A Quantum Mythology (14 page)

The
CCTV
footage only offered glimpses of the individual who had freed Silas. Those images were indeterminate, showing a flickering, vibrating, ghostlike vision of a screaming woman.

‘Hmm,’ Grace said. Du Bois noticed that she’d sent him something and opened the link in his phone. It was a clip from a recent horror film which showed exactly the same vibrating woman. Du Bois sent an intelligent program into the hospital’s security systems to upgrade it sufficiently so du Bois could perform a more thorough diagnostic. It would take a while due to the limits of the hospital’s computer system.

They were moving further and further into the older and less used parts of the hospital. The guard with them was giving every indication of becoming more and more uncomfortable.

‘Mr Patel?’ du Bois said. ‘We can handle it from here. We’ll buzz you when we need to get out.’

‘Are you sure?’ the guard began. Du Bois reassured the man and sent him on his way, whilst Grace looked bored.

‘Think he was frightened of ghosts?’ Grace asked as soon as the guard was out of earshot. They were underground now, in a vaulted corridor made from the same red brick as the rest of the original buildings.

‘I think if Scab was locked down here, then genuinely odd things could have happened. It would be understandable if the staff didn’t like it.’ Du Bois reviewed the location of the oubliette and wondered, ‘How did they know?’

‘That Silas was here? We live in the world of mass communication, even in the world of black tech. Someone, somewhere always knows, and someone, somewhere always puts it out there.’

‘You think we have a leak?’

‘She would’ve known.’

‘The traitor? She’d gone before we captured him.’

‘She would’ve known, but frankly a reasonably intuitive L-tech program could have heard about the events in Birmingham and Switzerland and worked out the details itself. Do you not remember that craziness we found in Lubyanka Square?’

Du Bois looked unconvinced. They had come to a heavy cell door. It was the only door in the corridor and it was actually bonded to the frame around it. Du Bois sent the code. The door unsealed itself and swung open.

‘And suddenly I want my gun,’ he muttered.

‘You’re a very insecure person.’

Grace pushed the door open and stepped into the dark room. Du Bois followed, his eyes adjusting immediately, illuminating the near total darkness as if it was daylight.

‘Who’s doing it?’ Grace asked him. Du Bois removed the small carbon fibre punch-blade disguised as a belt buckle and passed it to her. ‘You realise with my look, you’re stereotyping me?’

‘Rank has its privileges,’ du Bois muttered as he knelt down next to the man-sized hole in the floor. He’d seen oubliettes before. They were usually secured by a metal hatch with a grate in it. This one had been sealed over by the stone floor. It must have been like being buried alive, standing upright.

‘Age has its privileges,’ Grace muttered as she drew the blade across the pale skin of her arm. Blood welled in the wound but it didn’t bleed. Instead the nanites in her body reproduced and dispersed into the surrounding area as a nano-screen. The tiny molecule-sized machines settled on every surface, searching for information.

The stench in the oubliette was indescribable. Du Bois had to all but switch off his senses of smell and taste to put his head in the hole and look around. He saw crude symbols painted on the stone. He didn’t want to think too much about what they’d been painted with. He started to run the images through a recognition program. It was a relief to take his head out of the hole.

‘There was no facility for food,’ du Bois mused. ‘They just left him here to rot.’

‘Maybe Mr Brown wanted him punished after all,’ Grace suggested absently. Then more attentively: ‘So some of the wards had failed. He wasn’t going to get out soon but he’d … Eugh—’

‘What?’ du Bois asked. Grace was wearing an expression of distinct distaste.

‘So he used his nanites, probably instinctively, to create a network. He used matter from his own faeces.’

‘Lovely,’ du Bois said, grimacing. ‘For what?’

‘As far as I can tell, it was a receiver.’

‘He was learning.’ He pointed into the hole. ‘Looks like crude rendering of occult symbols. If the program is reading it right – and it consulted one of the sleeping minds on this – then they’re a mixture of pop-satanic symbolism.’

