A Quantum Mythology (56 page)

The space within was cavernous. In scale it reminded him of the cargo bay of an amphibious assault dock. The interior walls were coated with what looked like stainless steel. The ceiling was a curving dome that matched the exterior shape of the seed-pod and steel-covered ribs ran across it. All that seamless plating made him think of surgical instruments, but it couldn’t disguise the organic feel of the huge chamber. Lodup was starting to feel like Jonah.

One end of the cavern tapered off where the ceiling curved down to meet the floor. The other end was a steel-covered wall studded with various bumps and protuberances. Lodup guessed that the steel covering the oddities was supposed to make them look like machinery, but once again their organic nature was apparent. Another iris door in the wall opened like an eye blinking and Lodup started walking towards it. His footfalls barely made a noise due to some odd sound-dampening quality of the chamber.

He walked through narrow corridors that half-reminded him of being in a submarine, and which also resembled some kind of steel-covered gullet. He found the man sitting on a work surface in a small cubbyhole. Inside the cubbyhole the metal had a definite biological look to it. It was moving, as if it was covering some kind of pulsing organ.

The man wasn’t quite what Lodup had expected. He was wearing a thermal dive sheath, but it was split open to the waist, revealing a hairy chest and paunchy stomach. The paunch alone made him unlike anyone else working in Kanamwayso. He was a small man with dark, weather-beaten skin which made Lodup think he came from the Mediterranean region. He had shoulder-length straight black hair, streaked through with white, and a neatly trimmed goatee. He looked up as Lodup filled the doorway.

What surprised Lodup the most was that he recognised the man. He was the priest who laid the tall, beautiful boy down in the pool of green water, the pool that had contained some kind of snake-like creatures.

‘I’ve seen you before,’ Lodup said.

‘That is not possible,’ the man replied.

Lodup decided not to argue just yet. After all, in the normal surface world, telling people you recognized them from your dreams tended to sound strange.

‘It’s a spaceship,’ Lodup said.

The man nodded. ‘Very good,’ he said.

Lodup couldn’t quite place the accent but again, it struck him as Mediterranean. He stepped aside as the man walked past and headed further forward in the seed-pod.

‘It’s actually a biotechnological, extremophile, panspermic seed-pod that we’ve spent centuries reverse engineering to allow humans to at least steer it, if not pilot,’ the man told him.

‘You … what? Cut them free, inject them full of nanites which hollow them out and then build the required interface technology?’ Lodup asked.

The man glanced behind him. ‘There’s a bit more to it than that, but essentially yes. We have to convert extensively so the human mind can deal with living inside another organism like a tapeworm.’

‘And if they wake up?’ Lodup asked. ‘I don’t think they’re sane.’

The man led him into another steel-covered room. At first Lodup thought it looked like a cockpit with windscreens, but he realised they were in fact monitor screens. There were also controls and rudimentary joysticks like those found in modern aircraft. The two seats looked like a cross between the bucket seats you would find in military aircraft, and the couches in the Command-and-Control centre back in the habitat.

‘It would be piloted by direct neural link with the pilots we have been breeding. The manual controls are mostly in case something goes wrong, but I suspect they would only help psychologically in that eventuality. And to answer your question, we virally lobotomise them first. We effectively kill their minds. We murder the city’s children, but I wonder if that is our greatest crime.’

‘I saw you in my dream. When I blacked out,’ Lodup said.

The man turned to stare at him. Lodup wasn’t sure what he saw there – hope, fear, desperation?

‘Where?’ the man demanded. ‘Here?’ Lodup nodded. There were tears in the man’s eyes. ‘What was I … I can’t remember … he took it from me—’

‘I think you were some kind of priest. You were … I don’t know … baptising a boy in a pool with snakes in it.’

The man staggered back until he bumped into one of the couches and leaned heavily on it.

‘You can’t remember any of it?’ Lodup asked.

The man shook his head as tears rolled down his cheeks. ‘What else?’ he asked, in a voice choked with emotion.

Lodup was shaking his head as well. ‘That’s all I saw. What do you want from me?’

‘He’s always watching. I couldn’t play my hand. I had to wait until the end.’

