The Beauty of Destruction (45 page)

‘Doesn’t help my father, does it?’

Alexia let go of her legs and leant against the headboard.

‘Blame him, if you want, he has broad shoulders, but if you’re not with us then you’ll need to think of something else to do.’ Alexia just watched her for a while. ‘Everybody believes they think for themselves, don’t they?’

Beth looked down, not saying anything. Alexia got off the bed.

‘Get some rest, actual rest. I’m going to see if the other Patty Hearst wannabe will give me a fag.’

Beth stepped out of the doorway as Alexia passed. ‘Do you mind me asking something?’

Alexia stopped.

‘This is going to be one of those awkward conversations about the nature of my genitalia, isn’t it?’ Alexia turned and looked up at Beth. ‘Darling, I can be whatever you want.’

Beth felt herself start to colour.

‘No wait, I’m not …’

‘Not what, darling?’

‘I wasn’t …’ Beth tried again. Alexia was just smiling at her. ‘Sorry.’

‘It’s my fault you know, that he’s the way he is, that he does what he does. God, I was so innocent, suicidally naive like you wouldn’t believe. I couldn’t see the harm in it. Dressing like a girl, I looked so pretty, wanting to catch the eye of all the young men.’

‘Du Bois told me that he had been alive for centuries,’ Beth said. Alexia nodded.

‘Oh yes, horrible men capable of much worse than anything I could dream of would have burned me; somehow I couldn’t understand that. As for Malcolm, I was an abomination, against everything he stood for, but he never stopped protecting me. He was a proper knight, you see. We were both so naive. Do you know what he was doing when he first found the tech?’ she asked. Beth shook her head. ‘He was looking for the Holy Grail, I shit you not.’

Beth burst out laughing. Alexia smiled.

‘Like in Monty Python?’ Beth asked. Alexia nodded again.

‘He wanted to cure me,’ Alexia told her. Beth stopped laughing. ‘But here’s the thing. He didn’t want me to turn into the younger brother he had always wanted, so I could become a soldier, or maybe a priest. Though I rather fancied the life of a wandering troubadour – as I said, I was hopelessly romantic. I didn’t have a practical bone in my body, unless a nice young man put it there. He was going to turn me into a woman. He said it was because he wanted me to be happy, and I believe that, but on some level I think he knew that I was born in the wrong body.’ Beth wasn’t quite sure what to say. Suddenly the conversation seemed very serious. ‘I think my brother has been horribly led astray, and I’m sorry about your father, but cut Malcolm some slack or just fuck off.’ Alexia turned and walked down the stairs. ‘Now I need to tell that to the other one, though I suspect she’ll be less receptive.’

Beth was lying on the double bed in the master bedroom. Eileen hadn’t wanted to sleep there because of the bloodstains. It was for the best, leave the unaugmented civilians in the back of the house, away from the road.

When did I
start thinking of them as civilians?
she wondered. She was drifting off to sleep when she heard movement. She opened her eyes to see Grace standing in the doorway, watching her. Beth sat up. It was the first time she had seen the punk girl look unsure of herself.

‘Yeah?’ Beth asked. It sounded harsher than she’d meant it to, but it wasn’t that many hours ago that Grace had been cutting her up with her twin fighting knives.

Grace opened her mouth to speak, and then seemed to think the better of it. ‘Forget it,’ she muttered, and turned and walked away. Beth got up and followed her. The doors to the back rooms were open. She could see the ‘civilians’ asleep in the beds, or on the floor on inflatable mattresses and camp beds. Eileen and Dora, whether they had intended to or not, had provided a safe oasis for the sane amid all the madness – even for them, at least for now. They hadn’t needed to do that.

Alexia was now, presumably, on guard. If du Bois had come back she hadn’t heard him and he wasn’t upstairs.

‘Hey,’ Beth whispered. ‘What’s up?’ Grace was making her way down the stairs. She stopped and looked up at Beth. She seemed to be struggling with whether or not she should say anything.

‘Trust issues,’ she finally said.

