A Quantum Mythology

by Gavin G. Smith

  ‘Well, now you’ve brought it up he already knows.’

  ‘Only if he cares to.’

  ‘He cares.’ Both of them looked around at the sound of Scab’s voice. He was naked, again, growing out of the smart matter next to the now full swimming pool as if the ship was extruding him. He had taken to living within the ship’s smart matter. Vic suspected it was so the situation with his possessed son and his crew of serial-killer pirates wouldn’t cause him to lose his temper and kill everyone else on the Basilisk II. Nobody else, not even Elodie, appeared to realise how close they were to dying every time a new story came in, or one of them made a comment. Scab’s pale skin glowed red with the light from space outside. He wore two polarised lenses over his eyes.

  ‘Why?’ Vic asked. ‘We knew we were going to have bounties on us.’

  ‘Did we?’ Scab replied. ‘Nobody wants anybody else to get their hands on Talia. Even among the Consortium and the Monarchists, there’s internal competition for her.’

  ‘So?’ Vic asked. He didn’t really see how that mattered.

  ‘So Mr Hat must be working for someone in particular, one of the factions,’ Elodie said. ‘Though I agree with Vic – what difference does that make?’

  ‘I think he was my erstwhile employer’s second choice,’ Scab replied. ‘If the theft of the cocoon hadn’t been so out-and-out criminal, I think my employer would have preferred to use Mr Hat.’

  ‘Because he’s not such a psycho?’ Vic asked.

  Elodie raised an eyebrow, the ghost of a smile on her mouth.

  ‘He programs automatons to worship him,’ Scab said. There was no trace of irritation. He was merely imparting information.

  ‘I stand by my initial statement,’ Vic said. Elodie actually laughed this time. Scab frowned.

  ‘So what?’ Elodie said. ‘He’s employed by someone who’s probably a little bit more pissed off at you than the rest of Known Space is. We get caught, we get fucked, whoever catches us.’

  ‘I want to know how he is communicating with my erstwhile employer,’ Scab said.

  ‘He was on the other end of the blank at Arclight,’ Vic pointed out.

  ‘You think he may have a blank?’ Elodie asked.

  ‘The blank belonged to the Queen’s Cartel,’ Vic told them.

  ‘The stakes have been raised,’ Scab said simply. ‘And he has access to blanks.’

  ‘Again, so what?’ Elodie asked. ‘Are you going to tell us who he is?’

  ‘No,’ Scab told her.

  Vic was regarding his partner carefully. ‘You want a blank, don’t you?’ the ’sect asked. Scab looked over at him.

  ‘What for?’ Elodie asked. ‘Blanks are twinned. You’ll only be able to talk to your old employer.’

  Scab ignored her. He concentrated on his cigarette.

  ‘The person who hired you to steal the cocoon is on the Consortium board, isn’t he?’ Vic asked. Scab still said nothing.

  ‘Wow! What a great pool!’ The Alchemist – who Talia was insisting everyone should call Steve – said as he walked into the pool area. He was wearing some stained boxer shorts and an equally filthy, wide-open bathrobe. ‘Full of water and everything! Are there any dream dragons in it? No. Weird. Imagine that. Just a shame I’m not currently in the body of a waterborne mammal, isn’t it?’

  Vic’s olfactory sensors could pick up the stench from the other side of the pool room. Steve had gone on hygiene strike until he either got a dolphin body or his lack of hygiene annoyed Scab and the human killed him, whichever happened first. Elodie’s nose wrinkled in disgust. As a feline she was suffering the worst from it.

  ‘Why aren’t the ship’s nano-screens eliminating the scent molecules?’ she demanded.

  ‘I asked them not to,’ Steve told her. ‘Gee, I hope I can swim.’ He jumped into the pool. A small slick of grime spread out from his body but it was quickly sanitised by the ship’s nanites.

  Elodie opened her mouth to say something but then received the neunonic warning from the ship at the same time as Vic and Scab. Elodie looked less than impressed. Vic and Scab started running. Scab sent instructions to the ship with a thought.

