A Quantum Mythology (47 page)

Scab was flying the
Basilisk II
. He had multitasked, essentially forking his mind to control flight and defensive and offensive weapons, with a little help from the yacht’s personality-spayed AI.

They landed on the third of six rotating levels. The garden had once consisted of artfully arranged stones, sand, lacquered wood and water features. It was now glass, ash, molten slag and steam. Security shutters had slid down, turning the AG estate into a floating fortress. It was also moving at speed towards rapid-reaction forces despatched from other estates owned by Lotus Eater’s ruling family.

Vic aimed the strobe gun at nearby automated anti-personnel weapons that were targeting Scab and himself, pouring on fire from the rapidly cycling laser. One of the automated weapon systems glowed neon and exploded. Vic covered Scab as his human partner/captor advanced, double-barrelled laser rifle at the ready. Vic had no idea where Elodie was. The
Basilisk II
was a smoking mess. Most of the ship’s armoured skin was bubbling as it was battered around in the air, hit again and again from orbit.

Scab threw programmed thermal seeds at the armoured shutters protecting the estate. The seeds glowed red, orange and finally white as they cut a large circle through the armour. Vic strode forwards, still firing the six-barrelled strobe gun, and kicked the armoured shutter in the centre of the circle cut by the thermal seeds. His power-assisted hard-tech leg knocked it in, and the white-hot edge of the armour plate set fire to the carpet inside. Vic felt something move past him. He assumed it was Elodie. He threw his strobe gun in through the hole, the weapon’s spipod unfolding in mid-air. The six-barrelled rotary laser landed on the spipod’s four legs and scuttled into the AG mansion. Vic immediately started receiving sensor feed from the ambulatory weapon which he shared with Scab. They had to move quickly now. The information coming from the
Basilisk II
suggested that the ship couldn’t take much more of the kind of punishment it was currently receiving.

Vic unclipped his advanced combat rifle from the back of his exoskeleton with his upper limbs and sent information to his lizard power disc. The strobe gun was already firing. Vic stepped through the hole in the armoured shutter into the mansion, taking out targets provided by the strobe gun’s sensor feed. As he advanced into the open-plan room, his P-sat separated from his exoskeleton and rose up towards the ceiling beams.

Vic stepped to one side, still advancing and firing. He was receiving a lot of return fire and the room was starting to fill with smoke as the strobe gun wandered around, destroying carefully selected targets. Scab followed Vic in, taking out target after target with his double-barrelled laser rifle. A member of the security team died with each double beam.

Vic grabbed the power disc from its housing on the back of his exoskeleton with his right-lower limb and threw it. The moment he released the disc, he drew both of his double-barrelled laser pistols with his lower limbs. The security team were competent and had responded quickly and proficiently to an attack that shouldn’t have been possible. Vic and Scab started receiving accurate return fire the moment they came through the armoured shutter. The security team’s main problem, however, was their smart attire – while their armoured clothes had energy-dissipation grids woven into them, but their faces were bare.

The disc flew across their exposed skin, opening flesh, removing eyes. The majority were still combat effective, but at the very least the power disc surprised them. As soon as the disc scythed their skin open, either Vic or Scab hit them with headshots. They fell back, faces either red, steaming, superheated messes from Scab’s lasers, or full of holes from the electromagnetically propelled, caseless, armour-piercing explosive rounds fired from Vic’s ACR.

Everything went quiet inside. Outside, the
Basilisk II
was still taking a battering. The strobe gun leaped up onto a counter, rotating three-hundred-and-sixty degrees, seeking more targets.

‘I’ve got him,’ Elodie said over the ’face link and revealed her position to their sensors. Vic and Scab instantly let their various weapons systems know she wasn’t a target. She was standing, holding on to a very fat human with a lot of dark-coloured hair and a large bushy beard. He was wearing a stained toga of the type popular in certain parts of the Monarchist systems. He was blubbering, almost hysterically, and had soiled himself. This confused Vic, because the human should have been able to neunonically and chemically control his response. Despite Elodie’s lightweight, stealth-adapted combat exoskeleton, Vic could still make out the feline’s distaste in her body language. The bearded human looked familiar to Vic. At first he couldn’t work out why, then realised that he reminded him, somehow, of the Living City’s spokesperson they had met with on Pangea. Perhaps all the Monarchist humans looked the same, he mused. Then Vic saw the tendrils of animated wire running from under Elodie’s retracted claws and into his head.

