A Quantum Mythology (32 page)

The other canvasses were all variations on the same theme. Jaggard’s genius wasn’t in what he painted, it was in what he implied. That and the sense that he was painting from life, painting things he had somehow seen.

Grace glanced up at du Bois. She looked unsure, almost frightened, and it wasn’t an expression he was used to seeing on her face. Not for a long time.

Stredder shouldn’t have felt anything. The L-tech device had altered itself to fit in with his reconfigured flesh. He knew that the feeling of having a foreign body inside his stomach was largely psychosomatic, regardless of the actual truth of the matter. Carrying the oldest piece of L-tech the Circle owned, particularly one with so much history to it, always felt different from the other courier jobs he did.

He shifted uncomfortably in his spacious seat and looked around the first-class cabin of the 747. He didn’t like any of this at all. Normally it travelled on one of the stealthed orbital transports. These came with their own set of risks but were considered worth it given the value of what he was now carrying inside himself. After all, it provided all of the Circle’s operatives with the templates for their augmentations. He had drunk from it himself on one of the Circle’s orbital stations after the Siege of Paris.

The chalice had been used in the Pacific, he presumed in connection with the city, and was on its way to London having come through Tokyo. The use of an unsecured civilian aircraft was very irregular, but there had been a sudden increase in recruitment. Stredder was worried that this increase was due to the end becoming a lot more nigh.

He had his blood-screen spread throughout the entire aircraft like a spiderweb. The best hope for safety lay in secrecy. He remained convinced that if the Brass City knew what he was carrying, they would almost certainly try to take it. The healthy paranoia that was part and parcel of being a good courier had him wondering if that was the point. Was Mr Brown using him as bait, for some reason?

The Brass City was not the only threat, either. The situation in Birmingham had caught his attention. He had worked with du Bois a number of times, and with Soggin on fewer occasions. She was undisciplined, in his opinion, but capable, and du Bois was more than competent, though given to questioning Control too much. That this madman, Silas Scab, had managed to so effectively escape the pair of them worried him very much indeed. Less than two days had passed since Silas had last killed.

The stewardess offered him another drink; he accepted. His augmented body would break the alcohol down into sugar, and then efficiently convert that into actual useful energy before he could feel any effect from the alcohol. That didn’t stop the stewardess from looking at him like he was an alcoholic.

Once again he glanced around at his fellow passengers. As he looked from one to the other, the information he had on them cascaded down through his vision. They were upper-echelon executives, playboys and -girls, children of the rich, one mid-range celebrity. If any of them worked for the Brass City or one of the independents, their cover was immaculate.

Something snagged his spiderweb. He allowed himself a moment. He closed his eyes before standing up.

‘Sir, you must remain seated,’ the stewardess told him firmly. They were on their final approach into Heathrow. ‘Sir!’

Stredder ignored the woman and moved down the narrow corridor between the seats into the business-class section. His enhanced hearing blocked out the stewardess trailing him, and he could hear another similarly one-sided conversation going on in the economy-class section of the passenger jet.

He felt the stewardess grab him and swung around to face her. She took a step back from the violence of his action. He wanted to tell her something but couldn’t think of anything to say. Instead he grabbed the chairs on either side of the isle. The soles of his shoes melted and he began sinking into the floor as his fingers dug into the seats, pushing into their matter as if it was putty. His vision was full of the 747’s technical schematics. There was only so much matter he could steal before the airframe became unstable and fell apart in the sky.

‘Sir, return to your seat now!’ The voice was all male authority. Stredder wrenched himself free of the now putty-like consistency of the seats and the floor. Already the molecule-sized alien machines that lived in his body were converting the matter sucked in through the pores on his skin and turning it into muscle mass. It was reinforcing his skeleton, toughening his skin. It was being broken down and converted into energy.

Stredder turned around and took a step forwards as if he was trapped in sucking mud. As he suspected, the authority in the man’s voice was bolstered by the automatic pistol in his hand. Stredder watched the man’s confidence turn to fear as he grew in front of him. He pushed now-clawed hands into another row of seats so the transformation could continue. He heard the screams start. Screams had accompanied him throughout his life.

The air marshal fired. A frangible bullet exploded into harmless powder against Stredder’s armoured chest, which was now covered with short bristly fur that may have looked canine but had more in common with sharkskin. Just touching it would draw blood. His clothes had sunk into his body now, their matter adding to his bulk.

