A Quantum Mythology (52 page)

The cables moved as something slowly but agilely made its way towards them. Vic suppressed an instinctive feeling of revulsion. At first the shape made him think it was a distasteful hard-tech arachnid augment for a ’sect. But as it came closer, he saw that the eight-legged form was a mostly soft-tech augment coupled with a base human. The human arachnid was wearing some sort of smock and a hat. His eyes were the compound eyes of a spider but the lids had epicanthic folds. He had a tiny pointed goatee and a long wispy moustache. Each of his multi-jointed limbs ended in a further eight digits that could manipulate as fingers or thumbs, and each digit ended in some sort of tool or surgical device.

‘I don’t like going anywhere unarmed, and I don’t like explaining myself,’ Scab said.

‘Careful,’ Vic ’faced Scab. ‘He doesn’t know who you are, doesn’t know your rep, so to him you’re just another dick.’ Vic was conscious of the stealthed arachnid automaton hiding high up in the net. More conspicuous were the three strobe guns on spipods moving around in the web. Vic liked the approach. One spipod for each customer and a stealthed surprise that probably would have fooled his sensors before they had become rich enough to significantly upgrade them.

Scab looked up at Vic. Scab was still wearing a suit, hat and raincoat, but the ensemble was less unpleasantly garish than his usual efforts and much more like the suits ‘normal’ people would wear.

‘You’re Jonas,’ Scab said, turning back to the cloner and soft-tech purveyor. The human arachnid nodded. ‘We have a job for you. We need a dolphin with very specific specs and soft-tech augments. We’ll also need neunonics, again to the spec we designate, a P-sat equipped with manipulators and one or two other things. We know your ability and your stock, and everything we’re asking for is well within your capabilities. We will pay you well for your services. We also need it done very quickly and very discreetly, for which we will also pay handsomely.’

Scab ’faced over the instructions, and then both he and Vic concentrated for a moment as they received feed from the bikes. The bodygloves’ countermeasures and their P-sats were dealing with people trying to tamper with them.

‘Hmm,’ Jonas said in a manner that Vic felt was supposed to be inscrutable. He suspected the clone-technician was running some kind of personality created from a pre-Loss human racial stereotype. ‘A dolphin? They are restricted. Mainly for Church use—’

‘I’ve told you, we know what you can do, and what you’ve done before, and we’ll pay you more than enough for your services to avoid the inevitable negotiations, because, frankly, they annoy me.’

‘They’re not for “Church use”,’ Steve said in exasperation. ‘They work with the Church.’

‘This is our friend Steve,’ Vic said cheerfully. Steve glared at Vic but didn’t correct the ’sect.

Jonas was looking at Steve with interest. Vic was pretty sure the cloner had worked out that the apparent human was actually a dolphin. This meant a Church connection, and nobody liked dealing with the Church, particularly as nearly all dolphins worked with bridge drives.

‘This will be very expensive,’ Jonas mused.

‘Here’s half the debt relief now,’ Scab said.

So much for inscrutable, Vic thought when Jonas rocked back in his web after checking the sum he’d just received.

‘I will have to source the P-sat and the hard-tech augments elsewhere. I will use discreet people I trust, pay them a lot of your money and order everything as separate components and templates to assemble here, if that is all right with you?’ Scab nodded. ‘And is there anything else I can get you, Mr …’

Scab just shook his head, then reached into the breast pocket of his suit and drew out his cigarette case.

‘Look, Scab—’ Steve started. Too late he realised his mistake. Vic and Scab both turned to stare at him. Jonas froze on his web. Scab put a cigarette into his mouth and lit the inhalable poison as Jonas scuttled around in his web to face Scab. The human killer put the case back into his breast pocket, and suddenly his tumbler pistol was in his hand. The spipod-mounted strobe guns moved to cover Scab but stopped abruptly, presumably the result of an order from Jonas who would not be eager to antagonise someone with Woodbine Scab’s reputation. The stealthed arachnid automaton high above remained still.

‘I don’t care,’ Jonas said. ‘I’m very greedy, and you’re paying me enough not to care.’

Scab just nodded.

They became so tired of Steve’s whining and trying to tell Jonas how to do his job that they sedated him. His new body was being speed-grown in one of the vats, the augments had already been spliced into it and his neunonics had crawled into the meat of the dolphin body’s brain to better adapt to it as it grew.

