The Beauty of Destruction

by Gavin G. Smith

  Lodup took a step back from Mr Brown as well, presumably somewhat cowed by Yaroslav’s reaction. The big Russian was hiding under the elliptical hardwood table on the raised area, just in front of the oval window. Silas was trying to lick the Russian’s face.

  ‘Who are you?’ Lodup demanded. ‘Why are they pointing guns at that guy? And why’s he dressed like that?’ King Jeremy was still wearing his post-apocalyptic gear. He looked even more foolish down here. Mr Brown ignored him. Instead he was looking around, and what he saw didn’t seem to please him.

  Siska rushed over to the Pennangalan, and embraced her silver-masked sister. Du Bois’s enhanced hearing picked out the hissing quality to Siska’s whispered Khmer.

  Mr Brown’s gaze had come to rest on a spot on the wall, an expression of disgust on his face.

  ‘What the fuck is that?’ Alexia demanded, the butt of her rifle against her shoulder, half raised. Du Bois risked taking his eyes off King Jeremy for a moment. It was a severed head. A middle-aged man he didn’t recognise, slightly chubby face, goatee beard, his swarthy skin suggesting a Mediterranean heritage perhaps. The head was impaled on an organic-looking staff, and there were strange organs where the staff met the head. Some of them were inflating and deflating like lungs, another he suspected was some kind of larynx, the rest of them he didn’t recognise. They didn’t look human. Dreadlock-like tendrils of flesh grew through his white-streaked black hair, connecting him to the wall, where the semi-intelligent, condensed adamantine matter had taken on a partly flesh-like appearance.

  ‘No, no, no, no,’ Mr Brown said, shaking his head. Both Silas and Yaroslav made a whimpering noise. ‘This will not do.’ Mr Brown walked across C&C to the severed head. Both Beth and du Bois shuffled round, looking between King Jeremy, who they were still covering, and his ex-boss. The severed head on the pole looked up at Mr Brown. Du Bois didn’t see fear in the eyes. He saw pity.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ the head on the pole said. Mr Brown nodded as though he understood. Then he tore the head off the pole and crushed it with his bare hands.

  ‘No!’ Lodup shouted, reaching for one of the Vector submachine guns. Du Bois grimaced, Beth flinched but neither of them shifted their aim from King Jeremy. Yaroslav continued whimpering and Silas licked his face some more, Alexia turned away, Siska just watched. Before Lodup could bring the SMG to his shoulder the Pennangalan’s Sig 716 carbine was levelled at the salvage diver’s head.

  ‘She’ll kill you. Lower the weapon,’ du Bois warned him.

  ‘What the fuck is going on? Who are these people?’ Lodup demanded.

  ‘He’s your boss,’ Siska hissed. ‘We work for him.’ Mr Brown turned slowly to look at Lodup.

  Du Bois found himself taking a step away. The expression on the obsidian-skinned ‘man’s’ face had gone beyond malevolent. His skin seemed to twitch with a life of its own. It wasn’t a human face, not any more, if it ever had been.

  ‘May I remind you, Mr Satakano, that man betrayed all of us,’ Mr Brown said, presumably meaning the owner of the severed head. His erstwhile employer gestured all around. ‘He must bear responsibility for much of the misfortune that we are now beset by. We must, however, find a new interface. Communication is so important, don’t you think?’

  Lodup was staring at Mr Brown. Then his eyes went wide. He opened his mouth to scream. Something complicated happened in the air between Lodup and Mr Brown. Lodup’s head fell off, and dropped to the grass-like carpet.

  ‘No!’ Siska cried. She had her Sig P220 pistols in each hand now, but she couldn’t seem to bring herself to point them at Mr Brown. The Pennangalan moved away from her sister, her featureless mask of beaten silver looking between Siska and Mr Brown. Du Bois tightened his grip on the .45, but still didn’t dare move it from King Jeremy. He could tell that the boy was only just starting to realise how out of his depth he was. Du Bois wasn’t quite sure how Mr Brown could do what he could do, but one thing was clear to him: they were only alive because Mr Brown wasn’t entirely sure he could stop du Bois and/or Beth from pulling the trigger, and then survive the resulting nuclear explosion. Du Bois nearly pulled the trigger. Despite everything else that was going on, it was clear that Mr Brown was an abomination. He couldn’t be allowed to live, to spread his corruption beyond Earth, but du Bois wanted to live. Right there and then du Bois understood just how much of a coward he was.

