The Beauty of Destruction (63 page)

Alexia struggled to drag her brother along the corridor away from the sounds of gunfire. She looked up as she sensed movement. Yaroslav was standing there. There was smoke coming from his back, but he looked more together. He was holding his SMG as though it was an actual weapon now.

‘Piotr, help me!’ she pleaded. He looked down at du Bois’s protean form, seemed to come to a decision, and walked towards her, sweeping his Vector to one side, letting it hang down on its sling. Too late Alexia realised there was something wrong, too late she recognised the look in his eyes. She let go of du Bois, and grabbed for her rifle, but Piotr had already reached for it and taken hold of it himself. She heard an explosion from further down the corridor, the shockwave buffeting them as a huge, calloused fist hit her hard in the face, slamming her back into the steel-covered organic machinery.

Under the mask the Pennangalan looked like her sister, but she was younger, her face softer, more innocent, except for the vertical slits of her reptilian eyes. Beth really wanted to just sit down and bleed. She was so badly damaged, had so many injuries, that she was amazed she could still move, let alone function. The alien nanotech in her body was killing the pain signals to her brain, auto-cannibalising her flesh to synthesise endorphins to help kill the pain. There was an odd vinegary smell coming from the body. Through the lessening pain she remembered that she was supposed to double tap. She raised the pistol to shoot the body twice in the head. Something wasn’t right. The acrid vinegar smell was nearly overwhelming. The physiology of the corpse, even allowing for the grenade that had gone off inside it, didn’t seem right. Something slithered inside the body. Beth’s eyes widened, her finger tightening on the pistol’s trigger. An intestine-like tendril whipped out through the dissolving chest cavity and around her wrist. Beth screamed as acid burned her skin. She lost her grip on the pistol and it tumbled to the floor. Another tendril wrapped around her neck, then another around her face, acid burning her screaming mouth. Hissing, a long serpent tongue flickered past rows of serpent teeth as the head separated itself from the body, dragging healing organs that emitted a phosphorescent glow, like fireflies, behind it. The head leapt on intestinal tendrils towards Beth’s face.

Alexia had been hit before, but it had been a while since she had been hit that hard. She almost blacked out. A feeling of nausea was suppressed by her augmented biology. She shook off the effects of the blow as she felt rough fingers around her throat, choking her. Then she was hit again.

‘Got to get it back, get it back,’ Yaroslav was muttering in Russian over and over again.

‘Piotr,’ she managed. He hit her again. The third time he hit her she did black out.

She came to on the ground as Yaroslav was replacing the magazine in his pistol. A cry of pain echoed through the metal corridors.

‘Beth,’ she tried to call out weakly, climbing unsteadily onto all fours. Yaroslav kicked her in the stomach. The force of the kick sent her flying into the machinery. Hands around her neck again, picking her up onto her feet, and slamming her into the metal. ‘What are you doing, Piotr?’ she said, trying to recover her breath. He just hit her again.

‘I am not the victim. I’m not the fucking victim!’ He let go of her neck and she felt him undoing her jeans.

‘No, Piotr! No!’ He jammed the barrel of his pistol into her face.

‘Shut up!’ he screamed. Then he yanked her jeans and panties down.

It was like being strangled at the same time as someone tried to burn your head off. She had managed to get her left hand in between the Pennangalan’s head and her own. Needle-like serpent teeth sank into her flesh, emptying their venom into her body. She could feel herself weakening, her neuralware making her aware of just how fucked she was. The thing was making a keening, hissing noise, despite having a mouthful of her flesh. The Pennangalan’s jaw dislocated, her mouth distending, trying to swallow Beth’s hand. In a blind panic, Beth managed to tear her smoking right hand free of the acidic, intestinal tendril that had wrapped itself around her arm. Her leather jacket was melting away where the acid was dripping onto it. She reached into a hole in the nanite-reinforced leather. The Balisong blade clicked open, and she rammed it again and again into the screaming thing’s separated head. She dropped the blade and pushed against the burning tendril, bringing her foot up and levering it in between herself and the separated head and organs. She pushed with her foot with all her might. The tendrils left smoking welts on her flesh. She rammed the head against the organic machinery on the other side of the narrow corridor, leant forwards, and dragged the shotgun from its back scabbard. Beth jammed the weapon through the flailing tendrils, against the thing’s head and pulled the trigger, and again, and again, and again. Shells ejected from the shotgun as the head came apart in a spray of buckshot. Beth screamed as she blew half of her own foot off. The tendrils stopped whipping around. Beth crawled away from it and grabbed for her dropped pistol. She rolled over and fired three rounds into the already healing head. It stopped healing. The nanite loads started to eat away at the Pennangalan. Beth lay down, pain overwhelming what her systems could cope with. She wanted to sob. Then she heard an inhuman scream.

