A Quantum Mythology (46 page)

Lodup glanced up at Siska. She had a look of great concentration on her face.

Lodup was not, and had never been, a fearful man. He was not a great risk-taker or an adrenalin junkie, which were factors that made him such a good diver. He could think on his feet and hold it together in difficult situations. After it was over, he sat against the wall of the C&C and wept. A shadow fell across him. He looked up at Siska.

‘You wanted to see,’ she said, but not unkindly.

‘What…?’ he started.

She knelt down next to him. ‘You’re a curious fellow, aren’t you?’ she said, smiling slightly. ‘And no.’

‘It won’t make any difference—’ he started. Then he realised that things would never be the same knowing he shared a planet with the ‘programmable biomass’. The worst thing was that he still didn’t want to leave.

‘We’re never going to tell you everything. I don’t know everything. We have enemies. The more you know, the more of a risk you are.’

‘What enemies? Who did that?’ he asked, desperation in his voice. Siska shook her head. ‘Why don’t I want to go home?’

‘That’s not our conditioning any more,’ she said. ‘You’re not a clone, you’re real meat, and you don’t have quite the level of protection that lifers like myself, Yaroslav and Deane have. Siraja thinks something in the city is reaching out to you. Trying to communicate.’

‘I want to leave.’

‘That’s the thing, Lodup – you really don’t.’

And he knew she was right.

Half of Yaroslav’s face was a flaking, blackened mess. He had lost body mass and was eating energy bar after energy bar as his flesh healed itself and shed large scabs of skin like burned dandruff. He was running through the footage as he healed.

It started at the stone circle with the ground shaking. Then a light began to fill the stones from within, rising up from the seabed and into the stones, until the pictograms carved into them burned brightly with the internal glow. The water was boiling all around them. Then a sphere of pulsing blue light appeared in the centre of the stones and became a sucking vortex. Water poured through it into apparent nothingness. Then it was gone, leaving in its place a large, egg-shaped granite boulder. Initially it looked as if the granite egg was hatching, but it was growing limbs, then a hollow head, transforming into the thing that had attacked the base.

‘He does not think it was the Brass City,’ Siska said quietly to Yaroslav.

‘It was a data raid,’ Yaroslav said in his thick accent as he took another bite of energy bar.

‘It was a data attack, and it wasn’t their style. Besides, how would they hack the stones? The Brass City are subtler, more thorough. He thinks it was the Egg Shell.’

Yaroslav stared at her. ‘Because it was L-tech?’ he asked. ‘The Brass City use L-tech. They specialise in infoscapes—’

‘It was a fetch. Geothermal-powered or not, its weapon was the sun. It was a thing of Lug’s.’

‘How long?’ Yaroslav asked.

‘Thousands of years.’

Yaroslav just nodded.

32

A Long Time after the Loss

The
Basilisk II
might have been an elegant yacht designed for speed and augmented for stealth and combat, but as it sank into the meteorite to harvest matter for raw materials, she looked like a parasitical insect.

The window tint had been removed and the pool room was bathed in the unsettling crimson glow of Red Space. Talia was wearing plastic polarised glasses as she stared out through the ornate circular window, watching the pool fill with water. She had a smouldering inhalable narcotic in one hand and a bottle of red wine in the other.

‘You consume everything,’ she said quietly, her voice full of sad awe. Vic hoped she wasn’t going to start crying again. He’d been waiting for a quiet time to review some footage taken from the mind of his possessed copy, the one who had been imprisoned on Suburbia. He interrogated the neunonics in the human form before he let the ship absorb and claim the body’s matter as raw material. He absently wondered if the carbon that had been harvested would eventually end up in one of his meals.

He wasn’t sure why he hadn’t told Scab about what he’d done. He guessed it was a false sense of independence.

