The Beauty of Destruction (64 page)

Fury as a state of being, fury
at loss of control. Things were being done to him
against his will. He had felt this before, or something
like it. Some fragmented remainder of a surgically removed memory
in the scar tissue that passed for his mind. He
was being turned into an Elite, or something very similar.
The awareness of everything returned as his senses spread out,
only to become confounded by the architecture of the strange
city he found himself in, on this world in Red
Space.

He lacked the superior biotech of S-tech, though
the invasive Lloigor nanites were doing the best they could
to improve his own soft-machine augments. Lug’s gift,
which had turned his combat armour and weapons into liquid
and reformed them, was not the cobbled together, jury-rigged
scavenging of ancient technology that the Elite-tech was. They
were fresh from their creators: armour, weapons and flesh now
just components in the same fighting machine.

Energy was the
problem. Wherever they were it seemed in short supply. He
was aware of an entangled link feeding him energy from
ancient machines. The feed was sluggish in a way that
suggested a radical change in physics. He was aware that
the energy on demand was severely limited.

He pushed himself
up onto one knee in the deluge as it surged
out and away from the centre of the circle. His
internal systems turned the wave of nausea, brought on by
the twisted architecture, into little more than a fleeting piece
of information. He felt the three Consortium Elite. If he
had known the scorpion and the snake then he had
long ago forgotten them, but he recognised the Innocent, and
he knew Patron for what he was: a screaming hole
in space.

‘No!’ He wasn’t sure how he heard
the scream, but he saw the path of steam the
burning spear made through the water. Even he was surprised
when the spear exploded through one of the still-glowing
stones, creating a fountain of energy, and hit the snake-
headed Elite. The Elite flew backwards, pushed by the spear’
s screaming, burning head. It hit a thick pedestal of
strange-looking stone. The horrible, tentacled statue atop the pedestal
was moving slowly, lines of energy and the instinctive knowledge
of the existence of a vast and languid mind telling
Scab that it was actually alive. The spear drove the
Elite deep into the stone, and then passed through her.
Scab was appalled. There was just a moment of fear.
No, not fear, awe. It had been Patron who had
been screaming. Scab didn’t care. He wanted to kill
the Innocent.

His armour bulged as it sucked strange matter
from the ground, an infection of nanites transforming it at
a molecular level into payloads. From the time he had
torn the egg from the flesh of his first kill
on Cyst and it had grown into his tumbler pistol,
he had preferred bullet to beam. His weapon was an
ergonomically optimised carbine. The barrel was widened and flattened. The
armour fed it the ghost discs, using much of the
available entangled energy feed to enable the discs to flicker
in and out of different physical states, some of them
even forming micro-bridges, or attempting quantum tunnelling to pass
through the Innocent’s armour. Each of the ghost discs
would fragment into voracious nanites if they returned to this
hard reality inside the Innocent. It was a distraction, nothing
more.

They were bathed in a cold, hard rain of
white light and something past ultraviolet: focused particle beam weapons,
X-ray lasers. This blackened planet under its red sky
had an orbital defence network. Scab was aware of it
being S-tech, biomechanical satellites and habitats with living weapons,
and Patron was in control of them. A flickering nimbus
of amber energy surrounded him as he kicked off through
accelerated particles, warping gravity around his armoured form to provide
flight. He was aware of Vic standing over Talia, both
similarly protected by coherent energy fields as the earth around
them ceased to exist, and another figure in raven-headed
armour, the spear-thrower,
kneeling, protected by her own field. Scab did not know her but she was familiar somehow.

The Innocent was moving, surrounded by his own flickering light, the exotic matter of the liquid glass that encased him rippling as the discs hit it and the armour transported them elsewhere. The rain of hard light and particles stopped. Both Scab and the Innocent dropped their coherent energy fields so they could harm each other. Scab still had his energy javelin: it was, after all, L-tech as well. The armour covering the palm of his hand parted to let the E-javelin out as Scab covered the distance to the Innocent. The Elite swung his oversized sword, making it look as if the weapon overbalanced him. It was a lie. The black blade, inimical to life, cut at Scab as he closed in. Scab’s new armour cut him open, pushing itself into his flesh, wounding him so it was armour the blade cut through, and not fragile – despite augmentation – flesh. Scab lashed out with the E-javelin. The Innocent parried with his blade. All the technology in the world couldn’t compensate for experience and sneakiness. Scab’s ‘weapon’, which had been shaped like a carbine, was now a knife in his other hand. He stabbed it towards the Innocent, who was suddenly surrounded by the amber light again. Scab gritted his teeth as he slowly inched the exotic matter of the blade into the Elite’s coherent energy field. The blade flickered between different physical states as it edged through the shield.

The spear disappeared like a screaming comet into the red sky. Scab understood its flight path. Behind him he was aware of black light and lances of fusion. He heard buildings crumble. He was also aware of, and then disappointed by, the attempts at electronic warfare. It demeaned them all, though he would seek any opportunity to prove himself hypocrite in this. The Innocent launched himself into the air. Scab raked his blade down through the amber light of the Elite’s shield, and made ripples in the liquid glass armour. A foot caught him in the head with enough power to powder armour plate. Scab bounced off the top of one of the smoking stones in the circle. His spine snapped and then reknit almost immediately. He impacted with the edge of the warped, tomb-like structure, creating a Scab-shaped imprint in basalt. The Innocent chased the burning spear. Scab cloaked himself in gravity and followed.

The feeling of power was overwhelming, after his new systems made the pain go away. Now Vic knew what it was like to be one of the Elite. New-found senses made him aware of the city’s scurrying, parasitical life already fleeing. A moment of shock as he saw an Elite killed with what looked like an archaic weapon. He was aware of the other two Elite, but did not fear them. Whether that was from a new sense of power, new conditioning, or both, he wasn’t sure. He was aware of the woman in the raven-headed armour who had thrown the spear. She might not be on their side, but she didn’t seem to be a friend of the Elite, and had already killed one. Only Patron gave him pause.

