The Beauty of Destruction (58 page)

Inside was vast, dark and empty, illuminated by the faint red light. She guessed there would be no atmosphere. Even with a hole this size it would take a very long time to evacuate all the air from a structure like the Dyson Sphere, but this had happened a very long time ago. The entire surface of the sphere seemed to be made up of mountainous ridges and valleys. Magnification showed the landscape consisted of segmented, organic, resinous-looking material. From their perspective the ridges climbed up the huge vertical-looking walls of the sphere’s interior, disappearing into the darkness above and below. In the red light it looked like Hell.

‘Is that a fucking statue?’ Talia asked. The light was coming from a fading, final sequence G-type star that looked small and distant in the centre of the Dyson Sphere. The light from the dim star was obscured by what did appear to be a massive statue, though the word didn’t really do it justice, of an ancient warrior with wings. The Monk had no idea what to make of that.

‘The Naga would have consumed all the matter, transforming it at a molecular level for their own purposes,’ Ludwig told them. The Monk noticed that the ship was starting to move towards the statue and the fading sun.

‘Then why not the statue?’ Talia asked.

‘He is a god,’ Ludwig said. Even Scab turned to stare at the automaton. It was not something that the Monk had ever wanted to hear a machine say.

‘Where are we going?’ Vic asked.

‘Lug,’ Ludwig told him. The ’sect opened his mandibles to ask another question. ‘Extremophile Naga spores are attaching themselves to the ship.’

‘Are they doing anything?’ the Monk asked.

‘Is there movement down there?’ Vic asked. The Monk had been thinking the same thing. Parts of the transparent hull were magnified. The mountains seemed to be shifting, parts of them uncoiling, flashes of light from engine fire as hibernating, biomechanical Naga ships started to awake.

‘If they know we’re here let’s speed up,’ the Monk said.

‘Speed up?’ Vic demanded incredulously. ‘Let’s just fucking leave!’ Movement was spreading like a forest fire beneath them.

‘There’s nowhere to run now,’ Scab said. The Monk glanced at him, his face in shadow, the rest of him illuminated by the faint red light.

‘They know something is happening but I don’t think they know exactly where we are yet,’ Ludwig said. The Monk wondered just how much the automaton had been compromised.

‘Can we go any faster?’ the Monk asked.

‘The faster we move the greater the likelihood of disco—’ Ludwig went quiet. The Monk stared at the floating cylindrical automaton. It was one of the Elite. They were capable of fighting entire fleets on their own, of destroying habitats, rendering worlds uninhabitable, and something had just made it go quiet. The air in the yacht’s lounge/C&C was suddenly filled with the funk of Vic’s pheromonic terror. She knew how he felt.

‘Is there safety with Lug?’ the Monk demanded. Ludwig didn’t answer.

‘Beth?’ Talia said, clearly frightened. The biomechanical ships, the Naga’s ‘dragons’, were separating themselves from their resin-like environment. The
Basilisk II
surged forwards, dramatically increasing its speed. Beth found herself using her neunonics to estimate how long it would take them to get to Lug, assuming that Lug was the statue, and how fast the biomechanical dragons would have to go to catch up with them. She abandoned it for the useless speculation it was. She had only come into contact with the Naga twice before. The first time had resulted in tens of thousands of deaths, and the sterilisation and subsequent destruction of an entire habitat. The second time it had nearly killed her. The serpent uplifts were voracious, and utterly inimical to all other forms of biological life. Suddenly this vast sphere had become claustrophobic. ‘Beth!’ Talia cried. The Monk almost snapped in response until she saw what her younger sister was pointing at. The Lounge/C&C’s carpet had developed scales. The faint red light was getting brighter. Suddenly Scab had stood up as if his armchair had just bitten him, his EM auto-shotgun in hand and his combat armour helmet growing over his head, the black visor sliding down over his face.

‘Seal up,’ Beth told her sister as her own helmet grew around her head. Talia’s eyes went wide.

‘Shit!’ the girl swore and ran towards her bedroom. The ship was reconfiguring, changing shape. The flexing of the smart matter hull was more sinuous than normal.

