The Beauty of Destruction (35 page)

He could see Beth in the
ECV
’s turret. She was shaking with rage. He looked at her and shook his head. He climbed into the
ECV
, half expecting Beth to open up with the minigun at any moment. Somehow she didn’t.

‘Turn around and drive slowly down the hill, stop when I tell you,’ he told Alexia. With difficulty in the vehicle’s relatively cramped exterior he pulled the bolt-action Purdey out of its sheath. He estimated the range and dialled it into the scope. It would be a quick shot, a hurried shot, uphill at an awkward angle. He worked the bolt and chambered a round. ‘Stop.’

He stepped out of the
ECV
and brought the Purdey smoothly to his shoulder. Targeting graphics appeared in his vision. La Calavera was walking over the drawbridge back into the courtyard. The two-headed figure was almost obscured by the curvature of the road. Du Bois inhaled. The targeting graphics were showing a spot just above the head. Du Bois squeezed. The rifle jerked back against his shoulder. The gunshot echoed up and down the canyon. Matter flew from the second head, the woman’s head, and she slumped forwards. La Calavera ducked out of sight. Du Bois climbed back into the
ECV
. They sped down the canyon, small calibre bullets bouncing off the patrol vehicle’s armour.

24

A Long time After the Loss

It was fucking nonsense. The Monk had no idea why she had gone along with it. In fact she pretty much
hadn’t
gone along with the plan. It had been Talia’s decision to pilot the ship. Scab had taken her into the smart matter. Apparently the
Basilisk II
’s smart matter had extruded non-invasive, or at least less invasive, superconducting tendrils that had grown in through Talia’s ears. The tendrils were many times more effective than the electrodes she had used previously to interface with the ship and other technology.

Standing in the cargo area, wearing her light combat armour, shoulder to shoulder with the oddly still and quiet primitive human weapons who were the inhabitants of Cyst, she had to admit her sister had some skills. The
Basilisk II
’s gravity field was such that they barely felt the manoeuvres, but the Monk had been receiving a feed from the ship’s sensors as Talia had put it through its paces. After her sister had got used to the ship she had weaved in and out of the Cage’s walkways, soaring high up towards the edge of the gas giant’s atmosphere and then diving into the gas clouds. She took the craft low enough to make it shake. She had bounced the heavily modified yacht off the continent-sized heavy weather. She had taken the
Basilisk II
low enough to make the smart matter flex, and to cause warning signs for structural integrity to appear in their neunonics, but still not as low as they would have to go.

‘Does Mr Scab think the structural tolerance specifications are a joke?’ the AI asked, appearing in her vision superimposed over the form of one of the Cystians with reversed knee joints, bone plates and barbed spears for hands. They were in the cargo bay; the lounge/C&C and all their belongings had been subsumed into the smart matter, their private rooms were gone. Instead they had made more space for the feral living weapons. The Monk looked over at Scab on the other side of Vic. The psychopath was wearing light combat armour as well. Vic had heavier armour that he had clipped to his already reinforced hard-tech frame.

‘I can’t believe that Benedict bought it,’ Beth ’faced the ship’s AI, or Basil as Talia had taken to calling him. ‘He must realise it’s a trap.’

‘It’s not much of one,’ the AI replied. She agreed. Benedict/Scab outnumbered them, outgunned them, knew all their best tricks and was capable of them himself.

Then why did I let this go
ahead?
she wondered.

‘Are you sure you are not motivated by revenge in this?’ the AI asked.

Am I?
She glanced over at Scab again.
Is that it?

‘Is this conversation going to help me do the dumb thing I’m already committed to doing?’ she asked. The feed showed them rising vertically above the gaseous bands of colour, towards the edge of the atmosphere again. The
Templar
was close enough that they had visual contact. Neither of them had started firing yet, it would be just a waste.

‘I just wanted you to know that she is fine and will be safe as long as the ship is,’ the AI told her. ‘And she has priority in the case of ejection.’ The Monk just nodded and then it started.

