A Quantum Mythology Read online

  Tendrils of wood and lead had grown from the pistol, passing through his hand and his arm, consuming – or transforming – his flesh as they wove in and out of it. The bones in his arm had broken to accommodate the pepperbox pistol and he felt other, smaller strands growing inside his body, his head. Then the demon in the gun started speaking to him. It told him what to do. Showed him.

  He had killed his own family first. Killed both their children in front of their screaming mother as, sobbing, he shouted at her about all the times he had betrayed her with other women, most of whom he had paid. The devil had laughed as he wept. When his friend came running to investigate the gunfire, he shot to wound. Then he left a bloody trail behind him as he dragged his friend through the house so the other man could watch his family die in front of his eyes, succumbing to the wound in his stomach as he did so. Then, slowly and with purpose, he descended the stairs and entered the town house’s servants’ quarters. He shot a footman but only injured him. The rest had fled screaming into the night.

  He went to sit in his old friend’s study. He wanted to put the pistol-limb to his head and pull the trigger, but the demon in the gun did not want him to die just yet. It had told him so. The demon liked the way the man made it feel.

  There is no hell, the demon told him. No place for me but here.

  So Sir Ronald Sharpely wept and reloaded the weapon and wondered when the crowd gathering outside would come for him. Or would it be the city watch, or even the redcoats themselves? The devil in the gun – in him, now – revelled in his thoughts, though it knew the best, the sweetest, had already come and gone.

  The first time he saw heat, like a desert serpent, was when the Hellaquin realised how truly damned he was. How far from God. So much further than all the killing, the stealing, the drinking and the whoring could ever have taken him.

  It was a narrow four-storey stone town house in a row of similar buildings on Duke Street in the desirable suburb of Aston. It looked new and expensive, and his own cottage in Cheshire could have fitted many times within the vast swathe of lawn at the back of the house. He was standing in the shadows of the trees at the bottom of the garden, observing the crowd that had gathered on the recently cobbled street in front of the house.

  The Hellaquin unwrapped the waxed leather from around the yew stave and flexed the wood to warm it up before stringing it. Even with his considerable strength, that was a challenge. He selected a number of arrows from the case, each one handmade from ash, each one hardened by the dripping of his blood onto the wood, each one just over two feet long. The arrowheads were armour-piercing bodkins made from something called adamantine, which the Knight had told him, long ago, just meant very, very hard. He had chosen these arrows over the ones that contained his own blood in the arrowheads’ cores.

  All the while he watched the house he could see the cooling heat of the bodies in the upper floors, and the vibrant oranges, reds and yellows of the murderer on the ground floor. The Hellaquin nocked the first arrow, waiting for the murderer to provide him with a shot.

  Sir Ronald screamed with hopeless, impotent frustration when he heard the town house’s front door thrown open, and then he was on his feet and staggering into the hall. He had but a moment to take in the well-dressed, blue-eyed, blond-haired man striding across the hall towards him, a pistol in each hand, before the figure disappeared in the smoke from his own guns.

  Sir Ronald staggered back as a pistol ball caught him in the chest, but the demon moved him like a puppet now. He raised his pistol arm and fired into the smoke, rotated the barrel as the pan mechanism ticked, fired again, rotated, fired again.

  The blond man strode out of the smoke, a sabre in one hand, a knife in the other. Bone poked through skin torn and bloodied by a nasty-looking head wound, but still the man came. Sir Ronald fired, the barrel turned, he fired again, and again. The man staggered as shot after shot hit him, the front of his coat darkening as blood soaked into it, but he kept coming. Sir Ronald moved to one side to get a better shot as the hall filled with yet more smoke.

  The Hellaquin watched Sir Ronald’s heat-ghost as his arm breathed fire at the Knight’s fainter ghost. Sir Ronald moved to the left. It was the move the Hellaquin needed. He exhaled, visualised the shot, lifted the bow and drew back the string. The poundage on the weapon was such that no mortal man could have drawn it. With hundreds of years of experience and the benefits of the ‘gifts’ he had been given by the Red Chalice, it took him but a moment to sight, and to judge the slight breeze in the hot night. He loosed and heard the window break almost immediately.