‘Probably harvested from the Internet. It’s how he’s rationalising his abilities,’ Grace suggested.

Du Bois looked unconvinced. ‘He didn’t seem the type,’ he said.

‘Then what?’

‘I think he believes he’s having some kind of relationship.’

‘With Satan?’ Grace asked, trying not to laugh.

‘With something bad.’

‘Like what? Some broken Lloigor information entity that thinks it’s a dark god?’ she asked.

‘Something like that.’

‘Here’s what I don’t understand. You want to imprison this guy, just suspend him – drop his mind into a virtual construct and punish him or keep him happy. But locking him in here on his own, with nothing to do except feed on his own body and never die – that’s only going to do one thing—’

‘Make him madder,’ du Bois finished.

Grace nodded and then went back to concentrating. ‘I’ve found something else.’ Du Bois glanced at her. ‘Tiny traces, I nearly missed them. It looks like the nanites that broke the wards and did the matter-hack to let him out self-destructed when they were finished.’

‘Brass City?’ du Bois asked.

‘This feel like their kind of madness?’

Du Bois had to concede that it did not. ‘L-tech? S-tech?’

Grace was shaking her head. ‘I can’t tell. The Egg Shell?’ She said the last hopefully.

‘If they exist, I don’t think this would be their sort of thing, either. I suspect we’re dealing with an independent, or rogue tech. Perhaps a possessor.’

‘Brilliant.’

Du Bois stood and brushed himself off. He had decided that before he got into the car he was going to use his nano-screen to hunt down every scent molecule native to this hole and destroy it.

‘Birmingham?’ du Bois asked.

‘Yaay!’ Grace cheered sarcastically.

Du Bois received the results of his interrogation of the
CCTV
system. He sent a smart worm to destroy his upgrades and erase any trace of their presence in the hospital’s systems. He shared the results with Grace as the door closed behind them, and he sent the command codes to seal it again.

‘So the
CCTV
caught the footage of whoever let Silas out. Someone’s gone into the system, removed their image and replaced it with—’ Grace said.

‘These cheap theatrics.’ Du Bois interrupted, lighting a cigarette as he walked, desperate to smell and taste something other than the oubliette. ‘Do you think the images on the
CCTV
looked a little immature?’

It took them around two and half hours to reach Inge Street in Birmingham. Grace could have got there much quicker but she decided to keep pace with du Bois. They managed to arrive just before the rush hour, when the city’s streets all but ground to a halt.

They pulled up by the police cordon around the sex shop. A crowd of angry detectives and forensic investigators were awaiting their arrival. The police had been ordered by the Home Office to keep clear of the scene until du Bois and Grace had shown up.

Du Bois got out of the Range Rover and looked at the police officers glaring at him. He sighed inwardly. Grace took off her crash helmet.

‘Surely it’s your turn to deal with them?’ du Bois said.

‘Not me,’ Grace said as she climbed off the Speed Triple. ‘I’m a biker chick’ – she frowned as she started playing with her hair – ‘with a very floppy Mohican, so they’re not going to listen to me. Besides, you know I’d just end up knocking one of them out.’

‘I remain convinced that you only punch them so I’m forced to deal with them.’

A particularly angry-looking, florid, paunchy police officer in uniform was making his way towards du Bois.

‘You have such a suspicious mind,’ Grace said, and stepped out of the policeman’s way.

One screaming argument with a chief superintendent later, Du Bois found himself staring at a vibrator that he thought would be quite uncomfortable for all but the most accommodating of orifices.

‘I’ve got one of those!’ Grace said brightly. ‘I mean a smaller one.’ She looked very pleased when du Bois actually blushed. ‘So the vic is—’

‘Vic?’ du Bois enquired.

‘Victim. Okay, I’ve been watching some police shows.’

‘Were they American?’

