A Quantum Mythology (10 page)

Du Bois had changed clothes and was now wearing an immaculate white linen suit and a panama hat. Lodup was convinced the European thought he was in a Graham Greene novel:
Our Man in Pohnpei
. They were seated on wickerwork chairs at a low table, and Grace was leaning against the railings on the bridge. There was a niggle at the back of Lodup’s mind telling him something wasn’t right with their surroundings.

‘Well?’ du Bois asked Grace.

In reply, Grace reached into her jacket and drew one of her knives. It was a fighting knife of some sort, with knuckledusters on the hilt.

‘Hey!’ Lodup shouted as she drew it across the palm of her hand, making a red line. Grace just grinned at him.

‘Us kids today, ay? With our self-harming.’ She clenched her fist. Lodup didn’t see any blood drip out of it. Then it hit him what was strange. There were no insects anywhere near them. The omnipresent mosquitos were simply not present. He stared at du Bois as the other man took a sip of his gin and tonic. Then he realised he hadn’t seen either of them sweat.

Lodup opened his mouth to say something but du Bois held his hand up, motioning for silence, before turning to look at Grace. Grace was concentrating.

‘We’re clear,’ she told him, re-sheathing her knife. If her hand was bleeding, Lodup couldn’t see it.

‘My apologies – we have to take certain precautions,’ du Bois told him.

‘And those precautions involve either self-harming or sleight of hand?’

‘So you’re a qualified master diver, once part of Mobile Diving and Salvage Unit One based out of Pearl. Freshly qualified, you worked the
USS
Monitor
project, off North Carolina. You also worked on the
Ehime Maru
, served aboard the auxiliary rescue salvage craft
USS
Salvor
and spent time at the US Navy’s Experimental Dive Unit in Panama City, Florida. You worked with Submarine Development Squadron Five as part of the Deep Submergence Unit. You’re a qualified hydronaut with experience in pressurised atmospheric diving suits. Since leaving the service you’ve been working as a contract salvage operator and commercial dive instructor, mostly based out of Guam.’

Lodup took a sip of his cold beer and said nothing.

‘I am also aware of some of the more covert jobs you did in the service. I can list them to prove how well connected our operation is,
but I do not wish to be indiscreet. Would you like to take my word for it?’

They had the influence to swing a Navy transport.

‘Sure,’ Lodup said. ‘Is your interviewing technique always based around making the prospective employee feel uncomfortable?’

‘You already have the job, if you want it. Our problem is persuading you to accept the strangeness of the situation.’

‘Who do you work for?’

‘Is just one of the questions we will not answer.’

‘It’s a salvage job, right?’

‘All I can tell you is that it is a long-term contract, six months with the option of a possible extension, and you cannot tell anyone where you’re going or what you’re doing – largely because you won’t know. We will arrange a cover story for your friends and family.’

‘Is it legal?’

Grace let out a snort of laughter. Du Bois rolled his eyes.

‘I assure you, that’s largely irrelevant. If it makes you feel better, we’re not breaking any law that I am aware of.’

Lodup glanced between the pair of them. ‘Look, I’m sorry, guys, but there’s just too much unknown here. I’ll give you your money back but this is too weird, and I’m going to have to say no.’

‘Whatever happens, the money is yours, Mr Satakano. We understand we’re asking a lot, which is why the reward we’re offering must be commensurate.’ Du Bois reached under his chair and produced a leather folder. Unzipping it, he removed some papers and handed them to Lodup. Lodup glanced through them. It was the specs and sales details for the
SS
Lady Macbeth
, a new-build deep-sea salvage vessel. Lodup felt a prickling on his skin. They couldn’t be offering him what they appeared to be offering him.
Could they?

‘We thought we’d appeal to your sense of opportunity,’ du Bois said, taking a cigarette case out of the breast pocket of his suit.

‘Sense of greed,’ Grace muttered. There was a momentary flash of exasperation on du Bois’ face as he fixed a cigarette into a holder.

‘This is my payment?’ Lodup tried to keep the eagerness out of his voice.

‘Yes.’ Du Bois lit the cigarette. ‘Plus a year’s capital to make a run of it.’

Lodup stared at the photograph of the ship. She was a beauty. No expense had been spared. He forced himself to put the papers down on the table.

‘I’m sorry, but this is too good to be true. No job is worth this
much. I’ve got some skills, but there’s others as capable as me with more experience.’

‘And they’ll probably be working with us as well,’ du Bois told him.

Lodup shook his head. ‘I haven’t heard of any jobs on that scale.’

