by Gavin Smith
‘What are they?’ he asked eventually, lowering the rifle. They didn’t seem any threat, and although he fancied killing something that he’d never killed before, particularly the crystalline things that made his head hurt, there were too many unknowns.
The Monk shrugged. ‘We don’t know. Aliens maybe. Real ones, not just uplifted animals like you and me. Maybe they’re technology or weapons or ghosts. Maybe just some Red-Space-imprinted manifestation of what we have up here,’ she said, tapping her head. ‘Maybe we should think better thoughts?’
Scab stared at her, trying to decide if she was making fun of him or not. He had not found her answer particularly satisfying.
It wasn’t enough. It hurt, it hurt so much. He imagined that every one of his cells was undergoing the white-light pain of a nuclear birth. There was no him, only agony. Suddenly he felt a connection. Something out of sight. Something appalling. For the first time he felt kinship, a connection, an empathy. He was a messenger, a herald, a harbinger.
The armour’s integrity had held. Much of the energy had been sent elsewhere, a light show bleeding out into empty space. His shields were down, but he was being fed the energy to rebuild them.
It happened in moments – Elite Scab rebuilt himself – but moments were a long time for people like them. They must have assumed he’d been destroyed. Which meant for moments they weren’t aware of him. Had he gone somewhere else? The contact had made him feel dirty. It made him feel alive and wish for death. He wondered if this was what having a purpose felt like.
He hit the atmosphere like a comet. There was flame to the horizon. He bathed in energy-weapons fire from a surprised orbital defence network. He rose into space, looking like he was made from a vast spectrum of light, a humanoid prism. Space felt cool to him.
He heard Horrible Angel screaming. It was an infrasound weapon for mortals in an atmosphere. Here it was a special effect. He liked it. It was suitably dramatic. The electronic warfare attacks were a disappointment, a silent duel, a distraction beneath them. They did, however, mean that for the first time he became fully aware of Fallen Angel’s presence. He was manipulating the forces of higher-dimensional physics in an attempt to cut off the complex entanglement effect. The amount of energy they were using must have been putting an enormous strain on the carrier signal from the primordial black hole network. Scab fought back. A conceptual sword-and-shield battle fought through other dimensions. It was science that only the ancients who had developed the technology understood. Fortunately their technology had been user-friendly.
Horrible Angel flew at him, cycling rapidly through her weapon’s various flavours of attack. Focused particle beam, DNA hack beam, ghost bullets fed to her through the entanglement effect from vast magazines in the Monarchist’s Citadel. Fired at a cyclic rate far in excess of anything a mechanical device could manage, the intangible bullets sought his flesh. They wanted to become tangible inside him. Elite Scab flickered through the frequencies of his coherent energy shields unimaginably fast to stop the bullets, as each one was keyed to a different vibration. He changed physical state at the same time, drawing on vast amounts of energy to do so, always trying to be in a different state from the bullet that was passing through where his body should be.
He knew something now. He sent a command back through the entanglement link. He knew that in the Citadel alarms would sound as his override code gave him access to a weapon that required full board permission to use. There would be a silent panic as those who supposedly could make that decision neunonically sought to stop his override signal. It had never been used. It was a massive escalation that if used they could never walk away from. Fuck them, Scab thought. He could see his death from here. This would be his goodbye.
Circling around distant suns, networks of orbiting crucibles made of ancient alien technology came alive and drank their respective suns. He became the triangulation point for the energy of three suns sucked dry in an instant.
He saw her wings. She was beautiful, her armour made her look like she was encased in living obsidian. He would miss her scream. The rifle-shaped weapon in his hands was a focus point. Nothing more. He fired. For a moment her flesh became an event horizon.
She was staring at the cocoon. Had been for a while. Scab studied her. She was soon to be a victim but despite himself Scab was starting to find her intriguing. Suddenly it occurred to him that this was important to her, personally. This almost automatically meant that Scab would struggle to understand the reasoning. He understood wants but only really in terms of the id. This was something else. It clearly wasn’t just a job to the Monk.
