A Quantum Mythology

by Gavin G. Smith

  Nearby he heard screaming. He looked up and saw something living growing from the body of a woman it was simultaneously consuming. He raised the SA58 FAL carbine to his shoulder and felt the gun kick against him as he fired. He put a three-round burst into the woman, then another into the thing growing from her before the body could fall into the water.

  Beth awoke to the sound of gunfire. Du Bois looked down at her.

  ‘We need to go,’ he told her.

  44

  A Long Time After the Loss

  It happened quickly. The cylinder fabricated to look like brass, wood and glass which contained the black, viscous fluid floated into the chamber. Patron looked up, frowning. Elodie started to move. The cylinder exploded and semi-liquid, oil-like pseudopodia shot out from it. At the same time, the two monks exploded, oily pseudopodia shooting out from the black, semi-solid masses of their protean bodies, their voluminous red robes disintegrating around them. Whatever the pseudopodia touched dissolved rapidly.

  Elodie rolled forward, one hand coming up to sweep away the assault cannon trained on her by the military contractor. The sting in her prehensile braid darted out and stabbed the blank.

  For a moment the Elite stood there, swaying, as the black, oily mass surged around him. Any pseudopodia that touched his glass-like armour flinched away from it, smoking. The Innocent analysed the contacts, released virals, nano-swarms, even electronic warfare, cycling through all his options, searching for a way to harm it. Then he raised his rifle-configured weapon and started firing. Bullets with exotic payloads, charged particles, decoherence matter-hacks, DNA-scrambling meat-hacks, even exotic bandwidth lasers tore into the pseudopodia.

  The military contractors were dissolving, being consumed by something utterly inimical to life.

  Patron’s suit dissolved. His face was a mask of fury as he reached for Scab to utterly end him. Scab swiped at him. The Scorpion’s sting tore through the sleeve of Scab’s jacket and slashed open a rent in Patron’s flesh. Beneath the skin was dead flesh and void. Patron took a step back. Surprised. Scab’s other arm began to glow from within. The energy javelin shot out of the hard-tech housing in his arm and Scab rammed it into Patron’s stomach. Patron now began to glow from within. He looked down at Scab and started to laugh. Then the blank began to scream.

  Talia’s blood had been carried around the blank’s body by nanites so aggressive that most of his veins were haemorrhaging. Under his nearly translucent porcelain skin, blood was spreading like a dye. The blank’s S-tech-augmented mind shone like a beacon. Patron joined in the screaming. He sounded like he was in agony.

  Vic drew his triple-barrelled shotgun pistol and levelled it at Talia. Elodie saw what was happening, but she was already throwing a syringe. It hit Talia in the neck.

  The Innocent had turned his rifle into a two-handed sword and was hacking at the pseudopodia as they shrank away from contact with the weapon. Vic found his targeting solution. Scab blew the wall of the chamber and Vic, Talia and Elodie were sucked out into space. Some of the contractors’ remains were sucked out with them, but the pseudopodia snagged them, dragging them back in to continue consuming them.

  The emergency-vacuum-survival nanites Elodie had injected coursed through Talia’s otherwise natural human body. The others’ augmented bodies would keep them alive for a short period of time.

  Tumbling through space, they had a moment to take in the massive size of the englobaling Consortium fleet. Fighters, corsairs and intership shuttles were tiny dots of light between the frigates, cruisers, carriers and the city-sized behemoth that was a capital ship. Manoeuvring engines glowed as they moved in a slow, graceful ballet around the monastic habitat.

  Holes appeared in and around the monastery habitat. Space looked like a rotting, honeycomb void. Wriggling, maggot-like absences of colour came through the holes, consuming everything, reaching for the fleet. The fleet, in return, made space a storm of light and force, and sent more matter to be consumed.

  A red rip bordered with a pulsing blue light opened in space. Elodie reached for and grabbed Talia, hugging the convulsing, haemorrhaging human to her. Behind them all the spectrums of destructive energy were being explored as distended, maggoty voids touched the first of the fleet and started to consume it. Manoeuvring engines burned brightly as the fleet, in disarray, tried to escape the void-things.

