‘I’m not going to lea—’
Du Bois turned to her. ‘Alexia, please. I can’t fight and worry about you as well,’ he pleaded. The form was beginning to look like the bag lady they had seen at the hill fort.
‘It’s her, isn’t it?’
‘Go! Please.’
Reluctantly, Alexia left the stage. Du Bois moved towards the bag lady, the .45 held securely in a two-handed combat grip. She was a nano-form now, though he doubted she understood it in those terms. She probably thought she was some ancient thing of the earth.
‘So you’re not going to leave it alone then?’ she asked, her voice a gravelly rasp.
‘I can’t. Not until I hear a better plan.’
‘Stop trying to find the girl. Her mother is the sea. They tried to wake her once before and left only old night and chaos in their wake.’
Du Bois had no idea what she was talking about.
‘Are you here to kill…’ He began and then fired the pistol three times in quick succession, hoping to catch her off guard. His internal targeting systems showed him where each bullet was going to hit. Centre-mass, nearly perfect shots. She darted forward, turning into an animated cloud of black. Solid again, she lashed out with her stick even as it was elongating and starting to resemble something more like a spear. The .45 flew from numb fingers as the spear butt caught his hand. She brought the butt around again in a long but frighteningly fast sweep. Du Bois felt bones break in his leg as he was swept off his feet. It was more like the ground rushing up to hit him than him falling to the ground.
‘A gun!’ She was angry now. Fingers tearing through his flesh, even as it hardened. Fingers grasping ribs, rupturing internal organs. Happening too quickly. He felt himself picked up by his ribcage and flung through the air. The moment she let go, flesh started growing back, bones began to re-knit. He crashed through a window, thudding onto the wooden boards of the pier outside the venue.
She was a cloud again. Fortunately du Bois had the presence of mind to roll away as she solidified over him. She brought the spear down, breaking the railway-sleeper-thick beams of the pier’s walkway.
Du Bois rolled to his feet, the bones in his leg re-knitting just enough to support his weight again. He grabbed the punch dagger from his belt buckle and transmitted a desperate instruction to the assembler contained in its hilt.
The bag lady stalked after him and thrust out with the spear. Du Bois rammed the punch blade into some iron railings and jumped, grabbed one of the lamp posts on the edge of the pier and swung out over the water. The lamp post was bending dangerously, close to breaking. The spearhead just missed as she stabbed at where his back had been. He swung back round to the pier and let go, catching the bag lady with a kick to the head that sent her staggering back. She recovered quickly and delivered a stepping kick that drove him to the floor, then stabbed the spear down towards him. Du Bois rolled out of the way, using the momentum to bring him up into a crouch. The beams beneath where he had been exploded as the spear went through them.
Du Bois leaped as she swung one-handed at him with the spear, powerful augmented legs taking him high over her head. He knew that he needed to keep out of her reach until he had a weapon.
All along the pier the lights on the lamp posts flickered out. In the amusement arcade the fruit machines died. The surrounding streets and houses went dark. Lightning played across the white-painted iron railings of the pier. The assembler in the hilt of the punch blade was rewriting the surrounding matter at a molecular level, using a pre-programmed template to create something useful. It needed power to do that, and the weapon it was creating would need power as well.
Du Bois landed and twisted like a serpent, the head of the spear just missing him. He rolled forward and then back up onto his feet, sprinting for the wooden wall of a building. She chased. He jumped, put a foot against the wall and then kicked back into a somersault over the bag lady’s head. She stabbed out with the spear again, the head splintering panels in the wall. She raked it back, tearing through the wall like it was paper, trying to get at du Bois, but he was running back to where he had left his knife.
Du Bois tore the new form free of the railing, leaving a large hole where the assembler had utilised and subsequently transformed the surrounding molecules. When du Bois thought about such things, which was rarely, he considered it some kind of alien alchemy. The process hadn’t quite finished, but what he was holding looked like a broadsword of the type he had first used in the twelfth century. Except that it was shimmering, indistinct and making a humming noise. The blade was a millimetre thick, very sharp, very hard, oscillating at a furious rate and white hot. A super-efficient, solid-state battery, which had just drained half the power from Southsea, powered the sword.
Du Bois turned to face the bag lady, who immediately became a swarm and engulfed him. He felt his flesh open everywhere. She painted him red as he screamed. He felt like little more than meat as he hit the ground again. These were wounds that his internal systems would not heal quickly. The nanites that made them would war with his as they tried to fix the wound. It was over. He could not fight this. He was wondering why she was bothering with the spear.
She reformed a few metres away. Looking down at him.
‘I think you would have made the right decision given time, but there isn’t any. I think you’re just too weak.’
Du Bois pushed himself up onto all fours and then to his feet. He looked like he had been scribbled on with a razor.
‘If you’re going to do that,’ he managed, ‘then you can’t complain about me using a gun.’ He started shutting down his pain receivers. It would mean he would not know his limits. He would probably be dead before he was aware of it, but he knew he had to die on his feet fighting.
‘A fair fight?’ she asked. He nodded, though both knew it would never be fair. ‘A good death.’
