The Beauty of Destruction (25 page)

Without any remaining point of reference it might have been difficult to work out where the wicker man had stood in the water before it had fallen apart, except there was a ship close to, or over, the spot. It looked like a galley from the Sea of the Greeks far to the south. Except this one was made of brass. He glanced at the brass scorpion clinging to his metal-clad shoulder. Then he started running again.

Bress had slithered into the water among the dust-covered marshes between the two islands closest to shore. He had waited until the tide was going out and let it sweep him towards the ship. Much closer he could see the living metalwork of the vessel was very similar to that of the scorpion, still with him on his shoulder.

The ship’s crew were all bundled up against the cold, but what little skin was on display was either swarthy, or various shades of brown, suggesting that they all came from the lands far to the south across the sea. They were a small crew for a vessel that size. Standing towards the rear of the galley, and not wearing furs like the rest of the crew, was a large, powerful looking, brown-skinned man. He wore a light-coloured robe split open at the front revealing a sizeable gut. Instead of hair he had bands of polished copper embedded into the skin on his head. From where Bress floated in the water, the man’s eyes didn’t look right either.

The water was much clearer than he remembered. He assumed that the seed of the Muileartach must have consumed, or transformed, any life that had been in the water as well. This made his job more difficult. After all, this ship must have been there for a reason.

As the man slowly turned around, surveying his surroundings, Bress let the water slip over his head as he sank down. He could not breathe the water like some of the children of the Muileartach, but he was confident that he could hold his breath long enough, though it could take several trips to locate what he sought.

Finding his master’s prize was easier than he had expected, but not for a good reason. The spear that Fachtna had used to slay the Naga dragon was ancient and powerful. It had killed the dragon, and the serpents melded with it in a rage. Crom had sent Bress to see if he could salvage something. The sailors in the brass ship seemed to want to finish Fachtna’s job.

The dragon lay in the silt on the seabed, scaled, sleek, reptilian, obviously dead, and half buried. On its back, legs and pincers digging into the dragon’s body, was another of the scorpions. Except this one was even larger than the one now clutched to his shoulder had ever been, even after it had consumed the rock. The arachnid’s mouth consumed the Naga dragon’s flesh. The sting and half of its tail was embedded deep into the dragon, and pulsed as if it was feeding something into the corpse. As Bress watched, the scorpion grew. The hindquarters of the dragon were rotting away in front of his eyes. Bress guessed that the scorpion was using the carrion it ate to create the poison it was feeding the dragon’s body through its sting, as well as increasing its own bulk. It was a monstrous but efficient parasite destroying its host.

Bress checked all around him in the clear water but he couldn’t see anything else. There was no way to approach the dragon without the scorpion parasite seeing. If it was a servant of those on the ship, as seemed likely, then it had just been told to do the one thing and didn’t care about anything else. If it did react to him then he wasn’t sure what he would do.

He looked up as he dived deeper and saw the bottom of the brass galley distorted by the water, but again there was no sign of him having been seen, or even of them looking out for anyone else. He felt his own much smaller scorpion crawling around his armour, seeking to be out of sight of the monstrous scorpion and the galley.

With a little difficulty he drew his sword, and with a thought the weapon started to change shape. The hilt extended, covering half of the blade, then thinned as it turned into the shaft of a spear, a much more practical weapon in the water. With another thought a barb grew from the shaft and pierced his skin, sucking in a little of his blood. If he was forced to fight the thing then he would try the same blood magic he had used on the smaller one.

Bress swam past multifaceted eyes of black glass as he made towards the head of the dragon. The scorpion gave no indication of having noticed him, as its mandibles tore away and fed the reptilian meat into its maw. Bress reached the head and used the spearhead to open the skin of his palm but it did not bleed. He put his palm against the dragon’s head, felt the smooth, hard, cold feel of the scales against his skin. Then, with a thought, he used the blood magic that Crom Dhubh had taught him. Naga blood magic. There was very little fear in Bress, yet as the dead flesh of the dragon opened against his skin, pulling his hand into the corpse, there was a moment when he tried to pull away – but it had him, and the moment of fear stretched out into the closest he had been to panic in a long time …

The flesh parted like a corpse giving birth. Bress fell through dead flesh and bone and into the dragon’s skull. He was surrounded by rotting meat, felt it pushing against him, like he had been swallowed. He flailed, his hand touching one of the dead serpents still attached to the throne of bone it had grown into to meld with the dragon.