‘Okay,’ Beth said cautiously. It made sense, Grace had been made to think that she had been betrayed in the worst way possible by the person she was closest to, only to find out that she had in fact been betrayed and lied to by her employer. ‘You don’t know me.’

‘I don’t get a bad vibe from you.’

Beth knew it had to run a lot deeper than that but she was gratified. ‘What do you need?’ she asked.

‘I don’t like sleep,’ Grace said. Beth nodded. ‘I’m not trying to hit on you or anything …’

‘I’m not a lesbian,’ Beth muttered. The only thing she minded about being mistaken for a lesbian was having to constantly explain she wasn’t.

‘Yeah, I know …’

‘You want to stay in my room?’ Beth asked, though it wasn’t really her room.

Grace looked less than pleased. Beth didn’t think the punk liked having to ask anyone for anything. ‘Yeah,’ she said finally. ‘I figured …’

‘That because he killed my dad I won’t have any problem blowing his fucking head off if he tries anything?’

Grace considered her words. ‘It didn’t sound that calculating in my head, but pretty much.’

‘You still think he did it?’

‘I think there’s a difference between what the head knows and the heart feels,’ she said. The way her cockney accent mashed the word heart, it could have been hate.

‘Course you can; in future, assuming there is one, you don’t need to ask.’ She would have no problem shooting du Bois.

Beth was awoken by the sound of the engines. The bedroom was softly half-lit by the still-working streetlights shining through the cracks in the thick curtains. Grace was already up, standing at the edge of the window, peering out onto the narrow residential road. She had the Noveske Rifleworks N6 carbine held in one hand, the suppressor still attached to the barrel. Beth didn’t get out of bed. She did, however, grab her Colt from the bedside table. It still had the suppressor attached as well. She heard a child whimper from the back bedroom, an adult gently shush them.

‘What have we got?’ Beth asked. It was barely even a whisper.

‘Low-riding muscle car with an MG, which has to be the world’s least practical technical. Two motorcycle outriders. Four, no, five guns including the driver and MG gunner.’

‘They coming in here?’ Beth asked. She knew that Alexia was outside. She imagined du Bois’s sibling would be covering the patrol from the castle as well.

‘Just looking around at the moment. If they come in here we try and do them nice and quiet,’ the punk girl said. It was kind of chilling. She looked younger than Beth. The problem was that Alexia didn’t have any suppressed weapons. ‘You take any inside. I deal with those outside.’

‘Understood,’ Beth said. After all, Grace had the experience, and as Alexia had said, it was nice when people made the decisions for you. They waited.

‘Alexia give you her “be nice to my big brother” speech?’ Grace asked quietly after a while.

‘Yeah, she called you the other Patty Hearst,’ Beth said, smiling.

‘Me? I was never heir to a bucket of piss.’

‘You mind me asking how old you are?’ she asked.

‘Maybe if I was a lady,’ Grace said, though there was little humour in her smile. ‘Not exactly sure, maybe a hundred-and-forty-five years old.’

‘You look good—’

‘Don’t say it,’ Grace told her. Beth went quiet. She couldn’t think of a way to ask what she wanted to ask. Grace was still looking out of the window. Beth could hear rough voices shouting to each other in a mixture of Spanish and English. ‘What?’

‘Du Bois … I mean other than the implanted memory …’

‘Let me make something very clear,’ Grace said, her voice hard, though she didn’t look away from the crack between the window and the edge of the curtain. ‘I’m only ninety-five per cent sure it wasn’t him. It’s difficult to discount what feels like an experience. I find out it was him and your
compadre
is fucking dead.’

‘He’s not my friend. If he did it, I won’t get in your way, I’ll even help. I just don’t know him.’

‘You don’t know what you’re doing, do you?’ Grace asked after a moment.

‘I don’t think you can understand just how far away all this crazy stuff is from my life.’