‘I’ve lived long enough,’ he said quietly. Du Bois knew that she would hack the cloning process and he would not be coming back. He knew he would miss this world and the people in it. He would miss Alexia.
He brought the sword up into a two-handed guard. She came at him with a bewildering number of rapid spear strikes: she swung and stabbed at him, two-handed strikes, one-handed thrusts, the spear moving towards him as if it wanted his flesh. He parried and dodged, moving sinuously, always trying to be where she least expected him to be. Ancient moves taught to him deep in the rock. He moved around the spear and her blows but never gained the upper hand. His sword and her spear cut through or destroyed any part of the pier they touched.
He ducked, dancing sideways under the spearhead, a blow meant for the side of his head just missing him. She reversed the movement of the spear and tried a back swing. Du Bois moved forward, for the first time in the fight on the offensive. He blocked the haft of the spear with his left hand, reaching across his body. The force of the blow broke every bone in his hand, but he did not feel it and the bones quickly started to heal again.
He was close enough now, inside her reach. He spat blood in her face. The nanites in the blood immediately attacked her nano-defences. She cried out, although even momentarily distracted she still had the presence of mind to reverse the spear and hit him in the stomach with the butt. She hit him so hard that the blunt force trauma burst the skin and broke three of his ribs, sending splinters of bone into his internal organs. The force of the blow took him off his feet, and he landed on one knee.
Du Bois swung the sword. It was as near a perfect blow as he had ever landed. He cut easily through the haft of the wooden-bladed spear to slice her open from her hip, up her torso and across her face. Then he stood up, reversed his grip, and with all the strength he could muster brought the sword down straight through her, practically bisecting her head and torso. She staggered back. Somehow she didn’t split in two. In the horrific wound all du Bois could see was blackness. The wound started to seal itself like a zip.
He smiled.
‘I win,’ he told her a
nd then lowered the shimmering, humming sword to his side. His phone told him that he had just received a text.
The bag lady spun the two halves of the spear around and jammed them together. The spear immediately healed itself. Then she stalked towards him and stabbed the spear into his foot. He felt the spear blade branch out and start growing up through his flesh, breaking out of and then back through his skin, climbing inexorably towards his heart, lungs and finally his brain to kill him.
Behind them, the wooden building they had wrecked collapsed.
The five distinct reports rolled across the water like thunder. The bag lady was solid when the bullets hit. The nanites infected her nano-form as powerful defences tried to track down each little machine and consume it.
‘Die, you fucking bitch! Die!’ There was more anger there than fear. Alexia attacked with more frenzy than skill with the two long-bladed Japanese fighting knives du Bois had had custom-made for her a long time ago. The weapons were balanced to contain tiny reservoirs in the hilt, the nanites delivered via grooves down the folded steel blades. The nanite virus that had cost Alexia a small fortune to obtain, helped the bullets to overwhelm the bag lady’s defences. It didn’t look like she died so much as turned to smoke.
As the roots retracted from du Bois’s leg, he collapsed to the ground. Alexia dropped her knives and ran across to him.
‘Thank you,’ he managed through a mouthful of blood, as she burst into tears.
Part of the pier collapsed into the sea. Alexia and du Bois were on that part. Alexia had to pull him out of the water. He found himself lying on the pebbled beach looking at the night sky, his view spoilt by the constant blue strobing from the lights of the multitude of emergency vehicles that had turned up.
There had been a heated discussion with paramedics. Du Bois could not afford to have them examine his body. In the end he’d had to show his special-forces warrant card to some high-ranking police officers and have them threaten to arrest the paramedics if they didn’t leave him alone. All the while, Alexia had fiercely stood guard over her brother.
Du Bois lit a cigarette. He’d managed to get a packet from one of the police officers. He reckoned he’d got the cigarettes because they thought he was about to die. Instead he was lying on the pebbles wondering how long it would take for his internal systems to repair themselves.
He pulled out his phone.
‘You know you can do that internally, with your systems? The phone’s just an external security filter and storage device,’ Alexia told him.
‘I got a text during the fight, but the phone’s systems quarantined it and didn’t pass it on.’
‘Someone was trying to hack you?’ Alexia asked and sat down next to him.
‘It’s from her,’ du Bois said, sounding confused. It had been sent moments before the bag lady had died.
The bag lady’s jamming during the fight had confused du Bois’s blood-screen but even through the jamming he had been aware of Alexia. The bag lady’s systems were more sophisticated than his; she too must have been aware of Alexia sneaking up on her with his gun.
Du Bois ran a security diagnostic on the quarantined message. There was nothing there as far as he could see. More to the point, the file was tiny. He opened the message.
‘I hope a good death is enough,’ Alexia read. ‘I don’t deserve a good death. I am a coward. I am too connected to leave. No, that is a lie. I am too frightened to leave and I do not want to become a ghost frozen in brass. There are so few of us left now. You must do the right thing. I have faith in you.’ Alexia stared at the screen and then at du Bois. The message was signed with an unfamiliar name.
‘Do you suppose that’s her real name?’ he wondered.
‘Couldn’t she just have committed suicide?’
‘She had to die in battle. She was a lot older than us.’
