The Beauty of Destruction (51 page)

‘Are you having fun?’ she asked, looking at the two dead surfers. ‘Is that what we just did all that for?’ Du Bois ignored her. He reached into the
ECV
and pulled out the Purdey. He worked the bolt mechanism on the custom rifle to eject all the rounds in it, and then took the magazine for the SA58 with the nanite-tipped rounds in it. He pushed five of them out of the magazine and loaded them quickly into the Purdey, as Inflictor got further away. He heard Alexia retch. There was a dune buggy and two quad bikes speeding towards the
ECV
, leaving a cloud of sand behind them. The vehicles were all decorated with severed heads hanging from chains.

‘Were we just playing war for the sake of it?’ Beth demanded. Du Bois removed the scope from the top of the rifle. Multiple explosions had rendered it so much broken glass. Grace was kneeling down, using the
ECV
as cover, bringing her carbine up to aim at the incoming vehicles. Du Bois took aim at Inflictor. The rifle was yanked from his grip.

‘What the fuck?’ he demanded, rounding on Beth.

‘He is the last person who might know where King Jeremy and Mr Brown are.’

‘He’s not a person!’ du Bois screamed.

‘Oh right, are we the cleansing fire here to punish the infidel, or are we trying to accomplish something with this … mass murder?’

‘It’s a battle,’ du Bois managed, the anger slowly leaking out of him, his words sounding hollow in his own ears. ‘He won’t speak to you.’

‘What did we do?’ he heard his sister howl.

‘Shut the fuck up please, Alexia,’ Grace said through gritted teeth.

‘We’ve got to try,’ Beth said.

Inflictor Doorstep had gone surfing.

36

A Long Time After the Loss

It was the colour that had driven the xeno-archaeologist mad. Doubtless Dr Josef Ertl had felt trapped in the blood-coloured space, but it was red that had pushed him over the edge and nothing else. There had been just too much of it. It had been inescapable. The ship that the doctor and his crew had used had been quite primitive. They hadn’t been able to tint the fixed transparent parts of the hull. Scab smiled as he thought about this. Red would have been all they could see. They would have bathed in it. They would have felt it outside the ship, pressing against the hull. He could understand that. Red Space had a palpable presence. Many people felt it. He felt it. Ertl’s cannibalism of his fellow crewmembers made sense. The cannibalism of the ship, programming small parts of the smart matter hull to turn into beetles he could hunt and eat, less so. The doctor’s mind had turned in on itself, cycled through fantasy to cope. Scab felt Ertl had taken the coward’s way out. He’d tried to hide from Red Space rather than embrace it. Known Space was the skin, Red Space was the blood underneath.

Dr Ertl had found the artefact many years after he had become lost. He had made marionettes of his fellow crewmembers’ bones; both the ship and the doctor were little more than husks by this point. That was why, other than a few cursory expeditions, nobody had ever truly believed his story. Except the entity that Ertl had allegedly spoken to claimed to have been from the ‘Ubh Blaosc’. That was what had caught Scab’s intelligent search program’s attention. It was slim. Nobody else had ever been able to substantiate Dr Ertl’s claims, though another ship, some five hundred years later, had claimed to have seen four black suns arranged in some kind of regular pattern within Red Space. It was the only corroborating information.

It was thin. Really thin. Ertl’s reverse-calculated coordinates had been vague, even by Red Space standards, and had borne no fruit for the few speculative expeditions that had taken Ertl semi-seriously in the past. This had caused yet another argument among the crew of the
Basilisk II
, but their choices were to become lost in Red Space, or be hunted down and killed, at best, by the Consortium.

Being lost in Red Space wouldn’t be that bad, though he would probably have to kill some of the others. He wasn’t sure that he would kill the Monk. He feared what she had said about him being a vulnerable child. He was self-aware. He had few delusions about who and what he was, but if he feared what she said then there was probably more truth in her words than he was prepared to admit. He couldn’t kill her until he had investigated what had been said, and either discounted it or come to terms with it. Anything else would be petty.

He wasn’t sure what to make of Ludwig. The Elite had remained silent and still since he had come on board the
Basilisk II
. The others feared the Monarchist Elite, which made sense. Scab was mostly angry that it was yet another thing that he couldn’t control. That said, it wasn’t doing anything, other than slightly affecting very local gravity.

Vic had to go.

He wasn’t sure what to do with Talia. There was no denying that she was very annoying, but she looked so much like his ghost. He wondered what would happen if he reduced Talia to a more primal state, perhaps if he peeled her? Though he suspected it would lead to shrillness. People seemed to lack self-awareness in the face of a straight-edge razor. It was depressing. If only he could take her physical form and have her possessed by the entity that haunted the bridge drive. It was probably this fantasy that had kept Talia alive for so long.