Grace thought for a moment. ‘He’s way too uptight. I mean, take the most uptight Catholic you’ve ever met and multiply them to the
n
th degree. The problem is, because of this, he seems to think there’s some reward for hard work, loyalty, and trying to be a good person, but he was a good friend. He’d do anything for you.’ Grace sniffed. ‘Fucking bastards! What they did to my head …’ She went quiet again.

‘So he was a good guy?’

Now Grace turned to look at her. Shaking her head.

‘How fucking naive are you? Who do you think we are? We’re mass murderers. Assassins. No, he was not a “good guy”. He was a boot boy for the ultimate fascist conspiracy, but hey, Hitler liked animals.’

‘You worked for them as well,’ Beth said. It was almost a defensive reflex.

‘Well, we all make mistakes, though his mistake happened over a period of eight hundred years.’

Engines were gunned. There was more shouting. Then Beth heard them drive away. A few moments later someone came in through the side door.

‘It’s Malc … du Bois,’ Grace told her. Beth headed downstairs. Grace followed.

Du Bois was in the kitchen. Through the open door Beth could see him putting two large sports bags on the kitchen counter. When he heard them on the stairs he grabbed his Purdey and joined them in the hall. Du Bois opened the side door and hissed his sister’s name. Moments later she joined them.

‘Well?’ Grace asked.

‘It looks like La Calavera’s people are getting ready to leave. If they were military, I’d say they were planning a convoy.’

‘So?’ Grace demanded. ‘Do we know that’s anything to do with us?’

‘I saw one of the
DAYP
. The demon-headed one with the stupid name.’

‘Inflictor Doorstep?’ Beth asked. He nodded.

‘King Jeremy? La Calavera?’ Grace asked.

‘I didn’t see them.’

‘Plan?’ Alexia asked.

‘Hit them on the road,’ Grace said. Du Bois nodded.

‘They’re armed to the teeth, but it’s mostly small arms. There’s not a lot of it that’s going to trouble the
ECV
’s armour. Their armour is mostly scratch built,’ du Bois told them.

‘Be nice if Karma had put a GMG or fifty cal on top. Still, boys and their toys,’ Grace muttered.

‘You said it was mostly scratch built armour,’ Beth said.

‘They’ve got a Cougar,’ du Bois said.

‘So she likes younger guys, who doesn’t?’ Alexia asked. Du Bois just looked exasperated. ‘Pardon me for trying to lighten the mood.’

‘That’s where anything of import will be. The nuke, the
DAYP
, probably La Calavera,’ du Bois continued.

‘Or it’s a decoy, or just a tank, and they’re in something fast-moving,’ Grace pointed out.

‘Can we not just follow them to whatever meet they have with Mr Brown?’ Beth said.

‘We could do, but they’ve got a lot of screening vehicles, and we’re going through significant bandit country, too big a risk of losing them. We need to control this. Control the nuke and get our hands on King Jeremy, and I can make him talk. That way at least we know what we’re walking into when we go after Brown.’

‘A chase through a well-armed LA playing Hell in the movie of the same name, against a convoy of heavily armed psychos? This doesn’t sound very controlled,’ Grace said.

‘Give me another option,’ du Bois said, clearly irritated.

Grace thought about that for a moment. ‘Okay, I’m in, but I’m not riding with you,’ she told him. Du Bois opened his mouth to object. ‘You don’t need another shooter in the
ECV
.’ She turned and went upstairs. Beth thought that she was probably right.

33

A Long time After the Loss

Vic was pretty sure that Scab was losing it. This scared him. They had travelled Red Space to an out of the way habitat that they knew was hip-deep in the black weapons trade. They had paid through the teeth to replace most of what they had lost. The reconfigured
Basilisk II
had passed the incoming bounty ships just inside Red Space. They were lucky it was only bounty hunters rather than one of the Elite that had traced them.

Scab had wanted to make examples on the habitat, though Vic was of the opinion that it had been inevitable that one of the black market arms dealers would sell them out. He had also wanted to make an example of one of the bounty killers’ ships. The first one through had been a converted freighter, modified to be closer to a light cruiser in combat capabilities. It belonged to a bounty killer called Crabber. It was a bit too much ship for the
Basilisk II
to handle. The Monk had ‘reasoned’ with him and that was how Vic knew that Scab was losing it. This many lost opportunities for violence had to come out somewhere.