‘Does monopoly mean that much to you?’ Scab asked.
‘Any degree of control is a possibly misguided attempt to stop the uplifted races from tearing themselves apart,’ she told him distractedly. It was obviously something that she’d heard before.
‘Fuck it. Let them.’
The Monk sighed and looked up at him.
‘What a wonderfully constructed facade of nihilistic luxury,’ she said. For some reason Scab thought she sounded a little uncomfortable with the words.
‘Huh?’ he asked.
‘You have neunonics. Don’t pretend that you didn’t understand what I said.’
‘I know what the words mean. I’m just not sure of their relevance.’
‘There’s too much beauty and wonder in Known Space for there not to be people there to bear witness.’
Scab nearly laughed in her face.
‘Leaving aside that nobody cares enough to stop and look beyond whatever their next personal fix is, that’s just narcissism. Stop trying to convince yourself you matter. It’ll be there long after we’re gone.’
‘We’re not so sure.’
Scab stared at her hard. She wouldn’t meet his look. That hadn’t seemed quite such a calculated thing to say, unless she was getting better at faking it. It was also clear that short of killing her and interrogating her neunonics, he wasn’t going to get any more. He didn’t want to kill her, yet. He wanted to see her way out, because he certainly didn’t have one. They lapsed into silence again.
‘What is this?’ Scab finally asked, tapping the cocoon. She looked up at him. Suddenly she was guarded. It was like watching someone slam a polarised visor down.
‘It’s what you think it is. Money, power, chaos.’
‘What’s it to you?’ he said evenly.
‘The fall of the Church.’
‘No, really.’ The Monk did not answer. ‘I know that Church neunonics are good and that you’ll have a time bomb in there to wipe them when you die, but we . . . I’ve been pretty well resourced for this. I wonder if it’ll still be there when I interrogate your corpse’s neunonics. The answer, I mean.’
‘And if I told you it didn’t matter, or rather it wouldn’t matter to you or anyone else involved?’
‘Then I’d say you’d have no reason not to tell me.’
Scab hadn’t been expecting the smile.
‘You’re right.’ But she said nothing more, to Scab’s slight irritation.
Then behind them the red sky went black. The planet shook and everything around them came apart, a silent explosion of ash.
It was a slow bullet, a magic bullet that killed him. Fallen Angel had fired it seconds ago, a ghost bullet on a discrete carrier wave. He’d not so much fired at Elite Scab as seeded space with them. Each bullet fired at his weapon’s impossibly fast cyclic rate was a mixture of Land S-tech. The bullets carried a payload of high-end nanites and virals designed, at great expense, with one purpose in mind: kill the other guy’s Elite.
Fallen Angel had linked his weapon’s aiming system to a chaos fact/probability targeting routine. The bullets travelled through vectors where Elite Scab could be. The bullet hadn’t hit Elite Scab. He’d moved into its path. It was fate’s bullet. It was the inevitable bullet.
There was literally no room for tear ducts in the redesigned physiology of an Elite. When he got back to the Citadel he would
try and weep for Horrible Angel. He knew that the black exotic matter would leak out of him like black tears only to be absorbed back in through his pale skin. There was, of course, less than no body. Her armour was gone as well. They were down one Elite.
Elite Scab had a body, though. Fallen Angel moved gracefully through the debris, heading for Elite Scab’s corpse as his own systems came back online. Even though his systems were hardened with ancient alien technology, they had still been knocked out. His wings expanded out of his back again.
The planet below was dead now. It looked like an apple someone had taken a bite out of. Some of the orbital platforms and ships on the other side of the planet might have survived. He couldn’t hear them yet. They were probably desperately trying to get their systems online as the dead planet pulled them down towards its surface. He couldn’t hear the Absolute either. He hoped it was dead. It had repelled him. It had not been a worthy master for them. It had turned an entire planet into a form of masturbation.