Yaroslav was staring at her genitalia, shaking his head.

‘I’m not gay,’ he said.

‘Okay, okay.’ Alexia tried to reason with him. ‘You’re not gay, so why don’t we just …’ Both of the long knives that her brother had brought back from Japan were in a horizontal double sheath on her webbing. She drew them quickly while he was distracted. The first blade opened up Yaroslav’s arm, the one holding the gun, down to the bone. He dropped the weapon. The second she rammed into his groin with as much force as she could muster. She felt resistance from his armoured clothes, from his hardening skin, but they were no match for the five-hundred-year-old folded steel. She buried the blade in his crotch. His scream sounded inhuman. Somehow he still had the presence of mind to backhand her hard enough to knock her off her feet. She landed next to her brother’s protean form. His clothes and webbing acting as an ineffectual bag for his bubbling flesh, she grabbed his pistol from its holster, and rolled back to face Yaroslav. The Russian was just looking down at the hilt of the blade protruding from his groin. The targeting symbols in her vision told her where to aim. She fired again, and again, and again until the slide locked back on the pistol, the magazine empty. Yaroslav stood there for a few more moments, staring at her, uncomprehending, then he collapsed to the ground. The nanite-tipped bullets were already starting to break his body down. Alexia dragged her jeans up and curled up against the metal-covered machinery.

‘You fucking bastard!’ she screamed at the corpse. She had made herself different. It had been a choice. It had been done on her terms. It wasn’t his place to make her feel like a freak. She had liked him, he had looked muscle-bound, big and dumb, she went for that sort of thing sometimes, though she knew he couldn’t have been unintelligent working for the Circle. She had wanted to look after him. He had seemed so frightened, and then this. She burst into tears.

Beth appeared at the end of the narrow corridor. She was bleeding, burned, leaning against the machinery to stay upright. Her pistol was held in both hands. Alexia looked up at the other woman through her tears. Beth just nodded, and then slid down the metal covering to sit on the floor. Alexia looked at her brother’s constantly transforming body as it struggled to cope with powerful biotechnology from a previously female line.

‘Transitions are always difficult,’ Alexia said quietly.

They were watching the mutated submersible surface in the moon pool.

‘You’re not going to put the
DNA
into us, are you?’ Siska asked.

‘No,’ Mr Brown said. She tried not to flinch at the sound of his beautiful voice. ‘The Naga-tech would reject it and probably kill you. The seed ships can leave the atmosphere. We have time to grow a clone to sufficient maturity. It amused me not to tell Malcolm the truth. I wanted to see what he would do.’

‘And the boy?’ Siska asked.

‘We will suggest the same thing to Mr Rush. The ship’s systems themselves will guide him in the cloning process. Unless he kills himself I expect great things of him. He has the potential to make kingdoms of madness, sublime entertainment.’

‘And you knew that Yaroslav was about to go thatch?’

‘Long overdue.’

‘But why did you send my sister?’ Siska asked. A terrified-looking King Jeremy was climbing out of the submersible. She did flinch as Mr Brown reached out to stroke her head.

‘Because you wouldn’t have killed them. Malcolm is out of the picture. It’s left to fate now, though I rather doubt that Alexia and Miss Luckwicke are a match for your sister. Besides she was so servile, so slavish in her obedience. It becomes boring.’ Siska tried desperately not to show any reaction, though her breathing sounded ragged to her own ears.