  ‘No more,’ du Bois managed. He saw his terrified sister glance over at him. He didn’t think she had liked the fear she had heard in his voice. Mr Brown ignored him and picked up Lodup’s head. He walked back to the pole. There was a crunch as he impaled the head. The tendrils that had connected the previous severed head to the wall of the habitat were waving around like the tentacles of a sea anemone. Wet sounds came from the pole as it grew up through Lodup’s neck stump. Eyes rolled down, and there was awareness. The strange organs started to work again. The mouth opened and closed but made no sound. Du Bois flinched at more crunching noises as tendrils pierced the back of Lodup’s skull.

  ‘You used to have the stomach to do what was required, Malcolm,’ Mr Brown muttered, distracted. ‘This is where your actions have led you. Take responsibility.’

  ‘You have come for our murdered children? The ones whose corpses you mutilated?’ The severed head spoke with a multitude of voices.

  Yaroslav was repeating one line of a Russian nursery rhyme over and over again. A tear rolled down King Jeremy’s cheek.

  ‘Yes,’ Mr Brown said brusquely, the drip bags of synthetic morphine nearly empty. ‘What is required? A sacrifice?’

  ‘What if we ask for a first edition of Borges’s Manual de zoología fantástica, a left-handed rubber glove with six fingers, the foreskin of Christ, the second season of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, Tantalus’s tantalus?’

  ‘I’m afraid I have limited resources at this moment,’ Mr Brown said impatiently. ‘I can offer you a beautiful hermaphrodite.’

  ‘That’s not going to happen,’ du Bois told him. The severed head’s eyes moved unnaturally in their sockets to look at du Bois.

  ‘Come to terms with what you want to achieve here,’ Mr Brown told du Bois without looking at him. He could feel his sister’s eyes on him.

  ‘One of us gets hurt, everyone dies,’ du Bois told him.

  Lodup’s severed head spoke again, but this time it was in the Mwoakilloan’s own voice. ‘What if we asked for you?’ he said to Mr Brown.

  ‘You’re too late. I have already been laid out on a stone altar in this town. What if I offered contact?’ There was silence. Du Bois remembered what Azmodeus had told him. The contact that had broken Mr Brown’s mind and driven the Seeders mad.

  ‘You will go unnoticed,’ the head finally said in a multitude of voices.

  Mr Brown nodded. Then he turned to du Bois. ‘And your sacrifice?’ Du Bois had the sense of the steel teeth of a trap closing around him.

  ‘What?’ du Bois asked. Beth glanced at him and then quickly back to King Jeremy.

  ‘The S-tech in your bodies can adapt the younger Miss Luckwicke’s DNA, accept it, allow it to replicate, but the resulting mutations will almost certainly be lethal. Which one of you is to die in agony? Is this why you brought the elder Miss Luckwicke along? To turn her into her sister? Or perhaps the brother you always considered to be a perverse abomination against your non-existent god?’ Mr Brown asked.

  Now Beth and Alexia were both staring at him.

  ‘What’s he talking about?’ Beth demanded. She was no longer looking at King Jeremy.

  ‘We can use one of the clones in the seed ships,’ du Bois said. He knew he was clutching at straws. Mr Brown was already shaking his head.

  ‘It would be a convenient murder, I grant you, but you don’t have the time to bring one to maturity,’ he told them.

  ‘You’re not turning me into my sister,’ Beth said. Du Bois was pretty sure she was close to turning her gun on him.

  ‘You never said anything about this,’ King Je
remy said.

  ‘It’s very simple, Mr Rush, you take one of the sisters and I take the other,’ Mr Brown said. The Pennangalan looked up at him sharply.

  ‘No … !’ Siska shouted.

  ‘Quiet!’ Mr Brown snapped. Du Bois heard the authority in his voice. He felt it. Even he wanted to obey.

  ‘Me,’ du Bois said. ‘I’m the sacrifice.’

  ‘Malcolm …’ Alexia started.

  ‘Please, let’s get this done,’ du Bois said. He wanted the tension to end, one way or another.

  ‘What about him?’ Beth asked, nodding towards Yaroslav. Du Bois could tell that she hadn’t wanted to make the suggestion.