He recognised the featureless automatons in the strange pre-Loss clothes. They belonged to a bounty killer called Mr Hat, a diminutive lizard with an enormous hat who had inadvertently saved them when he attacked the Dead-Skin Masks. According to the bounty killer ratings, Mr Hat was as good as – if not better than – Scab and Vic had been before they became fugitives. He had an impressive record, but was dogged by persistent rumours that his automatons were programmed with highly illegal deification routines. Vic had a feeling he’d met the lizard bounty killer before, but that was one of the periods Scab had edited out of his memory during his frequent neural audits. It may even have been the first time Scab killed him.

Vic felt strangely calm. He had known that someone they had angered would send people after them. This was confirmation. That was all.

‘Are you going to tell him?’ Elodie asked. Even with the augmented aural abilities of his skin, Vic had struggled to hear the feline enter the pool area, though he picked up her disturbance of the air particles via the passive motion detectors in his antennae. Talia, on the other hand, jumped when she heard Elodie’s voice. She turned and glared at the feline and then stormed out.

Vic did pick up the quiet hiss as Talia walked past Elodie. After all, it had to be loud enough for the human nat to hear, too.

‘You should be nicer to her,’ Vic said. Elodie just shrugged. ‘And tell him what?’

‘About the automatons and their boss?’

Vic swivelled his head around just over two hundred degrees in a way that most non-’sects found disconcerting and stared at Elodie.

‘I’ve got enough problems with Scab mind-fucking me.’ Vic tapped his head. ‘I can live without you hacking my neunonics as well. Besides, there’s some insect-on-sentient-mammal porn in here that I think you’d find very distasteful.’

Elodie raised an eyebrow. ‘You never know,’ she said salaciously. Vic put it down to standard feline flirting. ‘I’ve not hacked your neunonics, and if I had I certainly wouldn’t admit it over something so trivial. I did the same thing you did – interrogated the neunonics on your hairless-monkey copy before the body was destroyed. I wanted to know what happened to my copy. You’re a coward without neurosurgery, augmentations and drugs, by the way.’

Vic attempted a human shrug. He came to the conclusion that shrugging looked odd when you had as many limbs as he did.

‘I assumed you’d do the same,’ Elodie said, ‘and you had that slack-mandibled look you always have when you’re concentrating. It was a deductive guess, nothing more. So will you tell him?’ she asked again.

‘Well, now you’ve brought it up he already knows.’

‘Only if he cares to.’

‘He cares.’ Both of them looked around at the sound of Scab’s voice. He was naked, again, growing out of the smart matter next to the now full swimming pool as if the ship was extruding him. He had taken to living within the ship’s smart matter. Vic suspected it was so the situation with his possessed son and his crew of serial-killer pirates wouldn’t cause him to lose his temper and kill everyone else on the
Basilisk II
. Nobody else, not even Elodie, appeared to realise how close they were to dying every time a new story came in, or one of them made a comment. Scab’s pale skin glowed red with the light from space outside. He wore two polarised lenses over his eyes.

‘Why?’ Vic asked. ‘We knew we were going to have bounties on us.’

‘Did we?’ Scab replied. ‘Nobody wants anybody else to get their hands on Talia. Even among the Consortium and the Monarchists, there’s internal competition for her.’

‘So?’ Vic asked. He didn’t really see how that mattered.

‘So Mr Hat must be working for someone in particular, one of the factions,’ Elodie said. ‘Though I agree with Vic – what difference does that make?’

‘I think he was my erstwhile employer’s second choice,’ Scab replied. ‘If the theft of the cocoon hadn’t been so out-and-out criminal, I think my employer would have preferred to use Mr Hat.’

‘Because he’s not such a psycho?’ Vic asked.

Elodie raised an eyebrow, the ghost of a smile on her mouth.

‘He programs automatons to worship him,’ Scab said. There was no trace of irritation. He was merely imparting information.

‘I stand by my initial statement,’ Vic said. Elodie actually laughed this time. Scab frowned.