He found him. Elite Scab hung there in space. His armour looked undamaged. Soon his coffin would form around him. Fallen Angel would try and stop it, capture the tech, but it would be for nothing. The coffin would open a bridge at the beacon and start its autopilot funeral procession through Red Space back to the Consortium Citadel.
Hate and wishful thinking conflicted within Fallen Angel. All he could have asked for was a body to mourn. Like him, she hadn’t backed herself up. It was a cheat for light that burned as brightly as they had. And hate. He could never kill Scab enough.
They had felt the force of whatever had happened as it passed through them. It was a sensation rather than something real, an echo with only slightly more physical presence than a hologram, and now they were floating up through a blizzard of ash. Through the gentle blizzard Scab could make out the expression of worry on the Monk’s face.
‘Did your diversion just destroy a planet?’ she demanded.
It seemed unlikely, Scab thought, even for an Elite. On the other hand, there was nothing but ash now.
‘Why do you look so worried?’ he asked.
‘What, the apparent destruction of a planet and the death of billions is not a sufficient cause for worry?’ she demanded. It occurred to her that human emotions couldn’t handle this sort of atrocity as anything more than an abstract. At least that was what she told herself, because she couldn’t deal with the thought that she’d had a part to play in this crime. Scab shrugged. ‘Red Space navigation isn’t a precise science, well, at least not without a nav comp. Landmarks would have helped,’ she finally told him.
‘Maybe if you tell me what you’re looking for?’
The Monk ’faced a command from her neunonics to stop the cocoon’s rise. Scab could see it now through the gentle ash storm. The St Brendan’s Fire was perfectly still in the black blizzard. His neunonics showed multiple weapons locks.
‘Going to kill me with a blade now?’ the Monk asked.
‘Shit,’ Scab said.
29
Southern Britain, a Long Time Ago
‘It can’t be done,’ Morfudd said. Britha had to admit that she was probably right. They didn’t have nearly enough people. They would need ships and they had no way to kill giants.
‘We have to try,’ Fachtna said grimly, but Britha could see that he did not hold out much hope. To have come this far, she thought helplessly.
‘We are all going to die,’ Teardrop said, matter of fact. ‘Come to terms with that.’
‘For nothing?’ Morfudd asked.
‘Stay here if you want,’ Fachtna said.
Tangwen was leading the way. Behind them, riders crested the hill. They were Corpse People. The horses they rode were large and well built, their coats white in colour, their mouths and lower legs red – steeds from the Otherworld.
Ahead between the two islands they could see the massive wicker man rising from the waters, though Britha knew it was not made of wicker. Despite being several miles away she could make out its iron and wood framework. Above the line of the water its legs were filled with what looked like firewood. Its torso had different levels, each containing people. Her eyesight was now good enough to make out the arms of the frightened people inside the structure. After having the little crystal seeds pushed into their skulls they might have been docile enough, but now the seeds’ magics seemed to have worn off. What was worse was that somehow she could feel their fear. It was like a background noise to her thoughts. Worse still, she knew that there was something in those waters, something that called to her. She wanted nothing more than to wade in and let the dark waters cover her. She knew they would not be cold, somehow.
Teardrop came to stand next to her.
‘They hope this will bring their god? This Llwglyd Diddymder?’ she asked.
‘What we call the Muileartach and what the Atrebates worship as an aspect of Andraste is the last goddess who has not been corrupted by the sky gods. They will use the pain and fear of the sacrifice to drive her mad.’
‘How?’
‘She would feel it anyway. The goddess is not unkind, but the crystal seeds you saw in your dream are magics that will carry the suffering directly to her. Already what is happening will be affecting the goddess’s servants.’
To Britha this seemed like cruelty for the sake of cruelty. Like those warriors who enjoyed hurting people more than victory, like the mormaers who abused their position. It was not the way to act, and it was the job of those with responsibility, the dryw, the cateran, to stop such things. As she watched the black curraghs around the wicker man and the giants wading in waist-high water close to the shores, she wondered how they could take all this on with only fifty warriors.
