‘Well, this is nice,’ Mr Brown said. ‘Though a little tense. Could I offer anyone some refreshment, or are we all too macho for that?’ He had replenished the drip bags full of synthetic morphine hanging from his T-shaped staff. The Pennangalan, her featureless silver mask covering her face, carbine in hand, remained by her master’s side. King Jeremy was staring at du Bois with a look of utter hatred. ‘I am interested to know what you are going to do when we get there. Assuming that we’re not killed out of hand.’
‘The same thing you are,’ du Bois said.
‘Which is?’ Mr Brown asked.
‘Leave. Nothing has changed,’ du Bois said. ‘If we can’t get out, then you can’t get out. Who knows, a nuclear explosion in Kanamwayso might be good for everyone.’
Mr Brown started laughing. ‘You’ve always been an amusing fellow, Malcolm. Your naiveté is only outweighed by your childish sense of noblesse oblige. Strange qualities for an assassin and mass murderer, don’t you think?’
‘Why don’t you shut up?’ Alexia suggested. She was leaning against the bulkhead, smoking a cigarette. She seemed to have recovered a little from the chase, and all the violence. Du Bois was used to his sister looking glamorous, though he’d picked her up off the floor after her indulgences had really got her into trouble a few times, and she hadn’t looked quite so good then. Now, however, she looked haggard, as if the last few days had aged her. ‘It’s been a long, shitty day in a very difficult week. Nobody’s happy about the situation, so let’s deal with it as best we can, but let’s deal with it quietly.’
‘See, you look rapeable, but I think you’re some kind of freak, aren’t you?’ King Jeremy said.
‘Oh, for goodness’ sake,’ Alexia muttered. Beth just shook her head a little. Du Bois would have quite liked to have pulled the trigger there and then. ‘I suppose that pistol whipping is out of the question?’ she asked her brother.
‘He does have his thumb on the dead man’s switch of a nuclear weapon,’ du Bois pointed out.
‘It’s just one ridiculous cock substitution after another with you boys, isn’t it?’ Alexia asked. Once the comment would have angered du Bois. Now he had to smile.
‘Seriously now,’ du Bois told King Jeremy. ‘Please just be quiet.’
‘And she’s too ugly,’ King Jeremy said, nodding towards Beth.
‘Thank God,’ Beth muttered. ‘Maybe you should have a look under the silver mask,’ she suggested. King Jeremy glanced back at the Pennangalan, who didn’t react in any way. There was just a moment of unease on the boy’s face, and then his mask of spite was back.
‘You’re going to pay for what you did to Dracimus,’ he spat.
‘You mean young Mr Elling?’ du Bois asked. ‘You’re incapable of empathy, so don’t pretend you care about what happened to him.’
‘By the way, Inflictor … stupid name, what was he really called?’ Beth asked.
‘Kyle Nethercott,’ du Bois supplied, ‘and this here is young Mr Weldon Rush.’
‘Don’t call me that!’ King Jeremy demanded.
‘It’s just your name, darling,’ Alexia said.
‘And I don’t think you understand,’ Beth said. ‘You’re not in control here.’
‘I have a nuclear bomb!’
‘And yet you’re somehow still inadequate, but well done, very Dr Strangelove,’ Alexia said.
‘I should point out that Mr Rush may actually be unstable enough to take his thumb off the dead man’s switch if you continue mocking him,’ Mr Brown said, though he sounded more resigned than nervous.
‘Why don’t you control your ugly bitches?’ King Jeremy asked du Bois, grinning maliciously.
‘Well, this is terribly constructive. There’s nothing like having priorities,’ Mr Brown observed.
‘Why don’t you control us?’ Beth suggested to King Jeremy. ‘Pass the dead man’s switch off to a responsible adult …’
‘I’ll hold it for you,’ Mr Brown offered.
‘I’ll make them both fucking suffer, you can watch, see a prodigious imagination at work—’ began King Jeremy.