They had no interest in preserving the human body, so Jonas had used an invasive nanite procedure to download and then imprint Steve’s mind into the new body. All of which had taken the better part of a human-standard twenty-six-hour day.

Scab had spent most of that time almost completely still, crouched on the side of a catwalk near the edge of one of the vats. He had been chain smoking, and hadn’t reholstered his tumbler pistol.

Vic had also crouched down, but only because it was a comfortable resting pose for his hard-tech-augmented body. Jonas scuttled backwards and forwards, checking on things. There was no doubt in Vic’s mind that the arachnid human – or spider monkey, as Vic had started thinking of him – was more than a little nervous of Scab’s presence. Scab had been allowed limited neunonic access to the cloner’s systems so he could monitor what was happening. A number of items, including the components of the customised P-sat, had been delivered, but they’d all been left in the airlock.

Finally Steve’s new P-sat rose into the air.

‘Get me out of this filth,’ Steve said. ‘I need to be hosed down and put in the pool.’

Scab didn’t acknowledge the P-sat communication. Vic assumed his partner/captor was starting to think their plan hadn’t worked.

‘Now you pay me and leave?’ Jonas said. Scab turned to look at him. ‘Please?’ Jonas’s voice sounded calm, but the calmness had a narcotic quality to it.

Scab stood up. ‘What did you do?’ Scab asked.

‘Nothing,’ Jonas said, but fear was starting to break through the cloner’s drug-induced calm. The spider monkey swallowed hard and added some more drugs to his very nervous system, Vic suspected.

‘Guys?’ Steve asked. ‘Seriously, how are you going to get me back to the ship on a motorbike?’

It was a good question, Vic conceded.

Scab pointed the tumbler pistol at Jonas. Jonas shrank away. The spipod-mounted strobe guns swivelled to aim at Scab, and the arachnid automaton practically plummeted through the web to crouch just above the human killer.

‘Don’t make things harder on yourself,’ Scab told Jonas.

‘You need to listen to him, spider monkey,’ Vic added. He had straightened up as well. The big ’sect was a little insulted when only one of the strobe guns swivelled to cover him as he drew his triple-barrelled shotgun pistol with his lower-right hand, and both his double-barrelled laser pistols with his upper pair.

‘I didn’t do anything,’ Jonas said, absurdly raising four of his hands.

Scab manually cocked the hammer on the tumbler pistol. It was an affectation, nothing more. The arachnid automaton tensed in its web and the strobe guns’ six barrels started spinning up to speed.

‘Oh, wait,’ Scab said. Then he ’faced the virus to Jonas’s systems. It was an expensive Pythian-made sequestration virus that had been extensively modified by Elodie. Jonas’s systems were excellent. He was an illegal cloner and soft-tech augmenter at the top of his game. He could afford excellent defences, both physical – like the airlock, the automaton, the strobe guns – and viral, nanite and electronic. The expense of the modified Pythian software virus effectively outbid Jonas’s electronic defences. In less than a heartbeat, Scab was in control of everything in the cloning facility. Vic still thought his partner/captor was being melodramatic when Scab had the strobe guns swivel to point at Jonas.

‘You can’t lie to me,’ Scab told the spider monkey. ‘There are only degrees of suffering now. You decide.’

Scab ’faced access to the external feed from the clone facility to Vic. The ’sect saw featureless automatons in anachronistic pre-Loss dress walking along the
terrace towards the shop, coming from both directions.

‘I’m sorry!’ Jonas said.

‘No. You got caught,’ Scab said and pulled the trigger. The recoil jerked his arm up as the spinning bullet drilled into Jonas’s head. The spider monkey fell, getting caught up in his own net. Scab ’faced a virus to scramble Jonas’s neunonics, so the spider monkey would have to be cloned from a backup. He sent orders to the systems that would poison the soft-tech vats, kill the cloned bodies – except Steve’s – and destroy any stored minds that were about to be downloaded into the bodies. He then modified the sequestration virus to utterly junk the facility’s systems. There had to be consequences for messing with Scab. Consequences and collateral damage.

Steve, now in his new dolphin body, was thrashing around in his tank.

‘Guys! Guys! Why does it always come down to violence with you people?’

