The Beauty of Destruction (62 page)

‘You’re
too late. I have already been laid out on a
stone altar in this town. What if I offered contact?’
There was silence. Du Bois remembered what Azmodeus had told
him. The contact that had broken Mr Brown’s mind
and driven the Seeders mad.

‘You will go unnoticed,’ the
head finally said in a multitude of voices.

Mr Brown
nodded. Then he turned to du Bois. ‘And your sacrifice?’
Du Bois had the sense of the steel teeth of
a trap closing around him.

‘What?’ du Bois asked. Beth
glanced at him and then quickly back to King Jeremy.

‘
The S-tech in your bodies can adapt the younger
Miss Luckwicke’s
DNA,
accept it, allow it to replicate,
but the resulting mutations will almost certainly be lethal. Which
one of you is to die in agony? Is this
why you brought the elder Miss Luckwicke along? To turn
her into her sister? Or perhaps the brother you always
considered to be a perverse abomination against your non-existent
god?’ Mr Brown asked.

Now Beth and Alexia were both
staring at him.

‘What’s he talking about?’ Beth demanded. She was no longer looking at King Jeremy.

‘We can use one of the clones in the seed ships,’ du Bois said. He knew he was clutching at straws. Mr Brown was already shaking his head.

‘It would be a convenient murder, I grant you, but you don’t have the time to bring one to maturity,’ he told them.

‘You’re not turning me into my sister,’ Beth said. Du Bois was pretty sure she was close to turning her gun on him.

‘You never said anything about this,’ King Jeremy said.

‘It’s very simple, Mr Rush, you take one of the sisters and I take the other,’ Mr Brown said. The Pennangalan looked up at him sharply.

‘No … !’ Siska shouted.

‘Quiet!’ Mr Brown snapped. Du Bois heard the authority in his voice. He felt it. Even he wanted to obey.

‘Me,’ du Bois said. ‘I’m the sacrifice.’

‘Malcolm …’ Alexia started.

‘Please, let’s get this done,’ du Bois said. He wanted the tension to end, one way or another.

‘What about him?’ Beth asked, nodding towards Yaroslav. Du Bois could tell that she hadn’t wanted to make the suggestion.

‘His mind is near gone,’ Mr Brown said. ‘By all means hook up a madman to one of the seed ships. I should be interested in the results. If you have the slightest trace of common decency in you, you’ll put a bullet in his head.’

‘Piotr?’ du Bois asked. The Russian just shook his head. ‘Piotr, please, we’re leaving this place.’ He spoke gently, in Russian. Yaroslav continued shaking his head.

‘I don’t want to become something else,’ the Russian begged.

‘We’re not going to do anything to you. You’ll be safe with us. Please, Piotr, we need you to get up.’ Du Bois tried to ignore the sound of Silas licking the Russian’s face. The Pennangalan turned and walked out of C&C.

‘Where’s she going?’ Beth demanded. Mr Brown turned to look at the Yorkshirewoman.

‘Show some sympathy. She has just learned that she is going to die. She has gone to compose herself, but she will return. She is a good servant.’

Du Bois wanted to squeeze his eyes shut, and not see what he was seeing. The vast, labyrinthine city was so much larger than the last time he had been here. Living sepulchres, city-sized ziggurats and pyramids. Every angle just wrong enough to induce nausea, every angle leading to somewhere unseen. The twisted multi-storey bridges, made for huge and non-human physiologies, ran between structures grown for un-guessable purposes. The city had roots. It grew like an infection: a saprophyte urban sprawl. It crawled with warped life, but the armoured, multi-limbed, wedge-headed servitors, and the increasingly piscine-looking clones, were little more than cells in a vast organism. And among this urban infection they caught glimpses of the Seeders, though they could feel their presence pushing on their own membranous minds. Vast shadows, all unmistakably life, but so different to anything they really understood. The Seeders’ physiology existed in other places. Their armoured, biomechanical flesh the result of an evolutionary process violated by pain and madness. Each showing some warped elements of the templates of rudimentary biological life.

Du Bois’s mind wanted to shatter like so much brittle glass. He kept his eyes on the near-hysterical King Jeremy, but he was aware of all of this in his periphery. He cursed the technology that augmented his senses, and found himself wishing for blindness and a rude, dumb intelligence.

Yaroslav was curled up in a ball in the only working submersible they could find, water slowly rising around him. He was clutching the Vector SMG like a child clutching a teddy bear. Du Bois knew he would have to do something about removing the weapon from the Russian, but right now he just wanted this over with. He wanted to be somewhere else.

