The Beauty of Destruction (12 page)

‘I don’t know,’ he admitted. ‘Things … perhaps things haven’t been right for a while.’

‘Is there any hope?’ she asked, looking down.

‘Not much,’ du Bois admitted. Beth looked back up at him.

‘I’ve got nothing better to do right now.’

Du Bois started to laugh.

Mr Brown rubbed the bridge of his nose with thumb and forefinger.

‘He’s going to disobey me again,’ he muttered to himself. ‘That man! I really don’t have time for this.’ Mr Brown sounded genuinely aggrieved. He was cursing himself inwardly for not having more fully reprogrammed du Bois, but he had known it would have made him a less effective operative. His ability to improvise, his free thinking, had been his most valuable asset, but also his most troublesome.

‘Find me someone on the British mainland and assets on the eastern seaboard of the US. I want to know what, if anything, is still up in the air over the Atlantic. If it’s still up, I want a way to contact it. If not, I want an excellent prediction of where it went down.’

He hated that he still felt hope. The possibility of release.

It hadn’t been as bad in Scotland, purely because it was less populated, and du Bois had taken the Harrier out low over the Irish Sea as he headed up the west coast between the islands. The glow in the east had been Glasgow. The entire city must have been burning.

They had caught a glimpse of a destroyer among the islands. It was enough for Beth to see the hull was blood-stained, festooned with bodies, and the ship had been flying a black flag with an hourglass on it. The destroyer had launched a missile at them but the Harrier’s systems and du Bois’s piloting had meant they had avoided it easily.

The weather had turned as it had grown dark. Beth was only just starting to realise how tired she was, fatigued and hungry. Despite the tech, physiology had its limits.

Beth felt the aircraft slowing. Her eyes cut through the darkness and she could see cliffs just ahead of them, white-topped waves breaking against the rocks. She arched her neck, looking up through the cockpit at the castle perched on the edge of it. She felt the armoured airframe flex as the Harrier ceased forwards momentum and started to rise through the spray.

‘Where are we?’ Beth asked.

‘Home,’ du Bois grunted. Despite the L-tech retrofitting, the wind was still buffeting the aircraft and du Bois had to wrestle with it. As they rose past the walls, Beth could see that the small castle required some work but for the most part had been well maintained. ‘Given to the family by Robert the Bruce for some … considerations.’

They were up over the castle, and Beth could see there was a keep built against the sea wall and then a small courtyard. Du Bois kept the plane hovering over the courtyard, though the wind was knocking it around. He seemed to be concentrating intently.

‘Aren’t we landing?’ Beth asked.

‘I’m just checking the castle’s security systems.’

‘Oh, isn’t that dangerous?’

‘It’s an isolated system and I’m using a direct link, a tight-beam transmission from the plane.’ The plane dipped forwards and then started to sink towards the courtyard. ‘It’s safe.’ He sounded somehow disappointed as the Harrier’s wheeled undercarriage touched down on the courtyard’s cobbles.

‘Everything okay?’ Beth asked. If anything, du Bois had seemed more preoccupied than she had been during the trip.

‘My Black Shadow is gone,’ du Bois said. Beth assumed he was talking about a vintage motorcycle. The cockpit opened and both of them climbed out of the aircraft.

‘Alexia!’ du Bois shouted as he pushed the sturdy, metal-studded door to the main keep open. They were in a stone-floored hallway decorated with armour, weapons and large oil paintings of landscapes. Beth had half been expecting to see stuffed animals and family portraits. A grand staircase with dark, hardwood banisters led to the first floor and rain battered against the window over the landing. The weather notwithstanding, Beth was pretty sure this building was dark at the best of times.

‘Must have been as cheery as my place to grow up in,’ Beth muttered.

‘I didn’t grow up here. The only people who grew up here were servants’ children and they weren’t allowed in this part of the house,’ du Bois said, sounding distracted. He’d slung the carbine across his back.

‘Servants? Really?’ Beth muttered but du Bois was ignoring her.

‘Alexia!’ du Bois shouted again.

‘I thought you’d checked the security. Wouldn’t you know if there was someone else in here?’

Du Bois had mounted the stairs and was running up them two at a time.