Grace sighed.

‘And if you had we wouldn’t be doing our job very well, would we?’ du Bois pointed out.

‘You’ll have to fork out for a lot more salvage ships if you’re buying one for every operator.’

‘We try to find specific motivation for everyone,’ du Bois said. Lodup wasn’t sure he liked the other man’s choice of words. ‘We’re going to ask you to take a lot on faith. We’ll drop you in the middle of the ocean for pickup. All I can tell you is that you’ll be working at great depth, using proven but experimental dive technologies.’

‘That’s it?’ Lodup asked, already shaking his head.

‘The
Lady Macbeth
will be signed over to you before you start to prove we mean what we say and can deliver, but then you’re on a plane to Kwajalein.’

Lodup knew Kwajalein was a missile-tracking base. He had worked there as a contractor recovering test-fired missiles from the atoll.

‘This may sound like a ridiculous offer, and it is, but we’re in an extreme situation here.’

Lodup’s mind was racing. He was trying to work out what might be so valuable that they could afford to make such offers.
They must have found a practical way for either deep-sea oil extraction or mining. Probably a mother-lode as well.
Lodup took another swig of his beer and watched a lizard run along the veranda’s railing. The ship was everything he was working towards, but without the crippling debt.

‘This is too easy.’

‘There is nothing easy about the job you’re going to be doing,’ du Bois told him.

Lodup took another nervous swig from his beer.

‘I’m in.’

He used to be called Kyle Nethercott, before he ascended. He used to be from somewhere in the middle of America that nobody had heard of or cared about. He used to belong to a family that was just like everyone else’s. Except for his presence in it. A lot of what he used to be he had forgotten, or more precisely he’d had it erased.

It bothered him that he could not be the demon here, but he’d had to walk among them. He’d had to pretend to be one of them in first class on the flight from Boston Logan to Heathrow.

He’d spent a long time in the strangest places on the net, places he suspected had existed a long time before anyone had even heard of computers. Hiding there. Moving through them like a worm through soft earth.

There were so many murders, so many atrocities in history. He wasn’t sure why these fascinated him in particular, other than their apparent use of lost tech. Perhaps it was because the other killings had always seemed impure, somehow. The murderers had always thought they were doing something else. Delusions of transformation, or power, based in a fantasy world that they didn’t have the strength of will to make manifest. Whereas he felt motivated by a purer malice. He had always gone for the hurt. Like a harvest.

The defences were rudimentary. Perhaps the wards would have been potent in the nineteenth century, but spoofing them felt like walking through cobwebs. The fact they had forgotten him was a travesty.

Broadmoor was a high-security hospital that housed the most disturbed of Britain’s criminals. The murderer had been transferred here from Bethlem Royal Hospital, or Bedlam, more than a hundred and fifty years ago.

In a sealed, long-forgotten bowel of the prison hospital, Inflictor let his true face grow through his human mask. He knelt down on stone and drew a sharp claw over leathery skin, then used his dripping black blood as the medium for his matter-hack. The smart-matter stone peeled open. A hand gripped the edge of the revealed oubliette.

The man’s filthy skin was covered with scar tissue and scabs in the shape of arcane symbols Inflictor was sure he’d seen in some of the games he had played. The hairless, emaciated man pulled himself out of the stone hole and lay exhausted on the floor, panting for breath.

‘I heard a new world,’ he whispered. ‘I felt it through the earth. The ground shook and I tasted blood. I heard electric screaming.’

Inflictor nodded. He did not understand the words but he liked the sound of them. He reached into his own flesh and started to drag something through it. The man watched, transfixed. Inflictor tore the Cornucopia free. He had configured it to look like a drinking horn. If King Jeremy discovered he had taken it, he would freak out.

‘This is power and everything you need to know,’ Inflictor told him.

The other man looked up at the demonic face made of sharp teeth and hard leather scales. ‘You can’t have come for me. There’s no heaven or hell unless we make them.’ Inflictor shook his head. ‘Do you belong to me? A homunculus grown of my blood and excrement?’

Inflictor liked these words less well. ‘No. I enjoyed what you did. You should be free,’ Inflictor said. He did not like the nervousness he felt on meeting the man. It was a weakness. The other man nodded as if he understood.

‘I think they forgot me,’ the man said. His voice was sad. ‘This sounds like a magnificent age. I think I understand now. They will love me. Though they will call it something else.’

The man looked up at the boy pretending to be a demon. Whilst imprisoned, he’d had fever dreams of this new world. He would see them realised.

