A Quantum Mythology (38 page)

‘No, I was heavily protected. The people who could afford it wanted me there. I went down because I’m an ex-Church bridge tech,’ Steve said bitterly. ‘But sure, Scab, why not. I’ll do six impossible things before breakfast.’ Elodie and Vic looked puzzled, Scab was oblivious, but Talia was pleased that she finally understood a reference. ‘And where are we supposed to get the dragons from?’ he demanded sarcastically.

‘It’s not a hallucinogen. I’ll find the dragons,’ Scab said.

Steve just stared at him. ‘Oh, well, if that’s the case, it’s simply a matter of me agreeing to help you, then.’ Steve pretended to give the subject some thought. ‘So, having given it some thought, go and fuck yourself.’

Talia stifled a laugh.

‘I’d raise an eyebrow if I had one,’ Vic commented.

Scab was watching Steve impassively. Then he looked down. ‘I don’t understand this,’ he began quietly. ‘I have explained what we’re going to be doing. Why do we have to talk about it?’ Scab looked up at Steve with his dead eyes. Only Vic knew him well enough to be aware that violence was now even closer than it usually was with his ‘partner’, and it was normally pretty close.

Despite his bravado, Steve blanched. Then he appeared to bolster himself. ‘You don’t get it,’ Steve said. ‘You can’t do anything to me any more.’

Scab was on his feet and heading towards Steve.

‘Wait!’ Elodie shouted. Scab ignored her. ‘If you kill him, then we’ve just been wasting our time.’ Scab stopped. Long-term gratification warred with short-term pleasure. He looked calm, but Vic knew his partner was furious. If there was one thing Scab hated, it was being defied. ‘Just give me a moment, please,’ Elodie said turning to Steve. ‘What do you want?’

Scab turned around to look at Elodie, his expression unreadable. She ignored him.

‘Fine,’ Steve said. ‘I want access to whatever this ship can produce in terms of food and drugs. I want neunonics and augments to a specification that I will provide. I’ll need this for the work. I’ll require some equipment, much of it specialised enough that the ship won’t be able to assemble it. I want a cetacean body – again, I’ll provide the specs – which of course means I’ll need a pool and a P-sat with manipulators.’

‘Yes, yes,’ Scab said, ‘but I’ll decide the specs and install a meat-hack backdoor, and yes, you can have the body but you’re not getting the pool so it will be pretty useless, and yes, but I’ll have override,’ Scab told him.

‘Then no deal,’ Steve replied and crossed his arms petulantly.

‘The ship can’t sustain a pool,’ Scab told him.

‘It can, actually,’ Vic said helpfully. ‘It’s in the original template. It’ll need a bit of reconfiguration, and we’ll have to find an external source to feed the carbon reservoirs whilst it’s being reconfigured, but it’s completely doable.’ It was only when he’d finished that it occurred to Vic that Scab would have known all that. Scab was staring at him.

‘I think a pool’s a great idea,’ Talia announced, and took another long draw on her smouldering inhalable narcotic.

‘You’re a prisoner,’ Scab said, a slight tone of irritation creeping into his voice.

‘Fine, then I’m not going to cooperate, either,’ Talia said and crossed her arms.

‘I can’t see a lack of cooperation being problematic during vivisection,’ Elodie said. Talia glared at the other woman. ‘Why not the pool?’ she asked Scab.

‘Because there’s no need for me to do it,’ Scab said. ‘And I don’t like the smell.’

‘The environmental systems will scrub it—’ Vic started.

‘It doesn’t matter how good they are, you can always smell it on a ship of this size.’

‘What about an immersion?’ Elodie asked.

‘I want a pool!’ Talia demanded. Vic caught the look Elodie gave her. He suspected the feline was trying hard not to slap the pre-Loss human.

‘I know the difference,’ Steve answered.

‘You know what immersion means, right?’ Vic asked.

‘I know the difference.’

‘From an expeditious perspective, it’s easier to give him what he wants,’ Elodie told Scab. ‘His cooperation will make what I have to do easier.’ Steve laughed at that.

‘I thought cats didn’t like water,’ Talia said waspishly. Elodie ignored her.

‘I don’t care about his cooperation or making your job easier. Those factors are both irrelevant as long as I get what I want,’ Scab told the feline.

Talia laughed. ‘You sound like a child,’ the pre-Loss human told him. Scab glanced over at her, now openly irritated, and Vic started to fear for her. He reached out and put a hand on her shoulder. She looked up at him and he just shook his head, hoping she’d take the hint.