  Shot after shot and the blond man finally stopped staggering forwards and collapsed onto the marble floor of the town house’s hallway. The devil was already devising plans for the body, but first Sir Ronald would have to reload.

  Sir Ronald didn’t hear the window break. The adamantine-tipped arrow flew through the sitting room, then through an internal wall, and finally through Sir Ronald’s head before embedding itself deep in the outer wall, quivering. Sir Ronald collapsed forward onto the floor, leaving the demon to slowly fade away, trapped in cooling dead flesh.

  The Hellaquin stalked through the sitting room and into the hall. He saw the man, his arm fused with what looked like a multi-barrelled pistol, lying face down on the marble in a pool of red. The Knight was lying in a similar pool on his back. The Hellaquin nearly put an arrow in the Knight when he sat up.

  ‘I almost had him,’ the Knight muttered. The Hellaquin nodded with a sceptical expression on his face. Clouds of grey and black powder-smoke hung in the air. Through the windows at the front of the house, the Hellaquin could see the milling crowd.

  The archer kicked the grotesque man onto his back and knelt down next to him.

  ‘Is he healing?’ the Knight asked as he got up unsteadily and bent to retrieve his pistols, his sabre and his knife.

  The Hellaquin looked at the hole in the man’s head made by the arrow he’d fired.

  ‘Is there a maker’s mark on the pistol?’ asked the Knight.

  The Hellaquin picked up the deformed limb and checked the visible metal of the barrel, grimacing as he saw up close the fusion of wood, metal and flesh. The Knight was standing in the pool of his own blood as he sheathed his various weapons, the pool shrinking as he reabsorbed it. The healing would leave the Knight very hungry.

  ‘There’s no mark. What do we do with him?’ the Hellaquin asked, glancing out at the crowd again.

  ‘Damnation! We can’t take him with us – we’ll have to burn the house down and hope for the best.’ As he spoke, the Knight used his Far-Eastern knife to open a wound in his hand. He squeezed some of the blood from his wound into a small silver cup he had produced from somewhere on his person.

  ‘What are you doing?’ the Hellaquin demanded.

  ‘Just a touch of necromancy.’

  The Hellaquin crossed himself. ‘I have no taste for this.’

  The Knight looked up at the Hellaquin. ‘We need to know where he got the gun. If you don’t want to bear witness, go upstairs and set the fire.’ Then he poured the blood from the cup into the dead man’s mouth.

  The dead body started to convulse and writhe, flesh flowed like hot wax and the screaming started as the demon in the dead man’s flesh fought with the devils in the Knight’s blood. The Hellaquin climbed the curved marble staircase, trying not to look down, trying not hear the twisted words wrenched from the corpse.

  ‘Where on Steelhouse Lane?’ the Knight shouted at the writhing carcass.

  Upstairs, the Hellaquin found the bodies. All he could offer them was a pyre on a hot summer’s night.

  2

  A Long Time After the Fall

  Vic lay dead on the deck of the Church frigate the St Brendan’s Fire. Scab was watching the most valuable uplifted monkey in Known Space die. She was dying because foreign nanites were trying to colonise every last bit of
her body.

  Even as she gasped for breath, Scab was able to appreciate how beautiful she was. He might have felt nothing, but he understood aesthetics. If there was artifice in her genetic make-up, then it was old, powerful and elegant. She did not look sculpted like most in Known Space. She looked like she had been born with perfect bone structure, dark eyes and thick brown hair. She was tall, slender to the point of gauntness. Her skin had a porcelain quality to it, or at least it had until the advertising virals started crawling across it when she fell victim to the ambient nanite pollution from which most people were protected by their nano-screens.