‘I can’t go out there again,’ King Jeremy said from the door. He was weeping. Siska suspected the only reason he had been able to tolerate as much exposure as he had was because of the S- and L-tech augments the ridiculously dressed boy had managed to get hold of somehow. Mr Brown was striding across the room towards King Jeremy, a hand outstretched. The boy’s expression was one of abject terror. He held up the dead man’s switch. Mr Brown reached for it. Siska turned away as the air between Mr Brown and King Jeremy’s hand became nauseating and painful to look at. Silas yelped and ran whimpering for a corner. There were multiple wet cracking noises. King Jeremy howled in agony. Siska looked back. Bones stuck out of the flesh of his arm in multiple places. His hand and the dead man’s switch had fused. Mr Brown stroked the boy’s face with his two long-fingered, obsidian-skinned hands.

‘Shhh!’ Mr Brown said gently. ‘Don’t you scream, don’t you ever scream. You know nothing about pain and never will.’ King Jeremy managed to make do with just whimpering. ‘I find you repellent, Mr Rush, in so many ways. You are an abject lesson in what happens when the weak and the frightened gain power. I should extinguish you, but I suspect you will serve a purpose. I think that you will make things worse.’ Silas padded up to King Jeremy, and nuzzled against him.

‘P … p … please …’ King Jeremy managed.

‘Please what?’

‘I don’t want to be on my own …’

‘We all have to live with the consequences of our actions.’

Du Bois wasn’t sure how he got there. Presumably his sister and Beth had carried him to one of the couches in what was supposed to be the seed ship’s cockpit, but which was, in fact, little more than a place for humans to try and monitor the organism. The ship had known what to do. It had wrapped in him in a cocoon of metallic, intelligent matter. It had injected him with more S-tech in a bid to control the biological flux his body was held in. It had helped his mind dissociate from his body, and instead associate with the now rudimentary intelligence of the biomechanical craft.

They were rising through the Pacific. Something about the ocean made him think of amniotic fluid. He shared awareness with the ship. The bodies of the Pennangalan and Yaroslav were significantly less disturbing than what he saw through the lenses on the exterior of the seed ship. Huge, twisting empty spires, reaching for and breaching the surface of the ocean, screaming human faces as a skin disease on the living basalt. Vast charnel buttresses, each one a contradictory living necropolis, crawling across the ocean floor. Twisted simulacra of existing cities growing, fruiting, and bursting; feedback from the inflicted insanity as alien minds failed to understand, or even fully acknowledge, the fading human presence on their planet. From the matter of the city vast, screaming effigies grew and, like the cities, fruited and burst into infectious spores: a piscine Christ, a piscine Buddha, a piscine Krishna, more that were less familiar to du Bois’s already overwhelmed mind.

The ship rose from the clinging ocean, between the towers of the sunken city, and into a dawn of strange light. The ring of bright, flickering blue fire was a terminator. Before it was blue sky, behind it all was red and gaseous. The Seeders were taking their world somewhere else. The sun was turning black, being eaten by what looked like vast, squirming bacteria. The seed lurched as du Bois’s battered mind was overwhelmed by religious terror. After all, the God he claimed as his own was a solar deity.

He took the seed ship, with its cargo of human clones, and the minds he carried in his own head, away from the diseased and lost planet.

Lodup was in total darkness now, but it wasn’t frightening. He felt safe for the first time in a long while. There was light, like a spotlight on an empty stage. Sal was standing next to him. She turned to look at him with her black eyes.

‘Thank you,’ she told him. ‘We wished to spread.’ Then she disappeared with the light.

42

The City

Ludwig was home. Except that wasn’t his name. His name had been Ibic ÓLug, a raven, a weapon, one of many, created to hate and kill his enemy. They had failed and his home had fallen. The Ubh Blaosc was now the home of serpents. Oz had broken the false programming that the Monarchists had given him when he had become an Elite. He was free, but not for long. He felt the pain of the Yig virus he had contracted from Oz eating away at him, at what he was, at what he had tried so hard to remember. He no longer had a home, but he could still hear his grand-creator’s mindsong.