‘Okay, let me put it this way.’ Elodie sounded like she was reaching the limits of her patience as well. ‘You are more likely to get what you want if you use your godlike power over all of us and allow this magnanimous concession.’

Scab gave this some thought. ‘Agreed, but I never want to have another conversation like this again. They’re … difficult.’

‘One more thing,’ Steve said.

Scab’s tumbler pistol was suddenly in his hand. With someone other than Scab, Vic would have taken the gesture to be somewhat melodramatic. From Scab, Vic was pretty sure it was just a coping mechanism to get him through the next few difficult moments.

‘That looks like release to me,’ Steve said, nodding at the anachronistic revolver. Scab looked confused until he glanced down. He appeared to be genuinely surprised to find that he was holding the tumbler pistol. ‘I want a suicide solution.’

Elodie sighed.

‘Obviously. Not.’ Scab took his time enunciating the words carefully.

‘You’re not going to like any of the things I’ll be doing to you. You’re going to want to die a lot,’ Elodie told him.

‘It’s not for you. It’s for when the Church finds you, or an Elite comes knocking on the hull. This is non-negotiable.’

‘This isn’t a negotiation!’ Scab suddenly shouted. Elodie looked up sharply. Talia let out a little scream. Vic emitted terror-signifying pheromones. He had never heard Scab shout before. Scab stalked out of the lounge. Vic was pretty sure it was so he wouldn’t kill everyone in it.

Steve turned to Elodie. ‘We’ll come up with some compromise,’ she told the dolphin.

‘Yes, Scab appears to be all about the compromise,’ Steve replied caustically. ‘The prisoners wearing other people’s faces?’

‘Nothing to do with us,’ Elodie told him.

‘An imprisoned street sect?’ Vic asked.

‘That many? In the same place? Bit of a coincidence. I think it was a meat-hack. I think their core personalities were corrupted when they reasserted. Any idea who would do that?’ Steve asked a series of blank expressions. ‘Do you know what the Hungry Nothingness is?’ The expressions remained blank.

‘The ship,’ Talia started. ‘It was afraid of something. It was alone because its family had caught madness like a disease.’

‘What does that mean?’ Elodie demanded. Talia lapsed into sulky silence.

‘Talia?’ Vic coaxed gently.

‘I don’t know! All right? It … I … we didn’t think like I do now, okay?’

Vic just nodded. Elodie glanced over at Vic; the feline looked worried. He suspected it had more to do with Scab than the meat-hack on Suburbia.

Nobody saw Scab for two days. They couldn’t even detect his whereabouts on the ship. They had no idea where they were going as he’d locked everyone out of the navigation systems. All they knew was that they were in Red Space somewhere, though they appeared to be quite a distance from the Church beacons. This was making everyone nervous. Vic theorised that Scab was taking time to calm himself down. He suspected that Scab had sunk into the
Basilisk II
’s superstructure, feeding himself drugs and living in horrible immersions.

Then Scab returned, apparently back to his old self. He did not provide an explanation for his disappearance – not that any of them had expected one.

The lounge disappeared, to be replaced by some deckchairs and sunloungers around a large, deep and very empty swimming pool. They hadn’t dropped back into Real Space to mine matter to fill it yet. Scab’s early reconfiguration felt a little like petty spite.

Talia was sitting on the carpeted corridor outside Scab’s room, cross-legged on a blanket she’d had assembled. She was smoking a mentholated cigarette. It didn’t matter how many times she’d tried to explain the concept of a mentholated cigarette to the ship, they still didn’t taste right. She’d been there for some time. The white carpet should have shown the evidence of this in stubbed-out cigarettes, but the carpet kept on eating them. Finally Scab walked by.

‘Hey,’ she said, looking up at him, her eyes wide, only a little water in them. ‘Can we talk?’

‘About what?’ he asked, genuinely confused. Talia wasn’t sure what to say next. He turned to leave, but she grabbed his trouser leg. Suddenly he was standing several steps away, relaxing into a more normal pose, and she no longer had hold of anything. Talia had barely seen him move.

‘I mean, we slept together,’ she told him, her voice sounding small. He shook his head, looking for relevance. ‘That means nothing?’

‘It’s something I’ve done, I suppose. Why are you crying?’

‘I’m not,’ she snapped, wiping away tears. Scab turned to leave. ‘Wait!’ Scab stopped and turned back. ‘Look, I want to do something.’

‘So?’

