Goodbye, his grandfather told him.
Ibic’s coherent energy fields reached out for the uplifts and enveloped them. Ibic ÓLug exuded the black, liquid glass exotic material of his armour and then accelerated. He drew vast amounts of energy from the network of proto-black holes that powered him through the entangled link. He flickered in and out of phase, dragging the three uplifts with him. He avoided the Naga through speed, stealth, and just not existing in the same physical state as them. Lug’s seeds grew like a virus through the uplifts’ equipment, transforming it. Their new armour then injected further seeds into the uplifts themselves. He could not hear their screams through the coherent energy field that enveloped them, but he was aware of their agonized contortions, at least in as much as he was instinctively aware of everything.
Six standard minutes as the uplifts measured time, a gift from humanity. Six minutes from the head of the sun god to their destination. He had hoped speed and stealth would be enough, but he could see Naga craft moving towards the destination. Perhaps they could feel the energies building, or perhaps it was just a function of enormous biomechanical minds playing the odds. The surface around the pool had come to life, much of it taking to the air. Níðhöggr itself, this hive fleet’s own behemoth god, was making its way towards their destination. The huge biomechanical ship’s movements looked ponderous, but it had been closer, and was moving fast enough that it would get there first. Ibic ÓLug wished that he could kill the snake’s god, a god that the machine weapon/warrior had been created to hate, but knew he did not have the power, even now. The Níðhöggr was no mere Consortium capital ship.
Alchemy in machine guts. He used his own precious matter, and diverted his own precious energy feed, to create the three items. He knew these would be his own final gifts, and his death, as he plummeted towards the Naga godship.
Ibic ÓLug plunged into the Níðhöggr in a different physical state. He could not see through the godship, but he had been aware of the lines of energy snaking under the behemoth, meeting in the pool on the surface of Ubh Blaosc. Instinctively Ibic could feel what was happening in the pool. The Níðhöggr’s defensive fields tore at the raven, shredding him in the way that no Lloigor-derived Consortium or Church shield could. He was screaming as the serpent god flayed him. All of his power went to keeping him in the different physical state that was protecting his uplift cargo in the flickering, shifting coherent energy fields clutched to him like a mother holding newborns. He saw the guts of the serpent ship, armoured bone superstructure, vast biomechanical organs. He saw the sparks fly through its vast nervous system, its children squeezed rapidly through its veins. He wished he could reach out and harm this thing he had been created to fight.
And then suddenly he was beneath the Níðhöggr, in its vast shadow. He could see the glow of the stones in the black water, the lightning playing across them. This had to be timed just right. He came to a halt, and bled off the kinetic energy that tried to act on the three shielded uplifts, their flesh and armour still changing. He drank the kinetic energy; every little bit helped. In his vision the forces at play looked like a tiny star going nova, and then space bent away from him and his instinctive understanding failed him as the trod was opened. He switched off the coherent energy fields, and the three uplifts dropped.
He ejected his gift. Three coherent field generators made as best he could in the time he had. The field generators attached themselves to the falling uplifts’ transforming armour.
Ibic ÓLug was now shieldless, but now he could cause hurt.
It looked like he had exploded. Ghost bullets with virulent S-tech biological virals, and potent L-tech nanotech virals, intelligently sought crucial organs. Black light, fusion lances, de-coherence beams undid molecular bonds, and dust rained down on the resinous plain. DNA hacks regressed complex biomechanical organisms into protoplasmic slime. It lasted less than a moment. The black water drained from the pool. For a moment the glowing stones were visible, a ring of blue fire within, a red world beyond. In the sky above, the Forge flickered. Then the Níðhöggr breathed, and introduced Ibic ÓLug to the conditions at the heart of a sun. Then a star collapsed.
Patron was sure that the concentric rings of stone where the Lloigor machines had set up this particular trod, one of the few in Red Space, were the petrified ribs of some unknown creature.