‘Weldon,’ du Bois said. He was more profoundly depressed at the state of today’s youth than seriously angry. ‘You’re not a comic book villain, you’re just an angry young man. I’m sorry that your comfortable middle class upbringing in one of the wealthiest nations on the planet was hard. I am sorry you felt like an outsider, or were bullied, alienated, had cruel or unfeeling parents, I really am, but you have to see, for your own sake, that there are more constructive ways of handling it than becoming an entitled little sociopath. I know you think that these threats sound horrific and frightening, but to us they just sound like you waving around all your insecurities.’ The expression of malice on the boy’s handsomely sculpted face faltered for a moment. It would have been funny if it hadn’t been so heartbreakingly pathetic the way he looked to Mr Brown for reassurance. Mr Brown’s expression was sympathetic, but he was nodding in agreement with du Bois. Then the mask of malice was back and du Bois knew that he had barely made a dent.
‘Fuck you and your whores,’ King Jeremy spat.
‘I’m his sister, you little freak,’ Alexia said in disgust.
Beth leant in closer to him, though still keeping him covered. Du Bois was pleased to see that her finger was back around the trigger guard and not the trigger itself, however. ‘There’s something I’ve always wanted to ask people like you,’ she told him. ‘What are you so afraid of?’
It was clear he didn’t have an answer. Or if he did he didn’t want to share it.
‘So nobody wants tea then?’ Mr Brown asked.
Du Bois wasn’t sure what it was, some change in the background noise, but he knew they were within the borders of the city. He was aware of it at a primal level, a mounting fear. He was pleased he could not see beyond the sub, any external views having been mercifully switched off. He could see his own fear reflected more openly on King Jeremy’s face. He suspected it was only due to extensive augmentation that the boy was able to cope with having weapons pointed at him, let alone deal with the city. It was a place that you needed brain surgery to work in. He half expected King Jeremy to panic, and then all this would end in a bright flash of light. He had only ever visited Kanamwayso once before. Just before the Boxer Rebellion. He hadn’t liked it then. It would be infinitely worse now the Seeders had awoken.
The sub moved quickly, far faster than a conventional sub, which unfortunately made them noisy in the water, but they had still been locked in the same position for the better part of three days. All of them were more than capable of it physically, but it would still take a toll on their bodies. It was just fortunate that they had near perfect control of their bodily functions.
He had reviewed what he knew of the evacuation craft, the spayed seedpods of the once-slumbering alien intellects that inhabited the sunken city. Each of them could effectively act as a colonisation ship. There were millions of frozen embryos, vast stores of human, Seeder, and what they knew of Lloigor knowledge. They were equipped with a great deal of the tech, certainly enough to start assembling what they would need if they could find the raw materials. Du Bois was sure that he could work out a way of dumping all the slave minds that Mr Brown had uploaded, and all the evil greedy bastards that he had recruited, and replace them with the minds that Hamad had stolen and Azmodeus had rediscovered. All that was missing was Talia’s genetic material to run the ship’s biomechanical navigation systems. King Jeremy had the sample of genetic material. After nearly three days of thinking on this du Bois was still no closer to solving the problem.
‘So this is your plan?’ du Bois asked Mr Brown. ‘Just have the sub take us there?’
‘Did you think I would have a password? They are alien, in the true sense of the word. Alien as any god. I personally think that you’re too small to worry about. They are possibly aware of humanity, on some level, like you are aware of a fungal infection, but your destruction was little more than a spasm
odic reflex action. Your problem in this, as it is in your defiance of me, is hubris. You desperately want to matter. You don’t.’
Alexia laughed.
‘Calm down,’ Beth said. ‘We only wanted to know if you had a plan.’ He was both impressed with and grateful to his sister and Beth. This was his world, a twisted and perverse version of it in some ways, or perhaps just a more honest version, but both of them were handling it. They might not have been as inured to the violence as he was, but he knew he could trust them. Though he suspected neither of them would struggle to kill King Jeremy, or mourn for Mr Brown if it came down to it.
‘There’s nothing certain here,’ Mr Brown told them.
Something scraped against the hull. King Jeremy screamed, and du Bois didn’t like the way the boy’s thumb slipped a little on the switch. Alexia came off the bulkhead like she had been electrocuted. Beth flinched. Du Bois felt his sphincter tighten.
Mr Brown was just smiling. ‘Would you like to see?’ he asked. ‘It must be extraordinary.’ Du Bois nodded towards the boy. Under the best of circumstances it could drive someone like King Jeremy over the edge. This wasn’t the best of circumstances. ‘You’re quite right of course.’