‘This.’ She nodded at the wicker man. ‘This is the man that Crom Dhubh must kill as the Serpent Father said?’ Teardrop nodded. It was foolish and weak to worship the gods, she knew, but she found herself feeling sympathy for the Muileartach. ‘Why do this to her?’ They were talking in the language of the Pecht, so Morfudd would not understand and realise that she was not the daughter of Andraste, though the warrior was watching them suspiciously.
‘Because they are low men,’ Teardrop said. Was there a hint of anger in his voice? ‘And because as a goddess, the one we call the Muileartach has magics far more powerful than anything you or I could imagine. She can open the way for this Llwglyd Diddymder.’
‘That name was not taught in the groves,’ Britha told him.
‘I do not know of it either.’
‘It is not a good name.’
‘Agreed.’
Tangwen came running back, keeping low.
‘I have found a causeway onto the island and hopefully through the marsh.’ The east side of the western island looked boggy.
They could hear the sound of hoof beats behind them. Britha glanced over her shoulder. The Corpse People had made their way down and were now galloping towards them but were still some distance away.
Tangwen turned and headed off. Britha went to follow. Morfudd stayed still and her people did likewise.
‘This is a poor place to fight warriors on horseback,’ Teardrop told her. ‘On the causeway they can only come at you a few abreast.’
‘Though if you run you may live longer as a craven,’ Britha said impatiently. She was sick of having to coax them every step of the way. Morfudd stared at her. Britha realised then that the other woman hated her and would quite like to kill her.
‘Your people are dead; your rhi is dead,’ Fachtna said grimly. ‘All any of us have left is to sell our lives dearly to the monsters that did this.’
Morfudd turned to Fachtna. The warrior had been getting steadily grimmer. The choices they had made, the sacrifices, Britha’s killing of the boy and the changes in Teardrop had all taken their toll. The swaggering bravado was gone.
Finally Morfudd nodded and they all made their way down onto the causeway.
‘I think they know we are here,’ Tangwen said nervously.
‘I don�
��t think those that matter care,’ Britha told her. The hunter had been scouting ahead. She had now decided to stay closer to the main group.
They had crossed the causeway to the east side of the western island and were now following it past channels of water and reed-choked islands of viscous mud. It smelled of low tide and decay. The shore of the eastern island was hundreds of feet away but they could still make out the bodies tied to poles. They were above the waterline now, but at high tide the poles would be partially submerged. Each of the corpses tied to the poles was a red ruin below the waist. They had also had their faces cut off. Gulls picked at the cadavers.
All along the shore of the eastern island the mad had come to jeer and scream at them. Clad in rags or naked, many of them bearing self-inflicted wounds, they looked wretched. Britha didn’t like it and it was clear they were making the Cigfran Teulu nervous. They spat and made signs to protect themselves from evil. They saw their future on those poles.
Standing among the army of the wretched were what Britha guessed were their dryw. They wore soiled robes that might have once been white. Leaning on grisly decorated staffs, each of them wore a flayed skin mask of someone’s face over their own features. If once they had cared for the unwanted, moonstruck or other unfortunates, then that time was long gone.
Some of the mad ran across the mud, threw themselves into what was now quite a small channel between the two islands and swam towards them. Some of the warriors readied their casting spears.
‘Save your spears!’ Fachtna’s voice rang out over the mud. The authority in it had them hesitating. Fachtna was at the front of the column with Britha, Tangwen and Teardrop. Morfudd was at the rear because that was where they were expecting to be attacked first. Morfudd glared at Fachtna, who cursed himself. The Cigfran Teulu glanced at Morfudd. She motioned them to lower their spears.
‘Horsemen!’ Morfudd’s voice carried to the front of the column. Britha, Tangwen, Teardrop and Fachtna turned to look. Sure enough, Corpse People on horseback were approaching three abreast along the causeway.