Lodup moved back and leaned against the organic steel. It felt warm. Wrong, somehow. ‘Who are you?’ he asked.

‘My name is Germelqart,’ the man told him, ‘and I was born a very long time ago.’

‘I got that,’ Lodup said, gently. ‘Who’s always watching?’

Germelqart tried to answer, his mouth opening and closing, but it was as if something was preventing him from talking. More tears filled his eyes. Lodup pushed himself off the wall and moved towards the man, putting a hand on his shoulder.

‘Are you all right?’ he asked.

Germelqart looked up at the taller man. ‘No. I was a spy, and now I am a traitor. I have lived among these people for millennia, just waiting to betray them. What kind of man does that, Lodup? Tell me that.’

Lodup stared at Germelqart. ‘What have you done? What is this thing for? Exploration?’ At the back of his mind, Lodup had convinced himself that he was involved in humanity’s next big adventure.

‘These are for an evacuation.’

‘For whom?’ Lodup asked.

‘Humanity, or those lucky – or unlucky – enough to be going.’

Lodup went cold. ‘Why would they need to evacuate?’

‘Because this city is waking up. The suicides, the people going insane – those are the defensive spasms of waking minds. All are signs.’

Lodup stared at the other man. ‘And you’ve betrayed this plan?’ Lodup asked carefully. Germelqart swallowed hard. Lodup wasn’t sure what he’d have expected of a man millennia old, but he still looked very human. Guilt was written all over his face.

‘You have to understand something—’ Germelqart started.

‘Do I?’ Lodup asked. ‘Siska, this is Lodup, do you read me, over?’ he said, sending the words as a packet transmission in a burst of low-frequency infrasound. There was no reply. He turned and headed towards the cockpit’s doorway.

‘Do you think I would be speaking to you now if there was the slightest chance that you could affect what I’ve done?’ Germelqart asked. Lodup turned back. ‘I can give you answers, if that is what you want.’

‘And if I leave?’

Germelqart shrugged. ‘I don’t know,’ he said.

‘What do I have to understand?’

Germelqart turned one of the chairs around and sat in it. The chair configured itself until he was comfortable. He gestured towards the other. Lodup walked over and sat. The way it moved underneath him was disconcerting.

‘The Circle was formed more than two thousand years ago to fight those who abused the alien technology. As you can imagine, at that time we thought it was magic. Gifts from the gods. We thought those who had been augmented by the technology were the children of gods – demigods, if you will,’ Germelqart said. Lodup nodded, wondering at how much his world had changed in just a few short weeks, that he could accept such things so easily. ‘As far as we can tell, when the disaster befell the city, some sort of self-destruct command was given.’

‘Which petrified them,’ Lodup said.

Germelqart nodded. ‘Yes, but it also did something else. Each of these seeds has an organ capable of harvesting a great deal of energy. You understand that any space travel is limited by the speed of light?’

‘So I’ve heard.’

‘Well, this organ allows them entry into what is effectively another universe, a coterminous universe with different physical properties. Hyperspace. The self-destruct mechanism wiped out the Seeders’ ability to use that organ, but not the organ’s capabilities.’

‘So they couldn’t spread whatever drove them mad?’ Lodup asked.

‘Precisely. But one of them escaped before it could be affected by either the self-destruct mechanism or the corruption itself. We found it … It was threatened …’ Germelqart’s face was screwed up in concentration, as if he was desperately trying to remember something, ‘By … something. It hid the secret of how to access this other place inside a human. Very quickly the Circle’s priority became protecting the bloodline that stemmed from that person.’

‘As well as controlling the technology?’ Lodup asked, trying not to make it sound like an accusation.

‘Once, there were worse things than the Circle.’

‘Once?’

‘Well, such things probably still exist, but the Circle has changed. We are the most powerful organisation in the world. We have existed for over two millennia. Corruption was all but inevitable. We were the real science. Human efforts, whilst impressive, were ultimately irrelevant, so we recruited as many of the great minds as we could. But others always stumbled across the tech, and they needed to be prevented from causing great harm. That meant recruiting powerful people, and we had always relied on violence when we needed to. We were born in a violent time.’