‘Lot of trouble to go to,’ Grace said as she and du Bois made their way to their huts. Either side of the path lay fairly thick undergrowth. They could see insects playing in the lights on the path, but their blood-screens kept the irritation of the insects far from them.

‘It’s quicker this way. Besides, the ship is irrelevant.’

Grace laughed. ‘The end’s been coming since I started doing this. It’s just another form of manipulation.’

‘Control will pick that up on their next audit.’

‘I can’t police my thoughts, why police my mouth?’

Du Bois opened his mouth to reply. Pain lanced through his head. He screamed and dropped to his knees, clutching his head. Blood was seeping out of his nose, ears and tear ducts.

Grace had a pistol in each hand as she scanned the jungle on either side of her. She spared du Bois a concerned glance and saw the pain writ across his face. He shook his head, trying to force himself to recover enough to speak.

‘Malcolm?’ she asked.

‘I’m okay,’ he muttered. He didn’t sound okay.

‘An attack?’

‘No, download.’

He remembered everything now. The murders, the scorpions, the fused gun-limb, how the Hellaquin died. Mr Brown coming for the monster. He remembered the disgust Silas Scab engendered. He remembered the gunshot. He now knew it was the American who had shot him. His phone started to ring. He reached into his linen suit jacket and pulled it out. He looked at the phone’s blank black screen. The phone answered itself.

‘He’s escaped,’ the voice on the phone said.

Du Bois looked up at Grace.

8

A Long Time After the Loss

Red lighting was a universal sign that things weren’t going well. So was the smell of burned flesh and the pain from her wounds. The Monk could hear the mourning song the dolphins were singing. They’d lost more than a tenth of the
Lazerene
’s crew complement, over a thousand dead.

The mistake had been to try the possession immersed. The thinking was sound. A virtual Scab had to be less dangerous than the real thing. An electronic prison made from some of the best software actual credit could buy, developed by some of the best coders in Known Space. Then slave him so he had to answer questions.

Except Scab was a talented hacker before the Elite recruited him and honed his skills. The first thing he did was hack the time-dilation parameters on the immersion. Subjectively he’d had all the time in the world. From Scab’s perspective it took him more than a hundred years to find his way out of the immersion-prison construct.

The Scab personality they used had been cobbled together from black thrill-kill immersions, available to the most rabid and rich of Scab’s bounty-killing fan base. They purported to be pirate copies of the files held in the Consortium Psycho Banks, where they were used to help profile recreational killers. Church techs had then attempted to use predictive programs to piece together the rest of Scab’s personality. The Monk was of the opinion that they had bred a younger and more feral Scab. Parts of the
Lazerene
’s interior were still burning.

They had to destroy the
Lazerene
’s AI after the Scab personality effectively possessed it and took control of certain of the ship’s systems. The
Lazerene
would have to return to the Cathedral, where all of its computer systems would be stripped out and destroyed. It would take months, and the Monk was going to miss the AI. She could still smell cooked uplift flesh.

She walked into the red light of the bridge, looking down at the dolphins crowding around their dead in the tanks below the catwalk. The flesh on her face was still knitting together, the burned, dead skin flaking off and falling to the metal of the catwalk like black snow.

It was wearing Benedict’s limbless body and hanging from a harness attached below a security satellite that had its weapons angled down at him. He was grinning at her. He was basically a nat now – she’d removed his limbs and drilled into his skull to destroy Benedict’s neunonics. He’d probably end up with brain cancer as a result, but the body would be destroyed as soon as it had served its purpose.

‘Motivate me,’ Scab demanded from the mouth of Benedict’s dangling body.

‘You don’t tell me what we want to know, then no more playtime for you. You want to die, say so now.’

Scab gave this some thought.

‘Should we accept the invitation?’ the Monk asked.

Scab started laughing until there were tears in Benedict’s eyes.

‘The problem with what you’re asking is that any Elite is a tremendous drain on resources. Even allowing for the threat you might pose, it would significantly weaken whomever met your price,’ said the man with a goldfish bowl for a head. He was wearing a nappy. When he finished talking, a dummy appeared in his sculpted crystal head.

Vic knew the man. He was a player in the Consortium, an immortal trying to win a seat on the board and become a Lord of Known Space. Vic wasn’t sure he’d ever known the man’s name. He’d met him investigating a series of murders on the
Semektet
, a pleasure yacht for the Consortium’s upper-echelon executives.

