The Beauty of Destruction (61 page)

On one of the walls a tall, thin man had been crucified. Spikes had grown from the habitat’s hull through his wrists, and his side. His left hand was missing. Crabs were eating his legs and lower torso, leaving the rest of his body alone. The crabs looked wrong somehow, they were albino, had never seen the sun, but they were too large for this depth and shouldn’t have been able to walk up walls.

On the bulkhead above the crucified man, the words:
I died for your fucking sins
had been written in a thick smear of blood.
Your fucking
sins
had been crossed out and replaced with the words:
nothing at all
.

‘Is that Deane?’ du Bois asked, more for something to say than anything else. He knew it was. Mr Brown nodded anyway. Deane had been the dive supervisor in the habitat.

They could feel the spore-like nanites of the city testing their own blood-screens which all of them, bar Mr Brown, had refreshed before leaving the sub. His skin was itching like mad. It felt badly inflamed.

‘How far underwater are we?’ Beth asked in a small voice.

‘Some four thousand metres,’ Mr Brown said cheerfully. ‘A little under three miles of water over our heads, or four hundred atmospheres if you prefer. That is to say that the pressure down here is four hundred times what it is on the surface.’

‘I don’t feel that much different,’ Beth said, glancing around at their surroundings, obviously less than happy.

‘Your body is adapting to it,’ du Bois said. ‘The nanites are scrubbing the nitrogen build up, your lungs are modifying to breathe the gas and deal with oxygen toxicity, your joints are being reinforced …’

‘Not to mention modifying your larynx so you don’t sound like a cartoon character,’ Mr Brown added. ‘Though you’ll not be as suited for operations here as the crew were.’

‘Where’s the Pennangalan?’ du Bois suddenly demanded.

‘Ah,’ said Mr Brown. ‘You noticed.’

‘Of course I fucking noticed,’ du Bois snapped. ‘Alexia, keep watch.’ His sister nodded, her ARX-170 rifle at the ready.

‘Malcolm, you need to remain calm—’ Mr Brown started.

‘You need to tell me where she is, right now,’ du Bois said. Something loped out of the hatch. Alexia swung round, her rifle coming up to her shoulder. Beth’s pistol wavered for a moment, as she almost took it off King Jeremy and pointed it at the thing. Du Bois was similarly tempted. At first he had thought it was a large, pale greyhound, except that greyhounds can’t climb submarine ladders. Then he realised it was a broadly human form, but sexless, emaciated, with chalk-white skin, its physiology modified to better enable it to move on all four of its spindly limbs. Its face seemed vaguely familiar. It went to Mr Brown’s side and nuzzled against him. Du Bois looked up at his ex-employer as the Pennangalan finally climbed out of the hatch.

‘What’s wrong with you?’ du Bois asked.

‘His name is Silas,’ Mr Brown said, smiling, patting the creature that seemed eager for his attention. ‘Yes it is, yes it is!’

‘Silas Scab? The clockmaker?’ du Bois asked. He had killed him. A Swiss child murderer who’d had access to the tech somehow, though he hadn’t been affiliated with the Circle or the City of Brass.

‘His son,’ Mr Brown said impatiently.

‘Azmodeus mentioned him, so did Inflictor … Nethercott. He said he had freed him,’ Beth said. Mr Brown turned to look at King Jeremy.

‘I didn’t know anything about that,’ King Jeremy said, shaking his head.

‘What’s it doing here?’ du Bois demanded, his voice tight. Even King Jeremy looked disgusted.

‘He contains genetic material that I am interested in. I didn’t reveal him, well more
it
really, earlier because I knew it would upset you.’

‘What do you want with his
DNA
?’ du Bois asked.

Mr Brown sighed. ‘Does it really matter right now?’

‘Malcolm!’ Alexia said sharply. She had her rifle trained on a figure standing in one of the corners. A female, blonde hair tied back, wearing a ragged beige coverall. Her eyes were completely black.

‘One of the clones,’ Mr Brown told them. ‘I think you can probably assume that she is controlled by whatever minds control the city.’

‘Is she a threat?’ Alexia asked. Mr Brown laughed.

‘The window,’ Beth said. She nodded towards the oval window that looked out from C&C over the moon pool. Du Bois recognised Siska. The Pennangalan’s sister, though rumour had it that they could both lay claim to that title. Her hair covered most of her face. It had only been a quick glance, but du Bois was pretty sure that under the hair something was wrong. He had worked with her closely, very closely, in Sumatra and the South Seas during the late eighteenth century. He hoped he didn’t have to kill her.