He could hear the gobbling, tearing noise of the scorpion. He looked down the dragon’s gullet. Scythe-like brass blades tore through flesh, letting surprisingly little seawater in. He saw diseased flesh spreading through the corpse towards him. He was sure he couldn’t have it come into contact with him. He felt around, trying to find the sac that held the dragon’s brain, cursing Crom Dhubh in his mind and hoping the Dark Man could hear it. He touched what he thought was what he was looking for. More of the blood magic that he had been taught. He felt the sac rip and his long fingers wrapped around something that felt partly like shaped stone, as if it had been worked, and partly like flesh. Bress tore the stone/flesh thing out of the momentarily revived pulsing organ. The cavity he was in was starting to fill with seawater and other fluids. He jerked his hand away from where the rotting corruption had grown close to him. He tried to wriggle around, trying to concentrate, to suppress the fear, but this was too close to being swallowed, or unborn. He smeared his bloody palm on un-diseased dead flesh again and the contraction yanked him into the flesh.

Snow had covered the tracks but after they had found the first few and then worked out the enormous length of the giants’ strides, tracking them became easier, though their efforts would be difficult to hide from any who chose to look themselves.

They had climbed down and followed the ravine. Then they climbed over the hills of the southern ridge, and curved round west, running parallel with the valley, always climbing.

The cave was in a narrow gulley, the entrance obscured by trees, though a few of those had been pushed aside and then put back in their normal position recently. The giants would have had to crawl to get into this cave, but not far into it there was a large crevice in the rock.

Germelqart had prayed to the chalice and then pricked his finger and dropped a little of his blood into the red molten contents before they went into the cave. Tangwen hadn’t felt like she had walked through cobwebs as she entered, though her skin was itching, Selbach’s too judging by the scratching. The Pecht scout had to be coaxed, quietly, into the cave. He was standing looking down into the hole.

‘Even if I wanted to, I could not see down there to climb,’ he said, crossing his arms.

‘We could make it so you could see in the dark,’ Germelqart said, quietly. Tangwen stared at the Carthaginian. ‘Just so he can see in the dark.’

‘Drink from that which makes slaves? I think not.’

Germelqart looked down into the hole. ‘I could perhaps make the climb but I do not have your skills. I would risk discovery.’

‘I’ll go alone,’ Tangwen said. She didn’t relish the idea. Partly because two of them doubled the chance of any information getting back to the warband if something went wrong, and partly because she just didn’t want to go alone.

‘We will not offer this chance to warriors unless we are forced to,’ Germelqart told Selbach.

‘I have not drunk from the chalice,’ Tangwen said. ‘It is a great honour.’ Selbach turned to look at her sceptically. ‘Sorry.’

‘We seek to avoid the attention of the gods lest we have to fight them again,’ Selbach said.

‘We are fighting them,’ Germelqart pointed out. Selbach still looked unsure.

‘Will it make me braver?’ he asked.

‘You’re brave enough,’ Tangwen told him.

She was more than a little surprised when Germelqart grabbed Selbach by his limed hair and cut a chunk out of it with his bronze dagger. She almost intervened. Selbach broke free and backed quickly against the rock wall. He looked angry, hurt and frightened. Germelqart held up the lime-stiff piece of hair.

‘You understand what I am, a
magus
… a man of power and knowledge, yes?’ he demanded. Selbach nodded. ‘Boast that you have drunk from the cup and the warriors will steal your eyes, but I will do something much, much worse. Do you understand?’

Tangwen wasn’t sure if Germelqart was trying to trick the man into believing him or not, but she could see that Selbach seemed convinced. The Carthaginian reached into his bag and produced the Red Chalice. He held it out to the Pecht scout. Selbach stared at it, obviously frightened, but he reached out for the cup.

It was a long, hard climb in the white and green ghost light, though she was relieved that Selbach was a good climber. The Pecht scout still looked terrified as they descended into the Annwn, the Underworld.

He had, of course, panicked when the hot metal contents of the chalice had forced itself into his mouth and down his bulging throat, glowing under his skin. He had curled into a ball and refused to look at them. They had coaxed him up and he had a moment of wonder when he realised he could see in the dark.

They had left Germelqart in the cave above. The Carthaginian had prayed to the god in the Red Chalice to work his magics to hide Tangwen and Selbach from the Crom Dhubh’s wards.

Tangwen wasn’t sure how long they had been climbing for. All she knew was that her muscles ached. Below her she could make out a faint white glow. What she couldn’t hear was the sound of water.

The bottom of the hole was another cave. It was set back from the edge of a lake. She couldn’t see where the glow was coming from yet. She put her foot down onto stone. To her right the cave went further back into the rock, opening up into a much larger area. On her left was the lake. The white glow was light reflecting on thick, white ice where the lake had frozen.