Somehow a nuclear explosion was starting to seem like the easy way out. Something else brushed against the sub. Something about the contact reminded du Bois of an unwelcome caress.
Du Bois climbed out of the hatch and onto the bridge of the modified Virginia-class sub’s sail. He had clambered up the ladder one-handed, his Accurised .45, with the magazine of nanite-tipped bullets in it, pointing down at King Jeremy who was out next. He couldn’t risk looking around, not yet, but his peripheral vision was telling him that something was very off in the huge moon pool. The moon pool was part of the underwater habitat that the Circle had used as a base of operations to plunder the S-tech from Kanamwayso, the city of gods, the name they had given to the petrified city. The name had been taken from Pohnpeian mythology.
‘Come on, out of there,’ he snapped. He felt vulnerable now and didn’t like it.
‘It’s hard. I’ve only got one hand,’ King Jeremy whined. Du Bois had to resist the quite strong urge to slap the boy. Beth was out next, covering King Jeremy, then Alexia, who initially seemed eager to get out of the sub, and then less so as she looked around, appalled.
‘Jesus Christ,’ his sister said.
‘Keep him covered,’ du Bois said. Beth nodded. He looked around.
‘Normally the Victoria doesn’t dock here, it’s too busy, and we had to raise the habitat to do so, but that’s less of an issue now,’ Mr Brown said as he climbed after them with fresh morphine drips attached to his staff.
They had pushed up a number of the pontoon jetties in the huge open moon pool as they had surfaced. The Victoria, as the submarine seemed to be called, was now wearing the pontoons around her hull like a necklace. The light was flickering but his vision was compensating for it. Above him the rotary weapons systems looked rotted. The submersibles, the robot-like atmospheric diving suits, were all twisted and warped, as if things had grown out of their matter and pulled their way clear. On one of the larger submersibles something had grown from the condensed adamantine hull, a stillborn monster frozen in amber.
On one of the walls a tall, thin man had been crucified. Spikes had grown from the habitat’s hull through his wrists, and his side. His left hand was missing. Crabs were eating his legs and lower torso, leaving the rest of his body alone. The crabs looked wrong somehow, they were albino, had never seen the sun, but they were too large for this depth and shouldn’t have been able to walk up walls.
On the bulkhead above the crucified man, the words: I died for your fucking sins had been written in a thick smear of blood. Your fucking sins had been crossed out and replaced with the words: nothing at all.
‘Is that Deane?’ du Bois asked, more for something to say than anything else. He knew it was. Mr Brown nodded anyway. Deane had been the dive supervisor in the habitat.
They could feel the spore-like nanites of the city testing their own blood-screens which all of them, bar Mr Brown, had refreshed before leaving the sub. His skin was itching like mad. It felt badly inflamed.
‘How far underwater are we?’ Beth asked in a small voice.
‘Some four thousand metres,’ Mr Brown said cheerfully. ‘A little under three miles of water over our heads, or four hundred atmospheres if you prefer. That is to say that the pressure down here is four hundred times what it is on the surface.’
‘I don’t feel that much different,’ Beth said, glancing around at their surroundings, obviously less than happy.
‘Your body is adapting to it,’ du Bois said. ‘The nanites are scrubbing the nitrogen build up, your lungs are modifying to breathe the gas and deal with oxygen toxicity, your joints are being reinforced …’
‘Not to mention modifying your larynx so you don’t sound like a cartoon character,’ Mr Brown added. ‘Though you’ll not be as suited for operations here as the crew were.’
‘Where’s the Pennangalan?’ du Bois suddenly demanded.
‘Ah,’ said Mr Brown. ‘You noticed.’
‘Of course I fucking noticed,’ du Bois snapped. ‘Alexia, keep watch.’ His sister nodded, her ARX-170 rifle at the ready.
‘Malcolm, you need to remain calm—’ Mr Brown started.
‘You need to tell me where she is, right now,’ du Bois said. Something loped out of the hatch. Alexia swung round, her rifle coming up to her shoulder. Beth’s pistol wavered for a moment, as she almost took it off King Jeremy and pointed it at the thing. Du Bois was similarly tempted. At first he had thought it was a large, pale greyhound, except that greyhounds can’t climb submarine ladders. Then he realised it was a broadly human form, but sexless, emaciated, with chalk-white skin, its physiology modified to better enable it to move on all four of its spindly limbs. Its face seemed vaguely familiar. It went to Mr Brown’s side and nuzzled against him. Du Bois looked up at his ex-employer as the Pennangalan finally climbed out of the hatch.
