The Beauty of Destruction (52 page)

The
Basilisk II
was reconfiguring itself. Rooms and the lounge/command and control were reassembled. All of them were extruded out of the smart matter. A badly bruised Talia disconnected herself from the ship, and her sister took over, flying the yacht neunonically. Ludwig was still where he had been since he came aboard. All were silent, all were staring through the transparent hull. Talia wasn’t even complaining.

Scab might not have completely understood the emotion, but he felt the atmosphere. There was an overwhelming feeling of sadness about the place.

‘Find a place to land,’ he said.

‘Why?’ Vic demanded. Scab was tiring of the ’sect only ever being able to see things in terms of his own fear. He turned to look at his erstwhile partner.

‘Because we’re in an alien spaceship,’ he suggested. He could tell that the ’sect didn’t think that was a good enough reason. The Monk seemed to, however.

‘Well, we’re going to have some time to get used to it,’ the Monk muttered.

Scab had the
Basilisk II
check for any kind of communications coming to or from their ship. If anything was happening then the ship’s excellent sensor suite couldn’t detect it. Suddenly Scab couldn’t shake the feeling that Ludwig was watching him. It took him a moment or two to recognise the sensation as discomfort.

He felt the
Basilisk II
touch down on a relatively flat piece of the Lloigor ship’s interior, between two massive curving bits of the metallic substance that made up the ship’s superstructure. The curving metal structures managed to simultaneously look a bit like pipes, and a bit like hills. They were nestled among windowless towers. The atmosphere outside seemed to be breathable, and gravity was pointing the right way. Scab made his way towards the cargo bay and the fore airlock.

‘Wait,’ the Monk said. Scab turned to look at her.

‘For what?’ he asked. ‘All the First Contact bureaucracy in the world isn’t going to make any difference. We are stranded here.’ He continued towards the cargo bay. He could hear the Monk complaining as Talia followed him. Then he was aware of the presence of Ludwig just behind them as well.

Vic was the last to leave the ship. He had his weapons drawn.

‘Just for once, maybe?’ Talia asked, pointing at the guns. Scab could see the ’sect was conflicted; he wanted to please Talia, but he wanted to live in fear as well.

‘That’s the sort of nice idea that gets you into trouble,’ Vic muttered, but holstered his pistols.

‘I don’t think it would make much difference,’ the Monk said, looking around. The whole ship was illuminated by a not unpleasant blueish-white twilight, though it further added to the somewhat melancholy nature of the place. It stretched out as far as Scab’s augmented eyes could see in all directions. It was like some vast subterranean world. The only thing that bothered him was that it reminded him a little of the Cathedral.

‘Well, if we can find a source of food and water, or even just matter, living here won’t be so bad,’ Vic said. ‘At least we’ll get some peace and quiet.’ Both the human women were staring at him. ‘What?’

‘Why would you tempt fate like that?’ Talia demanded.

Scab was wondering why there had to be talking. It was odd but he didn’t want a cigarette.

‘So it’s very nice and all, but now what?’ Despite Talia’s words Scab could hear awe in her voice as she looked around.

There was nothing one moment, and then suddenly it was in the air above them. It was a floating, three-faced head; then a scruffy, long-haired human in a trench coat with awful teeth; a multi-armed, part-insect part-human-female black-skinned death goddess; a wedge-headed Seeder servitor on a cross; a hooded old man with a beard and only one eye; a young man with a crown of thorns crucified on a tesseract; an androgynous-looking human with ginger hair and different coloured eyes; a horrific caricature of Scab. The flickering images were vast and ever changing.

Talia had backed away so quickly she had fallen over. Vic had weapons in his hands again. Scab was just watching.

‘It’s a display of power,’ the Monk said, but Scab didn’t think so. It was trying to communicate, trying to find a frame of reference. It may have wanted to negotiate from a position of strength, but who didn’t?

‘Who are you?’ Scab asked quietly.

The words hurt and seemed to make everything shake, much like communication with Ludwig. The answer was a mash of many different words. He managed to make some of them out, but most of them were nonsense to him: Durga, the Leveller, hive Kali, Seeders, Odin, Bowie, God and other names.

‘I think I’ll call you Oz!’ Talia shouted into the thunder of words. The words stopped.

– Please focus.

