Bad Cow

by Andrew Hindle

  “Not entirely sure what that means,” Gabriel said cautiously, “but alright. In my world, you’d better believe there are good guys and bad guys, so maybe I’m an average person. But as I’ve already said, I’m not about to try to use or control you. That’s going to be your choice.”

  “Like it was with the Destarion,” Ariel said.

  “I think,” Gabriel said cautiously.

  “Why did this spaceship not kill the Demons when the Atonement began?” Aunt Agñasta asked suddenly.

  “That’s a reasonable question,” Gabriel replied. “The Atonement did hit all the big corporations and take out some of the more disastrous religious fringe cults, but it didn’t really touch the inhuman agents at work on the planet. The Demons, the Imago, any of that.”

  “Is it just because humans were easier?” Ash asked.

  “That was my assumption,” Gabriel admitted. “It’s also because the Demons don’t directly lead, don’t overtly do dastardly things. They’ve got their methods and their habits and it’s possible the Destarion – or the Pinians – didn’t consider them a threat. Remember, the Demons and Imago are invested in keeping the world working the way they like it, with the yummy humans they like to eat. Their behind-the-scenes machinations are more or less in line with the good immortals.”

  “Aren’t the humans invested in keeping the world working and…” Ariel started, then sat back as Gabriel put down his second drink, picked up his third and gave her a steady look. “Oh. Right.”

  “The Atonement left the most difficult and intractable humans dead,” Gabriel said, “and the Disciples responsible too. Paving the way for you three. And the world was saved, for a time.”

  “Saved,” Ash said with a shake of her head. “That’s why I’ve been so busy.”

  “There have always been conflicts,” Gabriel said, “but you of all people should know the difference between conflict and war.”

  It was the truth. Things had lulled in the past twenty years. Everyone had stood and squinted at one another with their fingers on their triggers, waiting to see what would happen next. And the population, who had long been waiting for their monstrous leaders to admit their culpability and surrender their power, had finally got what they wanted.

  Now, granted, malcontent human civilians getting what they wanted wasn’t the best basis for ongoing stability, but it was enough. Just enough to get them here. And the Destarion had known that. She’d known human beings for so long, she was like a surgeon. Cutting away just the right amount of cancerous flesh. She’d performed an operation on the planet-strangling mass-culture, and she’d pulled its claws. They’d grow back, but for now they were gone.

  “You are unhappy with what happened,” Agñasta said shrewdly.

  “There’s nothing much to be happy with,” Gabriel replied. “She didn’t need to do it that way, as effective as it might have been for a while. It did work as advertised. It was just … not the way Angels choose to do things. Okay,” he raised a hand, “I admit, the Angel way hasn’t exactly been great. We don’t have much of the ‘do God’s job while God’s away’ thing. We’re practically the embodiment of the status quo. But the Destarion – she has it. She’s got a way of dealing with organic creatures that is as out-there as God’s is, because we’re talking about an entity that has never been an organism. They’re just two very different examples, just … as different from one another as they are from humans. It…”

  “What should she have done?” Ash asked.

  “Ahh, second-guessing with the benefit of hindsight is pointless,” Gabriel growled, but couldn’t help himself. “She could have just hacked into the computers,” he went on, “and – I don’t know, distributed all the virtual wealth, all the data, all the material wealth, equally among the eleven billion inhabitants of this planet. That would have…” he paused, looking at the identical horrified expressions on the five human faces. “That would have destroyed the entire world, wouldn’t it,” he sighed.

  “Oh yeah,” Arial said.

  “Yes,” Ash added.

  “I suspect so, sir,” Jarvis put in.

  “Never mind all that,” Ash went on. “We’re finally getting somewhere, aren’t we? The Destarion is the key to this job of yours. You said it might even make this job of yours unnecessary.”