Vic holstered both laser pistols as Scab made one of the strobe guns scamper over to the insect and leap up at him. Vic caught the heavy weapon. It would be a bit more unwieldy than his own as it didn’t have the miniaturised AG motors to offset its weight. Then Vic ’faced a courier service with the best reputation for speed, security and discretion on the planet. Finally he left instructions with the arachnid automaton to protect Steve and overrode the airlock, popping both doors.

Even over the sound of the waterfall they could make out the sound of superheated air molecules exploding so rapidly that the noise of one detonation ran into the next. There was a near-constant red glow coming from outside where the exterior strobe gun was firing constantly. The one in the airlock was firing more intermittently as Scab and Vic marched through.

Outside, the narrow terrace was filled with the burned body parts of the featureless automatons, many of them still glowing neon from their overloaded energy-dissipation grids. Scab sent one of the spipod-mounted strobe guns ahead of him. Almost immediately it was tracking targets and firing rapid bursts of thin red light. Energy-dissipation grids lit up on the remaining automatons, dressing them in neon. One overheated and exploded. Scab kicked another over the stone lip of the terrace and fired into a third, point-blank, with his tumbler pistol.

Vic walked out behind Scab. His thorax and upper limbs rotated one way, his abdomen and lower limbs another. He started firing the strobe gun, concentrating the beams between two or three of the automatons at a time, overheating their energy-dissipation grids until they blew. A split-screen view from his neunonic targeting systems told him exactly where to place the shots, and he fired all three barrels of the shotgun he was still holding in his lower hands. All three tungsten solid shots hit one of the automatons and pierced its downgraded armour before the explosive charges blew. The automaton’s torso went spinning away from its legs.

The other spipod-mounted strobe came scuttling out after Vic, spinning on its pintle, firing, covering Vic’s back as more automatons scrambled up the rock face and onto the terrace.

Scab and Vic had done their homework. Any decent automaton would give even the most augmented bounty killer a run for their money unless they were in full military-spec combat gear. Mr Hat owned a small army of them, but other than his automaton deification fetish, Mr Hat prided himself on doing things by the book. Scab and Vic had been forced to downgrade their capabilities when they came planetside, and similar laws existed for automatons. Even so, Vic hadn’t expected Mr Hat to risk so many of them as, expense aside, the automatons apparently worshipped the diminutive lizard.

Vic reloaded the shotgun pistol and flicked it closed. He spun his thorax around and fired the shotgun at the chest and head that was chasing after him using its arms as legs.

An automaton leaped over the lip of the terrace and landed on Scab, ramming him into the rock wall. Scab spat his cigarette into its eyeless face. The automaton grabbed the wrist of the hand holding the tumbler pistol and forced it down. Scab’s metalforma knife appeared in his left hand and he rammed it up through the automaton’s chin. Strands of the smart-metal blade, fed by the small assembler in the hilt, grew through the automaton’s head as it staggered back. His wrist now free, Scab shot his attacker twice in the chest and kicked it away from him. He fired the last two rounds in the tumbler pistol’s cylindrical magazine, then raised his left hand and fired the mini-disc launcher strapped to his forearm. The electromagnetically guided monomolecular discs flew out, cutting into the heads of the automatons and spinning around inside them. It wasn’t enough to stop them, but it would give them pause. He flicked open the tumbler pistol’s cylindrical magazine, slid in new rounds from a speed loader and snapped it shut with a flick of his wrist. He tore his metalforma knife from the head of the automaton as it fell to the ground and kept walking. The strobe guns were firing nearly constantly now. The automatons charging them looked like bright neon ghosts.

The bikes were surrounded by a number of people, some of them dead from laser fire, others just stunned, concussed or diseased. One of them, a male feline, his fur shaved and dyed in what Vic assumed were gang colours, was moaning and trying to stand. Scab shot him as he walked by, then ordered one of the slaved strobe guns to deliver the coup de grâce to the other still-living would-be bike thieves. They were likely too poor to have clone insurance, Vic thought.

All the strobe guns were running low on juice now. The automatons had ceased their attack. Vic wasn’t sure if they had destroyed them all, or if Mr Hat had pulled them back because too many of his worshippers were dying. One of the strobe guns stood guard and Vic dropped the one he’d been using. It extended its spipod and scampered across the ground, then leaped up onto the bike. The remaining strobe gun attached itself to Scab’s bike. With a ’faced instruction, the bikes allowed the strobe guns to connect to the universal hardpoint on their roofs, next to the P-sats. The bikes’ miniature fusion reactors started recharging the rotary laser weapons.