‘I go down first,’ du Bois told King Jeremy. ‘Don’t slip, you don’t want to fall into that water.’ The boy swallowed and then nodded.

‘You fucking bastard!’ Lodup Satakano shouted at him as soon as they moved into Command and Control. The room stank, it seemed that the habitat’s recycling had ceased to work. The Mwoakilloan salvage diver looked ill-used, gaunt, wide eyed. Du Bois could understand his anger.

He recognised Piotr Yaroslav, he had been a
Rota Osobogo Naznacheniya
combat diver during the war. Du Bois had helped recruit him after they had worked together hunting SS Werewolf units that had gained access to stolen S-tech. He was not sure about the security chief’s new steroid abuser physique, however.

Siska looked worse closer up. There was something wrong with her skin, and he was pretty sure he didn’t want to see her eyes right now.

‘Malcolm,’ she said as he entered.

‘Can you get us out of here?’ Lodup demanded. ‘My family …’

‘Your family are gone,’ Yaroslav snapped, and then raised his futuristic-looking Vector SMG to his shoulder when Silas bounded into the room. ‘What the fuck is that?’

‘No, you see my family didn’t have much in the way of phones and computers, internet access …’ Lodup started.

Du Bois didn’t have the heart to tell him that Mwoakilloa and Pohnpei were among some of the first places that the spores would have reached. If his family were lucky they were dead, if not then they weren’t his family any more.

‘He is mine, Piotr,’ Mr Brown said as he walked into Command & Control. Yaroslav screamed and cowered, backing away from Mr Brown. Du Bois hadn’t been expecting that. The man had seen some of the worst excesses that the Eastern Front had to offer. He was no coward. His fear of Mr Brown, however, looked almost religious in nature. What had happened to them? It was obvious they had been there for a while. He looked at the remains of their meals, empty water containers, the partially absorbed sewage they had seen running down the stairs. It made sense. The Seeders here would have started to awake from their slumber at the same time the one in the Solent had. There was a body lying on the floor, the carpet-like grass analogue growing into and around it. The body had the same black eyes as the woman they had seen in the moon pool. One of the clones. He had been beaten to death.

Lodup took a step back from Mr Brown as well, presumably somewhat cowed by Yaroslav’s reaction. The big Russian was hiding under the elliptical hardwood table on the raised area, just in front of the oval window. Silas was trying to lick the Russian’s face.

‘Who are you?’ Lodup demanded. ‘Why are they pointing guns at that guy? And why’s he dressed like that?’ King Jeremy was still wearing his post-apocalyptic gear. He looked even more foolish down here. Mr Brown ignored him. Instead he was looking around, and what he saw didn’t seem to please him.

Siska rushed over to the Pennangalan, and embraced her silver-masked sister. Du Bois’s enhanced hearing picked out the hissing quality to Siska’s whispered Khmer.

Mr Brown’s gaze had come to rest on a spot on the wall, an expression of disgust on his face.

‘What the fuck is that?’ Alexia demanded, the butt of her rifle against her shoulder, half raised. Du Bois risked taking his eyes off King Jeremy for a moment. It was a severed head. A middle-aged man he didn’t recognise, slightly chubby face, goatee beard, his swarthy skin suggesting a Mediterranean heritage perhaps. The head was impaled on an organic-looking staff, and there were strange organs where the staff met the head. Some of them were inflating and deflating like lungs, another he suspected was some kind of larynx, the rest of them he didn’t recognise. They didn’t look human. Dreadlock-like tendrils of flesh grew through his white-streaked black hair, connecting him to the wall, where the semi-intelligent, condensed adamantine matter had taken on a partly flesh-like appearance.

‘No, no, no, no,’ Mr Brown said, shaking his head. Both Silas and Yaroslav made a whimpering noise. ‘This will not do.’ Mr Brown walked across C&C to the severed head. Both Beth and du Bois shuffled round, looking between King Jeremy, who they were still covering, and his ex-boss. The severed head on the pole looked up at Mr Brown. Du Bois didn’t see fear in the eyes. He saw pity.

‘I’m sorry,’ the head on the pole said. Mr Brown nodded as though he understood. Then he tore the head off the pole and crushed it with his bare hands.