  ‘His mind is near gone,’ Mr Brown said. ‘By all means hook up a madman to one of the seed ships. I should be interested in the results. If you have the slightest trace of common decency in you, you’ll put a bullet in his head.’

  ‘Piotr?’ du Bois asked. The Russian just shook his head. ‘Piotr, please, we’re leaving this place.’ He spoke gently, in Russian. Yaroslav continued shaking his head.

  ‘I don’t want to become something else,’ the Russian begged.

  ‘We’re not going to do anything to you. You’ll be safe with us. Please, Piotr, we need you to get up.’ Du Bois tried to ignore the sound of Silas licking the Russian’s face. The Pennangalan turned and walked out of C&C.

  ‘Where’s she going?’ Beth demanded. Mr Brown turned to look at the Yorkshirewoman.

  ‘Show some sympathy. She has just learned that she is going to die. She has gone to compose herself, but she will return. She is a good servant.’

  Du Bois wanted to squeeze his eyes shut, and not see what he was seeing. The vast, labyrinthine city was so much larger than the last time he had been here. Living sepulchres, city-sized ziggurats and pyramids. Every angle just wrong enough to induce nausea, every angle leading to somewhere unseen. The twisted multi-storey bridges, made for huge and non-human physiologies, ran between structures grown for un-guessable purposes. The city had roots. It grew like an infection: a saprophyte urban sprawl. It crawled with warped life, but the armoured, multi-limbed, wedge-headed servitors, and the increasingly piscine-looking clones, were little more than cells in a vast organism. And among this urban infection they caught glimpses of the Seeders, though they could feel their presence pushing on their own membranous minds. Vast shadows, all unmistakably life, but so different to anything they really understood. The Seeders’ physiology existed in other places. Their armoured, biomechanical flesh the result of an evolutionary process violated by pain and madness. Each showing some warped elements of the templates of rudimentary biological life.

  Du Bois’s mind wanted to shatter like so much brittle glass. He kept his eyes on the near-hysterical King Jeremy, but he was aware of all of this in his periphery. He cursed the technology that augmented his senses, and found himself wishing for blindness and a rude, dumb intelligence.

  Yaroslav was curled up in a ball in the only working submersible they could find, water slowly rising around him. He was clutching the Vector SMG like a child clutching a teddy bear. Du Bois knew he would have to do something about removing the weapon from the Russian, but right now he just wanted this over with. He wanted to be somewhere else.

  Alexia was leaning against the leaking submersible’s bulkhead, her eyes squeezed shut in a way that made du Bois envious. King Jeremy was making whimpering noises as he sobbed. The submersible piloted itself. It knew its way through the twisted geometry of the city’s living architecture. It moved like a wounded fish. Its superstructure was badly warped from where something had tried to grow out of it.

  The submersible had been accompanied by something that looked like a cybernetic whale for part of the journey. Its battleship-armoured body was covered in living eyes watching their vehicle.

  Mr Brown had stayed in C&C. After all, the threat stayed the same. If du Bois took the DNA sample, then King Jeremy detonated the nuke. If King Jeremy double-crossed them, or Mr Brown interfered, then Beth and du Bois shot King Jeremy, and the nuke was detonated, and if Mr Brown lived then he was trapped, the DNA lost. Eventually they would have to let King Jeremy go. At least this way they would be some distance from Mr Brown.

  The submersible had surfaced in a smooth black cavern. The ceiling and edges of the cavern were obscured in darkness. The edges were either too far away or somewhere else entirely as a result of the strange geometry. The moment they left the submersible their protective blood-screens were being eaten by the city’s aggressive biomechanical nano-spores. Alexia had to coax Yaroslav out of the mutated vehicle. The illumination in the strange cavern flickered like a broken strip light as the five of them made their way across the rubbery texture of the floor. They could see the biomechanical ship, the mentally spayed offspring of the Seeders, a panspermic, extremophile organism turned into an escape pod for a species. It looked like a cross between the seedpod it was and a bottom-feeding marine creature of some sort. It was easily the size of one of the larger football stadiums. The airlocks, the lenses protruding through its skin, were violations of its alien flesh.

  ‘Malcolm,’ Alexia whispered. She was looking around frantically, her rifle at the ready. He could feel it too. Even their augmented eyes could not penetrate the darkness at the edge of their vision, which seemed to expand as the light flickered out. He had the impression, just afterimages in the light, of people, many of them, perhaps thousands, in the darkness, just out of sight, watching them.

