The Beauty of Destruction

by Gavin G. Smith

  ‘La Calavera double-crossed them?’ Beth asked. Du Bois nodded.

  ‘Why pay for it when you can get it for free, and he’s insane. He doesn’t care about the consequences.’

  ‘So he’s working for the DAYP?’ Alexia asked. ‘But then why send you to the scene of the crime?’

  ‘Because he wanted time,’ du Bois said.

  ‘But he does want a confrontation,’ Grace said. ‘A challenge.’

  Du Bois noticed Beth looking between the two of them.

  ‘That doesn’t make sense either,’ Alexia said. ‘Why would the DAYP want to blow up Mr Brown? What would they gain?’

  ‘I don’t think they do,’ Grace said. ‘But everybody has nothing to lose at the moment.’

  Du Bois was nodding in agreement. ‘They’ll use it as a bargaining chip to make Mr Brown deal with them, rather than turning them inside-out and taking what he wants anyway,’ he added.

  ‘Do you know where he’s going?’ Beth asked Grace.

  ‘No, only that he’s here to meet with someone.’

  ‘Where is he now?’ Alexia asked.

  ‘I don’t know. Karma took out our spaceplane. We took the Osprey and came after you. We dropped Mr Brown and the Pennangalan some place in Bel Air. Looked like there was a car waiting for them.’

  ‘How’d you find us?’ Beth asked, narrowing her eyes. ‘And why does Mr Brown care? We’ve got to be nothing more than an irritation to him now.’

  ‘He didn’t,’ du Bois said.

  ‘I did,’ Grace said. ‘We tracked you with our own satellites.’

  ‘Keep all the really dangerous people fighting each other,’ du Bois said.

  ‘Which I’m guessing was the whole point,’ Grace said quietly.

  ‘What did he do to Karma?’ Beth asked. ‘It’s like he rearranged his body with a thought. I liked him.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Grace said. ‘I’ve never seen anything like that before. It’s got to be some application of the tech.’ She looked at du Bois but he just shook his head.

  ‘Something’s been bothering me,’ Alexia said.

  ‘Just the one thing?’ Beth asked.

  Alexia pointed up at the Osprey. ‘Who’s flying that?’

  30

  A Long time After the Loss

  Scab had wanted to see this confrontation between the two sisters. Vic had a big power-assisted claw on the Monk’s shoulder. Talia was holding her bleeding, obviously broken nose.

  ‘You didn’t have to hit me!’ the girl wailed. Scab was aware of how much shriller his life had become ever since they had found Talia. It was why he preferred the ghost. Why couldn’t she be more like the ghost?

  ‘I’m sorry. It was a reaction. You attacked me,’ the Monk told her sister as she shrugged Vic’s hand away. Scab knew this was a lie. The Monk had wanted to hurt Talia. He suspected she had felt this way since long before the Loss. He could understand why. Talia was very annoying, but it was more than that. Sometimes beauty was difficult to be around, and sometimes beauty hid spite.

  ‘Let me see it,’ Vic said, trying to pull Talia’s hands away from her bleeding nose. Talia angrily tried to slap him away but hurt herself on his hard-tech body. Scab sat down on one of the armchairs in the Basilisk II’s lounge/C&C, and lit a cigarette. The chair moulded itself into what should be the most comfortable configuration for him. It was comfortable but he didn’t like anything else making decisions for him.

  ‘What did you do?’ Talia demanded. Her voice had a nasal quality because of the broken nose.

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ the Monk said.

  ‘I saw the ghost!’ Talia shouted. Then she pointed at Scab. ‘The one he’s in love with!’

  Everyone turned to look at him for a moment. He didn’t like it, but he just took another drag on the cigarette.

  ‘I don’t know what Elodie told you,’ Vic said. ‘But she was trying to manipulate all of us. That’s not how Scab’s built.’

  I can love, Scab thought, but of course he could never say that.

  ‘The bridge drive is alive, isn’t it?’ Talia demanded.

  Now Vic turned to stare at the Monk. Scab cocked his head to one side and exhaled smoke through his nostrils. He thought about getting undressed. As he listened he was creating an unusually subtle, for him, search routine utilising some of the Pythian software they had bought previously.

  ‘You can’t …’ The Monk looked like her sister had actually managed to slap her, hard.