‘So what?’ Elodie said. ‘He’s employed by someone who’s probably a little bit more pissed off at you than the rest of Known Space is. We get caught, we get fucked, whoever catches us.’

‘I want to know how he is communicating with my erstwhile employer,’ Scab said.

‘He was on the other end of the blank at Arclight,’ Vic pointed out.

‘You think he may have a blank?’ Elodie asked.

‘The blank belonged to the Queen’s Cartel,’ Vic told them.

‘The stakes have been raised,’ Scab said simply. ‘And he has access to blanks.’

‘Again, so what?’ Elodie asked. ‘Are you going to tell us who he is?’

‘No,’ Scab told her.

Vic was regarding his partner carefully. ‘You want a blank, don’t you?’ the ’sect asked. Scab looked over at him.

‘What for?’ Elodie asked. ‘Blanks are twinned. You’ll only be able to talk to your old employer.’

Scab ignored her. He concentrated on his cigarette.

‘The person who hired you to steal the cocoon is on the Consortium board, isn’t he?’ Vic asked. Scab still said nothing.

‘Wow! What a great pool!’ The Alchemist – who Talia was insisting everyone should call Steve – said as he walked into the pool area. He was wearing some stained boxer shorts and an equally filthy, wide-open bathrobe. ‘Full of water and everything! Are there any dream dragons in it? No. Weird. Imagine that. Just a shame I’m not currently in the body of a waterborne mammal, isn’t it?’

Vic’s olfactory sensors could pick up the stench from the other side of the pool room. Steve had gone on hygiene strike until he either got a dolphin body or his lack of hygiene annoyed Scab and the human killed him, whichever happened first. Elodie’s nose wrinkled in disgust. As a feline she was suffering the worst from it.

‘Why aren’t the ship’s nano-screens eliminating the scent molecules?’ she demanded.

‘I asked them not to,’ Steve told her. ‘Gee, I hope I can swim.’ He jumped into the pool. A small slick of grime spread out from his body but it was quickly sanitised by the ship’s nanites.

Elodie opened her mouth to say something but then received the neunonic warning from the ship at the same time as Vic and Scab. Elodie looked less than impressed. Vic and Scab started running. Scab sent instructions to the ship with a thought.

Scab had already overridden the door lock on Talia’s room and it was wide open when he reached it. Vic was right behind him. Talia was struggling with the smart-matter bed, which had morphed to restrain the human nat. Beside her was a rapidly diminishing red-wine stain and the carpet was already absorbing a broken bottle. The bedsheets and carpet were absorbing blood from a ragged red gash on her wrist. Pills from a half-empty bottle were also scattered around the bed.

Scab stood next to the bed and looked at her. He took a drag on his cigarette.

‘Talia!’ Vic said, stopping just behind Scab. ‘What did you do?’

Scab glanced at his partner.

‘Let go of me!’ Talia shouted at the bed.

Then the realisation of what she’d been trying to do hit Vic. ‘Were you trying to kill yourself?’ the ’sect demanded. He turned as he heard laughter. Elodie was walking down the carpeted hallway towards them.

‘I don’t think so,’ the feline said. Scab was shaking his head. ‘If she was, it was a pretty half-hearted attempt, don’t you think?’

Vic returned his attention to Talia. He suspected he was never going to be able to understand humans.

She stopped struggling and looked up at him pathetically. ‘I don’t want to be here,’ she told them.

‘It’s been ten minutes since her last little psychodrama,’ Elodie said, coming to stand by Vic. ‘She just wanted some attention. With nothing to contribute, this is the best she could do.’

‘Why didn’t you come and talk to me?’ Vic asked Talia.

‘Because you don’t care. You won’t kill me,’ she said plaintively.

I will
, he thought,
I promise.

Elodie glanced at the insect.

‘Well, she’s got my attention,’ Scab said quietly and took another drag on his cigarette. ‘We can’t risk her actually managing to damage herself.’ He turned to Vic. ‘Sort out her wrist, purge her and then drop her into an immersion. I don’t care which one. You can visit her there.’