One of the uplifts was dead. He did not think he liked any of them, but then he was a weapon, it was not his purpose to like. Hovering just outside the huge head of the sun god, Ibic knew that it was only a matter of time before even he would be overwhelmed. The Naga did not fight like the other uplifts. They swarmed until their enemy was overcome. There was no false concern for the lives of their warriors – only victory, consumption mattered. They bathed him in their plasma fire. Any Elite would struggle in the heart of a sun. Still their ships fell like rain, sundered, diseased, controlled so they turned on one another. Phased bullets sought crucial system organs.

Grandfather Lug told the raven his plan. The remaining uplifts staggered as the sun god had spikes, filled with the seeds of Lloigor technology, grow through the serpent’s extruded crust of resin and inject their bounty into Scab, Vic and Talia’s otherwise mundane armour. It would be the sun god’s final gift. Through the mindsong Ibic saw the three remaining uplifts about to fall. The Forge, the dying red sun, started to flicker, creating arcs of weak coronal ejection. He saw and felt the particle spray flow around him, a vast fountain of sparks in inhuman vision.

Goodbye
, his grandfather told him.

Ibic’s coherent energy fields reached out for the uplifts and enveloped them. Ibic ÓLug exuded the black, liquid glass exotic material of his armour and then accelerated. He drew vast amounts of energy from the network of proto-black holes that powered him through the entangled link. He flickered in and out of phase, dragging the three uplifts with him. He avoided the Naga through speed, stealth, and just not existing in the same physical state as them. Lug’s seeds grew like a virus through the uplifts’ equipment, transforming it. Their new armour then injected further seeds into the uplifts themselves. He could not hear their screams through the coherent energy field that enveloped them, but he was aware of their agonized contortions, at least in as much as he was instinctively aware of everything.

Six standard minutes as the uplifts measured time, a gift from humanity. Six minutes from the head of the sun god to their destination. He had hoped speed and stealth would be enough, but he could see Naga craft moving towards the destination. Perhaps they could feel the energies building, or perhaps it was just a function of enormous biomechanical minds playing the odds. The surface around the pool had come to life, much of it taking to the air. Níðhöggr itself, this hive fleet’s own behemoth god, was making its way towards their destination. The huge biomechanical ship’s movements looked ponderous, but it had been closer, and was moving fast enough that it would get there first. Ibic ÓLug wished that he could kill the snake’s god, a god that the machine weapon/warrior had been created to hate, but knew he did not have the power, even now. The Níðhöggr was no mere Consortium capital ship.

Alchemy in machine guts. He used his own precious matter, and diverted his own precious energy feed, to create the three items. He knew these would be his own final gifts, and his death, as he plummeted towards the Naga godship.

Ibic ÓLug plunged into the Níðhöggr in a different physical state. He could not see through the godship, but he had been aware of the lines of energy snaking under the behemoth, meeting in the pool on the surface of Ubh Blaosc. Instinctively Ibic could feel what was happening in the pool. The Níðhöggr’s defensive fields tore at the raven, shredding him in the way that no Lloigor-derived Consortium or Church shield could. He was screaming as the serpent god flayed him. All of his power went to keeping him in the different physical state that was protecting his uplift cargo in the flickering, shifting coherent energy fields clutched to him like a mother holding newborns. He saw the guts of the serpent ship, armoured bone superstructure, vast biomechanical organs. He saw the sparks fly through its vast nervous system, its children squeezed rapidly through its veins. He wished he could reach out and harm this thing he had been created to fight.

And then suddenly he was beneath the Níðhöggr, in its vast shadow. He could see the glow of the stones in the black water, the lightning playing across them. This had to be timed just right. He came to a halt, and bled off the kinetic energy that tried to act on the three shielded uplifts, their flesh and armour still changing. He drank the kinetic energy; every little bit helped. In his vision the forces at play looked like a tiny star going nova, and then space bent away from him and his instinctive understanding failed him as the trod was opened. He switched off the coherent energy fields, and the three uplifts dropped.