Tangwen put one foot on the ice; it didn’t flex, or crack, and felt solid under her foot, but ice had fooled her before. She stepped out onto the frozen surface of the lake, all her weight on it. Selbach was already crouched down on the ice. He said nothing but motioned towards the island in the middle of the lake.

The light itself was coming from Oeth. The isle looked stark black against the white of the ice, its tower of bone reaching up towards the jagged rock teeth of the huge cavern’s ceiling, a tribute to the gods of atrocity. There was movement off to her left. One of the giants was walking across the ice. Two more of the creatures were standing on it as well. At first she thought that one of the stationary giants had suffered some horrible wound, its chest and torso sundered, its ribs split and peeled back, the open flesh and bone like thick bark. If she had not drunk of Britha’s blood she would have believed this to be the case. She heard Selbach spit to protect himself against evil. Britha’s blood allowed her to see further and better in the darkness of the Underworld. On the ice in front of the giant was a man. He was slumped as though dead, or asleep, though something that looked like roots, or the thin branches of a tree, or the veins that ran through skin, propped him up on his knees. They had grown from the giant and into the flesh of the motionless man.

Tangwen was appalled but the beginning of a plan was starting to form, a plan that threw up more problems than it solved at the moment, but a plan nonetheless. The ice could take the weight of the giants.

‘We need to find an easier way to get down here,’ Tangwen whispered to Selbach.

Fighting against the current, Bress had made it to the eastern island, the one the mad had inhabited. He had started running down the isle’s west coast, trying to stay out of sight of the brass galley. This was made more difficult by the isle now being a grey wasteland.

Eventually he had to lie down and hide when the brass galley’s invisible oarsmen started to row the strange metal craft between the two islands towards the coast.

From his position Bress watched as four horses stood up on the deck of the ship. They had torn themselves out of some kind of caul. They seemed completely docile despite being on the deck of a moving ship, and even from where Bress was lying he could see that they were magnificent creatures, completely unlike the native horses.

The brass ship closed with the coast as the horses were saddled. A ramp was lowered into the marshy shallows and riders, including the man with metal strips running through the skin on his head, led the horses through the shallows before mounting them. The riders headed north, leaving a cloud of grey dust in their wake.

17

Now

‘If Rush is just going to meet your Mr Brown, is there even anything you can do?’ Beth asked. Du Bois wasn’t sure how to answer. He had been making this up as he went along. He was half convinced he was just going through the motions because he didn’t know what else to do in the circumstances. He despised the
DAYP
but it was starting to look like it was the Circle that had caused the most damage.

Flying over the eastern seaboard had been depressing. Broken city after broken city, often with open fighting in the streets. Skyscrapers burning like candles.

The mid-west had been better. Entire swathes of it had looked untouched, though they had stayed away from built up areas and military bases. There were always reminders, however. A number of the farms they saw looked like they had been fortified. Du Bois guessed they were less likely to have been near phones or the internet when it had happened, though many farms used radio. He had seen a number of fields with disconcerting patterns drawn in them by combine harvesters.

The mountains had been best. Among the Rockies, the sky bright blue and almost cloudless above them, it had almost been possible to forget about what was happening, if you ignored the smudge, little more than a discolouration, in the north: Denver burning.

‘We’re heading south but LA’s west, so where are we going?’ Beth had asked.

What are
you doing?
he’d asked himself.
It’s unlikely
he’s alive, if he is there are no guarantees
he’ll help you
,
and even if he does there’
s no guarantee he’ll know what you need to
know.

‘I know someone,’ du Bois told her. ‘He’ll know people in LA.’

‘Is this all coming from us?’ Beth asked a while later. They were over desert now. They had overflown what du Bois had assumed was a Native American reservation. Their flight had sent a committee of vultures flapping into the air. The human carrion they had been feeding on were laid out in rows. Du Bois was pretty sure he’d seen a few muzzle flashes as they’d flown past as well. ‘Is this just inside all of us?’

‘Perhaps,’ du Bois said. ‘But we have,
had
, an emergent psychology that prevented us from behaving like this. Even if it was just a veneer of civilisation, we accomplished so much. That’s what matters.’

‘Seems kind of redundant in the face of the tech.’

Du Bois was starting to worry about Beth. It had been a long journey, and she’d had a lot of time to think.