  Vic had no idea why he wasn’t dead. The three P-sats sped through the wound in space. Vic, Elodie and Scab reached for them, grabbed extruded handholds and were pulled through the rip into Red Space.

  Patron stood in the vacuum among the hungry living voids, screaming silently, in agony.

  The Basilisk II was waiting for them, its mouth-like airlock open. Vic was angry and scared. Scab had managed to call the things they’d first seen when they destroyed the Seeder ship that Talia had been linked to in Red Space. They appeared to have more destructive power than an Elite, and somehow Scab could influence it. Things just kept getting worse and worse. This wasn’t even considering the fact that the man who had hired Scab initially – Vic couldn’t remember his name – had taken an energy javelin in the stomach and not died. It didn’t matter how augmented you were, you died when someone cut you open with a coherent-energy weapon.

  The P-sats took them into the airlock which closed behind them, and air cycled in as the smart-matter chamber sank into the floor of the cargo bay. Vic glanced down at Talia. Burst blood vessels covered her visible skin but she was gasping down air, kept alive by the nanites Elodie had injected her with. Elodie was standing over the human with an expression of contempt on her feline features. Scab was looking deeper into the ship. Vic decided to fulfil his promise just as he started receiving warnings from the motion detectors on his antennae and his P-sat.

  ‘Something’s wrong,’ Scab said, drawing his tumbler pistol and spit gun. Vic rotated his thorax and pointed his triple-barrelled shotgun pistol at Talia. Something fell from the roof, kicking Elodie and Scab hard enough to send them sprawling to the ground as she fell past them. Vic fired the weapon with a thought. The gun went off on the floor, where it was lying, still held in the hand on the end of his newly severed arm. The barrels weren’t pointing anywhere near Talia when the weapon went off. The recoil shot the limb backwards across the airlock’s deck.

  Scab had flipped back onto his feet. The flechette penetrators fired by the shotgun pistol hit him in the leg. Some of them beat the hardening armour of his suit trousers, embedded themselves in his hardening skin and then exploded. Scab’s leg was blown out from underneath him.

  Surprised, Vic had a moment to take in the white-hot glowing end of his new stump, and then he was drawing both of his double-barrelled laser pistols with his upper limbs. Combat-exoskeleton-clad figures were appearing in the cargo bay now, levelling assault cannons, double-barrelled, flechette-loaded automatic EM-shotguns and strobe guns at them as they decloaked.

  The Monk was crouched over Talia protectively, a thermal blade designed to look like a bayonet in each hand. Vic wasn’t sure why he hesitated.

  ‘I want to live!’ Talia cried. Vic froze.

  Scab had the tumbler pistol pointed at the Monk and the spit gun pointed at Talia.

  ‘For someone with a death wish, Woodbine, you work very hard to stay alive,’ the Monk said.

  ‘I like doing things on my own terms,’ Scab replied.

  ‘Unfortunately, you’re getting predictable. How many times have you pulled this trick? You need to remember that we were the ones who taught it to you in the first place.’

  ‘That’s fair,’ Scab said, nodding. ‘How’d you find us?’

  ‘We didn’t find you, we found the monastery in the severely corrupted neunonics of one of the heretics. The one who delivered the Marduk implant to you on Arclight,’ she told him. Scab was nodding. ‘The Basilisk is being surrounded by our ships as we speak.’

  ‘I know,’
Scab said. Vic was surprised that the Church was still letting him speak to the ship. ‘And St … the Alchemist is dead.’

  Vic found that he was utterly ambivalent about this bit of news.

  ‘He committed suicide when we came aboard,’ the Monk said.

  ‘Fair enough. Get your people off my ship, back your ships away, you and her stay as hostages until we’re clear. I’ll kill you, but I won’t mess up your cloning,’ Scab told the Monk.

  ‘This is stupid,’ Elodie said. She put her hands up. ‘Don’t shoot, I’m out of this.’ She pointed at a far corner of the cargo hold. ‘Cover me if you want but I’m going to stand over there, okay?’ She walked across the hold under the guns of the Church militia.

  The Monk was shaking her head in exasperation. ‘All we want to do is talk,’ she said, the frustration telling in her voice.

  Vic levelled both his laser pistols at Scab.