‘You’ve already got one of those dildos lodged in your arse, haven’t you?’ an exasperated Grace asked as she looked around at the collection of adult DVDs, sex toys and underwear. ‘I’ve lived too long – this all looks really boring to me.’ She grinned at du Bois. ‘Still, must make a pleasant change from the hair shirt and self-flagellation.’

‘I haven’t done that in—’ du Bois began before he realised she was making fun of him. He ignored her, concentrating on the task at hand; downloading the information on the victim from the buffer he kept on his phone into his head. Her name was Linda Galforg and she was forty-three years old. She had moved to Birmingham from Somerset to attend art college twenty-five years ago. She dropped out of college but stayed in the city. Unmarried, no children, reported missing by her housemate late last night. She had walked to an appointment less than a quarter of a mile from her home in Kings Norton. She left the appointment but never came home.

‘Quick work,’ du Bois muttered. Silas had been free for less than twenty-four hours. Du Bois sent search routines out all over the country to see if he could trace Silas’s whereabouts from the moment he left Broadmoor to the time the body walked into the cinema. There was always the slight chance that the two things were unconnected, but he thought it unlikely.

The body had flagged in their system because its temperature put the time of death several hours before Linda Galforg had walked into the adult shop.

‘A psychic?’ du Bois said.

Grace shrugged. ‘Let’s go and look at the body.’ She sounded a little subdued.

With the lights on, the small, cramped cinema was an unpleasantly seedy affair. Worn seating, threadbare carpets, and everything appeared to be encrusted with dried stains.

Grace crossed her arms. ‘I am not inflicting this place on my nanites,’ she said with a degree of finality.

Du Bois sighed, drew his tanto and cut across his palm. Grace was looking at the body of the dead woman. Linda Galforg, who’d had a life, experiences, connections and relationships, had been reduced to a limp, lifeless doll, a plaything for a damaged mind. Du Bois could see Grace reliving events more than a hundred years in the past, and knew there was nothing he could do help her. He leaned against the wall and lit a cigarette, sending instructions to the forensically programmed nano-screen to ignore the ash.

‘It’s him,’ du Bois said after what felt like an interminable wait for results. Then he shook his head. ‘Her brain is missing.’

Grace stared at him. ‘That’s a little B-movie, isn’t it?’ she asked, disgusted.

‘He mended the skull after he opened it. The nanites formed a small
CPU
– enough to control her nervous system, to animate her.’

‘Anything else?’ Grace asked.

‘There’s a lot of semen residue in this room.’

Grace stared at him, her sense of humour gone. Du Bois frowned as he started receiving new information from the forensic nano-screen. Linda Galforg stood up. Grace was already reaching for her pistols and backing away from the reanimated corpse. Du Bois held his hand up, motioning for Grace to hold position. He stepped out of the way as the woman lurched towards him. When she reached the blank white screen, she fumbled in the pocket of her skirt for a lipstick, which she used to write the words ‘I lied’ clumsily on the screen. Then she turned to look at du Bois.

‘Shit,’ he swore under his breath. ‘Come on,’ he said to Grace. The corpse opened its mouth and let out a rasping scream. Then ignited. The nanite-fuelled conflagration fed on the flesh it burned. Du Bois and Grace beat a hasty retreat as the cinema caught fire and headed back into the street.

‘What triggered it?’ Grace whispered before they were overwhelmed by questions as smoke started pouring out of the sex shop.

‘My investigation, the nano-screen. He was waiting for me.’

‘I really want this guy,’ Grace said.

Du Bois could hear the repressed fury in her voice.

11

A Long Time After the Loss

Elodie Negrinotti strode along the walkway miles above the surface of Ubaste. The planet had started off as a Rakshasa park world, named for one of the felines’ semi-mythic ancestral heroes, a warrior queen. When the Consortium arrived in the system, it had briefly become a conflict resolution world, but there was a push to preserve its natural resources. During its exploited phase, Ubaste was wealthy enough to spend just under a century as a Consortium core world. Its glory days were now long gone, but a central position along a number of Red Space trade routes meant that the planet had not fallen as far as New Coventry – or worse, Cyst.