‘Technology is just one part of humanity’s accomplishments, and the tech notwithstanding, what we have done from a standing start is astonishing. Then there’s literature, art, symphonies …’

He would work it out afterwards. A flash in the extreme ultraviolet part of the spectrum, invisible to unaugmented humans. The Harrier no longer had a wing. It seemed to be happening in slow motion. The aircraft was tipping towards the desert floor. With a thought, transmitted by touch to the aircraft’s systems through the stick, du Bois ejected Beth, himself, and the storage compartment. Explosive bolts blew and they were rocketed out of the aircraft at an angle a little too horizontal for du Bois’s taste. The desert floor shot by beneath him. Dirt and wreckage flew into the air as the Harrier bounced, spinning, off the ground. The seat fell away from him. He started to fall, he had a moment to try and right himself and then the parachute deployed. The earth came up to meet him way too quickly. He cried out as impact with the ground tried to push his femur into his chest cavity.

Beth was standing over him, Model 0 in hand, looking all around. He glanced to one side and saw an IV tube full of regenerative matter hanging off a piece of aircraft wreckage that had been embedded in the ground. His neuralware told him that he was pretty much healed now. Only a little time had elapsed. With a thought he cut off the IV’s flow. It was arguably overkill to use one of the IVs for this. They were last ditch. He hadn’t been that badly hurt, but he didn’t say anything.

He sat up, brushing himself down. Beth had dragged the
armoured storage compartment closer to him.
The Harrier was in a trench some distance away.

‘Thanks
for ejecting me first,’ Beth said. ‘I got off lightly.’
He just nodded and stood up, making for the storage
compartment. ‘What happened? I saw that weird flash.’

‘X-ray
laser,’ du Bois told her. He touched the storage compartment
and unlocked it with a thought. ‘Fired from an orbital
platform.’ He laughed humourlessly as she looked up.

‘So we
were lucky, then?’ she said.

‘No, they were slowing us
down. If they had wanted to kill us they could
have.’ Du Bois was quickly and efficiently pulling his gear
out of the storage unit and putting it on.

Beth
glanced up into the clear blue sky again. The sun
was beating down on them but all it was doing
was providing energy. They regulated their own bodies’ temperatures and
the UV rays wouldn’t damage their skin now.

‘So
they can kill us any time?’ Beth said.

Du Bois
shrugged. ‘Easier in the air. They’ll still be having
comms problems but they can certainly fire on us. On
foot it’s a hammer to kill an ant.’

‘And
this is your Control?’ she asked. He nodded. ‘Could they
know where we are going?’

‘Possibly,’ he admitted.

‘Why didn’
t they just kill us?’

Length of service?
he wondered
, but he knew the Circle wasn’t sentimental. ‘I don
’t know.’

Finally he picked up the SA58 carbine and
turned, heading south.

‘So we’re going to walk into
this trap then?’

‘Let’s go and see if we can find someone to donate us a vehicle,’ du Bois suggested.

‘This would be much easier for you
if you would let us know where you are,’ the
voice on the end of the tight-beam radio uplink
said. King Jeremy had to admit that he was right
.

The LAV III armoured vehicle had given them the edge
in getting out of Boston, at least until they had
come across other military vehicles. It had been cool to
see what the 25mm chaingun could do to mobs of
people, though. Stealing the F-22 Raptors had been exhilarating
but it had meant leaving most of
their gear, and their slaves, behind. The dogfight over Nevada had been less fun, despite their uploaded skills.

They had only been able to take the most valuable of the Lost Tech with them. That had, however, included the cornucopia, which meant that they could fabricate almost anything on a small scale, just by plugging it into whatever matter they wanted to break down. That had given them their not-so-small arms and the portable tight-beam uplink. It had also fabricated their clothes and armour so they could look more post-apocalyptic. Given the time, they could have modified the 6
×
6 Cougar armoured truck they had taken from a military unit turned brigand to fit the aesthetic, but they were moving too quickly.

They were somewhere in the Sierras now, looking down on California. In many ways King Jeremy loved this new world. They could be more overt but commuting was a bitch.

‘My problem remains the same, Mr Brown,’ Jeremy said. ‘I don’t know you, I don’t trust anybody, and your story sounds like bullshit.’

Mr Brown had told them that the world was over. What had happened was effectively an alien attack. The same aliens the biotech was derived from, and it would get worse before it got better. All King Jeremy knew was that something bad had happened, and he knew alien technology existed. The rest wasn’t that much of a stretch. This Mr Brown clearly knew about, and had access to the Lost Tech, and was offering them a way out. The problem was that King Jeremy was now having to deal with someone with at least comparable – and probably greater – resources than he had, but he seemed to be the only game in town. King Jeremy hated playing games he didn’t know he was going to win. He was going to LA looking for an edge.

