A Quantum Mythology (51 page)

Grace twisted the bike’s throttle. As the bike lurched forward, she cried out as pain lanced through her leg. With a thought she released chemicals to deaden it. Her internal systems were already repairing the damage she had received.

The bike was handling sluggishly. It was picking up speed, but not quickly enough. On the other side of the road, she saw the Sprinter driving the wrong way down the bridge’s on-ramp, cutting into the oncoming traffic and causing havoc. Grace twisted the Speed Triple’s throttle, willing more speed out of it, but the van was gaining on her. It hit the central partition and lurched across it, bearing down on her. Glancing behind, the van filled her vision.

The Range Rover hit the Sprinter doing ninety miles an hour and pushed the van across the road. For a moment it looked like the Sprinter was going to turn over, but the driver managed to regain control.

Du Bois put the four-wheel drive between the Sprinter and Grace and matched speed with her bike. She reached over and grabbed hold of the railing above the driver’s door. The Sprinter sideswiped the Range Rover, forcing it into the bike, and Grace pulled herself from the Speed Triple as it flew into the concrete wall at the side of the road. Somehow her feet found the Range Rover’s running boards.

Then the Sprinter was gone. It had turned sharply right towards the city centre. Du Bois braked hard and slewed the Range Rover right. Grace held on for dear life.

She reached back and opened the driver’s side rear passenger door. She put one hand on the top of the open door and the other on the roof of the speeding Range Rover, then pushed herself over the door and slid into the leather upholstery of the back seat. The door slammed shut behind her as it hit the wreck of a car left in the Sprinter’s wake.

‘Give me something to shoot this fucker with!’ Grace screamed. Du Bois unlocked the concealed gun compartment in the back of the Range Rover with a thought. Grace leaned over the back seat, opened the hatch, grabbed the M320 grenade-launcher and pushed it open. She loaded a forty-millimetre high-explosive armour-piercing grenade, then pushed open the thick armoured glass of the sunroof and stood up on the back seat.

‘Wait until you’ve got a clear shot, and watch for collateral damage,’ du Bois shouted.

The Range Rover was weaving left and right as du Bois raced after the Sprinter, gaining on it now as it ploughed through traffic.

The Sprinter turned right on the Paradise Circus Queensway, driving
into oncoming traffic. More cars swerved out of the van’s way. One of the oncoming vehicles clipped the van and was launched into the air. Grace dropped back into the vehicle as the airborne car clipped the roof of the pursuing Range Rover, slamming the sunroof shut. Du Bois almost lost control of the vehicle, but managed to wrestle it back. Grace stared at the sunroof for a moment, then pushed it open and stood up again.

Brakes squealed and tyres smoked as the Sprinter slowed and turned left alongside the neoclassical town hall. The street was empty of people and traffic. Grace fired the grenade-launcher just as the van reached the end of the side street. The grenade hit the van in the rear right-hand corner. The explosion lifted the back of the other vehicle off the ground and swung it around. The van came to a halt in an open pedestrian area containing a shallow, stepped amphitheatre. Du Bois pushed the accelerator to the floor, intent on ramming the Sprinter, but astonishingly the van was still running. It shot forwards, and du Bois had to brake hard and slew the Range Rover around the corner. Pedestrians scattered.

‘He’s heading for New Street,’ Grace said as she reloaded the grenade-launcher with a flechette round. Silas was going to drive the armoured van right down a busy pedestrian street. The van sped through the gap between Council House and the town hall.

‘Down! Belt!’ Du Bois downshifted and floored the accelerator again. Grace slid into the rear seat and tried to pull one of the seat belts on.

The Sprinter sped into Victoria Square, heading for the steps that led down to New Street. More pedestrians scattered. Du Bois hit the back of the van at the top of the steps, forcing it into a stepped fountain in an explosion of water and the grinding of tortured metal.

Grace hadn’t managed to get the seat belt on properly. She was flung forwards and battered her face against the front seat. Her arm was caught in the seat belt, which stopped her momentum, but she cried out as it was wrenched out of its socket.

The Range Rover was grounded, see-sawing on the fountain’s stone lip. The Sprinter tottered at the highest point of the fountain, and then toppled over, sliding down the fountain’s water-covered steps.

Du Bois, furious now, was out of the Range Rover and running after the van. As he ran, he switched out the magazine in his .45 for the magazine of nanite-tipped bullets. He swarmed up onto the Sprinter, which was now lying on its side.

Grace managed to stagger out of the Range Rover, gripping her
arm. She saw du Bois kneeling on the upturned van. He reached for the door to open it.

‘No!’ Grace screamed.