The words hurt again. He, Talia and the Monk were staggered, capillaries in eyes burst, ears bled. This time it was Ludwig who had spoken. Talia closed her eyes and looked like she was concentrating. The images had gone, and an old man with a great beard and a ragged grey robe was standing in front of them. His palms were bleeding from holes in them. His eyes were different colours.

‘You are unfocused, chaotic, difficult to understand and always have been,’ the old man said.

‘So what’s your name?’ Vic asked.

‘Oz,’ the figure and Talia said at the same time, the human girl sounding a little exasperated.

‘What are you?’ Talia asked. ‘Are you the ship?’

‘I am as you are, a three-dimensional machine designed to serve the creators. Mine are hypothetical five-dimensional beings that probably ascended a long time before the death of their universe, and the birth of yours. My essence, my beginning, is only seven thousand, four hundred, and thirty two iterations from the microscopic vessel that breached the walls with the last of the old universe’s energy.’

Scab was pretty sure that the words meant he was from somewhere else, but beyond that he didn’t really care.

‘We’re not machines,’ Talia said. ‘We’re biological, natural.’

‘There’s nothing natural about biological life,’ Oz said. He seemed to be studying them with a kind of detached curiosity. ‘You had a creator. You were programmed to evolve, just like machines. Biological life is not indigenous to this universe. It spread. Like a fungal infection.’

‘But the Seeders must have evolved,’ the Monk said. ‘Or did they come from somewhere else?’ Oz turned to look at her, a blank expression on his face. ‘You don’t know, do you?’

‘I had nothing to add,’ Oz said, nodding towards Ludwig. ‘I am trying to fix your raven’s mind, but he has been badly hurt, and changed, and much is missing.’ They all turned to look at the machine Elite.

‘He’s not really ours,’ Talia said.

‘Yes,’ Oz said.

Scab was reasonably sure that Oz wasn’t purposely trying to be difficult. It was just a communications problem. It didn’t stop it from being annoying.

‘No, he’s really not,’ Talia persevered.

‘The ravens are like myself. They are grown in times of need to protect the adopted great-grandchildren. You remind us of our masters a long time before they ascended. Well, at least until you lost your way.’

‘Protect us from what?’

‘Níðhöggr, your insane progenitors.’

‘There is a Destruction, something that consumes everything it touches,’ the Monk said. ‘Do you know of it?’

Oz concentrated. ‘The Screaming?’

‘Would you protect us from that?’ the Monk asked. Scab let out a dry chuckle.

‘Nothing can protect you from that.’

‘Do you know what it is?’ the Monk asked.

‘I know it belongs in your universe.’

‘So you’ll help us?’ Talia asked.

‘I am trapped.’

‘You can’t get free of this place?’ Talia asked.

‘I will wait until one or more of the black suns die,’ Oz said. ‘I have changed the strange programming in the raven. Those that changed him no longer control it. It will protect you, though it wants to go home. As do we all. Once I carried many tens of thousands of ravens.’ It was the first time Oz had shown anything approaching human emotion, just a slight wistfulness in his voice.

‘What happened?’ the Monk asked.

He shook its head. ‘I was damaged and I did not know this red place.’

‘Is that how the black suns trapped you?’ Talia asked.

‘They hold me here, or perhaps they dance around me like demons to the sound of some mad piper?’

Scab narrowed his eyes. He was aware of the Monk tensing. That hadn’t sounded right. It had been a departure from its previous very literal speech patterns. Oz turned around and there was another younger, slyer face growing out of the back of his head. Vic took a step back. There was something serpentine about its features.

‘We should get back on the ship.’ Scab heard the words over a ’face link that he hadn’t given permission for and he didn’t recognise the voice. He assumed it was the new Ludwig. The Elite, or raven, or whatever he was, had just gone through his ’face security like it hadn’t existed. It was just one more reminder for Scab that he needed power, and then he needed to make examples.

‘How will that help?’ Vic asked over the ’face link. ‘He is the ship and we are all trapped.’

‘He will make a path for us while he can still fight the Yig virus,’ Ludwig said.

The metallic material of the ship had started to take on a faint, but noticeable, scaled appearance.

Talia was backing towards the ship. The Monk was doing the same, though she moved between this new serpentine Oz and her sister in a way that suggested to Scab she had no idea of the gravity of the situation. That made him smile. There was, however, something that Oz had said earlier in the conversation that had been nagging him.