‘Very well, Mr R … King Jeremy, but we could have been on our way now if you trusted me.’

Or dead,
King Jeremy thought. ‘We’ll see you at the rendezvous.’ He handed the headset back to Dracimus.

‘So they’ve got their own satellite network up and running?’ the other human-looking member of the
DAYP
asked. He might have turned out to be a whiny bitch but he had been proving more useful than the normally reliable Inflictor recently. His demon-headed henchman was spending a lot of time looking to the west. King Jeremy had managed to get little out of him lately except the word ‘ocean’. According to Dracimus, Inflictor had been spending most of his time watching the same surf film over and over again, or playing ‘Shadows over Oceania’.

‘Yeah, they’ve got all the toys,’ King Jeremy muttered. He put the range-finding binoculars up to his eyes and looked down. On the road ahead he could see a small convoy of various off-road vehicles. They were driven by what looked like a collection of well-armed, overweight, middle-aged men who’d seen one too many road warrior movies.

‘And no reason to share,’ Dracimus whined.

‘Have you got any better ideas?’ King Jeremy asked, wishing he had designed the psychometric games he’d used to recruit members of the
DAYP
a little better.

‘Yeah, we find a compound and set ourselves up as fucking kings, man! An army, a harem, we could rule America if we wanted, maybe even Canada as well.’

The bikes, pickups and buggies were getting closer. It was going to be impossible to avoid them. He had to admit the naked bodies strapped to the front of some of the vehicles were a nice touch. If he had time he would do something similar.

‘Just get in the fucking truck,’ King Jeremy snapped.

Tucson looked like London after the blitz. If London had been neatly set out in a grid, and surrounded by picturesque mountains.

‘Well?’ Beth asked from the bed of the pickup truck they’d stolen. They had stopped on a mountain road just inside the boundaries of the Catalina State Park.

‘Too far to tell,’ du Bois said. What he didn’t like was that it was obvious that Tucson had been extensively bombed from the air. Entire neighbourhoods had been turned into a series of craters. Much of it was still burning, including parts of the state park. He could make out people and vehicles moving here and there, but no large mob movements that he could see. There was nothing moving in the air at the moment but they were trying to get to Davis-Mothan Air Force Base in southern Tucson, which seemed the most likely place for the planes to have originated from. It looked like it had been a military-assisted urban suicide.

‘If we had the time I’d say leave the truck and conduct a reconnaissance on foot but …’

Beth put the Model 0
LMG
down and climbed out of the truck bed, into the truck’s cab.

‘What are you doing?’ du Bois asked.

‘Driving,’ Beth told him.

‘I thought we agreed I’m the most experienced driver.’ He knew that until she’d uploaded the skill Beth hadn’t ever driven.

‘You’re also the most experienced shooter,’ Beth said, starting the engine.

‘Beth …’

‘I’m tired of killing people!’ she shouted at him.

They had tried to take the back roads to get to Tucson but it hadn’t always been possible. They had been chased twice. Where possible, Beth had tried to disable the vehicles, but they had also been attacked, and they had killed the people the truck had belonged to. They had been infected by the alien insanity. There were still bloodstains on the vehicle.

Du Bois slung the carbine and climbed into the truck bed, going down on one knee and picking up the
LMG
. Beth pulled away and started heading down the winding canyon road towards the city. The air was full of burning embers from one of the nearer forest fires.

Du Bois had started to put it together as they got closer to the air force base. He had seen the wreckage of A-10 Thunderbolt IIs, close air support aircraft. Ugly bombers nicknamed ‘Warthogs’. He had also seen the wreckage of MQ-9 Reapers – Remotely Piloted Aircraft. It looked like the drones had been mounted with air-to-air missiles. The Warthogs had bombed Tucson and then been engaged by the Reapers. It looked like it had been a hell of an aerial battle.

The base itself looked like it had been attacked from the air as well, but it was difficult to make out the extent of the damage as they weren’t going to the base proper but rather to the Boneyard. This was a vast graveyard of decommissioned, mainly military aircraft parked in neat rows out in the desert.

The Boneyard was on their left as they made their way down the road that ran along the perimeter fence. It had been breached in a number of places. On the right were tracts of low rent housing. There was no movement on either side of the road other than the occasional vulture taking to the air. They had seen bodies along the perimeter fence, some of them in air force uniform; it looked as though most of them had been carrying weapons. There were also a number of military vehicles either riddled with bullets, or hit with heavier ordnance. On the inside of the perimeter fence du Bois could make out the wreckage of a number of unmanned ground vehicles, armed, mainly caterpillar-tracked drones.