  Scab had already overridden the door lock on Talia’s room and it was wide open when he reached it. Vic was right behind him. Talia was struggling with the smart-matter bed, which had morphed to restrain the human nat. Beside her was a rapidly diminishing red-wine stain and the carpet was already absorbing a broken bottle. The bedsheets and carpet were absorbing blood from a ragged red gash on her wrist. Pills from a half-empty bottle were also scattered around the bed.

  Scab stood next to the bed and looked at her. He took a drag on his cigarette.

  ‘Talia!’ Vic said, stopping just behind Scab. ‘What did you do?’

  Scab glanced at his partner.

  ‘Let go of me!’ Talia shouted at the bed.

  Then the realisation of what she’d been trying to do hit Vic. ‘Were you trying to kill yourself?’ the ’sect demanded. He turned as he heard laughter. Elodie was walking down the carpeted hallway towards them.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ the feline said. Scab was shaking his head. ‘If she was, it was a pretty half-hearted attempt, don’t you think?’

  Vic returned his attention to Talia. He suspected he was never going to be able to understand humans.

  She stopped struggling and looked up at him pathetically. ‘I don’t want to be here,’ she told them.

  ‘It’s been ten minutes since her last little psychodrama,’ Elodie said, coming to stand by Vic. ‘She just wanted some attention. With nothing to contribute, this is the best she could do.’

  ‘Why didn’t you come and talk to me?’ Vic asked Talia.

  ‘Because you don’t care. You won’t kill me,’ she said plaintively.

  I will, he thought, I promise.

  Elodie glanced at the insect.

  ‘Well, she’s got my attention,’ Scab said quietly and took another drag on his cigarette. ‘We can’t risk her actually managing to damage herself.’ He turned to Vic. ‘Sort out her wrist, purge her and then drop her into an immersion. I don’t care which one. You can visit her there.’

  Vic nodded.

  ‘Bastards!’ Talia shouted at them.

  Elodie and Scab turned and walked out of the room, leaving Vic standing over the bed.

  It had cost a fortune in terraforming to tint the atmosphere to make Lotus Eater’s sun appear green in the sky, but then it was a privately owned planet. The owner, one of the Lords of the Monarchist systems, clearly liked it. Most of the planet was bespoke – designer flora and fauna, all of it set up to be appealingly ‘alien’ to once-human minds. Unlike most planets, it was almost empty. It had a tiny population.

  The estate was suspended hundreds of feet above a garishly coloured savannah with oddly shaped plant life. Bizarre and exotic flying, stalking and grazing fauna populated the plain. Sculpted mountains rose in the distance.

  The estate itself was made up of a series of steps surrounding a slowly revolving segmented house, each flight rotating counter to the direction of the ones above and below. Each step level had a garden, and each garden had a theme.

  A crimson wound bordered with pulsing blue light appeared in the sky above the grasslands. With it came a sucking wind that tore plant-life, birds, flying lizards and six-legged, vacuum-mouthed herbivores off the plain and through the wound. The Basilisk II emerged from Red Space, its ordnance already firing. The forward airlock hung open like a mouth.

  ‘Shiiiit!’ Vic howled as a herbivore the size of a G-carrier narrowly missed him, bouncing off one of the airlock’s support struts. The strut bent under the impact, but the smart matter immediately began repairing the damage.

  There was a hypersonic ripping sound as the Basilisk II fired its current payload of kinetic harpoons at the orbital weapons platforms
that would doubtless be targeting them by now. AG-driven smart munitions followed. The ship then began to regrow new munitions from its carbon reservoirs, running the base matter through military-grade assemblers programmed with complex weapon templates.

  The wound in the air snapped shut behind them. The Basilisk II’s closer-range weapons – EM-driven assault cannon blisters, rotary laser batteries – were already firing, acting as point-defence weaponry. A storm of light and force fluctuated back and forth between the estate and the Basilisk II as it circled. In addition to destroying incoming munitions, the Basilisk’s short-range weapons systems were also targeting the estate’s heavy weaponry and destroying the hardpoints. It looked as if the rotating anti-gravity estate had exploded.