Like most former core worlds, Ubaste was a planet-sized city built over a resource-gutted planet. They ran out of ground space quickly, so they built up. Many of the starscrapers pierced the atmosphere, and each of the massive buildings contained a population equivalent to that of a pre-Loss city. The lower levels never saw light from the system’s sun. Many of the buildings had acquired shanty towns of platform settlements molecularly bonded to the vertical arcologies.

From up high the planet looked like a labyrinthine collection of deep canyons. Few people ever left their home arcology, and when the inhabitants of Ubaste did travel, it was largely via the skyways, skyline and, more rarely, skywalks between the buildings. Very few of them could afford personal G-carriers.

At this height, on an open skywalk, Elodie needed an oxygen mask to augment her internal systems. Her nano-screen was also pushed to its limit resisting the high levels of nano-pollution, which were far worse in the open than inside the filter-protected arcologies. She had heard stories of naturally occurring nano-swarms formed of ancient nano-advertising viruses. There had even been unconfirmed reports of nano-storms.

Elodie was tall, slender and long-legged. Like a lot of other felines, she moved in a way that accentuated her assets, though it looked less forced with her than many. She was comfortable with her body and carried herself with an easy confidence. Elodie had modified her appearance to look more human. Her skin was a dark brown, her short, downy fur the same colour as her skin, and her whiskers were mostly gone. But while her facial features favoured the human augment, her eyes were the pure vertical slits of a cat and her pointed ears also showed her true heritage. Her long black hair hung down almost to her knees in a complex braid tipped with a silver-coloured metal ornament that came to vicious-looking point.

The feline showed little in the way of hard-tech augments, which suggested extensive soft-machine augmentation. She wore a ’sect-made segmented armoured bodice resembling part of a chitinous exoskeleton and thigh-length high-heeled boots.

It was Elodie’s P-Sat, a simple but elegant black sphere floating just over her left shoulder, that detected the other pedestrian coming towards her across the windy skywalk. Her nano-screen was too busy trying to cope with the nanite pollution. The fact that anyone else was out here at all warned her that something was going on. She sent the P-sat to loop under the walkway and set the device to running active scans, but to no avail – either the interference from the nano-pollution was too great or her devices were being jammed by someone with a great deal of skill and a surprising degree of subtlety. Elodie stopped and had a good look around. She couldn’t see anyone else, but the massive steel-coloured buildings surrounding her limited her vision.

The figure approaching her looked like a human, a hairless monkey. One of their baseline genders, a pure female despite the completely hairless head. She wore loose-fitting black clothing and walked like a seasoned fighter, someone who’d learned through practice, training and experience rather than via hardwired off-the-shelf skills. Elodie had learned the difference the hard way many years ago. Above her, the pale light of the sun was trying to make its way through the starscraper spires and the nano-haze, with limited success. Everything about the bald woman screamed Church monk.

Elodie glanced behind her, but she knew that if the other woman was there for her – and it seemed unlikely that this was a bizarre coincidence – then they’d have her retreat covered. She felt the first spots of gritty rain touch her skin as the beleaguered weather-control system attempted to use what was left of the planet’s water system as a heat sink. She looked up and decided to let the other woman come to her. She put her hands on her hips. Her P-sat was ’facing imagery and sensor data direct to her neunonics.

Fuck you, Scab
, Elodie thought.

‘Elodie Negrinotti?’ the woman asked.

‘No,’ Elodie suggested.

‘I think you are.’

‘Then why did you ask? I know what you want, and I haven’t seen him in more than ten standards.’ Then she saw what she was looking for – a slight atmospheric disturbance just behind the woman. Something was definitely jamming her P-sat’s active scans, and they were smart enough to use the ambient nano-pollution to help them do so. They were good and they were packing high-end cloaks. ‘I’ve had every bounty killer and wannabe in the surrounding systems ’face me or visit me, demanding to know where he is. I don’t know, I don’t care and I don’t owe him anything. Now I’m going to get on with my day, okay?’