‘You are all going to die,’ he growled before his elongated maw, full of canines, robbed him of the ability to speak. The air marshal fired again, and again. The low-impact bullets were useless against Stredder’s armoured half-human, half-wolf form. He had only meant to warn them, but now the passengers were climbing over each other to get away from him. He wanted to reach out and turn the air marshal into a red mess as chemically and neurally programmed rage coursed through his body. He could smell the little man’s fear.

He felt the pain for a moment. He saw the point of the blade appear through his chest. Then the nerve endings were locked down. The information that was pain was transformed into fury.

‘I even coated the blade with silver,’ the voice said from behind him. It didn’t matter. Stredder was beyond understanding anything as complex as language.

Stredder tore himself free of the now mud-like matter of the aircraft. He had absorbed several of the seats and left progressively larger and more animalistic footprints in the cabin floor. The blade was pulled out of the wound as he swung around. His system was already trying to heal the wound, but the blade had impregnated it with nanites that were already attacking his own systems.

The figure in front of him was tall and slender, dressed in dark clothes, pale, and his narrow head with its painfully sharp-looking features and dead eyes was utterly devoid of hair. He had a long, silver-bladed knife in each hand and was looking up at Stredder quizzically. His lack of fear gave the courier pause for a moment. Then he raised his foot and kicked the tall, thin man very hard.

Silas flew backwards, battering himself against the corner of the partition between business and economy class. He landed on the ground by the steward’s compartment. He had a momentary glimpse of a terrified-looking steward and stewardess as he tried to pick himself up. He wondered if they knew who the monster was in this fight. Then the courier was on him, tearing at him so viciously he was lifted off his feet and carried back into the economy section. Claws tore into his flesh and injected tiny venomous demons into his system. His own demon-infected blood whispered to him, telling him that the invaders were eating him from within. Chunks of his flesh were torn off by the raging technological hybrid. He laughed, spat blood and stabbed the courier time and time again. Teeth dug into his shoulder and he was flung across the central aisle of the 747’s economy-class cabin. He hit his back on the top of one of the chairs. Terrified passengers tried to scramble away from him and the air filled with the smell of faeces. His own spilled blood tried to find its way back into his body. The courier’s demonic venom was trying to prevent this, making his blood smoke. His wounds opened and closed like mouths. His skin crawled and muscles contorted as his body became a battleground for the tiny demons. He heard screams, but one of the first tricks he had ever taught the demons in his blood was to turn the sound of screams into music.

Silas tumbled off the chair backs and hit the floor. The courier was standing over him now, bloodied claws raised. Silas knew it was over. He was not sure that this death would be good enough. Suddenly it was much colder. A raging wind blew. Everything tipped sharply and he was falling, bouncing painfully off things. So was the hybrid. Tears appeared in the fabric of the aircraft.

They stopped falling. They had landed on something, a wall with moving pictures on it. Silas wasn’t sure how it had happened but he was on top of the courier. He found himself laughing as he stabbed and slashed down into the hybrid as it thrashed beneath him. Silas made the creature red. He could see the night sky now.

The courier was being eaten from within. The demonic venom on Silas’s blades had won their battle inside the technological hybrid’s flesh. Silas pushed his blade into the creature’s body, burying it so deep that his hand was inside the courier. With a thought, he cast his spell through the blade. Controlling the courier’s flesh, demanding it reveal its secrets. Around him the aircraft bucked and lurched, the airframe flexing dangerously. The courier was flopping weakly beneath him now. Silas pushed sharpened nails and then his long, powerful fingers into the creature’s flesh, and curled them around a metal stem. He tore the Red Chalice out of the courier’s flesh and the dying thing beneath him howled in agony. He lifted the hot metal to his lips. He had a moment to feel the pain of the molten metal pouring down his throat, then the plane tore itself in two.

She stood on top of an aircraft engine in a large trench where part of suburban Isleworth used to be, leaning on her staff. She was surprised how quiet it was, although she could hear the sound of sirens in the distance. There was the crackle of flames, of course, a sound that was welcoming more often than not. It was a comfort to her. Even in this age when she found herself standing around with other unwanted people, sharing borderline poisonous cheap alcohol.

She leaped the twenty feet down into the trench with ease and started making her way through the wreckage, ignoring the burning pools of aviation fuel. She walked across what used to be a railway line and found herself gazing at something that didn’t look very human. It was little more than half a blackened face fused with the equally blackened fuselage of the 747. It was still moving.

‘You risked death. Why?’ the bag lady asked.

An eye turned to look at her. ‘I am dead,’ it managed in a voice full of pain.

‘I don’t think so, my dark little boy.’