He took another drag on the cigarette. It was a long time since he had been this badly hurt, perhaps even back when he was just a normal human. He noticed one of the pay-as-you go phones he had been checking was switched on and his mobile had automatically called it.
He heard a ringing from behind him. Coincidence, surely. He craned his neck. Every movement hurt. Further up the beach he saw a figure he vaguely recognised. Du Bois magnified his vision, and DC Mossa, the detective who had first told him about Natalie, came into sharp focus. She was frowning as she looked at a ringing mobile. She pressed and held down a button. The ringing stopped and du Bois saw that the phone he had been calling had just been switched off.
‘Have you still got my pistol?’ he asked. Alexia handed him the .45. Water dribbled out of the barrel. He would have to strip it down and clean everything later. He dried it as best he could on the coat a paramedic had lent him and stood up, shrugging off the coat. He limped towards Mossa.
‘Malcolm?’ Alexia got up to follow him. Mossa looked up as he approached.
‘You look like shit.’ she said. Then she noticed the gun in his hand.
‘What’s… What the fuck?!’ Du Bois pointed the gun at her. Mossa had been loud enough to draw attention to herself. People saw the gun and came running. There were firearms officers present. They knew Mossa. They didn’t know du Bois, who found himself with MP5 sub-machine guns levelled at him. After the beating he’d just taken, they didn’t seem all that frightening.
‘I don’t care,’ he told her earnestly. ‘I just want a name, and it won’t get taken any further. You don’t give me a name and I’ll blow your head all over the beach.’ After all, she didn’t know that the gun was empty.
There was lots of shouting. Du Bois frowned. He wanted to hear what Mossa had to say.
‘It was you on the phone?’ she asked. He nodded. She looked at the gun and saw the resolve in du Bois’s face.
‘When I phoned in to re-task the police working the roadblock to help me raid the dog stadium, someone made a call from Kingston Crescent on your phone to another pay-as-you-go in the Tipner area, as close to the old dog stadium as triangulation could make out. You tipped someone off. I want to know who. Tell me and I’ll make sure that you don’t get prosecuted and you get to retire on full pension. Don’t tell me, and I blow your head off and find out anyway.’
There was more shouting. The only reason du Bois hadn’t been shot was that some of the senior officers on the scene thought they knew what he was.
‘McGurk,’ Mossa finally said. It was obvious from the reaction of some of the officers around them that what she had said made her dirty. Guns were lowered. Du Bois’s .45 wasn’t.
‘Where can I find him?’
25. A Long Time After the Loss
Even with the window polarised, the light pollution spilling into the large sparsely furnished marble office turned the two figures into shadows, like the negative of an old photograph.
‘You know what you are asking me?’ the Elite demanded.
‘I’m not asking you,’ the tall figure behind the desk said.
‘Because my copy demands it?’
‘No, because slavery is the price of great power.’
The Elite turned and walked to the window looking out into brightly-lit orbital space. Inter-starscraper vehicles looked like tiny black bugs lost in the sea of light.
‘This is a waste,’ the Elite said, and then sought his way through the glass. There was pain. His master was well defended.
A grotesque, an outlander, reaching for her, the needle in his hand, and she knew he was going to wipe her. Kill all her achievements in the Game, make the Absolute lose interest, deny her communion. Why was she helpless? She had her bone knife, a discreet thorn pistol, her body was laced with elegant and deadly virals; but the needle got closer until it filled her vision.
‘Zabilla?’ Dracup said gently. Her eyes flickered open. Internal narcotics dealt quickly and efficiently with the rising panic. Dracup was gazing down at her, but there was some vestige of paranoia from the dream that had her mistrusting how he looked at her. Beneath the concern, she thoug
ht she saw something new – towards her, anyway. A callousness. She bit back the anger. He was a fool if he was growing tired of her now while she was so close to such a major triumph in the Game.
More worrying was that the Absolute could not have failed to monitor the dream now that she was so important to the research into the cocoon. She wondered if the dream was a warning, the price of failure. Then she wondered if such thoughts were treasonous, if for no other reason than not being entertaining enough. Besides, she could not imagine that the punishment for failure would be so mundane, so private and over so quickly. She would surely become a public spectacle, entertainment, and the most galling thing would be that all those she had beaten to get where she was today would be there to enjoy her fall.
The fear was gone now, thanks to the drugs, and had been replaced with irritation.
‘A dream, nothing more,’ she told Dracup as she got up. She missed her old apartment. A not unattractive sculpted root structure made up two walls of their well-appointed apartment in the bunker down among the roots, but it could not make up for the loss of the view. She could not see the other atmosphere-piercing arcology trees. There was not that green quality to the light as the sun shone down through the translucent leaf canopy above, nor the bioluminescent glow at night. There was little of the Game to amuse her, just research. Down below the black leaves, she might as well have been one of the morlocks who served her. She got up and made her way towards the shower nook. The roots shifted, opening at her approach.
‘Be careful that your subconscious does not betray you,’ Dracup said.
Zabilla spun to face him. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
He was immediately conciliatory. ‘Just that we are being monitored closely…’
‘Do you not think I know that?’ Why are you saying this out loud? she left unspoken.
The Age of Scorpio Page 46