The executive had replaced his own head with a sculpted crystal replica, filled it with liquid software, downloaded his personality into the software and then added a number of very small and doubtless incredibly exotic fish. This was probably considered the height of fashion in the Consortium core worlds. Vic had thought then, and hadn’t changed his mind since, that it was deeply stupid. He’d named him Goldfish Bowl Head.

‘I don’t care about that,’ Scab told Goldfish Bowl Head. The head might be sculpted and immobile, but Vic was pretty sure he picked up the Consortium exec’s exasperation.

You can’t reason with a psychopath
, Vic thought. It wasn’t true but he thought it sounded cool. Psychopaths could be very reasonable when they were getting exactly what they wanted. Though Scab wasn’t really one of those kinds of psychopaths, either. If Scab was ever reasonable, he chose to do it when Vic wasn’t around.

As for the nappies: Scab had made everyone attending the immersion auction wear them in their virtual forms. Talia told him he was being childish. Scab replied that he was interested in just how far they were willing to debase themselves to get her. As a result, the immersion had them all wearing nappies and seated on small rocking horses in some saccharine version of an upper-middle-class nursery from a pre-Loss media. Vic had initially been worried that humiliating them like this would incur their wrath, but frankly he had no clue how they could get into any more trouble than they were already in.

Vic, Talia and Scab were all dressed normally, however. Talia had tried to reason with the attendees from the Church, several of the more powerful companies in the Consortium and the aristocratic representatives from the Monarchist systems. She’d eventually lapsed into silence when she realised that they cared about her as much as Scab did. She was now sitting against the wall, arms wrapped around her legs.

Vic was crouched, comfortably, nearby, trying not to keep looking at Talia, though she constantly caught him doing just that. Scab was leaning against the wall and smoking, which was arguably even more pointless in an immersion than it was in the real world.

‘Surely the offer we have made is more than sufficient,’ said one of the representatives from the Monarchist Regent’s Pleasure system, the dummy in his mouth disappearing as Scab neunonically allowed him to speak. ‘Overlord of an entire planet. Total control of a billion-strong sentient biomass.’ The man was grotesquely fat. Scab had allowed him to retain his make-up and wig. Vic was staring at the fat man. He was still behaving with a kind of pompous arrogance; they all were, despite their humiliation. Vic assumed they must have extensive conditioning which allowed them to act like pricks regardless of the circumstances. It was fascinating, Vic thought, from an anthropological perspective.

‘A seat on the board is a much more valuable commodity,’ Goldfish Bowl Head said, then his dummy appeared again.

‘Your own subsidiary would provide effective control over a number of planets and influence over many more. Not to mention the resources you would have at your disposal …’ This from a feline exec, the representative of Karnak Industries, one of the most powerful companies in the Consortium. Whatever sex the exec had started off as, she was now very feminine. Vic had to admit they’d done their research well. She was just Scab’s type, though the nappy and bonnet spoiled the allure somewhat. At least, the ’sect hoped it did.

‘But still not nearly as prestigious as a seat on the board,’ Goldfish Bowl Head said in exasperation.

The feline was unable to prevent a slight hiss escaping her lips. ‘You and I both know that’s a hollow offer. There’s no way the board would allow free rein to someone of Mr Woodbine’s persuasion—’

‘And what persuasion would that be?’ Scab asked.

The feline turned and held his dead stare. She was good, Vic thought.

‘That of a prolific murderer.’

Scab nodded. Vic was impressed. Either the feline or those who had sent her had done their research well. Scab respected that sort of honesty.

‘Would you reverse my psychosurgery? Provide me with a fleet? Legion? Ground forces?’

Suddenly nobody would look at him, not even the feline.

‘I don’t think you understand why you’re here,’ Scab told them. ‘This is an auction. This isn’t about you having to find increasingly more extravagant ways to try and control me. It won’t work. You must see that by now.’

Vic couldn’t be sure, but he was starting to think that Scab was amused despite himself.

‘Did I mention that the world would come with the title of emperor?’ the fat, wig-wearing blue-blood asked.

Scab shook his head and glanced over at Vic with an expression of bemusement.

‘How many people get to see themselves auctioned?’ Talia wondered.

‘Most slaves, I would imagine,’ Vic suggested

The attendees had started arguing among themselves again. This had been going on for some hours now.

‘This is a farce,’ Talia said. ‘He’s not going to get what he wants because he’s a psycho, and nobody wants to give a psycho power.’

Scab turned to look at the nat pre-Loss human woman. Talia smiled at him with venomous mock-sweetness.

‘That’s really not true,’ Vic said. ‘It doesn’t matter if he’s a psycho. They just want to give away the smallest amount of their power they can to get what they want. But you’re right, they don’t want to hand him that much power.’