Then came the orbital bombardment. Talia was kneeling on the ground. He moved to stand over her. Both of them were encased in amber light as they fell into the newly made crater. In the Thunder Squads he had worked with teammates to destroy cities. Now he could do it himself. Now he
wanted
to do it himself. One of the Elite was a female ’sect: a shrunken hive queen with an arachnid augment. Despite all the changes he had made to himself, despite the fact that he’d been a worker playing at being a warrior, his own deeply held prejudices made him disgusted at this violation of the insect form. The storm of accelerated particles and hard light passed. His ‘weapon’ was still in a shape he was comfortable with, that of a strobe gun. His coherent energy field flickered off and on to let the rotating weapon fire beams of fusion energy, black light mixed with the more discreet, exotic bandwidth lasers phasing in and out of this space, trying to confuse the scorpion Elite’s defences. Beams were refracted off the arachnid, more disappeared into the man-shaped screaming black hole that Patron had become. The beams scythed through twisted towers and spires started to fall. He was aware of vast, ancient, insane, somnambulant minds screaming out in pain through esoteric frequencies.

The scorpion Elite was in the air. Vic’s weapon followed her, leaving paths of destruction through the city as it did so. His awareness told him of discrete carrier beams containing a
DNA
hack striking him, which further enraged him. A de-coherence beam tried to loosen the molecular bonds in his reformed armour, sneaking through his coherent energy field while it flickered to allow his weapon to fire, but the armour’s matter was too clever for it. It pulled new matter from the ground, nanites transforming it into useful material. Vic was aware of Scab and the Innocent taking to the air after the burning, screaming spear that had killed one of the Consortium Elite.

The arachnid plunged though Vic’s barrage of energy and hit him in the chest, driving him into the earth. His bones were powdered and re-healed almost instantly, the pain momentary but overwhelming. He came to a halt. She was striking at him with her spear through the surrounding rock. Each blow was doing something to the coherent energy field, somehow sucking the energy from it. He could see root-like lines of light in the rock around him, conduits of energy for the stone circle. He thrust his hand through rock and grabbed one of the branches, then he dropped the energy field and grabbed the Elite. He was screaming as the energy coursed through him, his armour fusing with his flesh. His upgraded neunonics, too slow to switch off all his nerve endings, took his mind away somewhere else for a moment. The scorpion had gone. Vic was healed, his armour still smoking. He became aware of the arachnid hive queen’s location. He exploded out of the stone through a tower. Its geometry didn’t make sense, he was somewhere other than he should have been and he hit another building hard. He changed state, but the cold, old, living city tore at him. Screaming, he emerged, fantasies of godlike power somewhat tarnished, but he continued after the scorpion Elite at hypersonic speeds, towards the rising carrion sun, and the squirming parasites feeding on it.

Britha was knocked off her feet by the impact of the eight-limbed, black-armoured creature slamming one of the newcomers, this one with six limbs, deep into the ground. One of the other newcomers had taken off, following the one like Bress. Both of them chasing her spear as it flew towards the castle in the sky that kept on trying to harm them with its storm of light.

The third newcomer, who had the right number of limbs, and who wore armour like the other two, which had obviously been made in Ubh Blaosc, was lying in the centre of the deep crater made by the storm of light. Britha spared her a glance, feeling a strange kinship towards her. Then she looked back to Crom Dhubh.

Britha knew she should be afraid, and even after everything she had seen she was still appalled. She perceived him as a hole in space, crackling with black lightning. She felt him take energy from somewhere else, dark places, and feed it to his remaining black-clad warriors. Britha reached out through the tendrils to stop this, to sour the milk of an already poisoned teat. A whip-like tendril lashed out from within the man-shaped hole in a blur, the crystal cracked, the entities feeding off her screamed, and she echoed their scream. He began pulling down the crystalline branches growing out of her. The tendrils receded into her head, and back through holes to unseen places that it hurt to look towards.

The eight-limbed, black-clad, insectile warrior burst from the earth. Moments later the six-limbed newcomer followed, careening through the odd geometry of the city. The six-limbed creature was taken elsewhere for a moment, vanishing even from the awareness of the crystalline entities.

Crom Dhubh glided through the air towards the last armoured newcomer as she rolled to her feet. Britha reached down, pulling at the new strings of dark energy he was trying to set up to feed the magics to his warriors, and with a thought she rearranged the arm reaching for the girl in as painful and debilitating a way as she could manage. The crystalline parasites surged down through her head, consuming more of her, and she screamed. The girl was in the air, bouncing off useless buildings as she sought to get away. Britha heard Crom Dhubh’s scream in her head, it made the crystal vibrate. Then the Dark Man showed the
ban draoi
what he really looked like. He unfolded into different places, displayed the impossibility of his form. He wanted her to see all of him in the knowledge that she could not understand his shape and all of its possibilities.

Quicksilver and blood burst from her eyes, ears, and nose. She almost shut down, the parasites pushing through her head as they tried to translate what he, it, was to a human mind. More of the crystal tendrils growing from her were torn away. The parasites were frightened now. He reached for her with limbs and appendages unseen and impossible, and rearranged her through her armour. Her shield of light did not even activate, as it did not seem to be aware of the existence of parts of Crom Dhubh’s form. No time to cry out. He left her alive so she could appreciate pain as he reached for her with his other arm. She hadn’t even been aware of him moving in front of her, as he healed the damage she had done to him. Her armour carried her into one of the buildings, and ran for a shadowed corner that seemed to stretch away forever.