  ‘Can’t what?’ Talia spat. ‘I saw her. In the Drive. Looking back at me. Do you know who she looks like, Beth?’

  Vic was looking between the two sisters, utterly mystified. ‘Who?’ he asked.

  ‘The ghost looks like Talia,’ Scab said quietly. ‘I saw her for the first time after the Monks transferred the bridge drive from the St Brendan’s Fire to the Basilisk II.’

  ‘Fucking heretics,’ the Monk said, shaking her head.

  ‘Tell me, how many of the heresies were to do with self-determination for the bridge ghosts?’ Scab asked. The Church’s malice in this matter was as incidental as it was appalling, to someone else, that was, Scab thought. It did, however, prove that their sense of moral superiority was nothing more than rank hypocrisy.

  ‘Well, the heresy that was sheltering you fucking wasn’t!’ the Monk said angrily, but it was guilty anger. Talia was staring at her older sister, furious. The Monk sighed. ‘It’s not the bridge. The bridge drives were derived from S-Tech, biotech. The ability to navigate was hidden in Talia’s bloodline.’

  ‘But surely it’s your bloodline as well,’ Vic said.

  ‘They’re not real sisters,’ Scab said. The Monk turned to stare at him, but said nothing.

  ‘Beth’s parents kidnapped me when I was a baby,’ Talia said.

  ‘They didn’t kidnap you. You were given to them by your real mum,’ the Monk told her sister. ‘We don’t fully understand how the ships navigate in Red Space, it’s instinctive as far as we can tell, but the navigation system is a biological computer.’

  ‘Which apparently requires a consciousness,’ Scab added.

  ‘So they cloned slave Talia as hardware,’ Talia said, and then turned to Scab. ‘And you wanted me to see it.’

  ‘I felt you should,’ Scab said. People were always misunderstanding his intentions.

  ‘Well, thank you for sharing your wank-fodder with me. A silent, submissive Talia.’

  ‘She certainly whines less than you,’ Scab admitted. He had never wanted to kill Talia more. In fact he wasn’t sure why she was still here. Yes, she had piloted the ship, but both he and the Monk could do that. He couldn’t see a use for her. ‘We don’t have a use for her any more,’ he said out loud, pointing at Talia with the two fingers holding the smouldering cigarette.

  Vic actually stepped in front of the girl.

  The Monk sagged. ‘This again?’

  ‘Fuck you! I flew the ship!’ Talia spat, looking around the side of Vic’s massive, armoured, insectile form. ‘Despite your little head fuck!’

  Scab knew he was going to have to go or he would kill someone. He started to sink into the armchair and through the floor.

  ‘You flew like a pro. How did you manage that?’ Scab heard the Monk ask.

  ‘I pretended I was playing a computer game, and don’t change the fucking subject!’

  It hadn’t been as interesting as he had thought, Scab decided when he had sunk into the ship’s smart matter. He assumed the Church, and presumably by extension the Monk, had just rationalised it. It would be why the ghosts were silent, unseen most of the time. They would have told themselves it wasn’t happening. Made the consciousness into something else in their minds. It was how people who thought of themselves as ‘good’ worked. They weren’t really good. Just less self-aware. As far as he could tell, the idea of being a good person was just about looking down on others and making them feel like shit. His revelation meant there would just be more arguing. There w
as always more arguing. He missed it being just him and a submissive Vic. If his search didn’t come back with anything useful then he was going to have to come up with something else to do. If that happened he was going to kill everyone else on board.

  He thought about going to see her. Just to watch her. He knew that she was aware of him, but Talia seeing her had spoiled it somehow, soiled the experience. Instead he decided to see what was in the immersion construct that Churchman had uploaded to the Basilisk II for the Monk.

  The construct had been strange, almost frightening. It hadn’t made any sense to him, but then he had always found reality easier to cope with than fantasy.

  Now he was watching the Monk in her room, from inside the smart matter. She was getting undressed. He liked her body. It was spare and hard. There was no waste. She finished and stood in front of the bed, hands on her hips.

  ‘Scab? Come out. I know you’re watching.’

  Scab tried to decide what to do. He had few weapons left. Most of them had been eaten by the Templar’s nano-swarm. His robust tumbler pistol was being reconditioned by the Basilisk II’s assembler. He still had his metalforma knife and straight edge razor somewhere in the smart matter. He could still kill her if need be, but she was naked, as though showing herself to him. He pushed his face through the ceiling’s smart matter. She looked up at him.