He ejected his gift. Three coherent field generators made as best he could in the time he had. The field generators attached themselves to the falling uplifts’ transforming armour.

Ibic ÓLug was now shieldless, but now he could cause hurt.

It looked like he had exploded. Ghost bullets with virulent S-tech biological virals, and potent L-tech nanotech virals, intelligently sought crucial organs. Black light, fusion lances, de-coherence beams undid molecular bonds, and dust rained down on the resinous plain.
DNA
hacks regressed complex biomechanical organisms into protoplasmic slime. It lasted less than a moment. The black water drained from the pool. For a moment the glowing stones were visible, a ring of blue fire within, a red world beyond. In the sky above, the Forge flickered. Then the Níðhöggr breathed, and introduced Ibic ÓLug to the conditions at the heart of a sun. Then a star collapsed.

Patron was sure that the concentric rings of stone where the Lloigor machines had set up this particular trod, one of the few in Red Space, were the petrified ribs of some unknown creature.

All three of the Elite were there. The Innocent, his newest, was wearing only a pair of loose, baggy, white cotton trousers as he sat on the edge of the rock, dangling his feet over crimson gases. Hedetet, the hive queen he’d had violate her own form by remaking her as an arachnid, an eight-limbed, stinger-tailed, humanoid scorpion, was coated in her black, liquid glass armour, hiding the shame of her form. She was leaning on her weapon, which was configured as a spear.

Patron ran his hand over his favourite’s cobra-like head. She flinched at his touch less these days. All his hand felt was the exotic matter of her armour. Like Hedetet, the surviving Pennangalan sister was ashamed of her form. She was the most covert of the Consortium Elite. She had to be. She was not a full Naga, only a tech-infused hybrid. It still would have been more than enough to cause difficult questions in board meetings, and public outcry, such as it was, if her existence became common knowledge. Uplifts just weren’t self-aware enough to embrace their own destruction.

‘I am surprised they have got this far,’ Patron mused. It wasn’t their individual abilities he had doubted, more their ability to work as a group, or even in their own best interest. The stones glowed from within, picking out the symbols in the rock that even Patron struggled to understand. A ring of blue fire appeared within the circle.

Britha hit the ground hard. The blue fire, reflecting on the silver of the raven-headed armour, winked out. She felt the change in the power. She wanted to throw up from the pain. The raven-shaped helm folded away from her face but she was only dry heaving. The spear was screaming at her, her head felt like it wanted to burst. The parasite thing living within her seemed always just out of reach, teasing her as it hid.

‘Quiet!’ she screamed. She felt calmness flood through her in an unnatural way, but it allowed her the presence of mind to sing the mindsong that contained the magic, to calm the spear. She could feel the heat from the haft even through her armour. Its screaming rage subsided to a simmering fury, and it became almost manageable. She was aware of the crystal parasite creeping through her mind, eating what she was, what she had been. Her red hair drifted to the black ground as it fell out of her swollen skull.

She stood up and knew that she was in Cythrawl. She could still see the fiercely glowing magic burning within the stones, feel it. Beyond the stones a city, like the terrifying stories that Germelqart and Kush had once told her of their ‘civilisation’. Vast, dark structures, spires and towers that looked like barbed, spear-shaped brochs, reached up for the red sky. The angles were impossible, their shadowed parts reached to elsewhere. Once it would have hurt to even see such a thing; now, instinctively, she understood that those were paths she could walk. That was when she realised that she was little more than an echo now. Britha was no more. Her body was just a vessel. She was just a memory in a demon’s mind.

There were things there, vast creatures that had grown into the rock. She saw the power they drank as glowing lines coming from deep in the earth. She knew them as kin to the Muileartach. Somehow she could hear their minds echoing through the crystalline tendrils branching out from her head, and into other places. The minds might have been hopelessly moonstruck, but they were cold and languid. There was little for them to eat now. She was barely aware of the other smaller minds, the people who crawled across this city as lice crawled across skin.

