The Beauty of Destruction

by Gavin G. Smith

  ‘He has,’ Vic said. ‘Got me killed, though, by a fucking Elite no less.’

  ‘Ludwig?’ the Monk asked. Vic nodded.

  ‘But you had the godsware,’ Vic said to Scab.

  ‘The Marduk implant?’ the Monk asked. Scab nodded. ‘Still got it?’ Scab didn’t say anything. ‘Look, I know this is a shitty situation. I know we can’t trust Pallas, and believe me I know that better than anyone, but as far as we can tell he’s on the level.’ Pallas was the Blue Blood who owned the system. ‘They’re desperate. They know as soon as the Consortium are finished mopping up the Church, they are going to properly turn their sights on the Monarchist systems. The Blue Bloods are outnumbered, outgunned and one Elite down. We’ve sold this to them on fucking the Consortium over.’

  ‘Have you met him before?’ Scab asked.

  ‘That’s a complicated question,’ the Monk said.

  ‘Give me a simple answer.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Are we meeting him?’ Vic asked.

  ‘He’s getting cloned especially,’ the Monk told them.

  ‘Well, aren’t we special,’ Scab said. The blatant sarcasm worried Vic as well. It wasn’t really Scab’s style. Most of the time his sense of irony was either deficient, or too well developed for Vic to understand.

  ‘Hey!’ Talia snapped. ‘If you’re going to stick your dick in my sister then at least you can be nice to her!’ The Monk blinked.

  Scab narrowed his eyes, Vic suspected more as the result of confusion than anything else.

  ‘Thank you, Talia,’ the Monk managed.

  ‘They say Pallas might be the Prime,’ Vic said, meaning the progenitor of the Blue Bloods.

  ‘They said that about the Elder of the Living City, and the Absolute. I think if the Prime still exists he’s well hidden, and we’ll never see him. More likely he was eaten by his children a long time ago. I’m pretty sure that Pallas is first generation, though,’ the Monk told them.

  ‘What a waste,’ Scab muttered. Vic wondered what he was referring to.

  Ridiculously ornamental, retro-looking warships tracked them the moment they emerged from the bridge point. Similarly overly-decorated orbital weapons platforms tracked them as soon as they entered Black Athena’s planetary space. The arcologies’ security systems locked on as well, once the Basilisk II entered the atmosphere.

  Black Athena was a designer garden world. All the land was carefully laid out, manicured parkland interspersed with shallow waterscaped seas. The baroque pyramid arcologies dotted the planet, dwarfing even the landscaped, snow-capped mountain ranges. Though the arcologies did not break the atmosphere.

  The planet had a tiny permanent population, despite its vast security forces. It also had a vast transient population of wealthy tourists from the Monarchist systems and, until recently, the Consortium. Some of the more influential Consortium tourists were now hostages being used as an uplift shield.

  As they made for Bedlam, the near, yellow sun was sinking below the equator, casting the designer world into a strangely bright twilight. Vic was enjoying the scenery, just before he died, from his new biomechanical-style seat. The Mother had ’faced the design specs to the Basilisk II, but somehow the chair wasn’t as comfortable as it had been on Cyst. Much of the ship’s hull was transparent and he was receiving visual feed from the ship’s sensors, which he had overlaid with a suitably inspiring soundscape.

  Talia was safely cocooned again, deep in the ship’s smart matter. They were going to keep ’face silence unless things went really badly. She brought the ship circling around the Bedlam arcology, he suspected so she could check out the view, and brought it in to land on the designated landing pad close to the top of the arcology. Apparently Pallas kept penthouse suites on the top several floors of all the arcologies.

  They stepped out onto the landing pad into freezing temperatures and howling winds. Both Scab and Monk had stipulated no umbilical connection to the ship. Molecular hooks on Vic’s feet kept him adhered to the pad as he made his way with the Monk and Scab to the airlock.

  The outward sloping, transparent, smart matter walls of the lowest floor of the penthouse suite looked down on a massive, empty space thousands of storeys above the ground. Vic hadn’t expected the arcology to be hollow, somehow. His neunonics had long rid him of the agoraphobia that hive-born worker ’sects were conditioned with, but the massive drop was making him a little uncomfortable. A structure this size, Vic knew, would have to have internal weather control.

