He shot up into high orbit. The beam stabbing out from his weapon – it was in a rifle configuration at the moment – was almost an afterthought as he cut one of the planetary defence battle cruisers in two. High above Game, the two halves of the cruiser slowly drifted apart.
‘Notice me,’ Elite Scab whispered to himself.
He set the weapon to a wide-burst D-beam and played it up and down the top branches of one of the taller atmosphere-piercing arcology trees. The network of primordial black holes fed the weapon power via a form of complex entanglement. The D-beam rewrote the genetic codes of anything the signal hit and cancerous mutations appeared all over the outside of the tree. Inside, the inhabitants were reduced to protoplasmic slime or mutated into forms that weren’t conducive to survival in this reality. Some became super-efficient alien predatory life forms. Others might even have evolved into higher forms, though they were probably destroyed by destructive slimes and super-predators before they had time to appreciate their enlightened nature.
The Absolute flopped around violently in its nutrient bath. Ludwig was still out drinking suns, whatever that meant. Both the Angels were close but a Consortium Elite had just attacked them. He would need both of them to protect the Game. He sent the order to Fallen Angel. The attacking Elite was the priority.
Planetary attack warnings appeared in their neunonics. Scab and the Monk stood up from behind the cocoon. The hangar area was carnage. Scab sent an instruction to the AG motors on each corner of the cocoon. The cocoon rose unsteadily into the air as one of the motors had been destroyed. They made their way quickly through the carnage and red steam, shooting anything that moved, though they tried to leave the morlocks alone as they were finishing off the wounded Toy Soldiers.
The hatch to the Rapier fighter/bomber opened at a neunonic command as they approached. The Monk reached in and ferreted around for a bit. She came back with two rather vintage-looking emergency spacesuits.
‘Really?’ Scab asked, becoming more and more suspicious of the escape plan.
‘You don’t have to wear it if you don’t want to.’
Reluctantly Scab put his hands into the black bubble of the suit and let it grow over him before fixing the visor to it. His neunonics interrogated the suit. It was old but functional, so he dropped some updated ‘ware into its systems. The Monk did the same. As she did, she hacked the Rapier’s systems and started them up, running rapid diagnostics on those that she needed.
‘You’ll do,’ she muttered to herself.
‘What, you’re going to fly us out of here?’ Scab asked, both confused and mildly interested, which was arguably more emotional than he’d been for a good long while, not counting his time as Dracup, and he was trying to forget about that. He was deeply uncomfortable with the emotional dependency Dracup had on Zabilla.
The Monk sent the heavily coded and very secure override command. Immediately after, she sent a time-bomb self-destruct routine. She was determined to leave as little trace as possible.
‘Fuck!’ Scab was unused to genuine surprise and had only just sealed the spacesuit as reality tore open and revealed the red beneath. The Rapier had just opened a bridge point. Even Elites couldn’t do that. Scab turned to look at the Monk.
‘Its all bullshit, isn’t it, about not being able to open in a planetary gravitational field?’
‘There’s a fail-safe device on every bridge drive. Any attempt to open a bridge point in a strong gravity field junks the drive.’
‘But you have an override for the fail-safe?’
‘Obviously. Imagine the carnage if people knew they could pop in and out of Red Space, sneak up on their enemies. Also, we’re genuinely not sure of the effects of repeated openings of wormholes in gravitational fields on the fabric of space-time. You coming?’
The Monk stepped forward, the cocoon floating behind her.
‘But it’s all right for the Church to have the knowledge?’
‘Which we can’t use because then people would know. You won’t tell anyone, will you?’ She was heading straight for the rip. Scab grabbed another laser rifle, a bandolier of grenades and some spare batteries and followed.
‘No, I’ll keep the information and use it for myself.’
‘I like the way you volunteer for death, or at least total personality erasure,’ the Monk said. ‘Or maybe it’s too late for that.’
The Monk climbed over bodies to step through the tear. Scab followed her into the red.
26. Southern Britain, a Long Time Ago
There was screaming, the thrum of a bowstring, and the screaming stopped. Tangwen lowered the bow. She stood on the rampart looking out down the hill and over the vast fertile plain, so different from the sea of swaying reeds in which she had grown up. The morning mists mingled with dirty smoke from the campfires, from the smouldering remnants of the third hill fort, and smoke from the pyres the Corpse People were using to burn their captives in plain view. If they’d wanted them to suffer, they should have tried burning them out of bow range, Tangwen thought. There were four Corpse People around the pyres. They had died with arrows in them trying to light the fires, but Tangwen was running short of arrows coated with the poison that was Fachtna’s blood.
The defenders had said little as the four had entered the fort the previous night. Fachtna was still steaming, too hot to approach, Britha, a blood-soaked nightmare, carrying Teardrop. They had thought them gods or perhaps demons and had sunk to their knees – much to Britha’s contempt. Tangwen was afraid that they would let these people down, that they were not what the Atrebates believed them to be, but then she had spent her whole life in the presence of a living god and knew how helpless and how much like everyone else they could be, child of the Great Mother or no.
‘Fools,’ Britha said as she appeared at Tangwen’s side. She used that word a lot, Tangwen thought, but said nothing. The defenders either showed Britha great deference or gave her a wide berth. The warriors who wore stripes of black and blood vertically down their faces and braided crow and raven feathers into their hair, thought her a messenger from their bloody warrior goddess. ‘A man called Feroth taught me to fight and he taught me about battles as well. If you want an enemy to surrender then you show mercy, you give them a reason to. If they think that surrendering will lead to burning then they will fight to the last.’
‘They say that they kill and eat the warriors, those blessed by the Great Mother, but that the rest they take south towards the sea.’
‘I think that is where my people are,’ Britha said grimly and then lapsed into silence. The wounds she had taken last night had all but healed. The Atrebates had left the corpse of the bear at the gate. It would be another obstacle for the attackers. Tangwen had noticed how the carrion eaters, even the flies, stayed away from the corpse. ‘They are just children playing at being dead,’ Britha finally said. ‘They are liars.’
‘I think they believe it,’ Tangwen said. Though they hadn’t last night when the four of them had driven the corpse people away, but then she herself had wanted to flee when she had seen Fachtna and Teardrop’s magics, and Britha’s bloodlust.
‘You have done what was asked of you. Will you return to your people? I think a hunter of your ability would be able to sneak past them.’
Tangwen wasn’t sure.
‘I think…’ She searched for the right words. She remembered the time before the black ships had come. They would hunt, they would raid or even more rarely they would go to war with another tribe. Things were hard, but looking back they seemed simpler: she had been much more carefree, even if she might not have appreciated it at the time. ‘… that it will not matter if I go back to my people. These –’ she nodded towards the Corpse People ‘– or the ones in the black ships, they want everything, like the tribes the traders tell lies of, who they say cover many lands across the seas.’