‘Talia!’ the Monk screamed just as her visor slid down. Her new P-sat clicked into the clip on her new armour’s shoulder. She could see the dragons burning towards the yacht now. At least they had some distance to travel from the shell to the huge warrior-shaped structure partially obscuring the faint red sun. Talia emerged from the corridor that led to the bedrooms. She was tucking what looked like a stainless steel rose into one of the compartments on her recently assembled armour.

‘Close your fucking helmet!’ Beth ’faced. Talia actually flinched. It was perhaps a little harsh for her sister’s first ’face communication, but at least Talia was closing her helmet.

The yacht was heading straight for Lug’s huge open mouth. It had to be hundreds of miles high, thousands across and then it filled their vision. The floor of the yacht shifted beneath them.

‘The ship has fallen,’ Ludwig announced in a matter-of-fact tone. The ship was slowing. There was a flash of black light, and then Beth was tumbling through the sky heading straight towards Lug. The AG motor in her P-sat could do nothing to slow her. She was aware of several parts of the mutating
Basilisk II
falling away from her far below. Something took hold of her and she started to slow down. Then she became aware of the heat. Despite the late sequence of the star, despite the huge structure of the warrior in its way, they were still in the corona of a star. Her armour was right on the edge of its material tolerances. Then the heat went away. The four of them were being carried in some kind of coherent energy field projected by Ludwig, who was just above and behind them. Once again Beth found herself wondering just how compromised by the Yig virus the ancient automaton was. She was still getting AV feed from her P-sat. The fire of the dragon’s engines seemed to fill the sphere all around them.

Hanging underneath Ludwig, approaching the huge statue, all she could really see of it was the cavernous darkness inside the mouth. Beth suddenly felt calm. Then her augmented vision illuminated the interior of the enormous head. It was filled with the same resinous material that coated the Dyson Sphere’s inner shell. There was movement everywhere on the resin. The serpent uplifts, themselves slaves to one of the hive-minds in the huge Nagaraja-class capital ships, were uncoiling from their resinous nests.

‘You’ve killed us, Ludwig,’ Beth said to herself. A ’face transmission wouldn’t have reached him through the E-field. She wished she could comfort her sister. Talia would be very afraid right now.

Ludwig dropped them on the very edge of the open mouth. The Monk had a ninety million mile drop to her back. The E-field came down.

‘I’ll be outside,’ Ludwig told them.

They went through the motions. Flashes of laser light lost in the huge cavernous darkness of the mouth. The serpents, and other, scuttling, biomechanical weapons, rushed towards them. The most target-rich of environments. Not even Talia hesitated. Targeting systems told them where to aim: the closest first and then work their way out. Beth fired her hybrid EM shotgun/laser carbine combination, cycling quickly between the side-by-side weapons. Superheated flesh exploded where the laser hit. The auto-shotgun’s solid-state magazine was assembled into fin-stabilised, armoured-piercing rounds, designed to go through the serpents’ thick, armoured hide, and explode when they detected warm flesh. Her P-sat was firing its laser over her shoulder at incoming projectiles. She would save the grenades in the underslung launcher until they needed breathing space.

Vic’s strobe gun was a scythe of red light. The rotary weapon was in his lower limbs as he swivelled his abdomen one way and then back again. His thorax swivelled independently, his upper limbs firing his advanced combat rifle. The
ACR
ran dry. He quickly reloaded and started firing again, the diminishing magazine looking like it was being eaten by the rifle. It was clear that he was compensating for Talia, trying to keep her safe. The Monk’s younger sister, however, was holding her ground. She didn’t have anything like the firepower of the rest of them, and was presumably only able to function through the fear due to the chemicals her soft-machine augments would have dumped into her blood, but she was firing burst after burst from her double-barrelled laser carbine.

Scab was a picture of efficiency. One shot with his EM auto-shotgun and a serpent fell. Then the next and the next; he was moving with startling speed, his targeting systems prioritising threats. His P-sat, clipped to his armour, was stabbing out at the Naga as well.