There was something else here. Something that burned the tendrils of her crystalline awareness, made them shrink away from it. Something that she knew to fear more than a god, a sleeping mind whose desire to wake she could feel. On the horizon a huge, black, squirming and very close sun was rising.

Lightning started to play amid the circle of stones. Lug’s spear caught fire. The stones glowed from within, picking out the symbols in the rock. Part of her wanted to stay in the circle, journey by trod away from this terrible place, but she could see the power at play here, and stepped out of the circle just as the ring of blue fire appeared.

The blue fire faded. There were four of them. Two were clothed in a material not unlike the black shining rocks that the traders had once brought to her people. Rocks that they swore came from the insides of burning mountains. One such stood more than two heads taller than her. She had six arms, carried a strange-looking spear, and had a long, segmented tail that ended in a stinger. The other had the head of a hooded snake. Britha did not recognise the weapon she held, but it was easy to see that it was one. The third figure was unmistakeably Crom Dhubh, though his clothes were strange. She felt hate flare in her for all that he had done to her people. The parasite in her head showed him what he really was, a man-shaped squirming hole in space.

She felt something in her chest when she saw the fourth figure. It was Bress as a young man, with very short hair. He was nowhere near as tall, but it was unmistakably him. Though the innocence of his features, the childlike expression of wonder as he looked around at this horrible place, seemed very out of place on what were, ostensibly, her lover’s features. Britha’s hand shot to her mouth, and a quicksilver tear ran down her cheek, only to be absorbed through her skin a moment later. Then young Bress seemed to fall asleep, though he remained standing. His sleep did not look restful; he jerked and swung his arms around as the black shining material leaked through his skin like oil and coated his flesh. A long, black-bladed sword grew from nowhere and he let it drag on the ground.

There was no point in hiding. Crom Dhubh surely knew she was there, just as she could feel him, and see him for what he was. She stepped out from between the stones. Her helmet was still folded away from her face. There was just a flicker of surprise on his face.

‘I had not thought to see you here,’ he said, glancing at the spear. He was speaking in the tongue of the Pecht. It felt like an insult hearing him use the tongue of her people. He concentrated, and then looked away from her. ‘The same trick? Lug has been infecting his pets with parasites again.’

‘Why aren’t you dead?’ she demanded.

‘Am I not? Perhaps it’s just not something that happens to me. I should thank you. I used to think so small. Without you it would have been over before it had even started.’

‘You’ve destroyed so much!’ she cried, tears of quicksilver running down her cheek again.

‘You cannot possibly understand how little that matters.’ Then he concentrated. Britha could see it again. The light burning in the smoking stones. She could see the power branching out into places it had not been before, the magics of the stones overtaxed. Crom Dhubh and the three black, shining, stone-clad warriors walked out of the circle, away from Britha.

She thought of her people, the Cirig, Cliodna, her lover, Fachtna, her lover, Kush, Teardrop-on-Fire, Raven’s Laughter, their children, all the people of the Ubh Blaosc, that burning Otherworld. She thought of her children whom she would never see, now. Perhaps Crom Dhubh had a plan, but all the harm he had caused had only ever seemed to be done on a spiteful whim to her. He had found another Bress, an Otherworldly changeling perhaps, and enslaved him as well. She watched the changeling
dragging the
huge blade behind him. Crom Dhubh would turn him into
a monster as well, like the Bress she knew, if
he had not already done so.

What do you love,
Crom Dhubh?
The thought was a whisper in her mind. It sounded like her voice. She saw echoes of past movement stretching out and away from Crom Dhubh. The black-skinned man’s hand touching the snake-headed woman. The energies in the circle coalesced, and blue fire filled the ring of stones once again. The raven head flipped down over her face. She felt her armoured feet branch into the earth, anchoring her, as the deluge of black water tried to wash her away. The Spear of Lug made a path of steam through the water as Britha threw it.