Alexia was leaning against the leaking submersible’s bulkhead, her eyes squeezed shut in a way that made du Bois envious. King Jeremy was making whimpering noises as he sobbed. The submersible piloted itself. It knew its way through the twisted geometry of the city’s living architecture. It moved like a wounded fish. Its superstructure was badly warped from where something had tried to grow out of it.

The submersible had been accompanied by something that looked like a cybernetic whale for part of the journey. Its battleship-armoured body was covered in living eyes watching their vehicle.

Mr Brown had stayed in C&C. After all, the threat stayed the same. If du Bois took the
DNA
sample, then King Jeremy detonated the nuke. If King Jeremy double-crossed them, or Mr Brown interfered, then Beth and du Bois shot King Jeremy, and the nuke was detonated, and if Mr Brown lived then he was trapped, the
DNA
lost. Eventually they would have to let King Jeremy go. At least this way they would be some distance from Mr Brown.

The submersible had surfaced in a smooth black cavern. The ceiling and edges of the cavern were obscured in darkness. The edges were either too far away or somewhere else entirely as a result of the strange geometry. The moment they left the submersible their protective blood-screens were being eaten by the city’s aggressive biomechanical nano-spores. Alexia had to coax Yaroslav out of the mutated vehicle. The illumination in the strange cavern flickered like a broken strip light as the five of them made their way across the rubbery texture of the floor. They could see the biomechanical ship, the mentally spayed offspring of the Seeders, a panspermic, extremophile organism turned into an escape pod for a species. It looked like a cross between the seedpod it was and a bottom-feeding marine creature of some sort. It was easily the size of one of the larger football stadiums. The airlocks, the lenses protruding through its skin, were violations of its alien flesh.

‘Malcolm,’ Alexia whispered. She was looking around frantically, her rifle at the ready. He could feel it too. Even their augmented eyes could not penetrate the darkness at the edge of their vision, which seemed to expand as the light flickered out. He had the impression, just afterimages in the light, of people, many of them, perhaps thousands, in the darkness, just out of sight, watching them.

‘What’s that?’ King Jeremy screamed, making the rest of them jump. The young sociopath was pointing at a figure on the edge of the blackness. A man with a dragon’s head, he was wearing a finely tailored suit. The suit was covered in hundreds of mouths opening and closing, as if engaged in conversation. Du Bois recognised the figure as Siraja Odap-odap, the habitat’s AI. The darkness seeming to eddy around and behind the dragon-headed figure.

They increased the pace. The airlock door was already opening for them. Du Bois suspected it was a false promise of safety, but it was all they had. They stopped when they reached the airlock. Despite the airlock’s presence in alien flesh, the technology looked human, falsely comforting.

‘Give it to me,’ du Bois said. King Jeremy shook his head. Yaroslav flinched as he did so.

‘I will fucking shoot you in the head,’ Beth told him.

‘I can’t be here on my own,’ he pleaded, looking around, terrified. ‘I can’t go back through …’

‘For Christ’s sake,’ Alexia muttered. Du Bois half expected a warped vision of Christ to appear.

‘Come with us,’ du Bois said. Alexia and Beth turned to stare at him. He could tell from the expression on King Jeremy’s face that he wanted to.

‘Are you out of your fucking mind?’ Beth demanded. ‘Do you know what he’s done?’

‘Strand Mr Brown here, in this place,’ du Bois said, ignoring Beth. King Jeremy could be dealt with the moment his thumb was off the button. King Jeremy looked between the three of them. Yaroslav’s whimpering was becoming more urgent.

‘No,’ King Jeremy said, shaking his head. ‘You’ll kill me the first chance you get.’

Damn!

King Jeremy took out the vial. Its contents looked like a clear liquid, presumably the subtle, ancient, powerful S-tech reverting to its base biological nanite form. The vial extruded a needle. Du Bois held out a hand. King Jeremy pressed the needle into his flesh. Then he held up the hand with the dead man’s switch in it, and started backing away from them.

They stepped into the airlock and it hissed shut. Beth, Alexia and du Bois sagged. Du Bois holstered his pistol and leant against the metal wall. Yaroslav looked around with the mounting panic of a trapped animal. The inner airlock hissed open. The four of them staggered into the huge, stadium-sized chamber. It was coated in what looked like stainless steel, the metal covering what looked like a rib cage. Du Bois felt like Jonah. Then he hit the floor, hard.

‘Malcolm!’ Alexia screamed, kneeling down next to him. All-pervasive, ancient, powerful biotechnology started to break down and change a body that was not meant to host it. Turning bubbling flesh protean. Putting it in flux. He screamed, growing new organs, his physiology constantly resetting itself as it tried to find a form that could cope. As the pain became too much, du Bois went away.