  The ‘exhibits’ were in ‘displays’ on successive floors that ran up the inside walls of the megastructure. Ornate lifts made of smart matter designed to look like something called ‘decorative wrought iron’ ran at regular intervals up each wall. Similarly archaic-looking maglevs ran around each level, presumably to take tourists to their favourite psychopath or recreational killer. Vic didn’t think he would like the idea of being one of the exhibits. He could see some of the closer levels on maximum magnification. The inmates didn’t look happy. However, there were no tourists today. It seemed like the museum had been closed to the public for their visit.

  Vic turned away from the transparent smart matter wall. He still didn’t quite get the entertainment value of the place. The lowest floor of the penthouse suite didn’t make sense to him either. Everything was red and gold. The furniture looked flimsy, impractical, and all of it was dumb. It was the sort of place that only the deranged mind of a hairless monkey could come up with and think of as clever. Apparently it was supposed to be the recreation of something called a reception room, belonging to someone called a Russian Tsar. Scab was playing with what looked like a jewelled egg.

  ‘Please be careful, Mr Scab, that is the only remaining Fabergé egg.’ The man who spoke was surprisingly nondescript. He reminded Vic of the Elder of the Living Cities in some ways. He appeared to be baseline male human: tousled, dark blond/light brown hair, pale green eyes. He was wearing a pair of red cords, a padded yellow smoking jacket with a red lining, and a cravat. Vic’s neunonics had to supply him with the names of these items of clothing. He was also wearing a pair of red-gold-rimmed half-moon glasses, and he had a cigarette burning in a holder that looked like it was made from the bone or horn of some kind of rare animal. The Monk had rolled her eyes at the mention of Fabergé, and Vic’s human body language database suggested that she was struggling to keep the revulsion from her face. She sighed when Scab twisted the egg until it broke and dropped it onto the floor.

  ‘What an excellent way to start,’ Pallas said. ‘I had expected more than petty spite.’

  ‘That surprises me, considering you claim to have the original me down there,’ Scab said quietly. Vic and the Monk turned to look at the human killer. Menace had infested every last uttered syllable.

  ‘I checked,’ the Monk said.

  ‘Obviously I removed any mention of it from anything you were going to see,’ Scab said.

  ‘He’s just a clone,’ Vic said.

  ‘The hyperbole of an over-excited marketing department, nothing more,’ Pallas said.

  ‘I’m not happy about you having a cheap copy here either,’ Scab said.

  ‘Hardly cheap, Mr Scab, I assure you. Though he has come in useful to your compatriot here,’ Pallas said smoothly, and nodded at the Monk.

  ‘The copy that we downloaded into Benedict came from a Psycho Bank the museum sold us,’ the Monk told Scab. ‘Seriously, we don’t need any help to be at each other’s throats.’

  ‘Destroy it,’ Scab told Pallas.

  ‘Of course,’ he concentrated. ‘It is done. I’ve ’faced evidence of the clone’s destruction to you. Let me know if you require anything else in terms of proof. Would you like a seat? Can I offer you some refreshment, perhaps even food? I would certainly love to hear about your adventures, they sound terribly exciting.’ The three of them just stared at him. ‘Dr Ertl, then?’

  Given the distances involved, the elevator and the maglev ride had been surprisingly fast. They
were walking along beside the transparent-fronted cells, accompanied by their new P-sats, looking at the various inmates. Some looked comfortable. Others were restrained. Few looked happy. Vic guessed a number of them were displaying aberrant behaviour, but it was difficult to be completely sure because he had spent so much time with Scab. The inmates’ silence made the massive structure seem somewhat sepulchral to Vic, though Pallas was keeping up a running commentary on each exhibit they passed. It was kind of annoying.

  They walked past a fat lizard mumbling to himself, obviously an adult uplift, though there was something childlike about his behaviour. The next cell contained a restrained worker ’sect, which was odd as the worker caste were so heavily conditioned as part of their genetic engineering that it was quite difficult for them to be mentally ill, except by design. One cell had the disassembled, but somehow still moving, components of what had once been a rather baroque automaton. The human half-and-half in the next cell reached out to them, displaying the stigmata he/she had chewed in his/her palms.

  Each of the cells was decorated with an aesthetic presumably meant to showcase the inmate’s particular symptoms. Holograms showed teaser trailers of the inmates’ immersion mindscapes. Some were abstract and alien, others disturbing but less so than one of Scab’s custom torture immersions. A few were surprisingly beautiful. The latter often seemed to belong to those inmates showing the most external signs of being disturbed.