All three of the Elite were there. The Innocent, his newest, was wearing only a pair of loose, baggy, white cotton trousers as he sat on the edge of the rock, dangling his feet over crimson gases. Hedetet, the hive queen he’d had violate her own form by remaking her as an arachnid, an eight-limbed, stinger-tailed, humanoid scorpion, was coated in her black, liquid glass armour, hiding the shame of her form. She was leaning on her weapon, which was configured as a spear.
Patron ran his hand over his favourite’s cobra-like head. She flinched at his touch less these days. All his hand felt was the exotic matter of her armour. Like Hedetet, the surviving Pennangalan sister was ashamed of her form. She was the most covert of the Consortium Elite. She had to be. She was not a full Naga, only a tech-infused hybrid. It still would have been more than enough to cause difficult questions in board meetings, and public outcry, such as it was, if her existence became common knowledge. Uplifts just weren’t self-aware enough to embrace their own destruction.
‘I am surprised they have got this far,’ Patron mused. It wasn’t their individual abilities he had doubted, more their ability to work as a group, or even in their own best interest. The stones glowed from within, picking out the symbols in the rock that even Patron struggled to understand. A ring of blue fire appeared within the circle.
Britha hit the ground hard. The blue fire, reflecting on the silver of the raven-headed armour, winked out. She felt the change in the power. She wanted to throw up from the pain. The raven-shaped helm folded away from her face but she was only dry heaving. The spear was screaming at her, her head felt like it wanted to burst. The parasite thing living within her seemed always just out of reach, teasing her as it hid.
‘Quiet!’ she screamed. She felt calmness flood through her in an unnatural way, but it allowed her the presence of mind to sing the mindsong that contained the magic, to calm the spear. She could feel the heat from the haft even through her armour. Its screaming rage subsided to a simmering fury, and it became almost manageable. She was aware of the crystal parasite creeping through her mind, eating what she was, what she had been. Her red hair drifted to the black ground as it fell out of her swollen skull.
She stood up and knew that she was in Cythrawl. She could still see the fiercely glowing magic burning within the stones, feel it. Beyond the stones a city, like the terrifying stories that Germelqart and Kush had once told her of their ‘civilisation’. Vast, dark structures, spires and towers that looked like barbed, spear-shaped brochs, reached up for the red sky. The angles were impossible, their shadowed parts reached to elsewhere. Once it would have hurt to even see such a thing; now, instinctively, she understood that those were paths she could walk. That was when she realised that she was little more than an echo now. Britha was no more. Her body was just a vessel. She was just a memory in a demon’s mind.
There were things there, vast creatures that had grown into the rock. She saw the power they drank as glowing lines coming from deep in the earth. She knew them as kin to the Muileartach. Somehow she could hear their minds echoing through the crystalline tendrils branching out from her head, and into other places. The minds might have been hopelessly moonstruck, but they were cold and languid. There was little for them to eat now. She was barely aware of the other smaller minds, the people who crawled across this city as lice crawled across skin.
There was something else here. Something that burned the tendrils of her crystalline awareness, made them shrink away from it. Something that she knew to fear more than a god, a sleeping mind whose desire to wake she could feel. On the horizon a huge, black, squirming and very close sun was rising.
Light
ning started to play amid the circle of stones. Lug’s spear caught fire. The stones glowed from within, picking out the symbols in the rock. Part of her wanted to stay in the circle, journey by trod away from this terrible place, but she could see the power at play here, and stepped out of the circle just as the ring of blue fire appeared.
The blue fire faded. There were four of them. Two were clothed in a material not unlike the black shining rocks that the traders had once brought to her people. Rocks that they swore came from the insides of burning mountains. One such stood more than two heads taller than her. She had six arms, carried a strange-looking spear, and had a long, segmented tail that ended in a stinger. The other had the head of a hooded snake. Britha did not recognise the weapon she held, but it was easy to see that it was one. The third figure was unmistakeably Crom Dhubh, though his clothes were strange. She felt hate flare in her for all that he had done to her people. The parasite in her head showed him what he really was, a man-shaped squirming hole in space.
