‘Are you still not ready? Everyone else has gone.’
‘Hush now. I’ll change and then we’ll find a deliciously sleazy club somewhere. Perhaps we can find some muscle-bound young stud who can help pull the stick out of your arse and maybe, then, we might be able to get you laid.’ Du Bois looked less than happy at this.
‘Is sex your answer to everything?’ he asked disapprovingly.
‘It seems a healthy response to the impending end of the world.’ Alexia was suddenly very serious. She turned and wandered back towards the changing room.
Du Bois stood up and headed for the stage. One of the keyboards hadn’t been put away. He sat down in front of it and pressed a few keys. Nothing happened. He had to download the instructions straight into his mind before he was able to plug it in, turn it on, get it to make noise and find a setting that made the instrument sound vaguely like a piano.
Long steely fingers started with the opening strains of Debussy’s ‘Clair de Lune’. It didn’t feel the same as a real piano: there was something lacking in the personality of the instrument, no sense of exploration like you had every time you sat down at a new piano. However, he had to admit, as his fingers danced across the keys, that it sounded good. Quickly he was lost, playing the piece from memory. He remembered the first time he’d heard it – in a bar in Paris, played on a badly tuned upright as Europe headed inexorably towards its most ruinous war to date.
‘You’re much better than you give yourself credit for,’ Alexia said as he finished. He had known she was there and glanced over at her. She wore her long straight hair loose and had on a pair of tight jeans, ridiculously oversized boots and a sleeveless T-shirt with some horrible design on it that du Bois found difficult to approve of.
‘I’m not sure how much is me and how much is the blood,’ he said. Alexia came over and laid a hand on his shoulder. Du Bois could still remember the first time he had heard her – him, then – sing, the first time he/she had played the harp, in what seemed like a fleeting moment when their parents had been alive.
It got darker for a moment. A shadow had passed in front of one of the lights on the pier outside. It was a warning. Du Bois stood up, hand going into his jacket.
‘Malcolm?’ Alexia sounded worried. Outside the shadows seethed, coming to life like a swarm of black flies. Then the swarm was pouring in under the main doors to the venue.
‘Go!’ du Bois said.
‘But—’
‘Now!’ The .45 was in his hand as the swarm started to form into something resembling a solid shape. Du Bois ejected the magazine and replaced it with a magazine of nano-tipped bullets.
‘I’m not going to lea—’
Du Bois turned to her. ‘Alexia, please. I can’t fight and worry about you as well,’ he pleaded. The form was beginning to look like the bag lady they had seen at the hill fort.
‘It’s her, isn’t it?’
‘Go! Please.’
Reluctantly, Alexia left the stage. Du Bois moved towards the bag lady, the .45 held securely in a two-handed combat grip. She was a nano-form now, though he doubted she understood it in those terms. She probably thought she was some ancient thing of the earth.
‘So you’re not going to leave it alone then?’ she asked, her voice a gravelly rasp.
‘I can’t. Not until I hear a better plan.’
‘Stop trying to find the girl. Her mother is the sea. They tried to wake her once before and left only old night and chaos in their wake.’
Du Bois had no idea what she was talking about.
‘Are you here to kill…’ He began and then fired the pistol three times in quick succession, hoping to catch her off guard. His internal targeting systems showed him where each bullet was going to hit. Centre-mass, nearly perfect shots. She darted forward, turning into an animated cloud of black. Solid again, she lashed out with her stick even as it was elongating and starting to resemble something more like a spear. The .45 flew from numb fingers as the spear butt caught his hand. She brought the butt around again in a long but frighteningly fast sweep. Du Bois felt bones break in his leg as he was swept off his feet. It was more like the ground rushing up to hit him than him falling to the ground.
‘A gun!’ She was angry now. Fingers tearing through his flesh, even as it hardened. Fingers grasping ribs, rupturing internal organs. Happening too quickly. He felt himself picked up by his ribcage and flung through the air. The moment she let go, flesh started growing back, bones began to re-knit. He crashed through a window, thudding onto the wooden boards of the pier outside the venue.
She was a cloud again. Fortunately du Bois had the presence of mind to roll away as she solidified over him. She brought the spear down, breaking the railway-sleeper-thick beams of the pier’s walkway.
Du Bois rolled to his feet, the bones in his leg re-knitting just enough to support his weight again. He grabbed the punch dagger from his belt buckle and transmitted a desperate instruction to the assembler contained in its hilt.
The bag lady stalked after him and thrust out with the spear. Du Bois rammed the punch blade into some iron railings and jumped, grabbed one of the lamp posts on the edge of the pier and swung out over the water. The lamp post was bending dangerously, close to breaking. The spearhead just missed as she stabbed at where his back had been. He swung back round to the pier and let go, catching the bag lady with a kick to the head that sent her staggering back. She recovered quickly and delivered a stepping kick that drove him to the floor, then stabbed the spear down towards him. Du Bois rolled out of the way, using the momentum to bring him up into a crouch. The beams beneath where he had been exploded as the spear went through them.
Du Bois leaped as she swung one-handed at him with the spear, powerful augmented legs taking him high over her head. He knew that he needed to keep out of her reach until he had a weapon.
All along the pier the lights on the lamp posts flickered out. In the amusement arcade the fruit machines died. The surrounding streets and houses went dark. Lightning played across the white-painted iron railings of the pier. The assembler in the hilt of the punch blade was rewriting the surrounding matter at a molecular level, using a pre-programmed template to create something useful. It needed power to do that, and the weapon it was creating would need power as well.
Du Bois landed and twisted like a serpent, the head of the spear just missing him. He rolled forward and then back up onto his feet, sprinting for the wooden wall of a building. She chased. He jumped, put a foot against the wall and then kicked back into a somersault over the bag lady’s head. She stabbed out with the spear again, the head splintering panels in the wall. She raked it back, tearing through the wall like it was paper, trying to get at du Bois, but he was running back to where he had left his knife.
Du Bois tore the new form free of the railing, leaving a large hole where the assembler had utilised and subsequently transformed the surrounding molecules. When du Bois thought about such things, which was rarely, he considered it some kind of alien alchemy. The process hadn’t quite finished, but what he was holding looked like a broadsword of the type he had first used in the twelfth century. Except that it was shimmering, indistinct and making a humming noise. The blade was a millimetre thick, very sharp, very hard, oscillating at a furious rate and white hot. A super-efficient, solid-state battery, which had just drained half the power from Southsea, powered the sword.
Du Bois turned to face the bag lady, who immediately became a swarm and engulfed him. He felt his flesh open everywhere. She painted him red as he screamed. He felt like little more than meat as he hit the ground again. These were wounds that his internal systems would not heal quickly. The nanites that made them would war with his as they tried to fix the wound. It was over. He could not fight this. He was wondering why she was bothering with the spear.