  ‘You sure?’ Scab asked. Vic just nodded. Scab lowered his pistols and gave a Vic a look of utter hatred. Once it would have terrified Vic beyond the capacity for thought or action, regardless of the drugs he took to try and cope. Now it was just another day with Scab.

  ‘Look, you’ve got control of your ship. Keep your weapons. Just try not to be a tedious wanker until we get to the Cathedral, okay?’ the Monk asked. Scab was holstering his weapons. He nodded, once, then with some difficulty he stood up and hopped from the cargo hold. Vic lowered his lasers.

  The Monk relaxed and looked down at Talia, sympathy and concern on her face. She ran her hand over Talia’s face.

  ‘Beth?’ Talia asked. The Monk nodded. There were tears in both their eyes. ‘What have you done to your hair?’ Talia asked. Beth pulled Talia to her, hugging her tightly. ‘I’m so sorry.’ Talia sobbed into her sister’s shoulder.

  The Monk had shared something with the Basilisk II’s personality-spayed AI, and the ship piloted itself through Red Space using occulted beacons for guidance. A carrier, two heavy cruisers and an assortment of smaller ships escorted them on their journey. All the ships shared a similar baroque design and had religious reliefs and statuary on their hulls. They were still warships.

  They congregated in the pool room. Scab had turned as much of the smart-matter hull as was possible transparent. Though, curiously, he’d kept the window as well, and they were all bathed in the red glow. He had stripped down to his boxers but kept his hat and weapons on. He was also wearing a pair of sunglasses. He was lying on one of the poolside loungers on a heroin nod, only just about able to smoke a cigarette. A medical fabricator was regrowing the missing parts of his leg.

  Elodie fixed herself a drink, and then another. Vic assumed that, like him, she had also picked a relaxing narcotic from her internal supplies to help unwind and cope with the situation.

  Vic was also lying on a lounger, his remaining arms crossed. The fear of what Scab was going to do as a result of his betrayal hadn’t kicked in yet.

  Talia was crying a lot. Mostly from relief. The Monk – Beth was her name, apparently – was holding her, comforting her now that an amount of first aid had been administered.

  The Church militia were still aboard but keeping a discreet distance. Vic wondered if this was so they wouldn’t damage Scab’s pride any further.

  The dead dolphin floating on top of the pool was a bit depressing.

  ‘You’ll want to see this,’ Beth told her sister. She took Talia’s hand and led her around the pool to stand by the transparent hull.

  It loomed out of the red gas, a huge edifice carved from a massive asteroid. It was one single building more than a hundred miles long in the shape of a cross. The main body of the cross was about twenty miles wide, the crossbar fifty miles wide, and it stood about fifteen miles high. One end of the cross was semicircular in shape.

  Massive windows ran down the length of the huge building decorated with static, highly stylised images. Flying buttresses grew out of the walls, their bases carved from smaller satellite asteroids. Each buttress was topped with a tower containing sensor arrays and comms gear. The towers also had various weapon emplacements and landing pads big enough to take the largest drop shuttle or intership transport. The entire building was covered with religious statuary. It was a vast, technological, Gothic, pre-Loss cathedral writ large.

  ‘How did you call those maggot-things?’ Beth asked as the Basilisk II flew them down the length of the Cathedral. Many ships of all shapes and sizes were docked with the massive habitat, two of them capital ships. A third capital ship was ponderously making its way towards the Cathedral through the clouds of Red Space.

  ‘Are you expecting trouble?’ Elodie asked.

  ‘She told Vic about something that happened to her,’ Scab said, nodding towards Talia, his voice slurring slightly. ‘Someone, possibly some kind of sensitive, drank her blood and destruction ensued. I wanted to see what would happen if her blood was given to a blank.’

  The Basilisk II banked around the front of the Cathedral, various weapon batteries tracking them. Their carrier escort peeled away but the two cruisers stayed with them. Part of the huge circular window at the front of the Cathedral opened and the ships flew in.

  They were bathed in a warm orange light. The interior of the Cathedral was a vast open space. They flew over a statue the size of skyscraper carved to depict what everyone thought of as a devolved Seeder: a six-armed, armoured, spurred, wedge-headed creature, crucified on a six-armed cross. Beth asked the Basilisk II to magnify part of the smart hull. Through the clouds in the far distance they could see another similarly sized statue, this one a bearded human male, obviously in pain, wearing a crown of thorns. The figure had been crucified on a tesseract.