  Scab watched her die. He understood that she was a nat, unaugmented. He’d seen them before. They were bred in protected environments for study, as pets, kinks or food – curiosities, little more. So why was this one so sought-after? The Church, the Monarchist systems, the Consortium – they all wanted her. Why was this nat so important? He felt sure she was from before the Fall, but there had to be more to it than that. How could she be the key to bridge technology? Why had she been aboard the strange S-tech craft? Why had the Church monk’s hand opened the cocoon?

  Absently he noticed that the red steam in the air was coming from his blood meeting the still burning-hot energy dissipation grid woven into his clothes. More smoke billowed as some of his corrupted blood dripped onto the frigate’s deck. Vic had done more than his fair share of damage before Scab had driven the – very illegal – S-tech energy javelin through the other bounty killer’s chest. The powerfully built, hard-tech-augmented insect’s chest cavity was now a hollow fused mess.

  The codes Vic had ’faced to Scab before Vic chose to attack him gave the human bounty killer complete control of the Church frigate the ’sect had stolen on Scab’s orders. The ship’s AI was putting up a fight against the high-end control-virus program attacking it. Their erstwhile employer had been generous with the expenses, but that arrangement was at an end now as Scab intended to double-cross his employer.

  Most of the few surviving crewmembers aboard the frigate were locked down. Scab absently reprogrammed the frigate’s security nano-screen, weaponising it, turning it into a self-replicating flesh-eating nano-swarm.

  He looked down at the girl. The closest thing he had to a sense of humour was tempted to let her die there. Let it all have been for nothing. On the other hand, that wouldn’t help him get what he wanted.

  Scab watched her for a moment longer. Then he picked her up, ’facing instructions to the frigate’s med bay as he carried her out of the loading area. The screams of the crew being eaten by the nano-swarm echoed along the corridor. Scab found himself really craving another cigarette.

  The Monk stood on one of the catwalks that ran over the dolphins’ nutrient pool in the Command-and-Control chamber of the Church capital ship, the Lazerene. The large chamber was illuminated by the warm orange glow coming from the pool, and the smart-metal bulkheads of the chamber projected a panoramic view of the surrounding space. Holographic telemetry and other system information ran vertically down parts of the view, though all the data would be directly ’faced to the dolphins and to the crewmembers of various races bobbing around the chamber seated on AG platforms.

  It had been a star system once. Now it was going dark, consumed by squirming, maggot-like forms of nothingness momentarily lit from within by the sun’s fusion as they devoured the light of the system’s star. The same process had already taken the fourteen planets, a number of habitats and countless asteroids.

  The Monk stared fixedly at the image of the sun. The estimated number of deaths in the system was available to her, but it was large enough to be abstract.

  ‘We give them access to an apparently infinite universe, but then we pen them in until they teem over everything like termites,’ Churchman said. ‘We’ve overpopulated space. Who’d have thought that would happen?’

  ‘I’m not sure I want cod philosophy right now,’ the Monk said angrily, knowing her fury was misplaced. The dolphins were motionless in their fluid.

  Churchman wasn’t actually here. Every ship in the Church fleet had AIs modelled on downloads of Churchman’s personality. Each one had been allowed to develop independently, and as a result, each ship’s AI was quite different. Normally the Monk liked the Lazerene’s AI the best. The capital vessel was a more than capable warship, but that wasn’t its only purpose. The Monk didn’t like the battleships’, destroyers’ and frigates’ AIs. They tended towards imprints of an older and more warlike, single-minded Churchman. This AI looked like Churchman when she’d first met him, though the AI wore a priest’s dog collar. He appeared to be standing next to her, but that was just an image she allowed to be ’faced to her neunonics.

  The Monk was watching the refugee fleet making for one of the system’s bridge points. The Lazerene, along with the rest of the small fleet sent to the system, were waiting for them. They had already sent out the signal to remove the system from the astrogation programs connected to all bridge drives. The most potent Pythian-designed viruses actual credit could buy were erasing every last piece of information regarding the system from all of Known Space’s various communications networks. Once, a long time ago, the Monk had asked why this always appeared to go unnoticed. Churchman told her it didn’t – people just didn’t care.