Mr Hat reckoned the
Templar
was about half a light second out when it fired on the
Basilisk II
. The light cruiser no longer looked like a Church vessel. There were still statues and reliefs on the smart matter hull of the ship, but now they were the things of nightmare. They had made the exterior of the ship resemble the interior of the disturbed minds that had possessed the crew. Presumably they had toned it down a little to make the ship more aerodynamic for atmospheric actions.

The
Templar
fired its long weapons, the particle beam projector and the fusion lance, but the
Basilisk II
was already rolling and heading down towards the Cage, and the gas clouds. The light cruiser maintained its speed through the debris field that had been the blockading Consortium fleet. The ship’s laser batteries destroyed any wreckage that got too close. Sub-atomic particles hitting the magnetosphere created a coronal display that the
Templar
then burst through as it powered its way into the atmosphere.

The
Amuser
sank through the weak magnetosphere, all stealth systems active, trying to draw as little attention to itself as possible, using the debris field as cover. There was something wrong with the
Basilisk
II
’s configuration. It should have been folded down tight, spare and aerodynamic. Instead it had been made larger. He wondered what they could be carrying that they felt was that important.

He watched as the
Templar
fired multiple laser batteries downwards, trying to create a grid of destructive energy to ensnare the fast, elegant yacht. It fired AG smart munitions and emptied racks of kinetic harpoons. Mr Hat certainly wasn’t going to struggle to track the light cruiser.

The
Basilisk II
’s energy dissipation grid flared briefly as it flew through the lasers. Its own laser batteries, blister-like bumps in its smart matter hull, fired defensively, aiming at the friction-heated kinetic harpoons that were too close for comfort and the AG smart munitions, though the latter had initiated random chaos-fact-driven evasive manoeuvres. The yacht launched its own AG smart munitions but not as many as the reptilian bounty hunter had expected.

The
Templar
was heading straight down, hard burn. It looked like an arrow pointed at the planet’s core as it tried to bring its big guns to bear on the smaller ship. It was lost against the massive bulk of the gas giant, little more than a pinprick of light. The
Basilisk
II
, however, was using the Cage as cover. Even the fusion lance didn’t touch the S-tech material that the Cage had been constructed from. As the two sets of AG smart munitions closed, they detonated into multiple submunitions, destroying each other in a spectacular, expensive, but largely pointless, display of light and force.

Benedict/Scab knew that the
Basilisk II
could outfly the
Templar
but only for so long. The ex-Church light cruiser could follow the
Basilisk II
in and out of Red Space, and if they tried to run then that left them vulnerable to the big guns. Still, he had to admit that whoever was piloting the
Basilisk II
was good. He assumed it was his father/older self.

The
Templar
dived between the walkways of the Cage, and then levelled out, picking up some ionisation from a megastorm weather front in the clouds below them. Lightning wreathed the ship and the energy dissipation grid glowed slightly. The
Templar
’s weapon operators were trying to bring the particle beam cannon to bear, using the lasers and the fusion lance to shepherd the smaller craft into firing zones, but to little avail. The
Templar
launched another hail of kinetic harpoons, a number of them hitting the Cage and disintegrating. Several of the harpoons hit the
Basilisk II
, however, and the visual feed showed the yacht’s hull flowing as the carbon reservoirs replaced damaged armour. The forward lasers were lighting up the
Basilisk II
’s energy dissipation grid. They themselves were taking laser and harpoon hits but the bigger craft was just shrugging them off, powering through.

The
Basilisk II
rolled over one of the ziggurats and dived. Its engines glowed brightly, hard burn. Benedict/Scab smiled. They had them. He just wished there could have been an opportunity to board.

AG field or not, they were getting kicked around. The dive had made the Monk’s stomach lurch until altered biochemistry had controlled the sensation.

The feed from the
Basilisk II
’s sensors showed the massive bands of colour below them. They looked solid from her current perspective. It felt as if the yacht was getting beaten with giant hammers as kinetic harpoons impacted into the rear of the ship. The external feed showed the rear of the
Basilisk II
glowing neon, venting light and heat as lasers played across its hull. The thick white light of the fusion lance shot past them and into the cloud. It had probably missed by some distance but it had felt close.