‘No!’ Lodup shouted, reaching for one of the Vector submachine guns. Du Bois grimaced, Beth flinched but neither of them shifted their aim from King Jeremy. Yaroslav continued whimpering and Silas licked his face some more, Alexia turned away, Siska just watched. Before Lodup could bring the SMG to his shoulder the Pennangalan’s Sig 716 carbine was levelled at the salvage diver’s head.

‘She’ll kill you. Lower the weapon,’ du Bois warned him.

‘What the fuck is going on? Who are these people?’ Lodup demanded.

‘He’s your boss,’ Siska hissed. ‘We work for him.’ Mr Brown turned slowly to look at Lodup.

Du Bois found himself taking a step away. The expression on the obsidian-skinned ‘man’s’ face had gone beyond malevolent. His skin seemed to twitch with a life of its own. It wasn’t a human face, not any more, if it ever had been.

‘May I remind you, Mr Satakano, that man betrayed all of us,’ Mr Brown said, presumably meaning the owner of the severed head. His erstwhile employer gestured all around. ‘He must bear responsibility for much of the misfortune that we are now beset by. We must, however, find a new interface. Communication is so important, don’t you think?’

Lodup was staring at Mr Brown. Then his eyes went wide. He opened his mouth to scream. Something complicated happened in the air between Lodup and Mr Brown. Lodup’s head fell off, and dropped to the grass-like carpet.

‘No!’ Siska cried. She had her Sig P220 pistols in each hand now, but she couldn’t seem to bring herself to point them at Mr Brown. The Pennangalan moved away from her sister, her featureless mask of beaten silver looking between Siska and Mr Brown. Du Bois tightened his grip on the .45, but still didn’t dare move it from King Jeremy. He could tell that the boy was only just starting to realise how out of his depth he was. Du Bois wasn’t quite sure how Mr Brown could do what he could do, but one thing was clear to him: they were only alive because Mr Brown wasn’t entirely sure he could stop du Bois and/or Beth from pulling the trigger, and then survive the resulting nuclear explosion. Du Bois nearly pulled the trigger. Despite everything else that was going on, it was clear that Mr Brown was an abomination. He couldn’t be allowed to live, to spread his corruption beyond Earth, but du Bois wanted to live. Right there and then du Bois understood just how much of a coward he was.

‘No more,’ du Bois managed. He saw his terrified sister glance over at him. He didn’t think she had liked the fear she had heard in his voice. Mr Brown ignored him and picked up Lodup’s head. He walked back to the pole. There was a crunch as he impaled the head. The tendrils that had connected the previous severed head to the wall of the habitat were waving around like the tentacles of a sea anemone. Wet sounds came from the pole as it grew up through Lodup’s neck stump. Eyes rolled down, and there was awareness. The strange organs started to work again. The mouth opened and closed but made no sound. Du Bois flinched at more crunching noises as tendrils pierced the back of Lodup’s skull.

‘You used to have the stomach to do what was required, Malcolm,’ Mr Brown muttered, distracted. ‘This is where your actions have led you. Take responsibility.’

‘You have come for our murdered children? The ones whose
corpses you mutilated?’ The severed head
spoke with a multitude of voices.

Yaroslav was repeating one
line of a Russian nursery rhyme over and over again.
A tear rolled down King Jeremy’s cheek.

‘Yes,’ Mr
Brown said brusquely, the drip bags of synthetic morphine nearly
empty. ‘What is required? A sacrifice?’

‘What if we ask
for a first edition of Borges’s
Manual de zoología fantástica
,
a left-handed rubber glove with six fingers, the foreskin
of Christ, the second season of
Studio 60 on the
Sunset Strip
, Tantalus’s tantalus?’

‘I’m afraid I have
limited resources at this moment,’ Mr Brown said impatiently. ‘I
can offer you a beautiful hermaphrodite.’

‘That’s not going
to happen,’ du Bois told him. The severed head’s
eyes moved unnaturally in their sockets to look at du
Bois.

‘Come to terms with what you want to achieve
here,’ Mr Brown told du Bois without looking at him.
He could feel his sister’s eyes on him.

‘One
of us gets hurt, everyone dies,’ du Bois told him.

Lodup’s severed head spoke again, but this time it
was in the Mwoakilloan’s own voice. ‘What if we
asked for you?’ he said to Mr Brown.