  ‘So why do we have to kill them?’ she asked again, as she did every single time.

  ‘If the masses don’t know about it, they don’t care. If they knew about it—’

  ‘They’d fight it.’

  Churchman turned to look at her sadly. ‘At one time, maybe. I personally think the ensuing panic would play into his hands. He has the influence to manipulate them, to turn them on each other. In terms of humanity, he started breeding them towards the selfish, vicious, uncaring creatures you see now even before the Fall.’

  ‘We’re going to close the bridge point, remove the beacons anyway—’ she said, feeling guilty.

  ‘And let them try to hide and flee, living in terror until it inevitably consumes them? That only makes it easier for us. This way it is over quickly for them.’

  ‘We could take them—’ Even now she still wanted to weep each time.

  ‘We don’t have the resources,’ he said softly. Even now he still explained it as patiently as he had the first time.

  The only sound in the C&C was the water lapping against the bulkhead as the ship adjusted to the change in mass in this sector of space.

  The weapons section ’faced a question to the Monk. She didn’t answer. Churchman looked to her, as did a few of the crew. A number of the individualistic, heavily customised P-sats, the personal satelites the dolphins used to facilitate easier communications with the uplifted races also appeared to be paying attention to her.

  ‘What did Scab want?’ the Monk asked, to distract herself. She couldn’t quite refrain from speaking his name through gritted teeth.

  ‘Our presence at an auction.’

  The Monk nodded, clenching the muscles in her jaw. ‘Will we go?’ she managed.

  ‘Yes … in some form or another. We’ll certainly be represented.’

  ‘Will you pay?’

  ‘I imagine that if I can, I will.’

  ‘If?’

  ‘I’m not sure that child knows what he wants. Though in many ways he is one of the most perfectly suited people to live in this age.’

  The Monk started to reply angrily but was interrupted.

  ‘Ma’am?’ said the lizard militiawoman in charge of the weapons section. The Monk nodded for her to continue. ‘For the log, ma’am.’

  ‘Fire,’ the Monk all but whispered.

  The darkness was lit by lances of light, the glow of manoeuvring engines, vented energy from dissipation grids and explosions of matter from reactive armour as the hulls of the surprised and betrayed refugee ships were penetrated, burst and scattered across the cold vacuum.

&nbs
p; Only when they were sure they had hunted down the last survivor was space cut open by the ship’s bridge drives to reveal the gaseous, swirling, crimson wound of Red Space.

  ‘It’s kinder this way,’ Churchman said to her quietly, in her mind’s eye.

  ‘So we’ve come to genocide being the kinder option?’

  Churchman didn’t answer.

  The star had been fully consumed by the time the last bridge point closed. The faint red glow was the last ever source of light in that system.

  Everything had been so warm and safe. Even where she touched vacuum, her hardened skin had been long dead. She had known so much, felt so much. Now she was diminished, the tiny, frightened, alone thing she had been before and so, so cold.

  She opened her eyes. It had taken her a while to find the courage to do so. She was staring up at a ceiling made of cold, dark metal. The lighting in the room was subdued, the sources difficult to pinpoint. It was sparsely furnished, but the door looked to be electronically controlled and very substantial. A seam ran diagonally across it. She thought she could sense a faint vibration thrumming through the metal.

  She was lying on some kind of mattress that had moulded around her. There were a number of other beds in the room, and something about them made her think of hospital gurneys, although they had no wheels. She wondered if she’d been sectioned again. Perhaps the millennia in Red Space had been a bizarre hallucination, a schizophrenic loop. She looked down but couldn’t see any restraints on the bed.

  Some kind of apparatus with arms was folded into the ceiling above the bed/gurney. Behind her was some sort of screen showing information that looked familiar from hospital visits and medical dramas, except that the screen appeared to be part of the wall, and there was nothing attached to her that could be feeding it information.