Du Bois was surprised to find the door unlocked. He pulled it open as he heard Grace. He was more surprised when he saw something that looked like a clockwork mannequin sitting in the driver’s seat, and then the claymore mine went off.

Du Bois was blown high into the air as ball bearings tore through his flesh. Blackened meat landed, wetly, on the ground close to one of the Sphinx statues that watched over the square.

Silas crawled out of the canal, his clothes shedding water as he did so.

‘Excuse me?’

Silas froze. The voice had a very soft Middle Eastern accent that Silas couldn’t quite place. He turned slowly to see a nondescript-looking man, clearly of Middle Eastern descent, wearing a well-tailored but tastefully subdued suit and a keffiyeh headscarf. At first Silas wondered if this was just a passer-by, but then he realised his wards had been tricked. The demons that surrounded him, released from his blood, hadn’t detected the man. Silas was immediately on his guard.

‘This may sound like a strange question, but have you ever eaten the brains of an archer?’

‘Who are you?’ Silas demanded.

The man stepped forwards. Silas had a moment to see some kind of wriggling, metallic tendrils extend from the man’s fingers before they rammed into his head. Silas sank to his knees, drooling.

Hamad looked down at the peace of filth whose secrets he was stealing. It was another weak link in the Circle’s chain, another bit of information, no matter how old. He knew what the man had done and sought permission to kill him, but the Brass City refused. Silas was too valuable to them. He was keeping two of the Circle’s operatives very busy.

He had not been easy to track, but the electronic realm all but belonged to the Brass City. They eventually separated the carrier signal for his strange Alpha- and Theta-wave transmissions from the background noise and triangulated his position.

Hamad took what he wanted from the sick man’s mind, and a little more. Then he retracted the tendrils and let Silas fall to the ground. He might not have been allowed to kill him, but he had not been explicitly ordered against helping others do just that. He sent out a heavily occulted email to an old enemy.

35

A Long Time After the Loss

Cascade was a third-string Consortium world very much in the later stages of its industrial exploitation. Maybe a few hundred years away from becoming a gutted, skeletal planet like New Coventry, with an excess biomass too poor to get off the planet. The Consortium might then designate it a conflict resolution world if they needed a war, or if they just wanted to burn off some of the biomass.

It was nominally a shallow-water world, but the planet’s vast hydrosystem had been so utterly polluted by run-off from numerous mining ventures and the inevitable subsurface conflicts over the mines that chemically it was problematic to describe the filthy, mostly-black, turgid liquid which covered the surface of the planet as water.

Cascade still had enough value left that the corporate authorities didn’t want heavily armed ships breaching their atmosphere or, more to the point, their orbital-defence cordon. Scab could have bridged in from planetary Red Space, but the
Basilisk II
had been badly damaged doing that on Lotus Eater. Instead they docked at one of the
entrepôt
orbital stations, a slum of a habitat called the Tricorn.

After they found another asteroid to harvest, they used the
Basilisk II
’s smart-matter hull to extensively reconfigure the yacht’s appearance. The only thing they couldn’t do was change the signature of the drive that had originally come from the Church frigate, the
St. Brendan’s Fire
. That was why they had chosen the Tricorn as their entry point: the Church was the only organisation capable of recognising individual bridge drive signatures. The Tricorn was the
entrepôt
with the least Church presence.

Like the ship, Vic, Scab and Steve the Alchemist were also disguised. Though there was only so much that could be done with a seven-foot-tall hard-tech-augmented insect. On the other hand, most insects looked the same to the other uplifted races.

They were restricted on what weaponry, armour, virals and aggressive and defensive software they could take to the planet, and all weaponised nano-swarms were illegal. They carried the legal stuff openly, mostly sidearms and other hand weapons, and armoured clothing, plus two portable assemblers programmed with specific template builds. As for the other things they’d need, they smuggled in what they thought they could get away with and left the rest.

They became anonymous travellers, shuffling through the Tricorn’s vast, grimy departure halls towards waiting drop-shuttles. As they were jostled and bumped, Vic glanced down at his human partner/captor and wondered how close Scab was to killing someone in this crowd. It didn’t help that the walls were showing footage of the latest of the clone Scab’s pirate atrocities. These were interspersed with stories about the Consortium blockade of and ongoing sanctions against Pythia for breaking its planetary quarantine. Scab was pointedly looking down, his eyes closed, chain-smoking and listening to something via a pair of ancient audio crystals. Vic was amazed at the restraint Scab was showing. He guessed his partner had finally found something important enough to encourage a modicum of impulse control.

The drop-shuttle was an ancient piece of shit with heat shielding so thin that Scab actually started sweating. His sweat, less toxic after the internal purge, still made smoking rivulets through his make-up.