‘What’s wrong with you?’ du Bois asked.
‘His name is Silas,’ Mr Brown said, smiling, patting the creature that seemed eager for his attention. ‘Yes it is, yes it is!’
‘Silas Scab? The clockmaker?’ du Bois asked. He had killed him. A Swiss child murderer who’d had access to the tech somehow, though he hadn’t been affiliated with the Circle or the City of Brass.
‘His son,’ Mr Brown said impatiently.
‘Azmodeus mentioned him, so did Inflictor … Nethercott. He said he had freed him,’ Beth said. Mr Brown turned to look at King Jeremy.
‘I didn’t know anything about that,’ King Jeremy said, shaking his head.
‘What’s it doing here?’ du Bois demanded, his voice tight. Even King Jeremy looked disgusted.
‘He contains genetic material that I am interested in. I didn’t reveal him, well more it really, earlier because I knew it would upset you.’
‘What do you want with his DNA?’ du Bois asked.
Mr Brown sighed. ‘Does it really matter right now?’
‘Malcolm!’ Alexia said sharply. She had her rifle trained on a figure standing in one of the corners. A female, blonde hair tied back, wearing a ragged beige coverall. Her eyes were completely black.
‘One of the clones,’ Mr Brown told them. ‘I think you can probably assume that she is controlled by whatever minds control the city.’
‘Is she a threat?’ Alexia asked. Mr Brown laughed.
‘The window,’ Beth said. She nodded towards the oval window that looked out from C&C over the moon pool. Du Bois recognised Siska. The Pennangalan’s sister, though rumour had it that they could both lay claim to that title. Her hair covered most of her face. It had only been a quick glance, but du Bois was pretty sure that under the hair something was wrong. He had worked with her closely, very closely, in Sumatra and the South Seas during the late eighteenth century. He hoped he didn’t have to kill her.
�
��I go down first,’ du Bois told King Jeremy. ‘Don’t slip, you don’t want to fall into that water.’ The boy swallowed and then nodded.
‘You fucking bastard!’ Lodup Satakano shouted at him as soon as they moved into Command and Control. The room stank, it seemed that the habitat’s recycling had ceased to work. The Mwoakilloan salvage diver looked ill-used, gaunt, wide eyed. Du Bois could understand his anger.
He recognised Piotr Yaroslav, he had been a Rota Osobogo Naznacheniya combat diver during the war. Du Bois had helped recruit him after they had worked together hunting SS Werewolf units that had gained access to stolen S-tech. He was not sure about the security chief’s new steroid abuser physique, however.
Siska looked worse closer up. There was something wrong with her skin, and he was pretty sure he didn’t want to see her eyes right now.
‘Malcolm,’ she said as he entered.
‘Can you get us out of here?’ Lodup demanded. ‘My family …’
‘Your family are gone,’ Yaroslav snapped, and then raised his futuristic-looking Vector SMG to his shoulder when Silas bounded into the room. ‘What the fuck is that?’
‘No, you see my family didn’t have much in the way of phones and computers, internet access …’ Lodup started.
Du Bois didn’t have the heart to tell him that Mwoakilloa and Pohnpei were among some of the first places that the spores would have reached. If his family were lucky they were dead, if not then they weren’t his family any more.
‘He is mine, Piotr,’ Mr Brown said as he walked into Command & Control. Yaroslav screamed and cowered, backing away from Mr Brown. Du Bois hadn’t been expecting that. The man had seen some of the worst excesses that the Eastern Front had to offer. He was no coward. His fear of Mr Brown, however, looked almost religious in nature. What had happened to them? It was obvious they had been there for a while. He looked at the remains of their meals, empty water containers, the partially absorbed sewage they had seen running down the stairs. It made sense. The Seeders here would have started to awake from their slumber at the same time the one in the Solent had. There was a body lying on the floor, the carpet-like grass analogue growing into and around it. The body had the same black eyes as the woman they had seen in the moon pool. One of the clones. He had been beaten to death.
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