  “Sure,” Gabriel said, “given how much you already seen to know about her, I’d say there’s an excellent chance you’ll be able to use that information and … okay, here’s the thing,” he said, put down his glass and Roon’s pad, and reached into his pocket. He pulled out the electronic display tablet and leaned forward to set it on the coffee table. “I thought this was going to be a harder sell, but apparently you’re almost there already, so this is just…”

  “Ooh,” Ariel said, leaning over while Gabriel activated the pad. As always, he felt clumsy and brutish stabbing at the sleek solid-state machine and teasing its frame out to optimise the size and quality of the images. “Are these the pictures Laetitia was saying she got for you?”

  “They’re the ones,” Gabriel confirmed, and tapped the screen. Grainy images of a pale sphere resolved into a creamy moon with ruddy blotches and striations across its surface. “I give you: Europa.”

  “Okay,” Ash tilted her head and squinted as Gabriel zoomed, focussed, and tapped to a new image, showing some sort of thermal or relative-density filter. “I – oh.”

  There was silence as the humans all crowded around the display, looking at the shape picked out in the icy surface of the Jovian moon.

  “Is that…?” Ariel breathed.

  “That’s Hell,” the Archangel Gabriel said, “frozen over.”

  HELL IN ICE

  The shape wouldn’t have meant anything to Ariel if they hadn’t just been talking about Roon’s weird dream-diary and her scribbles of the sleeping hungry elevator God’s tooth thing that may or may not prove to be a source of clean energy for Earth, or a gateway to it. Now that it was in her head, of course, the curved spike with its crown of towering roots was impossible to see as anything but the ship.

  This was, if Gabriel was to be believed, the ancient and sentient warship that had dragged their previous incarnations off on a murder spree in order to keep human civilisation together for a few more decades. And Ariel thought Gabriel more or less had to be believed at this point. Even if he wasn’t an utterly convincing argument all on his own, there was just too much interlocking weirdness here to easily fit it into another explanation.

  Oh, she could come up with an alternative explanation, but Gabriel would probably say it was wrong and that would remove a major load-bearing piece of evidence from the overall story. And Ariel was aware that this was circular reasoning at best, but there really didn’t seem to be a damn thing she could do about it.

  “So … when was this picture taken?” she asked.

  “About six months ago,” Gabriel replied.

  “I don’t pretend to be following all the different satellites and space probes and things that are flying around the solar system looking at rocks,” Ariel admitted, “but I didn’t hear anything about a Europa fly-by,” she glanced at Roon, who most likely did follow all the technology at large in extraterrestrial space. Roon just shook her head, staring at the ominous shape in the image.

  “The fly-by wasn’t widely reported,” Gabriel said, “and the object itself wasn’t really reported at all, except in a few little looney corners of the media. Nobody much cares about space exploration anymore – you said it yourself, it’s all just considered to be satellites and space probes flying around the solar system looking at rocks.”

  “Now when I said that–” Ariel began.

  Gabriel waved it off with a chuckle. “Even people who do care about space exploration are generally agreed that the outer planets are worthless in terms of return on investment, resources, habitation, all those attractive elements,” he added. “The very, very few who see the outer planets as a stepping-off point for interstellar travel, whenever
that particular pipedream gets its day in the sun again – well, they don’t care about recognisable shapes and alien-looking relics. There have been too many Martian pyramids and carvings of faces and things that might be cities or vehicles or messages … we all just stopped paying attention. You might as well look for the face of God in the seed-patterns in a watermelon.”

  “Someone didn’t stop paying attention,” Ash pointed out.

  “No. Someone didn’t.”

  “I understand that the corporations responsible for the equipment tend to take a dim view of the ‘knowledge for knowledge’s sake’ philosophy,” Aunt Agñasta said, “because of its effect on their bottom line. If it is not marketable, it is a waste of effort.”

  “This looks quite marketable, Ms. Mulqueen,” Jarvis said mildly. Aunt Agñasta was too absorbed in the images on the tablet to spare him a dirty look for his unconscious butlerity. “Assuming the corporation knew what they were seeing and knew it was not just another accidental shape.”

  “This is a native/introduced differential filter,” Ash said, pointing to the data on the side of the image. “Similar to the ones satellites use to find bunkers and missile silos, but with a whole lot of really specific variables fed in. They knew exactly what they were looking for.”