‘What happened?’ Lodup asked, leaning towards Germelqart despite himself.

‘The powerful took over. Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against the wealthy, particularly those who have worked for their money, but to get into our club these days, you have to be the worst, most ruthless kind of powerbroker. Instead of the greatest of Earth’s minds going forth into the universe, it will be greedy rats leaving a sinking ship.’

Lodup leaned back again and took a deep breath. ‘Okay, so it may not be exactly what you wanted, but it pretty much sounds like business as usual for humanity, and assuming the city waking up will be as bad as you think it’s going to be, then at least humanity will survive.’

‘It will be as bad as I think it is going to be—’ Germelqart started.

‘Things aren’t the same as they were in prehistoric times. I accept that this city is full of all kinds of technology, but there’s only so much good that will do you when a dozen or so nuclear-tipped torpedoes hit it.’

‘You saw the thing in the black lake?’ Germelqart asked. Lodup went cold. He nodded. ‘We are not talking about unpleasant politicians or tyrants fleeing the planet. They are taking every lesson they have ever learned in social engineering about making people not care, about breaking up community and societal bonds, about control through greed, fear and envy, and they are going to spread it like a disease through the stars.’

‘That sounds a little paranoid,’ Lodup said.

Germelqart laughed bitterly. ‘Does it? That’s what I thought, until they wiped the minds of some of the greatest scientists, thinkers and artists in human history for storage space. You saw the servers?’

‘The stone things that came on the sub?’

Germelqart nodded. ‘They contain souls. The minds of those they are going to take with them. All of them conditioned. Did you see the freezers?’ Germelqart asked. Lodup nodded. ‘Clone embryos for the minds to be downloaded into when they’re rapidly brought to maturation. A slave race for some of the biggest bastards in recent history.’

‘Okay,’ Lodup said, still not sure if he believed any of this. He was sure he didn’t
want
to believe it. ‘So what did you do?’

‘Do you know what an
ifrit
is?’ Germelqart asked. The word sounded familiar to Lodup but he shook his head. ‘It’s a type of
jinn
, a fire spirit. I’ve released invisible electronic
ifrit
into their storage systems to burn out their minds. I’ve introduced viruses carried by intelligent nano-swarms to infect all their slave foetuses. I’ve given the security details and locations of every Circle facility – in the world and in orbit – to the Brass City, and I’ve poisoned the well.’

Lodup was staring at Germelqart. He wasn’t sure he understood everything the man had just said, but it hadn’t sounded good.

‘The well?’ Lodup managed, his mouth and throat suddenly very dry.

‘Every bloodline crèche has been hit with targeted virals. The Circle no longer has the ability to meld with the ships, to have them enter the hyperspace.’

Lodup swallowed hard. There were tears in his eyes now. ‘It sounds … it sounds like you’ve damned us.’

Germelqart leaned forwards. Strong fingers gripped Lodup’s arm and Lodup looked down. Germelqart had rough hands, the hands of a sailor. He looked back up.

‘Humanity would not have survived, not on those terms. We would not have been human any more.’

Lodup opened his mouth to answer. There was a sound like rapid coughing, and the keys of an old-fashioned typewriter being hit. Germelqart’s face crumpled in on itself, suddenly becoming a red and unrecognisable mess. Something hot and wet spattered Lodup. Despite the large-calibre entrance wounds that had replaced Germelqart’s face, the small man was still sitting upright, his entire form shaking. Lodup stared, horrified, as the man’s internal nanites tried to rebuild his face, but just as quickly as the flesh healed, whatever was in the bullets’ payloads ate it away again. Germelqart’s ancient, augmented body lost the fight. He slumped back in the chair, then slid onto the organic-looking steel floor.

Yaroslav advanced into the cockpit, still wearing his thermal sheath – though his looked armoured – the smoking, suppressed Vector SMG still aimed at Germelqart. He stood over the small man. Put another two rounds into his chest and one more into his head.

‘We can interrogate the corpse,’ Yaroslav muttered.

‘You’re right,’ Siska said from the doorway. Lodup looked up at her. ‘He has damned us.’