The Monarchist systems hadn’t seemed that safe when everyone was after Talia. Now, however, they were falling into a shooting war with the Consortium. A war there was a good chance the Monarchists would lose, as they were currently one Elite down. To counter the imbalance the Monarchist systems had been offering succour to Church refugees fleeing Consortium persecution. The aristos had more to worry about than Talia and the secret of bridge technology now.

Scab’s Pythian search programs had found only one reference to the Ubh Blaosc. It was in a suppressed report that the search program had to buy using one of their secure slush funds at not inconsiderable expense. They still had access to the funds from Talia’s fake auction, but those funds had taken a battering recently.

The report was from a successful xeno-archaeologist, a job title that really meant S-tech prospector, who worked out of the Monarchist systems. All that the report said was that the archaeologist, a Dr Josef Ertl, was looking for an S-tech artefact called the Ubh Blaosc. Reading between the lines it sounded like he had been hired by one of the Blue Bloods – the Lords of the Monarchist systems. Dr Josef had gone missing. His ship had eventually floated into one of the beacon-guided routes through Red Space some three thousand years later, which made him one of the luckiest carbon-based life forms ever to have existed. The chances of a lost ship drifting into one of the routes were astronomically low. He was, of course, dead, but they had been able to retrieve his last backup and clone him, after the Blue Bloods had destroyed the current Dr Josef Ertl, who had been cloned after the original had gone missing. It was thought that the returned Dr Ertl would be much more interesting.

‘So this Bedlam, it’s a Psycho Bank?’ Vic asked.

‘Pretty much,’ the Monk said. She was getting tired of answering the same question, but even with the information in his neunonics Vic wasn’t getting it.

‘But with real people?’ the ’sect asked again.

‘Yes,’ Beth had snapped. Scab had wanted to go in guns blazing, but the Monk had suggested another way. She had reached out to her covert Church contacts in the Monarchist systems to see if a meeting could be arranged. More to the point, could it be arranged to their satisfaction that there wouldn’t be any double cross. There had been some back and forth; Scab was less than pleased, but it looked like the Monarchists cared a lot more about fucking over the Consortium than they did about anything that Scab and any Church survivors were up to.

Even so, Talia was not happy that she had to go back into hiding. They could not know of her existence. Vic was of the opinion that if they were to stand a chance against the Monarchists’ inevitable betrayal, she would be needed to pilot the
Basilisk
II
. Telling her this had gone some way towards mollifying her.

‘I was in a place like it back on Earth,’ Talia said, looking down. Her sister turned to her.

‘You were in a museum?’ Vic asked, though he was struggling to deal with the concept.

‘More like the secure wing of a hospital,’ Talia said. The explanation didn’t really help much.

‘When?’ the Monk asked.

Talia looked profoundly uncomfortable. Vic hoped that she wasn’t going to start crying again. Though she had done a lot less of that recently, and she seemed to be getting on a lot better with her sister. Vic had even managed to spend some sexy time with her in one of the immersions she liked. With her non-invasive superconducting connection to the
Basilisk II
’s systems she was able to get a lot more out of the programs now.

‘Y’know, after …’

‘I went to prison?’

‘Well, I was going to say after you killed Davey, but yeah,’ Talia said. The Monk opened her mouth to ask something. ‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ Talia said quickly. Vic was wondering why she had brought it up in the first place. Vic opened his mandibles to ask for another explanation.

‘The entire planet is a museum,’ Beth said in exasperation. ‘It’s basically a place where they keep the material remains of the past on display, in the belief that it will be of interest, both in terms of education and entertainment, to the people of the present and the future.’

