was something in his eyes. She leaned forward and kissed him, and felt his whole torso flinch in response.

‘Now, without your neunonics, do you think you can control your physiological responses sufficiently not to get hard if I go down on you? I might struggle to get wet enough, but as soon as you’re hard, I am going to slide you inside me and rock you back and forth in your little sex swing here.’ She pushed the harness and let him swing for a while. He couldn’t contain himself any longer. He was shaking with fury, though the Monk suspected he was a little aroused as well. ‘Or you can stop fucking around, tell me what I want to know and I’ll go and assemble a packet of fags for you.’ Benedict/Scab frowned. The Monk cursed herself. ‘Cigarettes.’

He nodded as he struggled to control his – ultimately impotent – rage. ‘That,’ he said. ‘That’s how you’ll get him.’

‘What, threaten to rape his limbless body?’

‘No,’ he said, his tone serious. ‘What you just did – make him realise he’s not in control.’

She nodded.
What’s wrong with you?
she wondered, appalled at what she’d just done.

‘And I’m going to find a way to kill you,’ he told her with real feeling.

The Monk sighed, but there was something about the way he said it this time.

‘So what’s it to be? Information or a hand-job?’ she asked as she sat back down, this time against the airlock’s bulkhead.

‘I told you, after Elodie, I don’t know. Beyond wanting to get into a facility, a system or someone’s head, none of this makes sense to me. He must know something I don’t.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I don’t understand his play. What’s he got to gain from it?’

‘He has one of the most valuable things in Known Space,’ the Monk said bitterly.

‘Not if he can’t use that value. He’s dead once he’s sold her, and unless I’m missing something, his best chance to sell her was an immersion auction. Anything else is too risky.’

‘But you called that – it was about financing.’

‘Yes, but financing for what? The next auction carries the same risk.’

‘He could go to a buyer on the quiet.’

‘Then he gets less, and what he was already offered wasn’t enough.’

‘So what does he want?’

Benedict/Scab hesitated. The Monk raised an eyebrow. The possessing download had been extensively conditioned to cooperate with them, but still the core personality resisted somehow.

‘He cares about control, freedom. Being a god, because that can provide those things. Or dying.’

Which is nothing we don’t already know
, the Monk thought.

‘There’s something I can’t see,’ said Benedict/Scab. ‘I’m formed of information from the Legion obtained when they first captured him on Cyst; information declassified by the Consortium from his time as an Elite; black-personality immersions; and a composite put together by an intelligent Pythian profiling program based on the available information about him. He resisted being recorded after he left the Elite. He doesn’t use clones, so he didn’t have a backup personality.’

‘So you’re missing a lot post-Elite?’ the Monk asked.

‘I’m missing a lot post-Legion, though I don’t think he knows much about his time as an Elite.’

‘Do you believe the information we need is from that time? You might think it’s a convenient excuse to be uncooperative, but it does limit your usefulness somewhat.’

Benedict/Scab narrowed his eyes. ‘You understand what I just said, don’t you?’

‘He doesn’t have friends, he has few contacts, he eschews publicity as much as any high-profile bounty killer can, and he doesn’t keep company with other bounty crews.’

‘It has to be a job,’ Benedict/Scab said.

The Monk found it odd. In some ways the possessing personality appeared to be enjoying this, almost as if it relished the challenge, a trait largely dead outside of Church personnel.

‘So, which job?’

‘I would need to review.’

Then she saw it. She laughed. ‘We’re not giving you your neunonics back.’

‘Then it’s going to take a very long time.’

She ’faced instructions to have a screen painted on the airlock hull and for a holographic projector delivered, but he was right – it was going to take a long time.

‘Let me ask you something,’ Benedict/Scab said. ‘Why can’t your beacons find his bridge drive signature?’

Because he’s managed to modify it as well as put it in a new ship, and because he has help
,
the Monk didn’t tell Benedict/Scab,
and we thought all the heretic sects capable of doing such things had been destroyed a long time ago
. They were also sure that Pythia had arranged for the sale of a ship capable of changing the shape of its smart-matter superstructure sufficiently to disguise itself. Scab had used some of the proceeds from the fake auction to pay for a data lock. That hadn’t expired yet, and when it did it would cost the Church and all the other interested parties a fortune to buy Scab’s ship info.