38

A Long Time After the Loss

‘No,’ Benedict/Scab said quietly. ‘I don’t remember you.’

He was standing in the
Templar
’s Command and Control centre. He had changed little in C&C. He knew some of the crew had taken to decorating their cabins with grisly trophies, but that had never been his style. If anything, he had made C&C more anonymous, although the pools for the enslaved dolphins were starting to look rather polluted. He had to stop the crew from urinating and defecating in them. The nano-screens were having problems filtering out the smell.

‘Myself and my two brothers were running a black cloning facility in the Sea of Ghosts—’

‘I don’t care, I really don’t care. The only reason you’re not being eaten by a nano-phage swarm is because there’s still some ridiculous throwback ideal that I have to handle this one-on-one.’

The other man was in the body of a human Church militiaman. He was big, augmented, stripped to the waist. The sport fans among the crew had worked out the rules. No firearms or ranged weapons of any sort; no virals, swarms or toxins; no smart-matter blades or P-sats. Just dumb-blades and kinetic energy. The lizard with the home-assembled berserker augment had given him the most trouble.

‘See, the thing is,’ his challenger said, raising his voice, playing to the audience, ‘you’re not him. You’re not the Scab that took down and killed my brothers—’

‘And you, obviously,’ Benedict/Scab pointed out.

‘You’re just a cheap copy wearing Church meat!’

‘So are you,’ Benedict/Scab said. ‘But you’re right – I’m not him, not any more, if I ever was. I’m something new.’ He had found Mish Tullar’s shrine to Woodbine Scab. He wondered absently if his acolyte would approve of what he had become. He suspected not. Mish had struck him as a purist. On the other hand, he was also pretty sure he got a lot more pleasure from life than Woodbine did. ‘Wait a minute,’ he said. ‘You don’t go to a Psycho Bank for running a black clone op. What else did you do?’

‘We made copies of the uploads—’ his challenger started.

‘And dropped them into snuff immersions?’ Benedict/Scab said, incredulous. ‘You’re a fantasist? That’s basically a victimless crime. How do you expect to run this crew, let alone deal with me, if you’ve never actually killed anyone?’

‘No – wait,’ the man said, rattled. ‘I have … the things we did to—’

‘All very masturbatory, I’m sure. I’m guessing your brothers did the heavy lifting, intellectually speaking?’

The challenger looked confused. ‘What?’ he asked.

Benedict/Scab decided that he needed to get this over and done with quickly.

There was a gunshot. The man’s eyes went large. Then came the sound of drilling. He started to scream as smoke rose from the back of his skull. There was a cracking noise. The slow bullet penetrated the skull and exploded, splattering the man’s surprised face all over Benedict/Scab. He turned to his first mate, St. John, a prolific conceptual spree killer who had been taken down by Crabber’s bounty crew, so had no axe to grind with Benedict/Scab.

‘Really?’ Benedict/Scab enquired. St. John was in the body of one of the
Templar
’s C&C crew, which had received significant soft-tech and combat augments since he’d taken it over. A number of the possessing personalities from the Psycho Banks had been med- or biotechs. The
Templar
was also big enough to have assemblers with military and other restricted technology. They had been able to manufacture virals and nano-swarms to use on their raids, as well as personal hard- and soft-tech augments.

‘He was wasting everyone’s time.’ St. John’s human body looked very nondescript – average build, average features, average haircut.

‘But now there’s not a lot of his brain left, and we don’t have the facilities to regrow it. We’ve wasted a body someone else could have inhabited.’

St. John’s leadership challenge had been subtle. Benedict/Scab could tell by his first mate’s body language that he knew he’d been discovered.

‘I was going to kill him with a fork,’ Benedict/Scab said, holding one up. ‘Nobody gets killed by a fork these days.’