Elodie started to move past the Monk. The Monk moved slightly to stand in the feline’s way.

‘Look,’ Elodie said, trying to hold onto her waning patience, ‘you have resources and appear to know what you’re doing, so you must know I’m more trouble than I’m worth, and all you’d get is exactly what I’ve just told you.’

‘How many of them did you kill?’

‘Everyone that didn’t take the hint. You know what I do for a living, right?’ Elodie said, simultaneously trying to keep her temper and look for more of the atmospheric disturbances.

‘You’re a kick-murder and intrusion specialist. You work physical as well as information intrusion. In short, you’re a thief and a murderer.’

‘I only murder when the thieving isn’t going well.’
Like now.

‘You’re also one of the few bounties who got away from Scab. Or, more accurately, that he allowed to get away.’

Elodie was pretty sure she heard disgust in the Monk’s voice.
Is this where the hostility is coming from? She thinks I whored myself.

‘If you think I fucked him and he let me go, then you know as little about me as you do about him. I can’t help you, you judgmental bitch.’

The Monk bristled in a way that didn’t strike Elodie as terribly professional. There was something about her that was getting under the human’s skin. Perhaps she was just another human racist, envious of the effortless sexual attractiveness of the female feline.

‘We don’t believe that’s the case. I don’t think he has been in contact with you because he has no use for you at the moment. But other than his partner, Vic Matto, you’re probably the person with the greatest insight into him. We think this insight could aid us in finding him.’

‘What’s he done?’ Elodie asked, genuinely interested now.

‘That doesn’t matter. We’ll pay you the going rate for your services.’

Elodie was nodding, trying to look interested. ‘I’m expensive.’

‘I bet.’

‘Well, let’s agree on a price so I can at least pretend I have a choice in this.’

‘How much—’

Elodie scorpion-kicked the Monk. The Monk staggered back as her nose spread over her face, blood squirting from the nostrils. Elodie took a step and executed a reverse turning kick. It made contact with something, apparently in empty air, just behind the Monk. The soft-tech-augmented kick impacted hard enough to crack the cloaked militia soldier’s composite combat armour and the soldier staggered into the Monk. The soldier’s form was revealed as their armour struggled to project an image of the surroundings fast enough to react to the sudden movement and maintain the cloak.

Elodie’s braid darted forwards over her head. The pointed ornament on the end of the braid was now a potent viral-delivering stinger. Cross-eyed and frantic, the Monk clapped her hands together, capturing the braid, the dripping point inches from her face. Elodie cartwheeled backwards, tearing the braid out of the Monk’s grip. Elodie’s foot caught the Monk in the chin, hard. The Monk’s reinforced bones stopped the blow from powdering her jaw, but the force of the kick sent her staggering back into two of the cloaked militia.

Elodie kicked another militiaman coming up behind her as she completed the cartwheel, her boot catching him in the head with enough force to crack his helmet. Back on her feet, Elodie ran at the skywalk’s railing. One foot on the railing and then she was over and diving gracefully into Ubaste’s sky, miles above the surface. Her P-sat zipped after her.

The Monk was angry. It wasn’t that Elodie was necessarily faster or better than her. It was a sucker kick, but a good one. The Monk hadn’t seen it coming, hadn’t read the movement in Elodie’s body.

‘All units move in,’ the Monk ’faced to all her personnel. The twenty or so militia on the bridge with her became fully visible. They would be moving too fast for the cloaks on their combat armour to be effective once they stepped off the skywalk and into the air. The weak AG drives on the P-sats clipped to their armour slowed and guided their fall, sending them after Elodie. The Monk threw herself off the skywalk into free-fall, her augmented vision just about able to make out the plummeting feline. Four G-carriers banked around a nearby building and sped after their prey. There was no way she could escape now. It was just a question of how long the feline wanted to draw this out.