She felt something in her chest when she saw the fourth figure. It was Bress as a young man, with very short hair. He was nowhere near as tall, but it was unmistakably him. Though the innocence of his features, the childlike expression of wonder as he looked around at this horrible place, seemed very out of place on what were, ostensibly, her lover’s features. Britha’s hand shot to her mouth, and a quicksilver tear ran down her cheek, only to be absorbed through her skin a moment later. Then young Bress seemed to fall asleep, though he remained standing. His sleep did not look restful; he jerked and swung his arms around as the black shining material leaked through his skin like oil and coated his flesh. A long, black-bladed sword grew from nowhere and he let it drag on the ground.
There was no point in hiding. Crom Dhubh surely knew she was there, just as she could feel him, and see him for what he was. She stepped out from between the stones. Her helmet was still folded away from her face. There was just a flicker of surprise on his face.
‘I had not thought to see you here,’ he said, glancing at the spear. He was speaking in the tongue of the Pecht. It felt like an insult hearing him use the tongue of her people. He concentrated, and then looked away from her. ‘The same trick? Lug has been infecting his pets with parasites again.’
‘Why aren’t you dead?’ she demanded.
‘Am I not? Perhaps it’s just not something that happens to me. I should thank you. I used to think so small. Without you it would have been over before it had even started.’
‘You’ve destroyed so much!’ she cried, tears of quicksilver running down her cheek again.
‘You cannot possibly understand how little that matters.’ Then he concentrated. Britha could see it again. The light burning in the smoking stones. She could see the power branching out into places it had not been before, the magics of the stones overtaxed. Crom Dhubh and the three black, shining, stone-clad warriors walked out of the circle, away from Britha.
She thought of her people, the Cirig, Cliodna, her lover, Fachtna, her lover, Kush, Teardrop-on-Fire, Raven’s Laughter, their children, all the people of the Ubh Blaosc, that burning Otherworld. She thought of her children whom she would never see, now. Perhaps Crom Dhubh had a plan, but all the harm he had caused had only ever seemed to be done on a spiteful whim to her. He had found another Bress, an Otherworldly changeling perhaps, and enslaved him as well. She watched the changeling dragging the huge blade behind him. Crom Dhubh would turn him into a monster as well, like the Bress she knew, if he had not already done so.
What do you love, Crom Dhubh? The thought was a whisper in her mind. It sounded like her voice. She saw echoes of past movement stretching out and away from Crom Dhubh. The black-skinned man’s hand touching the snake-headed woman. The energies in the circle coalesced, and blue fire filled the ring of stones once again. The raven head flipped down over her face. She felt her armoured feet branch into the earth, anchoring her, as the deluge of black water tried to wash her away. The Spear of Lug made a path of steam through the water as Britha threw it.
Fury as a state of being, fury at loss of control. Things were being done to him against his will. He had felt this before, or something like it. Some fragmented remainder of a surgically removed memory in the scar tissue that passed for his mind. He was being turned into an Elite, or something very similar. The awareness of everything returned as his senses spread out, only to become confounded by the architecture of the strange city he found himself in, on this world in Red Space.
He lacked the superior biotech of S-tech, though the invasive Lloigor nanites were doing the best they could to improve his own soft-machine augments. Lug’s gift, which had turned his combat armour and weapons into liquid and reformed them, was not the cobbled together, jury-rigged scavenging of ancient technology that the Elite-tech was. They were fresh from their creators: armour, weapons and flesh now just components in the same fighting machine.
Energy was the problem. Wherever they were it seemed in short supply. He was aware of an entangled link feeding him energy from ancient machines. The feed was sluggish in a way that suggested a radical change in physics. He was aware that the energy on demand was severely limited.
He pushed himself up onto one knee in the deluge as it surged out and away from the centre of the circle. His internal systems turned the wave of nausea, brought on by the twisted architecture, into little more than a fleeting piece of information. He felt the three Consortium Elite. If he had known the scorpion and the snake then he had long ago forgotten them, but he recognised the Innocent, and he knew Patron for what he was: a screaming hole in space.