  Vic didn’t think he was the best judge of what was right or wrong. He was mostly of the opinion it was all right to do things that got you what you wanted, but there was no need to be as big a prick as Scab was about it. Bedlam, however, he was pretty sure, was wrong. This was mental illness as pornography.

  ‘Dr Ertl,’ Pallas said, and gestured into an exhibit. The chamber was very sparse, just a bed and a chair. The human sitting in the chair looked like he had once been a man-plus, but everything had sagged. His flesh was pale and unhealthy looking. He wore a robe. His eyes were dead and he was staring at nothing. His lips were moving, but according to Vic’s neunonics he was just mouthing nonsense syllables. The plain cell was painted blood-red. The teaser trailer for his mindscape was a burning, bleeding, crimson star.

  ‘You could have cloned him, run time-dilated counselling, hell, a surgical redesign, he doesn’t have to be like this,’ the Monk said, clearly angry.

  ‘Well, we’re doing a kind of an exploitation-era retrospective. He’s well medicated. Besides, he is more interesting this way.’

  ‘Oh yes, he should be able to tell us a great deal,’ the Monk muttered.

  ‘There’s an immersion version of his mindscape,’ Pallas pointed out. ‘Just ’face with the exhibit. It’s our latest attraction.’

  Vic was ignoring Dr Ertl’s red cell. He was looking in the next cell. It contained another worker ’sect done up in very human-looking drag. The ’sect appeared to be doing some kind of mundane domestic task in a pre-Loss, dumb matter, human environment.

  ‘Is that supposed to be me?’ Vic blurted out, more surprised than anything else.

  ‘On Suburbia,’ Pallas supplied. ‘Artistic licence, of course.’ The Monk walked past the fake Vic to the next cell/exhibit: a human girl, dark hair, too much eye make-up. The base female human inmate was wearing striped tights, platform boots and a strait jacket. One needle-tracked arm, with a badly scarred wrist, had managed to slip free of her restraints. She was drawing on the white floor of her cell with charcoal held in her free hand. The picture was of a falling tower hit by lightning. There were thousands of overlapping words scrawled on the walls. Vic’s neunonics were able to translate a few of them. Slut, whore, junkie, victim. In what looked like blood, someone had written over the other words with the phrase: the Empire never ended.

  ‘Is that supposed to be Talia?’ Vic demanded. Both the Monk and Scab looked at him sharply. Pallas was smiling.

  ‘You could have fucking ’faced the mindscape,’ Scab snapped at Pallas.

  ‘Would have rendered the trap sort of pointless, wouldn’t it?’ Pallas explained. The sad thing was, the confirmation it was a trap did not come as a surprise to Vic.

  ‘Scab,’ the Monk said, looking at the cell beyond fake Talia’s. Scab backed up so he could see what she was talking about. It was obviously one of his clones. Suspended by chains, no arms, no legs, a scar where his genitals should be, eyes and mouth sewn shut. Helpless.

  Vic was aware of an elevator moving up the closest shaft towards their level. Then Vic started to realise how much his erstwhile partner had lost it when Scab started to laugh. Vic saw the smug expression on Pallas’s face falter.

  ‘I think you might be trying too hard,’ Scab said.

  ‘Yeah, I mean talk about labouring the point,’ the Monk agreed.

  ‘Few can stand your mindscape for long, Mr Scab,’ Pallas told them. ‘Most need psychosurgery, or at least counselling afterwards.’

  ‘That’s tourists for you,’ Scab muttered.

  ‘Perhaps Miss Luckwicke would care to see the next cell?’ Pallas asked.

  ‘Let me guess, is it another petty headfuck?’ the Monk asked. She walked past the neutered and chained Scab clone that evidently hadn’t been destroyed after all.

  ‘You arsehole,’ the Monk snapped. She genuinely sounded upset. Vic moved to join her. It took a moment for him to realise that the bearded human figure in a loincloth and a crown of thorns, nailed to a cross, looked like the Basilisk II’s AI. It was weird. Vic wasn’t sure why it bothered the Church operative so much.

  ‘Congratulations, you’ve managed to irritate us,’ Scab said. Pallas’s smile was back.

  ‘Why go to all this trouble? The Consortium aren’t friends of yours,’ the Monk demanded.