And this was the bit that Vic didn’t get. Surely most of what they needed to know was in their neunonics? And if it wasn’t then they could ’face for it. He started to ask the question but Beth cut him off again. ‘There’s a number of arcologies spread out across the planet; each arcology has a theme and it stores, displays, and explains the artefacts of each theme. There’s an arcology called Earth, that’s supposed to be all pre-Loss artefacts. I know for a fact most of them are fake. Though I’ve always hoped that it’s the real
Voyager II
they’ve got. We even talked about stealing it.’

‘Then there’s the Mausoleum, where you can apparently talk with the reanimated corpses of interesting, but ultimately dead, people,’ Talia said with mock enthusiasm. ‘Which nobody seems to think is odd but me.’

‘Do they have Vic Matto?’ Vic asked.

‘No, I checked,’ Talia said. He felt funny inside at the thought of her doing that for him. ‘They claim to have Elvis though,’ she said. ‘Which sort of cheapens it all, makes it like Vegas.’

‘You never went to Vegas,’ Beth said.

‘Blackpool, then,’ Talia said, in exasperation.

‘It’s not the real Elvis,’ the Monk said, then she frowned. ‘At least I hope it isn’t. That would have been a waste of space and made him a lot more evil than I thought he was.’

‘Ooh, they have Walt Disney!’ Talia said.

‘Now that makes sense,’ the Monk said. ‘They have a number of arcologies for the diaspora, the colonial era, the exploitation, post-colonial era and recent history, though personally I think the last five thousand years have just sort of blurred together. There’s another arcology for the Seeders, the Church, the history of space travel, Red Space, the Art Wars and so on. Then there’s the Bedlam – that’s a museum of mental illness and interesting mad people, in which they are keeping Dr Ertl.’

‘See, that’s what I don’t get,’ Vic said. ‘If it’s a Psycho Bank, why have live ones? Isn’t that dangerous?’

‘The virtual ones can be as well,’ the Monk muttered.

‘So why bother?’

‘So people can go there and study and learn from them,’ Talia said. Vic just shook his head. Talia patted him on the arm. ‘Bless.’

He knew she was patronising him but somehow he found it very endearing.

‘It’s for entertainment, Vic,’ the Monk told him. ‘Entertainment.’

He brightened. ‘Look at the funny mad people? Yes, that makes sense.’

The Monk was just shaking her head.

‘Is he still looking at the bridge ghost and wanking?’ Talia asked.

‘No, I’m looking forward to our inevitable betrayal,’ Scab said, emerging from the carpeted and wood-panelled corridor that ran between their private rooms. Talia actually squealed, but Vic was gratified that she moved behind him and not her sister.

‘Your plan wouldn’t have worked,’ the Monk said. ‘The security’s too high.’

‘We’ve hit Blue Bloods before, even hunted them,’ Scab said. Vic was nodding. He had to admit he was with Scab on this one. They were basically walking into a trap.

‘So we just go and kill everyone?’ the Monk asked. ‘Look, this place is set up more like a Citadel, or even the Cathedral, in terms of security. I don’t think we could even get the ship inside.’

‘Worked well for the Cathedral.’ It was out of Vic’s mouth before he realised what he was saying. Talia was looking up at him ruefully.

‘We don’t have entire battle fleets and three Elite with us,’ the Monk pointed out.

‘I’ve broken into a Citadel,’ Scab said. The Monk narrowed her eyes.

‘He has,’ Vic said. ‘Got me killed, though, by a fucking Elite no less.’

‘Ludwig?’ the Monk asked. Vic nodded.

‘But you had the godsware,’ Vic said to Scab.

‘The Marduk implant?’ the Monk asked. Scab nodded. ‘Still got it?’ Scab didn’t say anything. ‘Look, I know this is a shitty situation. I know we can’t trust Pallas, and believe me I know that better than anyone, but as far as we can tell he’s on the level.’ Pallas was the Blue Blood who owned the system. ‘They’re desperate. They know as soon as the Consortium are finished mopping up the Church, they are going to properly turn their sights on the Monarchist systems. The Blue Bloods are outnumbered, outgunned and one Elite down. We’ve sold this to them on fucking the Consortium over.’