The light and the thunder from outside stopped as Elodie used the man’s hacked neunonics to spoof the orbital defence network and the estate itself into ceasing fire.

‘How long do we have?’ Vic asked.

‘We’ve got G-carriers and hoppers plus several ships from the security fleet all inbound,’ Elodie said. ‘The ships are coming from high orbit so they’ll take a while, but they’ll be in range in less than a hundred and twenty seconds.’

‘Is the estate ours?’ Scab asked.

Elodie nodded.

Missiles and other autonomous munitions were speeding across the plain and through the sky towards the
Basilisk II
as Vic, Scab and Elodie were carried by their P-sats back towards the partially melted-looking ship. The fore airlock opened and swallowed them even as the sky lit up overhead with incoming ordnance.

The
Basilisk II
banked sharply, its internal gravity keeping the passengers upright. The sky above them lit up again, this time with green fire as frigates from the naval contractor fleet pierced the tinted atmosphere. Light and energy reached out for the
Basilisk II
as it flew low over the savannah, scattering herds of fauna in its thunderous wake. Then the red, sucking tear appeared in the air over the grasslands and the
Basilisk II
disappeared.

Vic’s and Scab’s combat exoskeletons were still smoking as they cooled. Vic carried the two recently assembled tanks using all four of his limbs. Scab and Elodie followed the armoured ’sect through the ship and into the pool room.

Steve was curled up on the floor, sobbing.

‘It’s okay, it’s over,’ Elodie told the dolphin imprisoned in human form.

Vic walked over to the pool and ’faced instructions to the two tanks. Their bottoms split open and the contents fell into the pool. They uncoiled, writhing through the water in a display of angry hissing and flickering electricity. With a thought, Scab dimmed the lights and let their electrical displays illuminate the room. Steve was staring at them, awe all over his face.

‘A breeding pair?’ he asked. Scab nodded.

Vic watched the two serpents with their flat reptilian maws and bright reflective rainbow scales coil angrily through the water. He sort-of understood the fascination with the beauty of the creatures, though it wasn’t really something he’d taught himself to appreciate yet. They made him nervous, however. He’d undergone Key hallucinations in the past. It was a trip to a place he had no intention of returning to.

‘What you can’t assemble you’ll find in the cargo hold,’ Scab said.

Steve nodded dumbly, still staring at the two dream dragons as they sinuously explored their new home. Vic glanced over at Scab. His human partner had opened the faceplate on his armour to watch the dragons, his pale features bathed in their electric light. Vic wasn’t sure what the expression on his partner’s face was, but he knew it made him uncomfortable. After a few moments, Vic, still smoking gently, turned and walked out of the pool room.

Talia was curled into a foetal position, sitting on the bare wooden boards of the floor with her back against the wall, hands over her ears, screaming. Yellow-powder disc guns blew holes in the walls, while thrown and crossbow-fired discs thudded into the wood all around her. She knew that outside the hut, war-painted humanoid lizards mounted on flesh-eating dinosaurs and armed with spears and blades, both curved and circular, were galloping around the flimsy wooden house. She hoped they were simply going to kill her, although she had a suspicion they would eat her alive.

Vic appeared, standing over her. ‘Are you enjoying yourself?’ he asked as a serrated disc blade impacted into the wall next to him. Talia stared up at him, eyes wide with fear. It took her a moment to realise what he’d said. Then she threw herself at him, clawing at his armoured body.

‘Can you make it stop?’ she cried. Vic looked down at her, utterly mystified, then froze the immersion. She collapsed sobbing into his arms. He didn’t think he’d ever felt more like his namesake and hero than he did right then as he scooped her up, carried her into the colonial homestead’s bedroom and laid her down on the bed.

‘Did you not like the immersion?’ he asked.

She stared at him, chest heaving as she gasped for breath. ‘What are you talking about?’ she managed. ‘I just appeared here. Then these lizards starting attacking me.’

‘Yes, it’s my favourite. Vic Matto and
All’s Quiet on the New Croydon Front
.’