When St. John started to raise the tumbler pistol, Benedict/Scab was already moving. He grabbed the wrist of the hand holding the gun, then neunonically hacked the slow bullets. He rammed the fork into St. John’s eye. His first mate screamed as vitreous humour and blood squirted out of the socket. Benedict/Scab locked up the hand with the pistol in it and then jerked it hard. The compound fracture of the radius and the ulna was violent enough to break through the hardening skin. Benedict/Scab took the tumbler pistol out of St. John’s limp hand, then reached between the first mate’s legs and shot him in the anus. Benedict/Scab stepped back. The reprogrammed slow bullet drilled up into St. John’s stomach cavity and then exploded. The force of the explosion severed the spine and sent legs and torso flying in different directions. The legs slipped off the catwalk and into the filthy dolphin tanks. The torso landed, wetly, on the catwalk. St. John was still alive, blood bubbling out of his mouth.

‘You can’t fix that, either,’ Benedict told the torso before he turned to his Lizard second mate. He could never pronounce the lizard’s tribal name, so he just called him Harold. Originally downloaded into a human, Harold had found one of the few Church militia lizards aboard, exorcised the original possessing personality and then re-downloaded himself. Benedict/Scab was so impressed he’d promoted him. The lizard was formerly a tribal warrior who had never quite understood that you weren’t supposed to hunt the talking sentient mammals nowadays. His clothes were made out of dyed human skin and tribal scarring covered his visible scales. ‘You’re first mate now,’ Benedict/Scab told Harold. The lizard just nodded. ‘Get rid of that.’ He kicked at St. John’s still living torso. ‘The next job, we take the security detail alive for possession, and I want some quality control on the souls we’re downloading. No more fantasists.’

Benedict/Scab returned to his chair. The padding moulded around him and the chair’s AG motor lifted him up into the air. He was looking for the next target. Too many of them were paying ridiculous bribes to the
Templar
rather than fighting. He had to make an example of the next job. He opened the feed from the external sensors with a thought, then turned the smart-matter walls of C&C into screens and played the view from outside. They were bathed in red light.

The
Templar
came out of the red wound into Real Space and the tear closed behind them. The light cruiser was a long, heavily armoured behemoth of a ship. The external Seeder Church religious iconography on the ship’s partially smart-matter hull had been reconfigured by the diseased minds of Scab’s crew. The ship was now truly disturbing to behold. A demon ship.

The
Templar
emerged into light, close to a galactic core where space was filled with tightly packed stars clustered around a vast circle of blackness.

They had timed it perfectly. The luxurious cruise ship, run for high-echelon execs and visiting aristocracy, was approaching the bridge point. The cruise ship’s smart-matter hull was already turning opaque as its carbon reservoirs pumped matter to the ship’s hull, adding a layer of thick armour. Weapon batteries were growing through the hull – cruise ship or not, its passengers demanded a degree of security, which the cruise line had the resources to provide. That was fine. After all, Benedict/Scab wanted to make an example.

‘Destroy their weapons, engines and the drive, then close with them and prepare to board,’ Benedict/Scab said as he stood up. Part of the tediousness of commanding such a group of people was that he was expected to lead from the front. ‘Remember what I said – I want combat-augmented flesh for possession, so take down the ship’s private security details with as little mess as possible.’ He was going to try and control the crew a little. Letting them indulge their own appetites was a thing to behold, but this time he wanted to send a message, he wanted an aesthetic for this job. He wondered how much of the cruise ship he could wallpaper with skin.

Steve the Alchemist had partitioned the pool. About a quarter of it was a plant-choked environment for the serpentine dream dragons. They spent most of their time submerged, coming up only occasionally for air, making ripples, their electrical display sparking across the surface of the water.

The Alchemist had been hard at work extracting and refining their gland secretions with the help of his custom P-sat, which was equipped with waldos ending in very delicate manipulators. At the moment, however, the dolphin had his head out of the water and was watching various media streams on the pool room’s smart matter walls.

Vic and Elodie were both sitting on sunloungers on the edge of the pool watching the footage of the attack on the
Boredom
, a cruise ship operating out of one of the Consortium core worlds.

‘He’s hit too close to home,’ Vic muttered. ‘They’ve got to do something now.’

Because Scab had dropped out of view on the bounty killing scene and his recent exploits weren’t common knowledge, there was speculation that Benedict and Scab were one and the same person. Vic knew that under normal circumstances Scab would track down some of the people doing the speculating and make examples of them.

‘It’s just one desperate bid for attention after another,’ Elodie said.