Elodie had dropped several miles, travelling at terminal velocity in the .8 G. She was heading for the side of one of the other arcologies. She held out one hand and her speeding P-sat extruded a handgrip.
One day this isn’t going to work
, she thought as molecular hooks on the handle bonded to her palm. Her neunonics sent signals to her soft-machine-augmented physiology and the correct muscle groups and joints were reinforced. It was still going to hurt. She ’faced the order to the P-sat to brake. The P-sat tried to reverse her momentum and pull her arm out of its socket. As she hit the side of the starscraper, hard, she bent her knees, augmented physiology managing to absorb most of the impact, but it was still jarring. Sharp, predatory teeth clattered painfully together.

Aided by the P-sat, she was running horizontally around the building. Scan data told her that the Monk had hit the arcology starscraper behind her and was giving chase with the aid of her own P-sat. Presumably that had been cloaked as well. The militia were landing behind the Monk.

More worrying were the G-carriers. One of them dropped down level with her, its coaxial strobe gun tracking her movement. She killed the P-sat’s AG drive and pushed off the building back into free-fall. The G-carrier dropped into a dive after her. There was another behind that and two more spiralling down, trying to lock on to her position from further out.

It was a long dive. Elodie took them out of the weak sunlight and into Ubaste’s dark levels where the lights on the arcology starscraper windows resembled a strangely regular star field. She gave herself much longer to decelerate this time. It still hurt her arm. Nanites flooded to the area, trying to repair damage to strained muscles and stressed joints. She still hit the side of the enormous building hard. She slid down the outer wall, her armour protecting her, using the P-sat to slow her descent. She landed on the roof of one of the parasitical shanty-town buildings bonded to the side of the arcology starscraper. She heard shouting from within the structure.

The Monk hit the side of the starscraper level with the shanty-town rooftops and started running horizontally along the building towards Elodie with the aid of her P-sat. Elodie beckoned the other woman towards her. Two of the G-carriers dropped down to cover her but they’d had all the time in the world to burn her out of the sky and they hadn’t done it. They could try killing her and pick her up when she cloned, but her clone insurance was black and they couldn’t guarantee they’d find her before she was back on the street.

The armoured militia started landing on the roof.

Time to teach some lessons.
She axe-kicked the closest militiaman in the head, cracking his helmet. Her P-sat started firing its laser, momentarily lighting up the energy-dissipation matrices on their combat armour. The Monk’s P-sat opened fire on Elodie’s. The feline couldn’t risk losing it. Elodie’s P-sat stopped firing and plummeted out of sight. She was already spinning to face the next militia soldier. The sting on her braid shot through the cracked helmet of the militia soldier she’d kicked, found warm flesh and injected its viral venom. He started to fall, already dead, until his P-sat caught him, dangling him in mid-air.

Elodie went low and swept the legs out from underneath another militiaman with a tail. She assumed he was a lizard. As he fell off the side of the building, she ’faced a hack to his P-sat. Church security resisted the hack for a moment, but this was what she did for a living. His P-sat unclipped itself from his armour. He started screaming as he dropped. Elodie continued spinning.

The Monk was charging Elodie as she leaped at the next militiawoman. The Monk was in the air, a flying kick aimed at Elodie’s back when Elodie landed on the militiawoman. Her right hand shot forwards, hardened claws penetrating the helmet’s reflective visor and the militiawoman’s flesh. The momentum of the blow carried both of them off the roof and into the side of one of the hovering G-carriers. The militiawoman’s P-sat sprang its clip. Elodie knew she wasn’t going to be able to pull that trick too many more times – the Church’s electronic warfare specialists would be on to her now. Both of them dropped. The Monk flying-kicked the side of the G-carrier and dropped after them.

Elodie pushed the dead militiawoman away from her. Her envenomed claws had done their work. She controlled her free-fall and reached out. She felt her P-sat’s handle and grasped it. The P-sat was under relentless electronic attack now. Elodie knew how to protect her own gear, but they would get through eventually. Still, three of them were dead. Two more had scrambled uploads and would have to use older backups when they were cloned.