‘I don’t like what I am.’

‘Change, then.’

The laughter was a truly horrible sound. ‘Let me die,’ the fused mess that was all that remained of Silas managed. The bag lady said nothing. ‘Are you real?’

‘No. You’re insane, you know this. What if I told you that none of this mattered? What if I told you it was coming anyway? What if I asked you to stop now?’

‘I … I … just want to see god.’ There were tears now. The bag lady turned away, a look of profound sadness on her face as, without thinking, she walked into a large pool of burning aviation fuel.

‘Aren’t you going to take the chalice?’ His voice was stronger now. She heard the sound of metal straining. She stopped and looked over her shoulder.

‘I don’t need it. It didn’t work. I just don’t want them to have it,’ she said as the flames licked all around her. She started walking again, slowly sinking into the burning earth. ‘Though I’m not sure I can tell the difference any more.’

23

A Long Time After the Loss

‘Are … you … sure?’ Mr Hat left a long pause between each of the words. He wanted to emphasise the seriousness of the situation.

‘Who else could it be?’ Isaiah asked.

Mr Hat was sitting on the throne-topped control column in the
Amuser
’s Command and Control centre. The transparent part of the smart hull, which he had configured into a window, was magnifying and displaying separate incidents of violent chaos all the way along the prison habitat, on all three strips of land. Some of the inmates had even managed to start a fire on one of the windows. There was more feed arriving from the cameras in Suburbia itself. The lizard found himself wondering if it was still being shown as a reality soapcom throughout Consortium space. He imagined so. They always found some way to capitalise.

‘Mr Isaiah, I am about to tell some very powerful people that Scab is either here, or on his way here, on your say-so and some very circumstantial evidence. If there has been an incursion from Red Space, does it not seem a lot more likely that the Church is involved?’

The image of Isaiah being projected into Mr Hat’s visual cortex by his neunonics froze. ‘But you said Berger was the bait …’ Isaiah managed.

Mr Hat moved the
Amuser
with a thought, sending it to the docking arm closest to where Berger lived. He requested feed from local nano-cams but found that the whole area was still overrun by a privacy nano-swarm. He switched to macro-cam feed, but all he saw was chaos.

‘I understand the need for catharsis, but imagine what they could achieve if they were to organise,’ he mused to one of his human-looking eyeless servant automatons. ‘Wake all my children.’ The automaton nodded. Mr Hat turned his attention back to Isaiah. ‘The Church also wants Scab. Has it not occurred to you that
they
might want to use inmate Berger as bait, too?’

‘We can’t fight the Church as well!’ Isaiah said, appalled.

‘Fight them, Mr Isaiah? We will need to erase the very fact they have this capability, lest we wish to be assassinated.’ Over the ’face link he actually saw the other man blanch. He felt the thud and reverberating clang of the
Amuser
docking. All the while he was analysing the macro-cam footage, looking for something out of place. ‘I want G-carriers or hoppers ready to transport my servants to Mr Berger’s residence.’

‘What? You can’t go in there!’

‘Why not? The inmates have no augments to speak of and rudimentary weapons. The only thing I have to worry about is being rushed by what would have to be, frankly, a suicidal horde. Otherwise all I will be doing is committing mass murder on any who bother me. Now, do you want to task the G-carriers, or would you prefer I waste time communicating with the board and have them tell you to do it once it is too late?’

There was a moment’s silence. Mr Hat could see the sweat coating Isaiah’s face. The human made him feel faintly disgusted.

‘There will be G-carriers waiting for you,’ Isaiah told him.

‘Thank you, Mr Isaiah. The question is, what are
you
going to do?’

‘What?’ He sounded surprised that Mr Hat had even asked the question.

The
Amuser
’s control column sank into the ground and one of the automatons carried Mr Hat to his bath chair, taking the time to tuck him in with the tartan blanket.

‘Shall we thaw our guest?’ the automaton’s collective mind asked as one of them started rapidly wheeling the bath chair towards the airlock. Mr Hat considered the question. If it was a false alarm, did he want to be seen to be wasting this person’s time?

‘Yes, but tell him it is a Red Space incursion, and that I believe the Church is trying to secure Mr Berger as bait for Mr Woodbine.’

He felt the acquiescence of his loyal flock. One would stay behind to secure the
Amuser
and to take the blank from storage, and then contact their employer. He had almost forgotten about Mr Isaiah stammering his way through his delusions of adequacy.