‘There’s a chance that she could have circumvented the security,’ he answered distractedly. ‘Make yourself at home.’

Beth had found the kitchen. It was already quite warm, presumably because of the Aga, and she’d managed to get a fire going in the large hearth. She had also decided it was the homeliest room in the house, the most lived in, probably because of the servants. The fridge and the pantry had been well stocked and with a lot of fresh food, so it must have been done recently. She wondered where the servants were now, as the castle would have been a good place for them to hide if they were still sane.

She had intended on having a snack. It had turned into a feast of bread, cheese, pickles, cold meats and a cold roast chicken. She felt like a pig but her body had apparently needed the energy and was going about efficiently converting it. She had also found an excellent bottle of Scotch. Now all she had to do was not think about her dad. She hadn’t seemed to be able to program her neuralware not to do that.

‘She not here, then?’ Beth asked through a mouthful of bread and cheese as du Bois walked into the kitchen and put the carbine on the long oak table she was sitting at. He shook his head.

‘Girlfriend? Wife?’ It suddenly occurred to her that she didn’t know anything normal about du Bois.

‘Br … sister,’ du Bois said. Beth decided not to push further. Du Bois sat down and started helping himself to food. She’d all but emptied the huge fridge.

‘They’re a pain in the arse, aren’t they?’

Du Bois smiled. ‘You’ve no idea.’

‘We could look for her,’ Beth suggested. ‘I may not have had much luck …’

‘I wouldn’t even know where to start. She was in Brighton some days ago … Now? I just don’t know. Besides, it won’t make any difference unless we have an out.’

‘What is that out? There are other things happening, aren’t there? You said this wasn’t all done by that thing in the Solent.’

‘No, there are more of those things on the other side of the world, in the Pacific, and they are considerably less benevolent.’

Beth tried to think about this for a moment. She decided to take it at face value. It was just too far removed from being a con, or working the doors in Bradford, the things she was used to.

‘Why does everyone want Talia?’ Beth asked.

‘She was the descendant of a bloodline infused with living S-tech. She is connected to the thing you saw in the Solent. It was a Seeder, though I suspect you were in the seedpod rather than the actual Seeder itself. To cut a long story short, the Seeders were corrupted but they hid some of their genetic secrets in a human bloodline thousands of years ago.’ Du Bois took a mouthful of whisky. Beth was staring at him. ‘I’m no scientist but it seems that the information required to utilise Seeder technology to escape our current situation is encoded in Natalie’s
DNA
.’

‘Why the fuck did you put all your eggs in one irrational, goth basket?’ Beth finally asked.

Du Bois sighed, leant back in the chair, and spent some time chewing and swallowing a large piece of gammon.

‘We didn’t. She was one of a great number of children grown from the genetic information we had. We tried very hard to find her but it was difficult because your parents kept their heads down and maintained a low-tech lifestyle.’

‘The other children?’

‘Well, this generation would have all been young adults now, same age as Talia, though another generation was about to be born …’

‘Something bad happened, didn’t it?’ Beth asked.

‘A terrorist organisation called the Brass City attacked all of our facilities. They’re masters of electronic warfare, they were able to wipe out all the related information on the bloodline.’

‘The children?’

‘A tailored virus specifically designed to kill the bloodline and junk their
DNA
. The attack was so total, so successful, they must have thoroughly infiltrated the Circle.’

‘That’s you lot, right? The guy who ordered my death?’

‘Yes. That was Mr Brown, he runs operations for the Circle.’ Du Bois wouldn’t look at her. Instead he poured himself a generous measure of whisky and drank a large mouthful.

‘And finding my sister suddenly became a priority again?’ Beth said.

‘Indeed.’ Du Bois raised his glass to her and then took another drink.

‘So with my sister gone …’

‘Our greatest hope for survival lies with the samples I took from Natalie when we found her in the lockup, which is in the hands of a group of entitled, psychopathic nerds. Assuming, that is, they haven’t ditched in the Atlantic. Which I suspect is the most likely result.’

‘But you’re going to look anyway?’

Du Bois stared at the dark, peaty whisky in his tumbler, giving the question some thought.

‘I want to live. I want my sister to live,’ he said at last.

‘Will the Circle let you in on their evacuation plan?’ Beth asked.