Of course it was a waste of time. They were just postponing the inevitable. Behind her the Monk was aware of fire. It illuminated the interior of Lug’s head. It looked like a vast living plane of serpents writhing across the resinous landscape towards them. Her armour and the P-sat sent the images of what was happening outside to her neunonics. Ludwig was fighting the vast fleet of dragons coming up behind them. They bathed the automaton in their plasma fire. In return, black light projected out of him like a prism, slicing open ancient biomechanical machines, spilling their contents like guts. Out-of-phase ghost bullets went looking for minds, dragons de-cohered into vast showers of dust,
DNA
was hacked and Naga-craft fed on their own energy to regress to protoplasmic states. Viruses infected flesh, dragons turned on one another, projected high-energy particles, disrupted atomic structures. Ludwig was a ghost, wreathed in a corona of fire, moving between them, through them.

The Monk’s combat armour ’faced structural integrity warnings as she was bathed in plasma fire. There was only so much the energy dissipation grids could do as molecularly-bonded hardened composites took on a semi-liquid state and started to melt and run. As one, the four of them fired their grenade launchers. They surrounded themselves with explosions to give themselves room, to buy another moment of time.

The Monk was aware of Naga spores trying to infect her armour. It would make no difference. Their initial onslaught had caught the Naga before they could fire, but eventually the serpent plasma weapons would turn them to so much slag. It would be over quickly. She was just pleased that the Naga didn’t seem to be using electronic warfare of any kind.

The serpents were charging her now, firing. At the last she would move to Talia and give her sister the coherent energy field generator. She should have done that beforehand. She ’faced over the operation codes and instructions. She could see them up close now. Tall, thin, bipedal forms in biomechanical armour fused to scaled flesh. They carried organic-looking plasma weapons, and barbed spears that she knew were for injecting eggs – effectively voracious biological nanite factories – into host flesh. There were too many of them. The shotgun ran dry. She fired the carbine one-handed, the weapon partially melted, as she reached for another solid-state magazine. The closest serpent was almost upon her, appearing through the fire, its spear reaching for her. The magazine slid home, she dropped her hybrid weapon, and reached for both her thermal blades. It was the wrong decision. She should have triggered her P-sat. The spear touched her armour. Everything stopped. Her vision was filled with frozen fire.

And Beth was in darkness. There was a moment of panic. This shouldn’t happen. Her eyes should always be able to see, no matter what her condition. Torches burst into life. They were in a low, dome-shaped, stone and earth structure. Jewellery and ancient weapons were laid out around the chamber. There was even a chariot. She guessed it was supposed to be the representation of a burial mound, similar to those found in Ireland before the Loss.

She was dressed the way she used to dress so many millennia ago, her hair in a ponytail, boots, the leather jacket. Her sister was standing next to her. Scab was in his suit and hat, but it took her a moment to realise that the nominally human-looking figure, dressed as anachronistically as Scab, with four arms and compound insect eyes, was probably Vic.

‘An improvement?’ Talia said hopefully. She was pale and shaking.

‘Fuck!’ odd human Vic shouted. ‘It’s an immersion.’ Now the Monk was starting to get worried. Whoever or whatever had done this had gone straight through their neunonic security like it hadn’t existed.

‘So?’ Talia said. ‘Still better.’

‘Even sped up as fast as our brains can interpret the data, time still passes, events still happen, no matter how quick this is. It’s just postponing the inevitable,’ Vic explained.

‘We will arm you, armour you.’ The voice sounded like old paper being rustled. The corpse sat up on a stone bench, ancient leathery skin spread across bone, the tattered remnants of fine clothes hanging off its frame. It was difficult to look at, as though it kept folding in on itself. Its movements left permanent fractal images behind it, somehow reminding the Monk of a pupa. Talia let out a little scream, and her hand clamped over her mouth. ‘My grandchild knows what to do.’

Talia turned away from the corpse-like entity. ‘Your hair’s come back,’ she said to her sister. Vic turned to stare at the pair of them. ‘Oh calm down, we’re dead anyway.’

‘Are you Lug?’ the Monk asked. She was struggling to look at the corpse-like entity.

‘We need to get back,’ Scab said, looking around the burial chamber as if he could find a way out.

‘What is it?’ Vic asked quietly. It took a moment for the Monk to realise that the ’sect was talking about the Destruction.

‘We don’t know. Different intelligences have different names for it. The Screaming, the Destruction, the Hungry Nothingness. Somewhere in the fire and pressure of the birth of your universe was some kind of sentience. It was born into pain and light, like all of us. As we cannot even begin to imagine the extent of its sentience, we cannot begin to understand the depths of its suffering. Its existence was agony.’