Vic nodded.

‘Bastards!’ Talia shouted at them.

Elodie and Scab turned and walked out of the room, leaving Vic standing over the bed.

It had cost a fortune in terraforming to tint the atmosphere to make Lotus Eater’s sun appear green in the sky, but then it was a privately owned planet. The owner, one of the Lords of the Monarchist systems, clearly liked it. Most of the planet was bespoke – designer flora and fauna, all of it set up to be appealingly ‘alien’ to once-human minds. Unlike most planets, it was almost empty. It had a tiny population.

The estate was suspended hundreds of feet above a garishly coloured savannah with oddly shaped plant life. Bizarre and exotic flying, stalking and grazing fauna populated the plain. Sculpted mountains rose in the distance.

The estate itself was made up of a series of steps surrounding a slowly revolving segmented house, each flight rotating counter to the direction of the ones above and below. Each step level had a garden, and each garden had a theme.

A crimson wound bordered with pulsing blue light appeared in the sky above the grasslands. With it came a sucking wind that tore plant-life, birds, flying lizards and six-legged, vacuum-mouthed herbivores off the plain and through the wound. The
Basilisk II
emerged from Red Space, its ordnance already firing. The forward airlock hung open like a mouth.

‘Shiiiit!’ Vic howled as a herbivore the size of a G-carrier narrowly missed him, bouncing off one of the airlock’s support struts. The strut bent under the impact, but the smart matter immediately began repairing the damage.

There was a hypersonic ripping sound as the
Basilisk II
fired its current payload of kinetic harpoons at the orbital weapons platforms that would doubtless be targeting them by now. AG-driven smart munitions followed. The ship then began to regrow new munitions from its carbon reservoirs, running the base matter through military-grade assemblers programmed with complex weapon templates.

The wound in the air snapped shut behind them. The
Basilisk II
’s closer-range weapons – EM-driven assault cannon blisters, rotary laser batteries – were already firing, acting as point-defence weaponry. A storm of light and force fluctuated back and forth between the estate and the
Basilisk II
as it circled. In addition to destroying incoming munitions, the
Basilisk
’s short-range weapons systems were also targeting the estate’s heavy weaponry and destroying the hardpoints. It looked as if the rotating anti-gravity estate had exploded.

Vic, Scab and the nearly invisible Elodie launched their armoured combat-exoskeleton forms from the airlock ramp and the airlock closed behind them. P-sats in heavy-combat chassis carried them into the firefight, sensors feeding a dazzling display of trajectories into their neunonics as tactical programs tried to find the safest route.

The sky lit up above them as the orbital defence network recovered from the surprise of a heavily armed ship appearing out of nowhere. Beams of energy destroyed kinetic harpoons and AG smart munitions, despite the latter’s evasive manoeuvres and countermeasures.

The estate was beginning to recover as well. Vic and Scab felt the first weaponised nano-swarm, viral and electronic attacks. They were the best the money that allowed you to own and redesign a planet could buy. Not so long ago they would have overwhelmed Vic and Scab’s countermeasures. That was before the fake auction and Scab going into credit, even if it was black credit. Their defences held. Nobody had noticed Elodie yet.

The
Basilisk II
’s energy-dissipation grid was constantly lit up, the ship’s armour smoking, running in places as the carbon reservoirs struggled to regrow it. Kinetic harpoons rained down, hammering the vessel repeatedly towards the plain. Some missed the yacht and hit the plain, causing small tectonic events and large fauna stampedes.

Lasers and assault cannon rounds cleared the way for Scab, Vic and Elodie’s flight. Any weapons systems that targeted them, the
Basilisk II
destroyed. Even so, Vic and Scab were glowing neon figures as their combat exoskeletons attempted to deal with the incoming laser-fire, and they were battered around in the air by explosions and projectile hits. Every time the ship destroyed one weapon system, another took over. Elodie still remained unnoticed.