  There were a number of Church ships in the Cathedral, which obviously had an atmosphere. Many of them were surrounded by platforms with vehicles, automatons and uplift crews working on them.

  Much of the apparent floor of the Cathedral was taken up with vast pools. P-sats zipped over the surface of the waters, doing the bidding of the dolphins that swam in them. There were also thousands of flying vehicles moving between huge, open-plan platforms teeming with activity. Connecting the various platforms were a network of walkways and tracks for some kind of mass-transit system.

  Beth asked the Basilisk II to relay the sound from outside, and they heard tranquil organ music echoing through the vast building/habitat. Even Scab looked up at this.

  When the Basilisk II reached the junction where the crossbar cut across the vast building, the yacht started circling down towards a plinth-like landing pad. Close to the landing pad were vast pipes the size of skyscrapers, which appeared to have been grown out of the stone. At the base of the pipes was a huge keyboard. A gleaming figure was playing the organ. The Basilisk II landed as the music finished, the last notes echoing throughout the huge building.

  Beth took her sister by the hand. Vic got up and followed. Elodie shrugged and decided to do the same. They walked through the ship and down the ramp at the front of the yacht. Moments later, Scab joined them, buttoning up his shirt.

  The organ was some distance from the landing platform. They watched as a mechanical arm unfolded, picked up the figure that had been playing the organ and carried him across the several-miles-deep drop to the platform, then deposited him right in front of them.

  At first they thought it was an automaton. It was a bulky, squat, ten-foot-tall, roughly humanoid-shaped armoured body. It looked to have been made of gold, inlaid with other precious metals to form beautiful but abstract patterns. There was a bulbous glass-like bubble where a head or at least a neck should have been, but it was tinted and they couldn’t see into it. It was clearly some kind of protective exoskeleton.

  ‘Miss Negrinotti, Mr Matto and Mr Scab, you are most welcome,’ a jovial, booming male voice said. Then he turned to Talia, who looked terrified. He reached for her with a huge mechanical gauntlet, but she shrank away. He
apparently thought better of it and pulled his arm back. ‘And Miss Luckwicke, you have led us a merry chase,’ he said, more thoughtfully. ‘You are most welcome as well. I am Churchman.’

  Patron tumbled though dead space, frozen tears on his face. A hand wrapped in black liquid glass closed around his wrist. He opened his eyes.

  45

  Ancient Britain

  In the end, Madawg lived. His ribs were healing even as he landed in the water. They swam away from the island spending every moment assuming they were about to be attacked from behind, or below.

  They might have been powerful and imbued with Otherworldly magics, but they still knew fear as they climbed out of the chasm and left the Underworld.

  ‘All will know of your actions,’ Guidgen told Madawg as they climbed out of the valley. ‘Including your king.’

  ‘And yet I live,’ Madawg said, a sly smile on his face.

  Some of their horses had broken free, but they did not take the time to track down the valuable horseflesh. Instead they rode south, hard, making for the northern part of the Ardu.

  Britha felt numb. For most of the frantic ride she had been thinking of nothing. Her body ignored the cold, the pouring rain, the discomfort of the galloping horses, one of which died underneath her, pitching her into the mud.

  Numbness was better than the confused feelings she had for Bress. He had a sword in one hand and the key to seeing her daughter again in the other. His cruelty in denying her the key was born of his slavery, his cowardice. She hated him the most for that. She knew he felt for her, as she did for him, but it was not enough to make him stand against the mockery that was Crom Dhubh.

  She had been cold before, calculating. A practical woman, she knew that the chance of her ever seeing her daughter again was almost non-existent. They lived in a harsh land. Landsfolk and warriors alike lost children all the time. Once, she believed they were taken by the cruel gods that the Pecht had eschewed, as punishment for their lack of sacrifice. Now she was sure it was just the rigours of life that stole the young and innocent. She should put her child aside. She should return to her responsibilities. She shouldn’t just wear the mask. She should live it, try to redeem herself – in her own eyes, if nobody else’s. But she knew she would always be wearing the mask. She would play her part, but she would never give up on her child.