‘What life is natural?’ Scab asked. Oz turned to look at him. His eyes were reptilian slits now, but they were still different colours.

‘You think us monsters.’

‘Scab, what are you doing?’ Vic ’faced.

Questioning,
Scab thought but didn’t say.

‘Don’t presume to know my mind,’ Scab said, and then pointed at serpentine Oz. ‘I’ve seen your kind before, serpents I mean, though I’ve seen a ship’s AI before as well. You’re just another eating, shitting, murdering race of uplifts who presumably think you’re clever because you managed to reverse engineer obviously user-friendly, advanced technology.’

‘We know the truth,’ serpentine Oz said.

Scab’s sigh was audible. ‘There is no truth,’ Scab said. ‘Just the lies people tell themselves to get through the day.’

‘Scab!’ Talia hissed.

Parts of the massive Lloigor ship had started to move, he could feel it under his feet. The movement reminded him of a serpent’s constricting coils.

‘And where are we going to run?’ Scab demanded.

‘There is no need to run,’ serpentine Oz said. ‘I am a generous god. I have shown your ship the way, I will release you from my prison.’

Scab didn’t like this. He didn’t like it at all. It was too easy, and easy things never worked out. He almost registered the intrusion warnings from his neunonics before his defences were overwhelmed.

Scab was surrounded by cold, hard, black vacuum. He was among the stars. Moving at speed through a nebula, he was aware of faint signals, communications between distant particles, a network, a hive mind. The movement of what was unknown space sped up, and he found himself somewhere else. He screamed despite himself as he was plunged into the heart of a star where sentient fire played. Then he was far beneath the ice of a moon, bacteria-like silicon colonies leaching sustenance from faint heat sources. A crystalline virus that could sing, infecting rock, thought forms that created bodies of liquid hydrocarbons, clustered gas colony minds, unnoticed because unlooked for. If they ever had been able to, then the uplifted races could no longer see beyond their own frame of reference.

It was beautiful. It was the universe that Scab had always wanted to see. It was pure.

‘You are the lie,’ Oz said. ‘The tyranny of biology.’

Scab was sitting in his favourite chair in the lounge/command and control on the
Basilisk II
. The others were there as well, including Ludwig. His neunonics held no trace of his time in the very real-feeling immersion that the serpentine Oz had presumably uploaded into him. The memory was all in his meat.

The yacht was flying through the narrowing but still-cavernous structure of the Lloigor ship. Olfactory and visual analysis of the other crewmembers, excepting Ludwig, suggested tension rather than panic. Scab lit up a cigarette, his vision polarising to cope with what looked like a dull red sunset round the next bend in the craft’s vast superstructure. Then, as they rounded the bend, at the end of the huge – but constricting – cavern, he could see what looked like a partial view of a dull red star. The star had black rings of some kind of tech running around it, displays of energy crackling from it. He assumed this was the craft’s power plant, a fading artificial sun.

Scab ’faced with the
Basilisk II
. He was less than pleased that Ludwig was flying. The machine was looking for a way out of the huge Lloigor craft, and it was being guided through the shrinking tunnels by some invasive force in the yacht’s systems. The virus looked like a carpet of snakes. It was all but ignoring the yacht’s defences, suborning system after system. There was a sinuous beauty to it, Scab thought. He took a sample, imprisoned one of the constituent snake-like pieces of code in the most secure Pythian software he had, and stored it in his own neunonic memory. He wasn’t quite sure why he did it. It was a huge risk and if/when it got free it could turn him into that which he most feared, a slave, but the virus was subtle, all-pervasive, sinuous, beautiful and powerful.

On a whim he looked for the Monk’s immersion program, the one she seemed to think was so precious. It had not fallen to the writhing carpet of snakes, yet. He transferred that as well. The virtual environment took up a lot of his neunonic memory. Then Ludwig broke his ’face link with the ship. Scab sat in his chair, exhaling smoke. He could hear warning shouts from the Monk, cries of borderline panic from Talia and Vic. Scab ran a diagnostic to see if he had been infected by it. He hadn’t, as far as he could tell. Then he turned to look at where he knew the bridge drive was. Where his ghost was.