‘I mean other than just be a prisoner.’

‘You are a prisoner.’

‘The things in your head.’

‘Neunonics.’

‘Yes. I want them. I want to be improved, to have … augments.’

Scab looked at her for a moment, as if he was studying her anew. ‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘Don’t speak to me like that,’ he said. She looked defiant for a moment, but her resolve soon crumbled and she looked down. ‘It could affect whatever’s inside you. I can’t take the risk. If you want to know things, learn skills, then you’ll have to do it the hard way.’

‘Like you did?’ she spat. There was a certain assumption on her part that he was little more than a technological horror.

‘Yes,’ he said simply.

‘I want to be like you and El—’ Talia started. Scab’s hand shot out and grabbed her around the neck. Squeezing the air out of her, he picked her up and dangled her above the carpeted floor. Stared into her panicked eyes as she clawed at him and fought for breath. He watched her with dead eyes. She felt herself starting to lose consciousness. Then he let go and she collapsed into a sobbing, gasping heap on the floor. Scab walked into his room.

‘Well, that was beyond pathetic,’ a voice said from further down the corridor. Talia’s head jerked up at the sound of the voice to see Elodie move out of the shadows. Talia wasn’t sure how she did it but Elodie always appeared to be advancing out of shadow. ‘Looking for short cuts?’

‘Y … you …
you
use them,’ Talia managed between the sobs and gasping for breath.

‘To keep up with the competition. But neunonics and augments will only get you so far. My skills are hard earned, and you’re too soft to learn them.’

‘Would you—’

‘No,’ Elodie said, laughing.

‘Why not?’

‘I don’t even like you.’

‘Why not?’

Elodie knelt down by Talia and reached out to wipe one of the human girl’s tears away. Then she tasted it.

‘You annoy me because you’re weak. Tell me, why are you crying? You’ve been choked and beaten by lovers before, right? Are you angry because you didn’t get what you want, or because your violent bastard of an ex-lover isn’t interested in you any more?’ Talia glared at the feline woman. ‘Do you know why he fucked you?’ she asked, rhetorically. ‘Because he collects experiences in a desperate attempt to feel something.’

‘What do you do for him, then?’ Talia demanded angrily.

‘Why would I tell you that?’ she asked. Talia spat in her face. Elodie glared at her, genuinely surprised that Talia had the gall to do something like that. Her fingernails grew into claws. ‘Do you know how easy it would be for me to kill you right now?’ she asked, her tone dangerous.

‘You can’t!’ Talia cried triumphantly. ‘Your fucking psycho boyfriend wouldn’t let you!’

Elodie glared at her, stood up and headed towards Scab’s room, wiping the spit off her face. She paused by the door and looked back over her shoulder.

‘Fuck the insect. It’ll be good for your self-esteem,’ Elodie told her. Talia honestly wasn’t sure if she was being cruel or not.

Vic was coming to the conclusion that a tear-stained invitation to a human woman’s room to watch her drink too much red wine must be an intrinsic part of some long-winded human mating ritual.

Talia complained that he was too hard – which set her giggling – and angular for hugs. She covered him with something called a duvet and lay wrapped in that, cradled by his four arms, complaining bitterly about both Scab, which Vic could understand, and Elodie, who Vic rather liked.

‘It’s okay to spit and hiss at her, right?’ Talia asked.

Vic pondered this. ‘She’s a feline. I imagine she’d be better at it than you.’

A more-than-a-little-drunk Talia gave this some thought and finally nodded in agreement. ‘There’s nothing for me here,’ she said. ‘With the ship it was different. We shared something, but here everything I ever knew is gone. All my friends …’ She appeared to be hunting for the right words. ‘Everything and everyone here is really mean. Even the dolphin, and I thought they were supposed to be cute.’

‘You’ve got me,’ Vic said, hopefully. He was trying to stop his mandibles clattering together so he didn’t sound threatening in any way. Talia looked up at him but he couldn’t decipher her expression.

‘We’re not friends,’ Talia said.

Vic had researched this feeling after her last rejection of him. It was sung about in pre-Loss songs a lot. Apparently it was the result of the neurosurgery to make him more human, and it was called having your heart broken.

‘This is just Stockholm Syndrome,’ she told him. Vic had no idea what Stockholm was. ‘These immersion things – can you customise them?’

‘Yes,’ Vic managed, feeling miserable. She hadn’t noticed.

‘Can you, I don’t know, take my memories and make one like it used to be for me, only better?’