Alexia stared at du Bois, his flesh running like liquid. He had stopped screaming now. The noise he was making was more like keening. It changed resonance as his mouth took on different forms.

‘Wha—’ Beth started. Alexia was looking around frantically. She pointed towards the front of the craft, a wall of stainless steel-like material that covered what looked a little like organs, presumably the biomechanical working of the creature/ship.

‘He needs to be linked to the ship,’ she said. It was the only thing she could think of. Her only hope was the craft would recognise her brother as a living component, and stabilise him. If it could keep him alive, keep his consciousness alive, then something else could be worked out later.

His body was difficult and disgusting to grasp. She felt turgid, sludge-like shifting flesh against her grip as Beth helped her manhandle him towards another airlock-style door in the steel. Yaroslav trotted after them, still clutching his Vector SMG.

The airlock opened for them, and they made their way into a tangled warren of corridors between organ-like biomechanical machinery coated with the steel-like material. Alexia had only the vaguest idea of where she was going, other than forwards. She was on the left of her brother, Beth the right. She only caught a glimpse of the silver-masked figure leaning out of an intersecting corridor and heard the pop of the underslung grenade launcher firing. Beth pushed all three of them into a narrow passage on the left-hand side of the corridor. Du Bois’s sticky, protean form practically landed on Alexia. There was an explosion further down the corridor. Her augmented hearing protected her from the worst of the blast and allowed her to hear the thump of a body landing hard on the floor. She felt Beth’s weight move off them.

Beth had the N6 carbine up. She was kneeling beside the corner of the cramped passage she had shoved them into. Alexia was struggling to her feet, trying to pull her brother’s difficult, shifting form further down the passage. Beth risked glancing out into the main corridor. Almost immediately she was taking fire. The Pennangalan was marching towards them, firing short bursts from her carbine. Beth took one in the shoulder. The armour-piercing round, slowed by her armour, lodged in her hardening flesh. The force knocked her back. The wound started to heal almost immediately. In the momentary glance she had seen Yaroslav lying face-first on the floor of the corridor, his back a bloody, blackened, smoking mess. It had been a 40mm fragmentation grenade. It must have exploded behind Yaroslav and thrown him forwards. Beth leaned round the corner and fired the N6’s grenade launcher directly at the Pennangalan. The silver-masked woman threw herself into another branching passage further ahead. Beth was up, holding the N6 one-handed as she marched towards the corridor intersection. The fragmentation grenade exploded in the distance; shockwaves buffeted her, shrapnel embedded itself in her hardening clothing and opened up the skin on her flesh, which, again, healed almost immediately. Another three-round burst caught her in the chest as the Pennangalan appeared around the corner, crouched down low. Beth fired the N6 rapidly and clumsily with one hand, bullets sparking off the metal as she opened the grenade launcher, ejecting the case of the previous grenade, loaded it with a high-explosive, armour-piercing grenade, and clicked the launcher shut. The Pennangalan was firing bursts so rapid they were almost full automatic. Beth felt round after round hit her. Some were stopped by her armour, her hardening flesh, some grazed off her armoured skull, tore into her jaw. Others beat her armour and tore hot channels through her body. Each one was like getting hit by a hammer. The worst beating you could ever receive in a high velocity instant. She staggered, almost went down, but forced herself forwards, still firing. More than a few of her rounds hit home, staggering the silver-masked killer. Both of them ran out of ammunition. The Pennangalan disappeared from the corner, back into the other passage. Beth threw herself into the air past the intersection. The Pennangalan was backing away, a Sig P220 pistol in each hand, firing the moment she saw Beth, hitting the Yorkshirewoman as she fell through the air. Beth fired the grenade launcher. The
HEAP
grenade caught the Pennangalan in the stomach, she flew backwards into the air, and the grenade exploded. The concussion wave hit Beth, bounced her off some of the metal-coated organic machinery, and she hit the ground, a wounded, bleeding mess. She let out a primal scream of pain before forcing herself to her feet. She let the N6 hang from its sling and drew the
OHWS
, still loaded with nanite-tipped rounds. She limped slowly down the corridor towards the Pennangalan. The silver-masked killer looked like she had been hollowed out. Beth could see her spine, but somehow the other woman was still moving. Still trying to reload one of her Sig pistols with her own magazine of nanite-tipped rounds. Beth raised her pistol and put two rounds into what remained of the Pennangalan’s chest. The nanites started to eat away at flesh. It looked like she was being slowly dissolved. Beth continued to limp towards her, covering her with the pistol. She had a perverse need to see the face under the silver mask.