  ‘Come down, please,’ she said. He wasn’t sure why, but he extruded himself through the roof and dropped on to the convincing-looking smart matter replica of wooden boards that made up the floor in the Monk’s room. They were warm. He wasn’t sure why he was naked either, and he was surprised to find he was holding the inert form of the scorpion in his hand.

  Where had that come from? He had given the remains to the Basilisk II’s assembler after the Innocent had destroyed it. He had known that the assembler could never fix it, make the weapon operational again, but it had put the shell back together. The Monk was looking down at it. Scab held it up for her to see.

  ‘It’s broken. Dead,’ he explained. ‘Given long enough, that’s what happens.’ She nodded. ‘You like … things?’ he asked. He offered it to her.

  ‘Scab, I can’t take that. It’s … I don’t know, it’s precious to you, isn’t it?’

  ‘It’s just a thing. It’s no use any more. You like useless things. Your sister …’

  She laughed. ‘Why do I get the feeling this is you trying to be nice?’ She took the scorpion from him. ‘Thank you. I do like useless things.’ He grabbed her by the throat. She just looked at him. ‘No,’ she finally said, and pulled his hand away from her throat. He wasn’t sure why he let her. She dropped the scorpion on her bed. Then she reached up and touched the side of his face. He couldn’t quite read her expression. ‘This is the last time anything like this ever happens.’ She moved in closer to him, their skin touching. Her nipples brushed over his chest. She kissed him, gently. He only had a moment to suppress the worst of the toxins in his saliva. Even then he was sure the kiss must have burned.

  Later, when they were lying together in bed, the Monk was looking at the scorpion. She had grown a table from the floor to put it on.

  ‘If it’s no longer of use, why did you reassemble it?’ she asked.

  ‘Don’t do that,’ he replied. ‘Don’t look for meaning.’ She rolled over to look at him. Despite the question he felt calm.

  ‘It’s a connection, isn’t it? Not something you care about exactly …’

  He started to climb out of bed. ‘This will only weaken me.’

  The Monk sat up. ‘This will never happen again,’ she told him, again. He wasn’t even angry that someone was making decisions for him. He wasn’t sure what he felt. For some reason he didn’t leave. He just sat on the edge of the bed. ‘We have to stop tearing at each other. All of us.’

  He looked back at her and then pulled the covers off her and looked at her body, then shook his head. What am I doing?

  ‘This is not what I’m here for,’ he said quietly.

  ‘Why the ghost?’ Beth asked.

  ‘Purity,’ he whispered the word. ‘I think I have to kill your sister.’

  ‘That’s just the romantic in you talking,’ Beth told him. Scab turned to look at the Monk but there was no mockery in her words. ‘People can’t live up to that. Nobody’s pure. Everybody compromises. Even you.’ A tiny wisp of smoke arose from the mock-wooden floorboards. He unclenched his hands and saw where filed nails had penetrated the skin of his palms and drawn toxic blood. ‘See, I think it’s the other way around. The ghost has made you want the flesh, but you can’t have the feelings, the connection to her. So you have to destroy.’

  He looked back at her. ‘So I settle for second best?’ he asked, and gestured towards her.

  The Monk laughed and put her hands behind her head. ‘So Scab’s back, then?’ He stood up.

  ‘Want to turn your insight on yourself?’ Scab asked.

  ‘I’ve no doubt I’ve done this for all sorts of shitty, fucked-up reasons. Or maybe it’s just because I wanted to have sex, and you’re the only non-insect on board. Or maybe I just wanted to ask you not to hurt my sister. Thinking about it, I’ve gone to great lengths to protect her in the past.’

  Scab looked down. ‘Asking is better,’ he said quietly.

  ‘Then can I ask you to stop tearing at us? Stop setting us against each other?’

  He shrugged. ‘I don’t know,’ he admitted. ‘You can ask.’

  ‘Your … Benedict, we can’t …’

  Scab held up a hand. ‘Stop,’ he said. She had been doing well but he knew she was about to tell him to do something. ‘I … feel things, intensely. People don’t think I do but I do, but only in connection to myself.’