The sun looked pale, distant and weak through the haze of pollution. Planetfall found them on one of Cascade’s surface stations close to the Great Rift. The surface station’s landing areas were above the foul-smelling, turgid gunk of the planet’s all-encompassing ocean, so they took elevators down below the water, their internal systems compensating for pressure changes.

They actually had to walk to the carbon reservoirs in the laser-cut caves below the ocean. They transferred debt relief with their fake ID signatures to the AI system running the reservoirs and plugged in the portable assemblers. The custom templates began growing the bikes.

With the planet’s resources dwindling, much of its population was itinerant and followed the mining work. They were cheaper to employ than automatons. With air travel restricted, mostly by wealth, and the oceans so polluted as to make water-travel difficult, the vast road network beneath the ocean was the quickest, cheapest and – more importantly to Vic, Scab and the Alchemist – the most anonymous way to travel.

The bodyglove bikes were long, low motorcycles with powerful internal gyroscopes, powered by miniature fusion reactors. Moulded to the rider or riders’ shape, the armoured body slid over to completely enclose the rider.

‘Ground transport is so primitive,’ Steve muttered. Vic and Scab nodded.

Scab climbed into his bike, lying face down as the padding encased him. He wrapped his fingers around the backup manual control bars even as his neunonics established connection with the vehicle. The armour slid over him and locked into place. Scab’s omnipresent P-sat, configured to look like a black sphere at the moment, sank into a port on top of the bike. Its AG motor could help with certain manoeuvres, and the P-sat’s lasers would be the bike’s only legal offensive weaponry.

Vic’s bike was obviously larger. It had three in-line wheels, two at the back, one at the front. Vic lay face down, information from the bike’s systems appearing in his vision as he established a neunonic connection. Steve stood over the bike, staring at it.

‘I’m pretty much going to have to lie on you,’ Steve complained. ‘Also, I think this stupid body gets motion sickness.’

‘We’re here because of you,’ Vic told the dolphin irritably. There were easier ways to do what they were trying to do, but as ever, Scab had a plan. ‘Climb on, don’t throw up on me and absolutely don’t soil yourself, do you understand?’ Vic told him. Steve nodded and climbed on top of the ’sect. The padding configured itself around them and the armour slid shut. They sent their information to Cascade traffic control, reversed out of the carbon reservoir cave and headed for the on-ramp.

They were doing two hundred miles an hour by the time they hit the road. To Vic it looked less like a road and more like a vast plain. Formerly seabed, it had been flattened and then covered with a molecularly bonded hardened concrete analogue. As far as the bike’s three-hundred-and-sixty-degree sensor feed could see, lanes of traffic stretched out in all directions. The vast plain was interspersed with huge pillars with tunnels running through them to allow the passage of traffic. The pillars held up the ceiling covering the road system. The ceiling looked black but was actually transparent – the blackness was the sea above the road. Built during the joyous optimism of the mid-Colonial era, the grand engineering project designed to encourage tourism was now little more than a white elephant – and an accident waiting to happen. Vic decided to release a gentle relaxant. The road system was managing to make him feel both agoraphobic – he grew up in the confines of hive habitats – and claustrophobic at the same time.

They filtered through the busy traffic at speed, weaving between the other vehicles. For the bigger bulk-haulers or moving dormitory blocks, they simply joined the traffic speeding under them. Traffic authority and police contractors patrolled the gap between the road and the ceiling in G-carriers and hoppers.

‘I still don’t get the plan,’ Vic said over an occulted ’face link as they wove in and out of the wheels of a huge mobile leisure complex. He could see smaller shuttle vehicles driving up the large vehicle’s ramps into its parking bays. The shuttle vehicles would probably have come from larger domicile vehicles slaved to follow the mobile leisure complex.

‘Please slow down,’ Steve said. He did not sound happy. ‘And can’t you just drive in a straight line?’

‘We’re going to find Steve a new body,’ Scab’s reply came back.

‘I get that. I even get why we’re doing it this way,’ though it feels like a long shot to me, Vic decided to not add. ‘I mean overall. All right, we’ve got the most valuable commodity in Known Space, and yes, we’re actually in credit as a result of this, but how is any of that helping? Rich as we are, we can’t settle down anywhere, and we’re still no closer to cashing in on Talia.’ Not that Vic wanted to cash in on her. ‘All we’re doing is collecting strange people and strange things for no good reason that I can see. Have we got an exit plan?’

There was no answer for a long time and Vic gradually came to the conclusion that Scab wasn’t going to reply. He was wondering if the business with Scab’s clone was stopping his human partner/captor from thinking clearly. Or what passed for thinking clearly in Scab’s world, anyway.

‘The plan hasn’t changed. We’re auctioning Talia,’ Scab eventually said across the occulted ’face link.