‘Mr Isaiah, my advice would be to find the largest areas of unrest and use the automated weapon systems to make examples of them—’

‘But the damage—’

‘You need control before you can count the cost. If you turn over control of the facility to me …’ Mr Hat had reached the airlock door. It slid open. Now all the automatons were following him. They made their way down the docking arm.

‘Thank you for your advice, Mr Hat, but I think we can handle it from here.’ Isaiah’s ’face link had gone down and now he was hearing Al’s voice, and seeing his yellow cartoon smiling face.

‘Understood,’ Mr Hat said. He assumed Isaiah’s career with the Consortium was over. They had reached the maglev platform at the end of the docking arm where a carriage awaited them. He was wheeled aboard and the carriage moved smoothly away from the platform the moment all of his automatons were on board. ‘Mr Al, please be aware that we will be handling the Berger situation, and that I have board clearance that says I can.’

There was a worryingly long pause that made Mr Hat wonder if the AI had become corrupt and was now making decisions based on ego.

‘Understood.’

The maglev came to a halt. Mr Hat clambered out of the bath chair. Two of the block-shaped armoured G-carriers were waiting for them. They were armed with rotary strobe guns at each of their eight corners, with missile batteries locked away inside armoured housings. Mr Hat climbed into the rear G-carrier. Half the automatons went with him, and the others climbed into the front carrier.

Mr Hat started receiving the feed from the vehicles as they rose towards heavily armoured doors that were in the process of opening. Suburbia lay beyond the doors. He could see clouds of smoke rising from the three land sections to pool in the centre of the hexagonal cylinder.

Mr Hat’s neunonic search routines finally found what they were looking for in the macro-cam footage, something that stood out. A ground car that was still moving, albeit erratically, when Al was directly controlling all the others.

Vic watched the columns of smoke rising into the sky. He wasn’t sure it was the way to go, but he could understand the outpouring of rage from prisoners whose experience had not been unlike his. The problem was that not all the prisoners were there as a result of committing violent crimes, or any crimes at all, in fact. Suburbia was where the Consortium punished people who had irritated someone powerful. This meant that some prisoners were considerably less able to cope with violent situations than others. It was rapidly turning into a two-tier system: the victims and their victimisers. Which was the same as anywhere else really, he supposed, just the line was a little better defined here.

Elodie had her eyes closed, concentrating as she tried to steer the ground car via neunonic interface. The fact that they had a working ground car was drawing some attention.

Vic flinched as a spanner hit the passenger-side window of the car, cracking the safety glass. He saw a bloodstained woman with a knife in each hand standing on the edge of her perfect lawn. She watched them go by. He caught a glimpse of man running between houses, hopping from back garden to back garden, pursued by a horde of children who had daubed themselves with blood, like some kind of lizard tribal markings. He watched a man sitting atop another on the pavement, beating him into a pulped mess of blood, exposed bone and flesh.

Many of the prisoners, even with their personalities reasserted, were just milling around, not really sure what to do. A lot of them were drinking. Great pyres of belongings burned on lawns, driveways and pavements and in the roads. Elodie had to skirt around more than one bonfire while people hammered on the ground car. They saw rapes, murders and more than one large group of people who looked organised and were being led.

In the distance they could hear gunfire. Occasionally, lines of red light connected the laser batteries on the window segments with the land segments of the cylinder habitat. Tracer-tipped cannon fire from track-mounted rail guns on the window sections looked like a rain of violent light and explosions bloomed across all three land segments. Vic watched an S-sat fly by, skimming the roofs and treetops of the street they were travelling along, weapons firing.

‘They’re holding back,’ Vic muttered to himself. The car lurched as it drove over something lying in the road.

‘This is entertainment,’ Elodie said, her eyes still closed. On a nearby lawn, four children held a woman down while a fifth cut her face off. Three of the other children already wore dead-skin masks. The one without a mask watched them drive by. Vic found himself wondering how many people were still sitting in their houses, either out of fear or years of conditioning, and hoping this would end. He giggled a little bit when he thought of adding the canned laughter track to what was currently happening.

‘Scab would like it here,’ he said when he’d suppressed the nearly hysterical urge to keep giggling. He was finding human mood swings almost impossible to control without drugs. ‘It would remind him of home.’ Then he clapped his hand to his mouth to prevent more giggling.

Elodie opened her eyes and turned to glare at him. ‘Look, it’s hard enough to control this thing without—’

Vic felt the impact. His teeth banged together as everything slowed down. The concussion wave battered through the liquid in his body and squeezed all the air out of his lungs. The world started to spin and he found himself looking down at the cratered road from an aerial position. Much of the road appeared to be in the air as well, and reaching for the car. Then the second impact came as the car landed on its roof.