  “Yes,” Gabriel replied, “they did.”

  “So whose images are these that Laetitia has stolen?” Ash asked. “Whose bottom line was hurt with this?”

  Gabriel shrugged. “A corporation called Space 23,” he said, “a subsidiary of a subsidiary, it barely even exists, except in the virtual sphere where it’s like a tiny little black hole for electronic money. The thing about black holes is, they’re really quite difficult to detect unless you get close to them, you can really only theorise about their existence based on the effect they have on the surrounding … okay, extending the metaphor a bit too much. It’s one of Fagin’s pet projects,” he said.

  “Fagin, as in Mercibald Fagin, who is actually a Demon in disguise?” Ariel asked.

  “The very same,” Gabriel replied. “Although he’s not really in disguise, he’s just rearranged his surroundings so nobody even asks. And I still need to repeat, we’re not certain Mercy and Mercibald are the same person. Fagin might just be a cover. Not that Demons are particularly known for being low-key.”

  “Mercibald Fagin appeared on the corporate map maybe five years before the Atonement,” Ash said, and Ariel realised her sister had been doing a bit of her own study. “Before that, he barely even seemed to exist but that’s perfectly in line with modern branding and market strategy. He didn’t appear out of nowhere, but there’s a wide scatter of name-changes and probably a lot of skeleton-filled closets piled up somewhere.”

  “I understand Fagin made as small a splash as possible while still remaining a viable commercial prospect,” Ariel added. “Which wasn’t necessarily an unusual characteristic in the big swingers to survive the Atonement.”

  “That scale display on the side,” Ash said, pointing.

  “She’s over a hundred kilometres long,” Gabriel confirmed, “or tall, or whatever. The Mercy 1 probe flew over Europa in February–”

  “The Mercy 1 probe?” Ariel repeated. “That’s a bit on the nose, isn’t it? Is he meant to be hiding or not?”

  Gabriel chuckled. “Well, like I say, Demons are a bit like that. You have to understand, there were dozens of Angels but we all got caught with our pants down by the world rolling up the way it did. The three Demons on Earth were used to being sort of flagrant and flamboyant. They were a state-sanctioned evil, essentially. And then, practically overnight, we were all gone,” he went on. “And they weren’t affected by the need for holy ground. All things considered, we got lucky.”

  “They do seem to have a lot of advantages,” Ash said.

  Gabriel nodded. “They could have taken over far more thoroughly than they did, if they’d known what was happening. Fear of the Disciples held them in check, until it was basically too late. New Angels showed up. We went back to outnumbering them. Especially after Odium was killed. And then there were two.”

  “And then three,” Ariel added, “in the late Twentieth Century. And then two again.”

  “And now they know the Pinians aren’t paying attention,” Ash said, “and they know about the Destarion.”

  Gabriel sat for a time, looking at the Mercy 1 images and frowning reflectively.

  “You know what we used to call her?” he said quietly. “The Godfang? We used to call her the Sleeper.”

  “Didn’t she have enough nicknames?” Ariel asked.

  Gabriel ignored her. “It was before we were really certain it was her, you see,” he went on. “It didn’t occur to me that she was in here with us, and the rest of the Angels were lost, so when the new ones started showing up they had no idea what was happening. I had to teach them as best I could. I had my suspicions about what was out there, but she really was just … asleep. A big, dormant, powerful, immortal mind. So we called her the Sleeper, and … well, there was nothing much we could do about it anyway. We can’t fly to Europa, and humans have only relearned how to make it that far in the past few hundred years.”

  Ariel glanced at Roon, and saw her bright-eyed interest in that little word, relearned. How much had humans known, and forgotten, since they’d had machines like the Destarion at their command?

  It wasn’t really the time for such a discussion, though. Ariel already felt as though the extended weekend of talking with the Archangel had led them close enough to nowhere to make further tangents unconscionable.