  Vic, Scab and the nearly invisible Elodie launched their armoured combat-exoskeleton forms from the airlock ramp and the airlock closed behind them. P-sats in heavy-combat chassis carried them into the firefight, sensors feeding a dazzling display of trajectories into their neunonics as tactical programs tried to find the safest route.

  The sky lit up above them as the orbital defence network recovered from the surprise of a heavily armed ship appearing out of nowhere. Beams of energy destroyed kinetic harpoons and AG smart munitions, despite the latter’s evasive manoeuvres and countermeasures.

  The estate was beginning to recover as well. Vic and Scab felt the first weaponised nano-swarm, viral and electronic attacks. They were the best the money that allowed you to own and redesign a planet could buy. Not so long ago they would have overwhelmed Vic and Scab’s countermeasures. That was before the fake auction and Scab going into credit, even if it was black credit. Their defences held. Nobody had noticed Elodie yet.

  The Basilisk II’s energy-dissipation grid was constantly lit up, the ship’s armour smoking, running in places as the carbon reservoirs struggled to regrow it. Kinetic harpoons rained down, hammering the vessel repeatedly towards the plain. Some missed the yacht and hit the plain, causing small tectonic events and large fauna stampedes.

  Lasers and assault cannon rounds cleared the way for Scab, Vic and Elodie’s flight. Any weapons systems that targeted them, the Basilisk II destroyed. Even so, Vic and Scab were glowing neon figures as their combat exoskeletons attempted to deal with the incoming laser-fire, and they were battered around in the air by explosions and projectile hits. Every time the ship destroyed one weapon system, another took over. Elodie still remained unnoticed.

  Scab was flying the Basilisk II. He had multitasked, essentially forking his mind to control flight and defensive and offensive weapons, with a little help from the yacht’s personality-spayed AI.

  They landed on the third of six rotating levels. The garden had once consisted of artfully arranged stones, sand, lacquered wood and water features. It was now glass, ash, molten slag and steam. Security shutters had slid down, turning the AG estate into a floating fortress. It was also moving at speed towards rapid-reaction forces despatched from other estates owned by Lotus Eater’s ruling family.

  Vic aimed the strobe gun at nearby automated anti-personnel weapons that were targeting Scab and himself, pouring on fire from the rapidly cycling laser. One of the automated weapon systems glowed neon and exploded. Vic covered Scab as his human partner/captor advanced, double-barrelled laser rifle at the ready. Vic had no idea where Elodie was. The Basilisk II was a smoking mess. Most of the ship’s armoured skin was bubbling as it was battered around in the air, hit again and again from orbit.

  Scab threw programmed thermal seeds at the armoured shutters protecting the estate. The seeds glowed red, orange and finally white as they cut a large circle through the armour. Vic strode forwards, still firing the six-barrelled strobe gun, and kicked the armoured shutter in the centre of the circle cut by the thermal seeds. His power-assisted hard-tech leg knocked it in, and the white-hot edge of the armour plate set fire to the carpet inside. Vic felt something move past him. He assumed it was Elodie. He threw his strobe gun in through the hole, the weapon’s spipod unfolding in mid-air. The six-barrelled rotary laser landed on the spipod’s four legs and scuttled into the AG mansion. Vic immediately started receiving sensor feed from the ambulatory weapon which he shared with Scab. They had to move quickly now. The information coming from the Basilisk II suggested that the ship couldn’t take much more of the kind of punishment it was currently receiving.

  Vic unclipped his advanced combat rifle from the back of his exoskeleton with his upper limbs and sent information to his lizard power disc. The strobe gun was already firing. Vic stepped through the hole in the armoured shutter into the mansion, taking out targets provided by the strobe gun’s sensor feed. As he advanced into the open-plan room, his P-sat separated from his exoskeleton and rose up towards the ceiling beams.

  Vic stepped to one side, still advancing and firing. He was receiving a lot of return fire and the room was starting to fill with smoke as the strobe gun wandered around, destroying carefully selected targets. Scab followed Vic in, taking out target after target with his double-barrelled laser rifle. A member of the security team died with each double beam.