‘Have you met him before?’ Scab asked.

‘That’s a complicated question,’ the Monk said.

‘Give me a simple answer.’

‘Maybe.’

‘Are we meeting him?’ Vic asked.

‘He’s getting cloned especially,’ the Monk told them.

‘Well, aren’t we special,’ Scab said. The blatant sarcasm worried Vic as well. It wasn’t really Scab’s style. Most of the time his sense of irony was either deficient, or too well developed for Vic to understand.

‘Hey!’ Talia snapped. ‘If you’re going to stick your dick in my sister then at least you can be nice to her!’ The Monk blinked.

Scab narrowed his eyes, Vic suspected more as the result of confusion than anything else.

‘Thank you, Talia,’ the Monk managed.

‘They say Pallas might be the Prime,’ Vic said, meaning the progenitor of the Blue Bloods.

‘They said that about the Elder of the Living City, and the Absolute. I think if the Prime still exists he’s well hidden, and we’ll never see him. More likely he was eaten by his children a long time ago. I’m pretty sure that Pallas is first generation, though,’ the Monk told them.

‘What a waste,’ Scab muttered. Vic wondered what he was referring to.

Ridiculously ornamental, retro-looking warships tracked them the moment they emerged from the bridge point. Similarly overly-decorated orbital weapons platforms tracked them as soon as they entered Black Athena’s planetary space. The arcologies’ security systems locked on as well, once the
Basilisk II
entered the atmosphere.

Black Athena was a designer garden world. All the land was carefully laid out, manicured parkland interspersed with shallow waterscaped seas. The baroque pyramid arcologies dotted the planet, dwarfing even the landscaped, snow-capped mountain ranges. Though the arcologies did not break the atmosphere.

The planet had a tiny permanent population, despite its vast security forces. It also had a vast transient population of wealthy tourists from the Monarchist systems and, until recently, the Consortium. Some of the more influential Consortium tourists were now hostages being used as an uplift shield.

As they made for Bedlam, the near, yellow sun was sinking below the equator, casting the designer world into a strangely bright twilight. Vic was enjoying the scenery, just before he died, from his new biomechanical-style seat. The Mother had ’faced the design specs to the
Basilisk II
, but somehow the chair wasn’t as comfortable as it had been on Cyst. Much of the ship’s hull was transparent and he was receiving visual feed from the ship’s sensors, which he had overlaid with a suitably inspiring soundscape.

Talia was safely cocooned again, deep in the ship’s smart matter. They were going to keep ’face silence unless things went really badly. She brought the ship circling around the Bedlam arcology, he suspected so she could check out the view, and brought it in to land on the designated landing pad close to the top of the arcology. Apparently Pallas kept penthouse suites on the top several floors of all the arcologies.

They stepped out onto the landing pad into freezing temperatures and howling winds. Both Scab and Monk had stipulated no umbilical connection to the ship. Molecular hooks on Vic’s feet kept him adhered to the pad as he made his way with the Monk and Scab to the airlock.

The outward sloping, transparent, smart matter walls of the lowest floor of the penthouse suite looked down on a massive, empty space thousands of storeys above the ground. Vic hadn’t expected the arcology to be hollow, somehow. His neunonics had long rid him of the agoraphobia that hive-born worker ’sects were conditioned with, but the massive drop was making him a little uncomfortable. A structure this size, Vic knew, would have to have internal weather control.

The ‘exhibits’ were in ‘displays’ on successive floors that ran up the inside walls of the megastructure. Ornate lifts made of smart matter designed to look like something called ‘decorative wrought iron’ ran at regular intervals up each wall. Similarly archaic-looking maglevs ran around each level, presumably to take tourists to their favourite psychopath or recreational killer. Vic didn’t think he would like the idea of being one of the exhibits. He could see some of the closer levels on maximum magnification. The inmates didn’t look happy. However, there were no tourists today. It seemed like the museum had been closed to the public for their visit.