Du Bois shrugged. ‘Probably not.’

‘So we’re just going through the motions?’ Beth asked. The whole thing still seemed too ridiculous, despite her recent experiences.

‘Pretty much.’ Du Bois sagged in his chair. ‘Look, you don’t have to do this. You’re welcome to stay here. Wait for Alexia, if she’s in the UK she’ll be making her way here. If I can find an out I’ll come back.’

‘The planet’s fucked, isn’t it?’ Beth said.

‘It’s not ours any more and it’s going to become exponentially more hazardous to human life.’

‘You’re going after those Do As You Please bastards?’ Beth asked. She remembered tourist after tourist that she had been forced to kill on the streets of Old Portsmouth after the
DAYP
clan had enslaved them, turned them into zombies. She remembered the gunfight. They had acted like it was a computer game. Like they hadn’t been shooting at real people. She remembered them taking her sister. She was just a ‘thing’ to them, though perhaps they were no different to the Circle in that. And she remembered what it felt like to get shot, to die.

‘I still don’t have anything better to do,’ she said. She thought of her dad. Blinked back non-existent tears and tried to smile before taking a mouthful of the whisky.

It had just been pure chance that none of them had been using the satellite phone at the time. There had been screaming from the cockpit and then the executive jet had nosedived towards the Atlantic. King Jeremy and the demon-headed Inflictor Doorstep had climbed out of their seats and dropped down the centre aisle towards the cockpit. Dracimus had curled up in a ball and screamed. The door to the cockpit was open. The pilot had blood pouring from his ears and blind red eyes. The co-pilot looked like he was trying to chew through his own cheek.

Technology had overridden panicked responses. The Atlantic was a flat grey plain interspersed with flecks of white rushing up to greet them. King Jeremy lowered himself down to stand on the plane’s windscreen. It held. He’d never even seen this in an action film. It would be cool if they weren’t about to die. Inflictor reached down and dug his fingers into the flesh of the pilot’s arm. King Jeremy reached up and unbuckled the pilot’s seatbelt. Inflictor dragged the pilot out of his seat and up into the passenger compartment one-handed.

With difficulty King Jeremy wedged himself between the seat and the instrument panel, grabbed the stick and began pulling it back. The strength of his sculpted body, designed after the muscle-bound characters he saw in his computer games, meant he was slowly able to level out the aircraft and he sat down in the pilot’s seat.

Some hours later King Jeremy had put the autopilot on and bullied Dracimus into sitting in the pilot’s seat to keep an eye on it. Jeremy had heard the wet tearing and snapping sounds but even so he was still impressed with the mess that Inflictor had made in the forward part of the passenger compartment, with the bodies of the pilot and the co-pilot. Somehow it hadn’t sounded like they minded.

He had unplugged the pilot’s and co-pilot’s headsets when he heard the screaming coming from the earpieces. Dracimus had whined to know what was happening but Jeremy had no idea. As far as he could tell they had been subject to some kind of weird sonic-based electronic attack.

There were a number of satellite phone handsets in sockets built into the passenger compartment’s furnishings. One of them started to ring, then it stopped as King Jeremy passed it, then another started to ring as he came level with that one, then as he moved on that one stopped and the next one rang. Inflictor snapped a bone and looked up at Jeremy.

‘Don’t answer it!’ Dracimus squealed from the cockpit. It was this more than anything else that made King Jeremy pick up the phone. He heard the screaming. It would have been cool, like a horror film, if it hadn’t grated so much. He moved to hang up when he heard the voice.

‘Mr Rush?’ a deep, resonant voice asked over the screaming.

‘Don’t call me that!’ Jeremy snapped. He didn’t want to be reminded of that boy. That loser.

‘My apologies. Should I call you King Jeremy?’

‘What do you want?’

‘To discuss a deal, but first I think you need to understand the gravity of the situation.’

‘KJ!’ Dracimus’s panicked voice was like nails on a chalkboard.

‘Busy,’ King Jeremy spat.

‘You need to see this!’

Jeremy fantasised about ways to hurt Dracimus as he dropped the phone and stalked through the gore back to the cockpit. Inflictor stood up to join him.

Jeremy found himself looking down at the broken fingers of the ruined, smoking Boston skyline.