‘Yeah, but I mean, why bother with it? Why would any of them live up to their offers?’

Because
,
Vic thought,
they’ve all paid a lot of debit just to be here.
Part of the expense had resulted from Pythia agreeing to host the auction within the planet’s atmosphere. The immersion had been created within the infoscape of the nano-civilisation’s hive mind, and as a result was probably the single most secure immersion in the history of the uplifted races. What remained of the vast sums paid for admission had all gone into secure, occulted Pythian black accounts. Scab was now one of very few people in Known Space who was in credit.

Despite Pythia’s security assurances, and assurances that Scab would deliver Talia upon the successful conclusion of the auction, they had still come in force. Consortium battle fleets, capital ships, entire Monarchist fiefdom navies. The visiting dignitaries, their entourages and their heavily armed security forces had hired out entire habitats. Pythia’s orbital defences and their – now extensively augmented – fleet of military contractors watched the visiting ships nervously.

Raised voices were silenced as dummies appeared in the mouths of all the attendees again. Many of them looked less than happy about this, though Vic had noticed that a number of them were really taking advantage of having a dummy in their mouth and seemed to be enjoying it. The odd calm that spread over the nursery immersion felt very fragile.

‘I don’t think they really know you,’ Vic said in an attempt to console his ‘partner’. Scab just shook his head. He made the dummy disappear from one of the attendees’ mouths. So far this attendee had said nothing.

‘And what does the Church have to offer?’ Scab asked.

The Monk tried to suppress a strong urge to kill. Benedict/Scab managed to get his laughter under control and looked around the
Lazerene
’s bridge. No longer able to neunonically interface with the ship, he had to make do with the parts of the smart-matter superstructure that had turned into screens showing feeds from the damage-control parties, the med bay, and the ongoing struggle to regain control of the automated weapon systems, weaponised nano-swarms, security satellites and hacked automatons.

‘Was it worth it?’

‘Bye.’ The Monk started drawing her knife.

‘Send a sacrifice,’ the Scab possession told her. ‘This isn’t real.’

Nobody had the ability to wear a nappy and sit on a rocking horse with a dummy in their mouth and manage to look dignified. The elderly lizard, probably a cardinal, Vic guessed, came the closest.

‘I think,’ the lizard started, ‘that the best way to win the game is not to play it.’

Scab said nothing, just looked at him, his expression unreadable.

‘Well, how fucking profound,’ Vic muttered.

‘No threat?’ Scab asked.

‘I would reason with you if I could, bargain with you, threaten you, but you are insane, Mr Woodbine. What difference would it make?’ the Church representative said. Talia laughed. The old lizard looked at her. She shrank away slightly, still not used to non-humans. Vic’s facial-recognition software was pretty sure he saw sympathy on the lizard’s face. He wondered where the Monk was. She must have been cloned by now. ‘I don’t suppose we could have the backups for the crew of the
St. Brendan’s Fire
, could we?’

‘You don’t want the ship?’ Scab asked. The elderly lizard shrugged. ‘Offer me something.’

‘There are already more than enough people here who would pander to you, and you are not a greedy man. This is a farce.’

Vic thought he saw the ghost of a smile on Scab’s face. The ’sect saw the other attendees struggling to speak through their dummies.

‘So nothing, no offers, no threats for me?’

‘Not for you,’ the lizard said. He turned to the other attendees. ‘If this auction is successful, there will be one winner and many losers. As well as a placing a full embargo on bridge- and Seeder-derived tech on the winner, we will offer technical, spiritual and military aid to the losers in ensuring the utter destruction of the winner.’ He turned back to Scab. ‘You may put the dummy back in now.’

Vic was pretty sure a number of the attendees were going to give themselves embolisms back in their bodies if the dummies weren’t removed soon. Scab removed all the dummies simultaneously and there was chaos in the nursery as everyone started screaming and shouting, except for the elderly lizard, who began rocking backwards and forwards on his hobby horse.

Threats and counterthreats were bandied around. The offerings made to Scab became increasingly ridiculous. Finally Scab held up his hands for quiet, though Vic noted that he hadn’t replaced their dummies.

‘None of you is prepared to meet my price. I’m afraid we’re wasting time here.’ Then the screaming really began. Shrieking mouths appeared, pressing through the walls of the nursery. The noise was agonising, triggering various immersion overrides in Vic’s and Scab’s neunonics. Talia was simply lying on the floor, blood pouring from her eyes, ears, nose and mouth even though this was only her immersion form.