‘That should tell you something in itself. Now give me my smokes.’

Elodie was better than her competitors for the same reason that he and Scab were, Vic thought. The ’sect was watching her practise – hand-to-hand combat, quick cripple and kill kick-murder moves. They had all the right soft- and hard-tech augments. They were carrying all the right gear. They had a lot of experience, but the reason they were better, the slight edge they had, was because they practised. They kept their skills sharp, regardless of whether they were hardwired in or hard learned.

Elodie cycled through the various improvised patterns. She used moves from many different fighting forms, particularly lizard and feline as they were considered the two uplift species with the best martial arts. She had woven them into a form that suited her, though Vic knew she was always looking for more, always adapting, always improvising, so her moves couldn’t be predicted. She had a number of chaos fact algorithms programmed into her neunonics, which helped her mix it up a bit, fight counter-intuitively and put her opponents off balance.

If anything she was a better fighter than Scab, but Scab would always win. Viciousness went a long way towards victory.

She was putting her leg through its paces, helping to integrate the recently grown new flesh with the rest of her body.

‘What do you want, Vic?’ Elodie asked without missing a beat of her pattern. ‘You looking for an advantage?’

‘I don’t want to fight you. I like you,’ the ’sect said. ‘Y’know, as a person.’

‘Really?’ A series of quick kicks rising higher and higher until the final one had her practically doing vertical splits. ‘Good. Tell me what’s going on.’

Vic didn’t answer. Elodie practised in silence for a while. Her breathing wasn’t laboured; her feet barely made a sound on the replica wood of the deck.

‘Church trouble? Who’s the whiny hairless monkey?’ she asked. Vic still didn’t say anything. ‘If I hand her over to the Church, does my life get easier?’

Elodie executed a spinning kick in the air, landed into a leg sweep and then delivered a series of fast kicks from the ground.

‘You rely on kicks too much,’ Vic said. ‘They’re too slow, particularly the ones in the air. And he can hear you. Not just Church trouble. Board-level Consortium, Monarchist nobility and Elite involvement.’

She was good, but Vic caught the moment of hesitation when he mentioned the Elite.

‘Leg muscles are stronger than arm muscles, so kicks are my best hope against anyone with serious augments.’ She came to a halt and looked at the ’sect. The smart matter in her chamber started to reformat the room back to luxurious living quarters. ‘Like you. And fuck him.’ She concentrated for a moment and then smiled. ‘So I’m in.’

Vic saw the security warning from the
Basilisk II
’s systems that Scab had allowed him access to. He also saw Scab’s response – a hydra of seek-and-destroy programs, some subtle, most not, Pythian-designed programs which he used to counter-attack rather than defend. Some of the heads of the counter-attack program would cripple her; others would burn out her mind, subject her to meat-hack slavery or kill her, painfully. He wasn’t holding back.

‘A test.’ Elodie smiled. ‘Tell me, if it comes down to him and me, whose side are you going to be on?’

Vic felt a tickle of excitement. Together they just might stand a chance against him. But just as quickly as the optimism came, it was gone again.

‘You’ll do what he wants in the end as well. Don’t fool yourself.’

‘You want to fuck me, Vic?’

Vic gave the blunt question some thought. She was moments away from being crippled, enslaved or dead thanks to the heavily converted yacht’s systems.

‘Yes—’

‘But only to get back at him.’

‘Yes.’

‘I’m not enough of a hairless monkey for you to find fuckable?’

‘Close, though.’

‘Brave. I’m not Scab’s woman, but I think he believes he’s sprayed me.’

‘I can certainly smell him on you.’

‘It wouldn’t make any difference to him anyway.’

‘As I said, I like you.’

‘You think you like anyone who’s not him,’ she told him. Vic wasn’t convinced she was wrong. ‘What happened to you?’

‘I don’t care any more.’

‘That’s what I mean.’

The conflict between Scab and Elodie in the yacht’s systems went beyond what Vic’s clearance allowed him to see. He opened his mandibles to speak but Elodie held up her hand. He waited, only slightly resentful. Finally she blinked, obviously dealing with some pain, and spat out blood, which the now plushly carpeted floor absorbed. The tailored enzymes in her saliva would have destroyed any DNA and then self-destructed before it even touched the carpet. That wouldn’t stop Scab making the yacht’s systems analyse it.