He was watching her now, his senses neunonically ’faced with the ship, spread through the molecularly-bonded dense smart matter surrounding the glowing blue drive. She lived as a flickering image, so much less real than a hologram, little more than a discharge of energy, but with definite shape and form. She had a simpler, more childlike nature than Talia, Scab could tell. There was something pure about her, not the façade of purity like the Innocent. This was real.
Or a story
you have told to comfort yourself because all the compromise
has weakened you.

The ghost’s image started to distort, as if something had snagged her and pulled, a silent scream. He felt it like a cold knife made of panic slipped between his ribs.
Ludwig
, was his first thought, but ’faced information from the ship’s sensors reached him faster than the thought blaming their Elite stowaway. Significant gravitic forces acting on the
Basilisk II
. Far more gravity than was usual anywhere in Red Space. He had the ship’s smart matter squeeze him through it like live food travelling down a gullet. With a thought he disconnected his life support connections to the ship as it extruded him into the yacht’s lounge/command and control. The other three were already there, staring through the magnified, transparent smart matter hull at visual information that was probably minutes old now. Ludwig was still where he had last seen him. Something about the alien automaton made Scab think of a miniature singularity, and not just because the machine’s Elite-tech was powered by a network of entangled micro black holes.

‘I think we’ve found your black suns,’ Vic said. The ’sect still sounded scared, presumably despite drugs and neunonic control of his physiology. Scab realised that he must have been slipping in recent decades. He should have known, perhaps after New Coventry, that his ’sect partner had become too human to be of use to him. He should have started looking for a new partner then. Something tugged just at the back of his mind, some doubt, watered and fed by the Monk. Perhaps it was sentimentality. Perhaps he did need Vic in some unknown way. It was another thought he didn’t want to have right now.

Instead he focused on what was in front of him. Ten black suns arranged in a circle. They were Red Space echoes. They were static, according to the ship’s sensors, and obviously arranged by some kind of intelligence. He wondered if this was played out in Real Space somewhere unknown, or hidden from them by the Church. The suns burned with their own fire. His eyes were drawn to the centre of them as he watched. Like Red Space itself, he had convinced himself that he could feel them as some kind of palpable presence.

Sometimes clouds of gas obscured the suns, but for the most part the area encircled by the black suns was clear and open, untouched by the billowing clouds.

‘It’s a trap,’ the Monk said.

‘Just once I’d like to go somewhere and not hear that,’ Talia said.

Scab marveled at the power involved in keeping the ten suns in place, at their seemingly qliphothic nature; they were the opposite of life-giving stars, they were anti-life. There was a beauty to it.

‘Not for us,’ the Monk said.

‘Makes a change,’ Talia muttered.

The smart matter hull magnified the object in the centre of the suns. It was about the size of a capital ship, but did not conform to the design of any of the uplift ships he was aware of. It didn’t belong to any of the three factions, and from what little he could remember of the serpents – most of his memory from his Elite days had been classified, and virally removed – it didn’t resemble what he had seen of their S-tech either. It was tube-like in shape, one end rounded, the other blunt, and its hull was formed of interwoven strands of some kind of metal. It looked like rope of the kind he had seen in some of Vic’s colonial immersions.

‘I think it’s L-tech,’ the Monk said.

‘You think?’ Vic asked. ‘Weren’t you supposed to have been experts on this kind of thing?’

‘Yes, but we’ve never found a ship before. We didn’t think they had any. We thought they travelled in different ways,’ the Monk explained.

‘Like what?’ Talia asked, frowning.

The Monk shrugged. ‘We didn’t know, perhaps point-to-point wormholes.’

‘So if it’s not transport?’ Vic said. ‘A weapon?’

‘Maybe, maybe defence like this guy,’ the Monk said, and pointed at Ludwig with her thumb. Vic almost flinched.

Scab didn’t see what the fuss was about. He had killed Vic more often than Ludwig had.

‘Or exploration, like a probe,’ the Monk suggested.

‘Big probe,’ Vic mused.

‘Or a lifeboat,’ Talia suggested. ‘Why isn’t it being torn apart by the forces involved?’ Even Scab turned to stare at the girl. ‘Yes, I am from before the Loss, but no, I am not a complete moron, and yes, I can understand telemetry.’

‘The material it’s made from is really dense,’ the Monk said. ‘It has its own gravity well.’ Her sister nodded.

‘It wanted us to find it,’ Scab found himself saying. ‘Or something did. This was too easy.’