  “What’s Fagin intend to do with this information?” she asked, pointing at the images.

  “And how neatly did Laetitia steal it?” Ash added. “Is she being hunted by corporate goons as we speak?”

  “Don’t worry about Laetitia,” Gabriel said. “She’s very good at what she does. You’ve never heard of her, have you?” he asked Ash pointedly. Ash gave a half-smile and conceded the point. “Fagin – Mercy – knew on some level that the Godfang was out there, but he also knows he can’t go near her,” Gabriel said. “Odium tried, and was killed. Mercy is too canny to try to go there himself, and Fury … well, I don’t think Fury is even capable of it. After a while, Demons become sedentary and stop bouncing around with their teleportation power,” the Archangel explained. “It’s like their ability to access God-space wears off – or, more accurately, God-space starts to cling to them, starts to merge them with that sphere. At the start, when they’re young, they can use it a lot and it’s relatively safe, so it can be pretty dangerous to deal with a new Demon. Laetitia was exposed to one, and it’s left her … contaminated.”

  “So sooner or later, they lose this ability to teleport,” Ariel said.

  “Basically. They sort of get absorbed and rendered harmless, like their intrusion into God-space needs to be neutralised somehow. Mercy figured this out early and so he’s remained reasonably coherent. And after all, humans invented other ways for him to get around. Slower, but nicer. There’s no smiling people giving you cocktails and plates of nibbles in God-space.”

  “Apparently humans also invented other ways for him to access the Destarion, too,” Ash remarked.

  “Precisely,” Gabriel said in a grim tone. “Fagin may be trying to activate her, although that would be even more stupid than a human trying to do it, she’s so dangerous to Demons. More likely he’s trying to bury her entirely, to prevent her from being a danger, to prevent the piercing of the veil. At least until such time as he can bring the Pinians to the table and control her.”

  “Because there’s no benefit for the Demons if the human race is wiped out,” Ariel said, thinking about what Gabriel had already told them.

  “Right.”

  “Where’s the Mercy 1 probe now?” Ash asked.

  “Well, here’s the thing,” Gabriel replied, picking up the tablet and folding it back to pocket-size. “Mercy wasn’t even looking for this. He knew the Destarion was out there, because
Demons can travel that far. He just hasn’t, because the Destarion would kill him. No, this fly-by was just by way of confirmation, and a test.”

  “To see if she’d kill a human satellite.”

  “More or less.”

  Ariel stood up, deciding to get a drink for herself since Jarvis was too fascinated by the conversation to do his job either as a host or as a butler. He’d left the vodka and mixers out on the kitchen counter, so she poured herself a strong dose and returned to the drawing room.

  “So let me see if I’ve understood this correctly,” she said, sitting back down. “Let me tell it.”

  “This ought to be good,” Gabriel said.

  ARIEL TELLS IT

  Once upon a time, humans behaved themselves because religion was for real. Their God was a smite-happy God known for antics right out of the best parts of the scriptures, and had three immortal lieutenants walking around with the power of Water, Fire-and-Ice, and Earth to throw at the unbelievers whenever necessary. The Pinian Disciples.

  There were also Angels keeping things working, and Demons to act as a sort of balancing force even though God’s worlds were pretty much sovereign and the Demons’ leadership lived elsewhere. The Demons were low-key representatives of God’s opposite number. Not precisely important in the grand scheme of things, but when the scheme suddenly reduces in size, everything turns out to be relative.

  The main thing about the Demons is that they’re on Earth, and Angels can’t touch them because Demons and Angels dissolve each other somehow. Demons can teleport, at least for a while before that dissolves them.

  There are also Vampires, or Imago at least. Vampires are the dumb animal ones, Imago are the smart ones. They’re not apparently a big deal.

  Sometime around 0 AD, Earth is exiled from the rest of the universe. This is the work of God’s superiors, the Infinites, for some unknown reason probably related to punishing God and the Pinians for some transgression or other. A veil of some sort is thrown over the world, and the world is broken up into a solar system to help it remain sustainable, more or less, without outside help.