‘You’re Vic Matto,’ Talia managed as she tried to persuade her confused brain to work through all the terror.

‘No, I took my name from him. He was an immersion star till he died of a drug overdose so massive it scrambled his personality when they tried to clone him. A shame, really, as he was in his prime when he died. A lot of people think Monarchist assassins killed him. A pre-emptive taste-strike during the build-up to the Art Wars.’

Talia was still breathing heavily and staring at him wild-eyed. ‘We’re in a fucking
film
?’ she spat.

‘A film of what?’ Vic asked, confused.

‘This is a movie, a story?’

‘It’s an immersion, yes.’

‘Why?’

Vic was mystified. ‘What do you mean? It’s an adventure. You had entertainment, right?’

Talia stared at him. ‘Subjectively, what do you think just happened to me?’ she asked.

Vic thought about that for a moment. ‘Subjectively, you were dropped into a homestead during the humans’ diaspora period.’

‘And?’ she demanded.

‘You were attacked by a lizard hunter tribe,’ Vic said as he started to see what she was getting at.

‘And it didn’t occur to you that might be just a little fucking
frightening
if you’re not a seven-foot-tall, armoured insect violence junkie?’ she screamed at him, spittle flecking her chin.

‘So, not your thing, then?’

‘We watch stories, read them, sometimes listen to them. We never want to be in them because they’re too fucking
dangerous
!’ she shouted.

‘Sorry,’ Vic ventured.

‘I thought you were punishing me.’

‘What? No!’

Vic sat down on the bed, which creaked under the weight of his virtual hard-tech form.

‘You do this for fun?’ she asked. ‘How much violence is too much for you guys?’

Vic gave the question some thought. He remembered watching starscrapers collapsing and thinking the sight beautiful. He remembered watching an Elite destroy a habitat and being frightened by the raw power being displayed.

‘I’ve never really thought about it like that,’ he mused. ‘I don’t know for me. I don’t think there’s enough for Scab.’

‘So I’m not really here?’ Talia asked.

Vic shook his head. ‘No, you’re wrapped in the ship, asleep. So you won’t hurt yourself.’

Talia looked somewhat sheepish. ‘Can you take me somewhere else?’ she asked.

‘Scab has oversight, but he’s got some new pets to keep him occupied so we can try. Where do you want to go?’

Talia leaned against the bedstead and looked out of the window. ‘Do you have something of Earth, from—’

‘Before you guys lost it?’

Talia turned to glare at him but nodded. ‘Somewhere glamorous, but not in the middle of a battle or anything?’ she asked.

‘I’ll see what I can do,’ Vic told her.

They were standing in a spacious, tastefully decorated apartment with a balcony. The door to the balcony was open, diaphanous curtains blowing in the gentle wind. They were staring out over a cityscape. It looked very small to Vic.

‘I’m not sure where this is,’ Vic said.

‘It’s New York,’ Talia said. She was dressed elegantly in a tight, calf-length skirt, a striped blouse, stockings and heels, her black hair arranged into a bouffant style. One hand rested on her hip; the other held a cigarette holder with a lit cigarette in it. ‘Before the war, I think.’

‘
The
war?’ Vic asked. ‘You only had the one? What changed?’

‘I’m not sure about the giant floating, glowing jellyfish, though.’

‘I can get rid of them if you want.’

Talia turned and looked up at Vic. There was something different in her expression – something calculated that was starting to make Vic feel funny.

‘No, it’s okay,’ she said. ‘They’re kind of pretty, assuming they’re not going to attack us.’

‘I don’t think so.’

Talia moved closer and looked up at him with an expression Vic’s neunonics told him was best described as ‘coquettish’. She touched his armoured thorax with one perfectly manicured burgundy nail and ran it down to his abdomen.

‘Can you look more human?’ she asked, tilting her head.

This was a matter of pride for Vic. Humanophile or not, he was secure-ish in his identity as an insect. He always swore that he would never pretend to be anything he wasn’t. He would stand firm.

He turned into a muscular human male with four arms and multifaceted crystalline eyes. He glanced at his reflection in the huge mirror over the fireplace.

‘Shit,’ he muttered. ‘Scab’s oversight. He probably thinks he’s being funny.’