  Vic sent his P-sat out over the huge drop. None of his sensors had been able to pierce the smart matter of the exhibits. Some of them had opened, however, and figures had spilled out and started climbing towards them. Vic recognised them.

  ‘The price of peace,’ Pallas said.

  ‘Really? The girl died at the Cathedral,’ the Monk said.

  ‘Your sister is in the ship,’ Pallas said contemptuously. ‘And they don’t want her. She should have been mine to start with. They want him.’ He pointed at Scab. ‘Oh really, Mr Scab. I’m a clone …’ Scab shot the Pallas clone with his tumbler pistol.

  ‘Does nobody understand the benefit of catharsis?’ Scab wondered out loud. All three of them had weapons in their hands now.

  ‘Still a prick!’ the Monk said, looking down at the body of Pallas’s clone. The door to the elevator slid open. ‘For what it’s worth, you were right. I’m sorry.’ Scab ignored her.

  ‘Not. This. Way,’ Scab managed through gritted teeth. He sounded angry with himself.

  ‘Should we kill ourselves?’ Vic asked hopefully. The Monk and Scab turned to look at him. ‘It was worth a try.’

  Butterflies, thousands of them, were fluttering out of the cavernous mouth of the open elevator. Vic saw both the humans frown. Their neunonics were being ’faced with target locks from the arcology’s internal security systems. The first of the blank-faced automatons, in their laced finery and long-tailed suits and hats, were pulling themselves over the mock-wrought-iron railings. Mr Hat walked out of the elevator. The top of the diminutive lizard bounty hunter’s huge stovepipe hat was open. More butterflies were emerging from it. Vic focused on the butterflies and magnified. Beyond razor-sharp monomolecular wings, he assumed they were dripping with powerful toxins and/or virals. The ’sect was less than pleased to see the small bounty killer was carrying a squat, bulky S-tech de-coherence gun. Maybe the Monk’s coherent energy field would stop the weapon as it pulled them apart at a molecular level, but maybe not.

  ‘Mr Scab, Mr Matto, and I’m afraid I do not know your name,’ the short lizard said to the Monk. She didn’t answer. ‘Miss Negrinotti sends her greetings. She was well rewarded, and is back on Ubaste. This has been a merry chase. One of the most challenging of my career. It is over.�
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  ‘I think you’re right,’ Scab said. Vic and the Monk were looking around for any way out. Vic was aware of the Monk desperately ’facing the Basilisk II, but there was no reply from Talia. ‘I think all that remains is to make sure that you are never, ever, successfully cloned again.’

  This level of threat wasn’t really Scab at his finest, Vic thought. The human killer was biding time, but the ’sect couldn’t understand why. Then he realised. Scab was hacking the exhibit. Scab was either downloading Dr Ertl’s mindscape, or possibly even neurally auditing the inmate/exhibit. Optimism wasn’t a trait Vic normally associated with Scab. Mr Hat frowned. Vic didn’t think the lizard had quite bought the threat either.

  ‘Mr Scab, I don’t think you quite understand the gravity of your situation,’ Mr Hat said.

  ‘Seriously,’ the Monk said. ‘Let’s skip the supervillain bullshit and get to the, presumably brief, gunfight.’

  ‘This isn’t a colonial immersion,’ Mr Hat said, ‘and I brought a friend.’

  Vic tried to shut himself down there and then. Scab overrode and scrambled the suicide solution order the ’sect had sent to his own neunonics. Ludwig rose up through the floor. Vic’s neunonics flooded his system with drugs in an attempt to maintain some form of functionality in the face of abject terror.

  ‘You can be reasonable or unreasonable,’ Mr Hat said. ‘The only people it will make any difference to are yourselves. This is over now. You were good sport. Console yourselves that you’ve made me a very wealthy lizard.’

  ‘You get that you’re still just as miserable as the rest of us? Right?’ More than anything, Vic was surprised that he could speak in the presence of the Elite. He was talking to Mr Hat, but he couldn’t take his compound eyes off Ludwig. It was the visual feed from his P-sat, and the sensor feed from his antennae, that made Vic aware of Mr Hat’s moment of hesitation at his words. Vic forced himself to look away from the terrible, black machine, and to the diminutive lizard. ‘What if, just for once, we could have had something better?’ Vic asked. The lizard frowned.