  Vic grabbed the power disc from its housing on the back of his exoskeleton with his right-lower limb and threw it. The moment he released the disc, he drew both of his double-barrelled laser pistols with his lower limbs. The security team were competent and had responded quickly and proficiently to an attack that shouldn’t have been possible. Vic and Scab started receiving accurate return fire the moment they came through the armoured shutter. The security team’s main problem, however, was their smart attire – while their armoured clothes had energy-dissipation grids woven into them, but their faces were bare.

  The disc flew across their exposed skin, opening flesh, removing eyes. The majority were still combat effective, but at the very least the power disc surprised them. As soon as the disc scythed their skin open, either Vic or Scab hit them with headshots. They fell back, faces either red, steaming, superheated messes from Scab’s lasers, or full of holes from the electromagnetically propelled, caseless, armour-piercing explosive rounds fired from Vic’s ACR.

  Everything went quiet inside. Outside, the Basilisk II was still taking a battering. The strobe gun leaped up onto a counter, rotating three-hundred-and-sixty degrees, seeking more targets.

  ‘I’ve got him,’ Elodie said over the ’face link and revealed her position to their sensors. Vic and Scab instantly let their various weapons systems know she wasn’t a target. She was standing, holding on to a very fat human with a lot of dark-coloured hair and a large bushy beard. He was wearing a stained toga of the type popular in certain parts of the Monarchist systems. He was blubbering, almost hysterically, and had soiled himself. This confused Vic, because the human should have been able to neunonically and chemically control his response. Despite Elodie’s lightweight, stealth-adapted combat exoskeleton, Vic could still make out the feline’s distaste in her body language. The bearded human looked familiar to Vic. At first he couldn’t work out why, then realised that he reminded him, somehow, of the Living City’s spokesperson they had met with on Pangea. Perhaps all the Monarchist humans looked the same, he mused. Then Vic saw the tendrils of animated wire running from under Elodie’s retracted claws and into his head.

  The light and the thunder from outside stopped as Elodie used the man’s hacked neunonics to spoof the orbital defence network and the estate itself into ceasing fire.

  ‘How long do we have?’ Vic asked.

  ‘We’ve got G-carriers and hoppers plus several ships from the security fleet all inbound,’ Elodie said. ‘The ships are coming from high orbit so they’ll take a while, but they’ll be in range in less than a hundred and twenty seconds.’

  ‘Is the estate ours?’ Scab asked.

  Elodie nodded.

  Missiles and other autonomous munitions were speeding across the plain and through the sky towards the Basilisk II as Vic, Scab and Elodie were carried by their
P-sats back towards the partially melted-looking ship. The fore airlock opened and swallowed them even as the sky lit up overhead with incoming ordnance.

  The Basilisk II banked sharply, its internal gravity keeping the passengers upright. The sky above them lit up again, this time with green fire as frigates from the naval contractor fleet pierced the tinted atmosphere. Light and energy reached out for the Basilisk II as it flew low over the savannah, scattering herds of fauna in its thunderous wake. Then the red, sucking tear appeared in the air over the grasslands and the Basilisk II disappeared.

  Vic’s and Scab’s combat exoskeletons were still smoking as they cooled. Vic carried the two recently assembled tanks using all four of his limbs. Scab and Elodie followed the armoured ’sect through the ship and into the pool room.

  Steve was curled up on the floor, sobbing.

  ‘It’s okay, it’s over,’ Elodie told the dolphin imprisoned in human form.

  Vic walked over to the pool and ’faced instructions to the two tanks. Their bottoms split open and the contents fell into the pool. They uncoiled, writhing through the water in a display of angry hissing and flickering electricity. With a thought, Scab dimmed the lights and let their electrical displays illuminate the room. Steve was staring at them, awe all over his face.

  ‘A breeding pair?’ he asked. Scab nodded.

  Vic watched the two serpents with their flat reptilian maws and bright reflective rainbow scales coil angrily through the water. He sort-of understood the fascination with the beauty of the creatures, though it wasn’t really something he’d taught himself to appreciate yet. They made him nervous, however. He’d undergone Key hallucinations in the past. It was a trip to a place he had no intention of returning to.

  ‘What you can’t assemble you’ll find in the cargo hold,’ Scab said.