With every impact the growling intensified. The Cystians were becoming more restless. The Monk tried not to look around, tried not to show any weakness. The last thing they needed was a fight on the
Basilisk II
. She felt as if she was standing in the middle of a herd waiting for a stampede, except the herd were all predators.

Talia was jinking the craft around a bit, trying to not be where the
Templar
was sending ordnance, but it was mostly a straight dive now. They were rapidly outpacing the light cruiser. The
Templar
, in comparison, looked as if it was slowly falling towards the gas cloud.

And then they were in among the clouds of hydrogen, helium and methane. The clouds made little difference to the
Templar
– the feed from the ship told her the light cruiser was bathing the yacht with active scans.

A laser hit a pocket of methane the size of a capital ship, and just for moment the inside of the clouds was illuminated by flame and then snuffed out.

‘It’s beautiful,’ Scab ’faced. The yacht was being buffeted. The Cystians were making more noise. Little of it sounded like language to her ears, but it did sound like fear.

‘Want to speak to your troops?’ the Monk ’faced to Scab. He ignored her. Her vision was filling with warnings from the ship but so far they were warnings about exceeding the hull’s stress tolerances rather than actual hull integrity warnings. That changed when she saw the smart metal hull flex inwards. Suddenly she wished that they hadn’t made the
Basilisk II
bigger, that they weren’t carrying all that extra, feral, biomass. The feral biomass who were becoming more and more frightened, and trying to back away from the hull despite being packed in tight.

‘Well, this will be a shitty way to die,’ Vic said. He sounded more resigned than frightened. The Monk suspected that he had run out of fear after the fall of the Cathedral and his close encounter with the two Elite. He had seemed particularly terrified of the Monarchist’s L-tech machine Elite, Ludwig.

‘The
Templar
’s levelling off,’ the AI said. She checked the feed. The
Templar
was two miles above them. Talia took the yacht deeper. The smart matter was definitely bulging inwards, reaching the limits of its elasticity. The automated warning messages were becoming positively alarming. The
Basilisk II
levelled off. The Monk felt the ship slow significantly as Talia attempted to bleed off heat and lower the ship’s EM signature as she engaged the stealth systems. Her sister dropped AG smart munitions behind the yacht, leaving them hovering in the gas clouds.

The yacht was now relying on passive sensors; fortunately the
Templar
was giving them a lot to go on as it rained harpoons and lasers down into the clouds, and saturated the area with active scans. The Monk still didn’t like the way the hull was bending in. From the external feed she could see the eddies in the clouds from the downward passage of the harpoons. If just one of them hit the badly stressed hull the yacht would pop like a water balloon stabbed with a knife. AG smart munitions from the
Templar
were moving through the clouds like sharks seeking them, but the Monk knew that they had to stay at this depth until the AI had analysed the
Templar
’s actions enough to make a decent fist of predicting where the ship would be when they came out of Red Space.

Light and force lit up the clouds above them as rival smart munitions found each other and blossomed into explosively colliding submunitions. Waves of pressure buffeted the
Basilisk II
, further distending the hull. She knew they were dead. The Monk closed her eyes, which was foolish. She was still receiving the sensor feed, she just couldn’t see the hull pressing in towards her.

Benedict/Scab could not work out the play. They could hide but then what? If they skipped to Red Space, the
Templar
could do the same. They could probably evade and run, but then what had they gained?

‘Benedict?’ Harold hissed. His first mate wanted to run silent, lace the clouds with AG munitions as intelligent mines, try and find them with passive sensors, but he knew there was a small chance they would miss a bridge opening if they did that.

‘Continue the active scans. I want a laser spread tight enough to catch them. Can we seed the clouds?’ He ’faced the question to the ’sect sensor operator; he wanted to drop a nano-screen over a wide area but he suspected he knew the answer.

‘No, too much weather … bridge!’ the ’sect sensor operator ’faced just a moment behind the ship informing him of the energy signature. With a thought he ordered the ship to follow them into Red Space.

Blue light, a bloody red gash in the striated cloud. They were practically sucked through, helium and hydrogen venting and then dissipating into the crimson clouds. The hull flexed back to normal and then the ship lurched and went dead.