‘No!’ He wasn’t sure how he heard the scream, but he saw the path of steam the burning spear made through the water. Even he was surprised when the spear exploded through one of the still-glowing stones, creating a fountain of energy, and hit the snake-headed Elite. The Elite flew backwards, pushed by the spear’s screaming, burning head. It hit a thick pedestal of strange-looking stone. The horrible, tentacled statue atop the pedestal was moving slowly, lines of energy and the instinctive knowledge of the existence of a vast and languid mind telling Scab that it was actually alive. The spear drove the Elite deep into the stone, and then passed through her. Scab was appalled. There was just a moment of fear. No, not fear, awe. It had been Patron who had been screaming. Scab didn’t care. He wanted to kill the Innocent.
His armour bulged as it sucked strange matter from the ground, an infection of nanites transforming it at a molecular level into payloads. From the time he had torn the egg from the flesh of his first kill on Cyst and it had grown into his tumbler pistol, he had preferred bullet to beam. His weapon was an ergonomically optimised carbine. The barrel was widened and flattened. The armour fed it the ghost discs, using much of the available entangled energy feed to enable the discs to flicker in and out of different physical states, some of them even forming micro-bridges, or attempting quantum tunnelling to pass through the Innocent’s armour. Each of the ghost discs would fragment into voracious nanites if they returned to this hard reality inside the Innocent. It was a distraction, nothing more.
They were bathed in a cold, hard rain of white light and something past ultraviolet: focused particle beam weapons, X-ray lasers. This blackened planet under its red sky had an orbital defence network. Scab was aware of it being S-tech, biomechanical satellites and habitats with living weapons, and Patron was in control of them. A flickering nimbus of amber energy surrounded him as he kicked off through accelerated particles, warping gravity around his armoured form to provide flight. He was aware of Vic standing over Talia, both similarly protected by coherent energy fields as the earth around them ceased to exist, and another figure in raven-headed armour, the spear-thrower, kneeling, protected by her own field. Scab did not know her but she was familiar somehow.
The Innocent was moving, surrounded by his own flickering light, the exotic matter of the liquid glass that encased him rippling as the discs hit it and the armour transported them elsewhere. The rain o
f hard light and particles stopped. Both Scab and the Innocent dropped their coherent energy fields so they could harm each other. Scab still had his energy javelin: it was, after all, L-tech as well. The armour covering the palm of his hand parted to let the E-javelin out as Scab covered the distance to the Innocent. The Elite swung his oversized sword, making it look as if the weapon overbalanced him. It was a lie. The black blade, inimical to life, cut at Scab as he closed in. Scab’s new armour cut him open, pushing itself into his flesh, wounding him so it was armour the blade cut through, and not fragile – despite augmentation – flesh. Scab lashed out with the E-javelin. The Innocent parried with his blade. All the technology in the world couldn’t compensate for experience and sneakiness. Scab’s ‘weapon’, which had been shaped like a carbine, was now a knife in his other hand. He stabbed it towards the Innocent, who was suddenly surrounded by the amber light again. Scab gritted his teeth as he slowly inched the exotic matter of the blade into the Elite’s coherent energy field. The blade flickered between different physical states as it edged through the shield.
The spear disappeared like a screaming comet into the red sky. Scab understood its flight path. Behind him he was aware of black light and lances of fusion. He heard buildings crumble. He was also aware of, and then disappointed by, the attempts at electronic warfare. It demeaned them all, though he would seek any opportunity to prove himself hypocrite in this. The Innocent launched himself into the air. Scab raked his blade down through the amber light of the Elite’s shield, and made ripples in the liquid glass armour. A foot caught him in the head with enough power to powder armour plate. Scab bounced off the top of one of the smoking stones in the circle. His spine snapped and then reknit almost immediately. He impacted with the edge of the warped, tomb-like structure, creating a Scab-shaped imprint in basalt. The Innocent chased the burning spear. Scab cloaked himself in gravity and followed.
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