‘Daddy issues, anyone?’ Vic said, his mandibles clattering together in his approximation of laughter.

‘Oh, hi, Scab,’ Steve said through his P-sat.

Vic looked around, assuming it was the dolphin’s idea of a joke as he’d picked up nothing from his antennae, but Scab was standing in the entrance to the pool room in his shirtsleeves, suit jacket folded over his arms, staring at the smart-matter screens, shaking.

Vic released a cloud of pheromones so strongly redolent of the terror he felt at seeing Scab this angry that Elodie glanced over at him, eyebrows raised. Steve sank into his pool. The P-sat sank into the water with him.

‘Why?’ Scab managed. Vic didn’t have the courage to speak at the moment. ‘Elite … ? Fleet? The Church?’

It was a good question. Benedict/Scab had access to an excellent warship and a crew of killers, but his hit-and-run tactics aside, the
Templar
was no match for a concerted effort from a Consortium, Monarchist or Church naval squadron, and one Elite could have dealt with the problem some time ago. Instead, the
Templar
mainly had to handle second-rate naval contractors or competent ships of roughly the same size and class. There had been talk of a group of bounty killers going after the
Templar
, but Vic couldn’t see them getting that many different hunters to work together well enough to take it down.

‘They’re trying to draw you out,’ Elodie said.

Vic was pretty sure Scab was eventually going to lose it and wondered if that would provide him with release. He concentrated and ’faced himself into Talia’s immersion. He figured if he was going to die, he might as well do it there.

‘We’re going back to the monastery,’ Scab said through gritted teeth.

‘Why?’ Elodie asked. There was no answer. When she turned back he had gone.

It was a strange place, too small for him even in his six-limbed, compound-eyed human form. It was filled with one-function devices that had to be operated manually. Everything looked either brown or grey, the colour washed out. It was covered with a patina of ash and it smelled worse than Scab after he’d been chain-smoking.

Vic had given Talia control of an immersion environment, but without neunonics she had to program it the hard way via the voice interface.

She was sobbing again, curled up in the hallway of the strange little domicile. In the lounge, a badly rendered facsimile of a human male was sitting in a seat, smoking a cigarette.

Vic stared down at Talia with concern. She looked up at him through her tear-stained eyes.

‘I can’t get the smell of stale cigarettes right,’ she told him.

‘Please let me take you somewhere nice?’ Vic begged.

That just made her sob twice as hard. ‘I … I … I … can’t remember what my mum’s face looks like,’ she finally managed to say.

Vic knelt down next to her. ‘Let me show you some immersions of nice places, please. This just upsets you.’

‘Ask Scab if I can come out. I’ll be good. I promise I won’t hurt myself. I’ll do whatever he wants,’ she begged.

‘This really isn’t a good time to be around Scab,’ Vic told her. ‘Even less so than normal.’

Talia stood and ran up the stairs into a room, slamming the door behind her.

It was the third time that some incarnation of Scab had killed her. She had awoken in one of the Cathedral’s clone vats, and it had taken Churchman some time to calm her down. She wanted to deal with Benedict/Scab and then go straight back to hunting his father. She was furious. Churchman had talked her into doing something else.

This is better
, she thought.

She was desperate to know how Church security, particularly electronic security, had been so thoroughly breached. She wondered initially if it had been a beyond-black op run by the Church itself to draw Scab out. If that was the case then she was unaware of it, which was unlikely, unless Churchman was somehow unaware of it as well.

Without any current insight and the trail going dead after Cascade, the Monk had instead turned to chasing down the heretical sect lead, though she knew it could be a red herring.

The cults tended to revolve around the use of S-tech and breaking the monopoly on bridge technology. Frequently they involved slavish devotion to the Seeders or other entities. Most of the time it was a load of rubbish, but some cults got disturbingly close to the truth.

The Church militant, aided by a substantial mercenary army, had wiped the majority of the serious and sizeable heretical cults out over a thousand years ago. Those that still existed tended to be small street sects or lone insane individuals. The Church had interviewed a number of the fringe lunatics in the past, seeking insight, and their ramblings were usually a mix of nonsense and, sometimes, surprising accuracy.