‘Then why are we pandering to a chemist who’s going to make us potent hallucinogens?’ Vic asked as he swerved the bike around a cradled limousine with eight bubble wheels. The limo’s cab was tinted and his scans detected an active privacy field.

‘Key isn’t a hallucinogen,’ Scab said.

Vic tried to shake his head, aping a human gesture he’d observed, but the contours of the bodyglove’s internal padding held him still. Well, that explains everything, then, the insect thought. The bike’s three wheels inflated, becoming ball wheels, as they approached the Great Rift and they began receiving advisements on their speed from the Cascade Traffic Authority. Vic engaged the bike’s magnetic locks, adhering the bike to the road, which looked as if it came to an end right in front of them. Vehicles disappeared over the edge, cabs and cargo bays swinging in their cradles to remain level, accompanied by a thundering noise that not even the filters on their augmented hearing could completely dampen.

They went over the edge into a canyon more than five miles deep. Multiple lanes ran up and down the Great Rift Road, and they saw more than a few vehicles come unstuck when their magnetic locks failed, some bouncing off other vehicles as they fell. Subjectively above the vertically travelling bikes, the ocean had become a vast, black, horribly polluted waterfall.

There was a jarring crash as a sliding vehicle, its magnetic locks having only partially failed, slid into the rear of Vic’s bodyglove. As the bike slewed around, the ball wheels compensated by changing direction through the skid. Then they were travelling horizontally down the rift wall. The cradle on the small cargo vehicle that hit them hadn’t moved when it went over the edge and its cargo tumbled down into the rift. The vehicle itself was hanging on by one wheel now. Through the bodyglove’s sensor feed, Vic could see the lizard driver’s terrified expression. Vic ’faced the vehicle and, finding its electronic defences to be rudimentary, he sent an override signal to the remaining working magnetic lock. The cargo vehicle fell off the road, to be pushed away by a safety feature that used the road’s magnetic field to repulse debris. It would cause less chaos in the long run, Vic decided. Then Steve vomited on his back.

They took an off-ramp that led them behind the transparent, vertical road where a series of terraces containing towns and buildings had been cut out of the solid rock. Here the roadways were either horizontal on the terraces or diagonal ramps connecting level to level.

They found the place Scab was looking for about four miles down, a seedy apartment warren cut out of the rift wall. They parked the bikes as close to their destination as they could get, leaving their P-sats to guard the vehicles after initiating all the legal defensive systems they’d been allowed to equip the bikes with.

The shop was on one of the balconies facing the underside of the road. The continental-plate-sized waterfall looked like a solid wall of black, and only the noise told them it was moving. Even with audio dampeners they had to shout to be heard. ’Facing was an easier way of communicating, except that Steve, along with his hygiene strike, had refused to accept neunonics until he’d been given a dolphin body. The stench from the waterfall was also appalling to the point of dangerous, and their nano-screens had sent a number of toxic warnings to their neunonics. They had to force an upgraded portable nano-screen on Steve. Even so, the chemist looked decidedly ill.

Vic was still trying to wipe the vomit off as they approached the shop. The shopfront was a mixture of solid rock and armoured shutters covered in graffiti. Some of the graffiti was holographic, some cut into the stone with lasers. The blinking holographic sign was actually written in script, rather than showing an animation of the services the business proffered.

A strobe gun mounted on a mechanical arm appeared out of the wall to cover them when they ’faced to gain entrance. Scab kept ’facing debt relief until the heavily armoured door popped inwards and then slid open. They found themselves in an airlock covered by another strobe gun. They were extensively scanned. When the security systems attempted to take blood and
DNA
samples, Scab just ’faced more debt relief until they were allowed in. He paid enough that they didn’t have to relinquish any weapons, either.

The inner airlock door popped inwards and slid open.

‘There are much cheaper ways to get to see me,’ a heavily accented voice said.

Scab stepped out of the airlock, followed by Vic and Steve. Inside, it was very humid. They were standing on a catwalk connected to a series of walkways over a number of protein vats that Vic assumed would be used for growing various soft-tech augments and replacements. Embedded in the wall were a number of clone tanks filled with a murky green and yellow fluid. Just over three-quarters of them contained shapes consistent with variants of the four uplifted races.

‘No, no, no, I don’t think so,’ the Alchemist said, looking around.

‘Shut up,’ Scab told him.

Vic glanced up. The ceiling was a distant shadow, and the premises had obviously been expanded to subsume other apartments and commercial premises within the warren complex. The skeletal remnants of other rooms were still visible. More clone tanks had been embedded into the walls high above them, and strung between old supports, spars of rock, the walls and the actual ceiling was a network of heavy-gauge, weblike cables.