  ‘What’s that?’ King Jeremy screamed, making the rest of them jump. The young sociopath was pointing at a figure on the edge of the blackness. A man with a dragon’s head, he was wearing a finely tailored suit. The suit was covered in hundreds of mouths opening and closing, as if engaged in conversation. Du Bois recognised the figure as Siraja Odap-odap, the habitat’s AI. The darkness seeming to eddy around and behind the dragon-headed figure.

  They increased the pace. The airlock door was already opening for them. Du Bois suspected it was a false promise of safety, but it was all they had. They stopped when they reached the airlock. Despite the airlock’s presence in alien flesh, the technology looked human, falsely comforting.

  ‘Give it to me,’ du Bois said. King Jeremy shook his head. Yaroslav flinched as he did so.

  ‘I will fucking shoot you in the head,’ Beth told him.

  ‘I can’t be here on my own,’ he pleaded, looking around, terrified. ‘I can’t go back through …’

  ‘For Christ’s sake,’ Alexia muttered. Du Bois half expected a warped vision of Christ to appear.

  ‘Come with us,’ du Bois said. Alexia and Beth turned to stare at him. He could tell from the expression on King Jeremy’s face that he wanted to.

  ‘Are you out of your fucking mind?’ Beth demanded. ‘Do you know what he’s done?’

  ‘Strand Mr Brown here, in this place,’ du Bois said, ignoring Beth. King Jeremy could be dealt with the moment his thumb was off the button. King Jeremy looked between the three of them. Yaroslav’s whimpering was becoming more urgent.

  ‘No,’ King Jeremy said, shaking his head. ‘You’ll kill me the first chance you get.’

  Damn!

  King Jeremy took out the vial. Its contents looked like a clear liquid, presumably the subtle, ancient, powerful S-tech reverting to its base biological nanite form. The vial extruded a needle. Du Bois held out a hand. King Jeremy pressed the needle into his flesh. Then he held up the hand with the dead man’s switch in it, and started backing away from them.

  They stepped into the airlock and it hissed shut. Beth, Alexia and du Bois sagged. Du Bois holstered his pistol and leant against the metal wall. Yaroslav looked around with the mounting panic of a trapped animal. The inner airlock hissed open. The four of them staggered into the huge, stadium-sized chamber. It was coated in what looked like stainless steel, the metal covering what looked like a rib cage. Du Bois felt like Jonah. Then he hit the floor, hard.

  ‘Malcolm!’ Alexia screamed, kneeling down ne
xt to him. All-pervasive, ancient, powerful biotechnology started to break down and change a body that was not meant to host it. Turning bubbling flesh protean. Putting it in flux. He screamed, growing new organs, his physiology constantly resetting itself as it tried to find a form that could cope. As the pain became too much, du Bois went away.

  Alexia stared at du Bois, his flesh running like liquid. He had stopped screaming now. The noise he was making was more like keening. It changed resonance as his mouth took on different forms.

  ‘Wha—’ Beth started. Alexia was looking around frantically. She pointed towards the front of the craft, a wall of stainless steel-like material that covered what looked a little like organs, presumably the biomechanical working of the creature/ship.

  ‘He needs to be linked to the ship,’ she said. It was the only thing she could think of. Her only hope was the craft would recognise her brother as a living component, and stabilise him. If it could keep him alive, keep his consciousness alive, then something else could be worked out later.

  His body was difficult and disgusting to grasp. She felt turgid, sludge-like shifting flesh against her grip as Beth helped her manhandle him towards another airlock-style door in the steel. Yaroslav trotted after them, still clutching his Vector SMG.

  The airlock opened for them, and they made their way into a tangled warren of corridors between organ-like biomechanical machinery coated with the steel-like material. Alexia had only the vaguest idea of where she was going, other than forwards. She was on the left of her brother, Beth the right. She only caught a glimpse of the silver-masked figure leaning out of an intersecting corridor and heard the pop of the underslung grenade launcher firing. Beth pushed all three of them into a narrow passage on the left-hand side of the corridor. Du Bois’s sticky, protean form practically landed on Alexia. There was an explosion further down the corridor. Her augmented hearing protected her from the worst of the blast and allowed her to hear the thump of a body landing hard on the floor. She felt Beth’s weight move off them.