‘What or who?’ Talia asked. She looked less than pleased when Scab glanced towards the part of the ship where the bridge drive was encased by smart and dumb matter. The Monk, however, kept looking at Ludwig.

‘We have to go there,’ Scab said. ‘Talia flies.’

‘Go to what? It’s a solid mass.’

‘Ertl spoke with something,’ Scab said.

‘Via the ship’s comms, and that’s assuming it wasn’t a hallucination.’

‘You’re the one looking for this Ubh Blaosc,’ Scab said, starting to get exasperated.

‘Agreed, but let’s try communicating with it first, because at the moment there’s nothing there, and assuming that we could survive the trip, and going over the
Basilisk
’s specs I’m not sure of that, it’s a one-way trip. We don’t have anything like the energy to break free of the Black Suns once we get there.’

‘We need to go there.’ Scab realised he was suddenly very sure of this. He just wasn’t sure why.

‘Well, I’m glad we’ve discussed this in a reasonable manner,’ the Monk said.

‘Beth, this is Scab, Scab, this is Beth,’ Vic said. Scab felt a vein on his neck flutter as he tried to control his anger.

‘Presumably now we need some threats, call some bluffs, and all the other tiresome bullshit that passes for decision-making on this ship?’ the Monk asked. ‘You want what we want. Just let us explore some other avenues first before we reach for weapons, yes?’

The smart matter on the walls suddenly extruded raised symbols, the same ones repeated over and over. Scab’s neunonics told him that this was writing, an archaic and very slow form of communication. It was a pre-Loss human dialect. His neunonics translated the ‘words’ for him: ‘Please take me there. It is safe.’ All four of them turned to look at Ludwig.

‘See,’ Scab said, though he was less than pleased about the liberties the machine Elite had taken with the
Basilisk II
.

‘It’s hardly fucking validation, is it?’ the Monk shouted at him.

They all knew that Elite-tech provided a near instinctual understanding of its environment. The ghost of Scab’s memory of this feeling was maddening. Talia was doing the flying. All of them, including Ludwig, who had submitted to it silently, were encased in smart matter. The
Basilisk
II
had reconfigured itself into a compact arrowhead and got rid of all its cavities. With the exception of their extensively cushioned bodies, the yacht was now one solid mass. Even so, receiving the stress telemetry from the ship was beginning to make him wonder if he had made a mistake. He was so heavily ’faced with the yacht that he actually felt the forces working on the craft, distending its hull. He assumed that the feedback that Talia was receiving would be quite painful.

In the normal human visual spectrum it looked like they were plummeting towards the Lloigor craft as if they had fallen from a great height. It was only when his neunonics superimposed the interplay of the waves of force against the hull that he came close to understanding what was happening. The ship felt like it was being squeezed. It was taking the path of least resistance against the gravity. Talia was only hardening the hull and using the engines when they were necessary to stop the ship being torn apart.

Then the woven metal of the truly alien ship was suddenly much bigger in his vision. He felt a thrill of the unknown, not unlike the way he had felt when he seen the Seeder Ship that Talia had been linked to, and killed it. The metal of the ship started to uncoil. It grew, changing shape, blossoming like a vast metal flower. According to their sensors and Basil’s AI-modelled predictions, the ship was becoming less dense as it grew open spaces inside it. Outside of the sheer power of an Elite, Scab was struggling to think of a more awesome display of technology. Basil was feeding information on the stresses the hull of the other ship would be subject to from the ten black suns. The ship was easily the size of some planets now. It was a vast, metallic craft that had clearly been designed as much for aesthetics as anything else. It looked like something from an older, grander time. A craft fit for the titanic servants of heretical gods, or godlike aliens anyway.

And suddenly it filled their view completely and the gravity had gone. They were moving at great speed towards its hull. Even Scab’s sphincter clenched for a moment. He was aware of the panicked ’face exchange of communications. The
Basilisk
II
was burning hard to try and bleed off its speed before it hit the edge of the ship. It took Scab a moment to work out what had just happened. Then it took him a moment or two to come to terms with the information. It seemed that the Lloigor ship in its current configuration had just grown big enough that it would have been torn apart by gravitic forces, so it had protected itself with a coherent energy field. The amount of energy that would have been involved was incredible. He wondered where it got its power.

Part of the hull opened in front of them like an eye blinking, and then they were inside. Everything was smooth and curved. Inside was a vast open and lonely space that felt like it should be filled with smaller craft. It was like the blank-faced ghost of a thousand cities. Every internal structure looked as if a vast crew had just left, and the ship itself had slowly erased the material signs of their presence, but left hints.