‘Too soon,’ Mr Hat muttered as he saw the mass driver miss the ground car. The G-carriers coming in from high above were still several moments out. He thought about ’facing a protest to the AI, but other than having it on record for a board review, he couldn’t really see what good it would do. ‘Now just let them run.’

Vic opened his eyes. He was desperately gasping for breath. He started to thrash around, hanging upside down in his seat. Finally his lungs inflated before panic utterly overwhelmed him. He looked to his right. Elodie was hanging in her seat restraints, apparently unconscious. Vic took a moment to check she was breathing. She looked banged-up but otherwise okay.

It took several kicks to get the door open before Vic could crawl out and stagger to his feet. The air was still full of dust from the impact of whatever had hit them. Everything hurt, and he couldn’t cut off nerve sensations or flood his system with sweet, sweet painkillers.

Vic lurched around the car and spent some time trying to yank the driver’s door open. By the time he finally managed to scrape it open, Elodie was conscious enough to climb out of her seat.

‘Ow,’ was all she said.

They started tottering through the dust. They were less than a block away from where the Alchemist had lived/been imprisoned. All they had to do was figure out a way to get past the S-sats.

The S-sat’s weren’t going to be a problem.

‘How’d they do this so quickly?’ Elodie wondered. They were hiding in the still-smoking wreckage of a house.

‘Seriously, these people have almost as limited a way of expressing themselves as Scab does,’ Vic muttered.

The street the Alchemist lived on was called Eden Street. A faceless corpse hung from every tree and lamp post that lined it. The street was filled with over a thousand people, all of them wearing dead-skin masks. They were standing surprisingly still, not even talking to each other. Vic, still struggling to control his emotions without drugs, found the whole scene very creepy. They were approaching the night cycle now and the entire street was illuminated by the hellish red glow from a number of bonfires.

The Alchemist’s house was a collapsed ruin. It was littered with dead bodies, and among the pile of bodies was the wreckage of four S-sat’s. When Vic noticed that, he turned to stare at Elodie. She ignored him and continued scanning the crowd.

‘There,’ she said and pointed. Vic turned to look and saw their target tied to the bonnet of a ground car. He was naked, and it looked like someone had written all over his body in blood.

‘Charging S-sats until you overwhelm them. That’s fanatical bullshit, that is,’ Vic muttered.

‘Quiet,’ Elodie said. She was still looking all around, trying to figure out a way to get to the Alchemist. ‘The real question is, how did they know to grab the Alchemist?’ Vic looked both uncomfortable and preoccupied. ‘Did the Consortium imprison an entire gang, some heretic street cult? Why? And why imprison them so close together?’ Elodie contemplated that a bit longer. ‘I’m beginning to think the system here had already been hacked. I think the personality downloads were corrupted somehow.’ Then she turned around and glared at Vic. ‘What are you doing?’ she demanded.

‘I’ve actually wet myself,’ Vic announced.

Elodie glanced down despite herself. ‘You need to get a grip,’ she told him.

‘Look,’ he hissed, ‘it has occurred to me that, frankly, without all the hardware and a vast quantity of fucking drugs, I’m just not that brave!’

‘I think you had too much brain surgery,’ Elodie hissed back. ‘Took all that nice smoothness and turned it into folds, and then filled it with human bullshit! Now fucking control yourself, because if you shit yourself I will just fucking leave you!’

Someone cleared their throat behind them. Vic felt his heart sink. Elodie turned around to see seven of them, wearing the dead-skin masks, standing on the ruined lawn.

‘You know what you were saying about me shitting myself … ?’

Through his fear, Vic calculated that at least one of the Dead-Skin Masks was deceased, another was crippled and the third would be unconscious for quite some time. After the first fight he had decided that committing acts of blunt-force trauma with a body that was both soft and brittle wasn’t a great idea. So instead he’d decided on viciousness as a tactic.

The other four got them, however, and as they’d fought and struggled, more of the Dead-Skin Masks had joined them. They had taken quite a beating, and Vic was pretty sure something inside him was broken. Elodie’s body didn’t look like it was in good shape either. They had been dragged across the road and into Eden Street, and brought before another of the Dead-Skin Masks. He looked the same as all the others: a nondescript, suburban, generically bland adult male wearing someone else’s face. The only real difference was the six-foot-long stick he was holding. Bloodied bones and other grisly trophies hung from it.