  ‘That’s because you’re a psychopath,’ the Monk said. He suspected that she had worked hard to keep the tone neutral, to remove the sympathy in her voice that would have led to murder.

  ‘I am a virus. I have to stop the spread.’

  ‘We can’t just keep killing everyone. Even if Patron is practicing a scorched earth policy.’

  ‘Then I’m the useless one.’

  ‘You transmitted again,’ Beth said.

  ‘I’m being careful.’

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘I’m looking for the Ubh Blaosc.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘It’s not for you, or your sister, or that insipid fucking insect.’ The anger had come from nowhere. A red wave the colour of space sweeping over him.

  ‘The rage is starting to look a little impotent,’ the Monk said.

  Scab whipped round to stare at her. Shaking now. She held the look calmly.

  ‘Until one of you leaves me with no choice. I am here, now, because I am curious. In terms of motivation, it’s not much of one.’

  ‘Do you know why we like you? Talia and I, and I suspect many of the women you’ve been with in your life?’

  ‘Self loathing.’

  ‘Woman are attracted to you because you are a vulnerable little boy, and some of us, and maybe it is self esteem problems, never seem to quite grow out of wanting to look after boys like you. To mother them.’ His hands claws, he moved towards the bed. He wanted to taste the blood in her neck. ‘Don’t pretend. If you wanted to kill me you would have moved a lot faster. I’m not in any danger because you pride yourself on honesty. Even with yourself.’ He stopped. He found himself not wanting to think about what she had said. ‘You can’t be pure if they changed you with brain surgery. It doesn’t stop you from living a life.’ He just turned and walked to the door. ‘You could go through the wall, the ceiling, the floor, but you want her to know you’ve been with me, don’t you? You want her to hurt.’

  Scab turned back to the Monk. ‘So do you,’ he said quietly. The door opened and he walked out.

  The door closed behind Scab. ‘Only sometimes,’ she said quietly. ‘Fuck!’ Beth got out of bed and grabbed her robe hanging from the side of the small, narrow wardrobe. ‘Basil?’ The ship’s A
I, looking like Churchman, appeared. Absurdly she found herself feeling guilty. She suppressed her blush response and had the bed make itself with a thought.

  ‘Miss Luckwicke?’ the image of the ship’s AI, projecting itself into her neunonics, and through them to the visual centres of her brain, asked.

  ‘Could you say something judgemental but paternal to me about my behaviour?’ she asked. Basil smiled somewhat ruefully.

  ‘I’m afraid not, Miss Luckwicke, not without extensive reprogramming.’

  ‘Please don’t call me that, call me Beth,’ the Monk said irritably.

  ‘Are you sure that would help?’ the AI asked.

  ‘No, you’re right,’ she admitted. She wanted someone to judge her. She couldn’t work out what she had been thinking? What she had hoped to achieve? Orgasm? a voice inside her enquired, and she smiled. ‘Well, it certainly wasn’t a newfound sense of self control.’

  ‘Miss Luckwicke?’

  ‘Christ, you’re like a butler.’

  ‘I could change my response parameters if you wish.’

  ‘No, look, I’m sorry.’

  ‘Miss Luckwicke, if you’ll excuse me for saying I think you’re still grieving. There are a number of options available to you, pharmacological, neural editing, immersion counselling …’

  ‘No!’ Beth snapped. ‘I’m fine,’ she continued more softly.

  ‘Will you be co-habiting with Mr Scab?’ Basil enquired.

  ‘No! No, god no. That will never happen again. I’m sorry to have bothered you, please can you leave me alone?’

  The AI bowed. ‘Of course, though the other Miss Luckwicke is coming this way.’

  The Monk sagged. ‘Let her in.’ Basil disappeared and the door opened just as Talia reached it. The Monk went and sat on the bed and hugged her legs to her chest.

  ‘If you’ve come to have another screaming match then I’m afraid you won’t find much in the way of opposition.’

  ‘I don’t care about you and Scab,’ Talia said. It was obviously a lie. What the Monk suspected she meant was that she couldn’t understand why Scab had chosen Beth over her sister, which would, of course, make Talia feel jealous and shitty. Of course the Monk knew the truth, that Scab in fact preferred some perfect, idolised, unobtainable version of her sister, which made Beth feel shitty and jealous.