He was not going to take revenge on the Necronaught. Those memories belonged to a different person, who should have been long dead. His ghost had been resurrected in the pathetic clone copy that even now he knew was down on the surface.
Some of the more exotic payloads tugged at him, harmed him, he supposed, as he made his way towards the ship. The shields, what most people thought were S-tech but what Elite Scab knew were L-tech, were more problematic. There was actual pain and loss. He was diminished, but he did not scream as he pulled his way through them. He was breathing hard, covered in sweat as he fell through the armour and hit the ship’s cold hard deck.
With less than a thought he sucked the sweat back into his skin. He would use the salt and water for something more useful. He stood up. To the terrified-looking crewman standing in front of him, it looked like he was clothed in black liquid glass. The crewman, a tall human, base male in gender, had seen the Elite in a moment of weakness. He died immediately.
Elite Scab released the virals and the nano-swarms, all Sand L-tech derivatives. They would be too much for the Necronaught’s countermeasures. He gained access to the ship’s systems through the dead crewman’s neunonics and downloaded multiple crack and control AI programs based on a template of his own personality. Each of them had an inbuilt self-destruct code but they would overwhelm the Necronaught’s security, possess the host AI and effectively sequester the ship.
While this happened, Elite Scab walked through the ship killing the old-fashioned way. Every time he ran an extruded blade through a crew member or legionnaire, he thought about their souls. He knew that the soul did not exist. It was an ancient idea from before the Loss that he had come across. So much more information was available to you when you became an Elite. He knew that ultimately they were all little more than biological automatons created by the Seeders, but as he watched the screaming faces of his victims appear momentarily in the animated exotic matter of his armour, it was difficult not to think that the living material of the armour was consuming their souls. What he felt sure of was that the exotic matter wanted to consume life.
He took control of the ship. He ’faced with the ship’s nano-field for an external view. The Necronaught was belying its dark name. It looked like it was made of light as every other ship in the vicinity fired on it. The carbon reservoirs struggled to remake the ship’s reactive armour quickly enough to cope with the multiple impacts of sub-munitions and kinetic shots. In the centre of the ship, as faces screamed out from all over his armour, Elite Scab was barely feeling the hits.
Scab ignored the rest of the fleet; instead he aimed the Necronaught at the surface of Game and fired all its beam weapons and the kinetic shots that the carbon reservoirs had managed to regrow at the planet’s surface.
‘Notice me,’ he whispered.
He felt the rip in time/space. I should feel exalted, he told himself. Angels were coming especially for him.
It was quite tranquil floating upwards in the red light through what looked like the roots of the arcology trees, except here everything, all matter, was black and skeletal with oddly exaggerated angles. The frameworks of the arcology trees looked like expressionist sculptures rendered in blackened bone. The only matter here was the trees. It seemed that you had to be of a certain size to be remembered in this red-world copy. None of the smaller details – G-vehicles, piles of assembler debris, extraneous buildings – seemed to be present, and there were certainly no other life forms, not even ghosts. With the exception of the two of them riding the cocoon, their flight capability provided by the three working AG motors, everything was still. It was like a dead world. Scab found himself liking it.
They were sitting opposite each other on the cocoon. Scab’s end was listing a little, as it was the end with the destroyed AG motor on one of the corners. He had held on to the ornate double-barrelled laser rifle he’d taken off the Toy Soldier. The Monk still had a thorn pistol in each hand.
‘So, should we be pointing guns at each other in some extended Mexican stand-off?’ she asked.
Scab gave this some thought. ‘I know what a stand-off is. What’s a Mexican?’
‘Never mind.’
‘If it helps, I’ll kill you with a blade when the time comes.’
‘Thanks.’
‘No thanks needed.’ He turned and looked her up and down. ‘It just seems like it would suit you more.’
The Monk resisted the urge to thank him again. Sardonic just didn’t seem to register with him. ‘So your double-cross is in place then?’ she asked instead. Scab looked at her. He’d left the visor of the spacesuit clear but his expression was unreadable.
‘The Game exists here,’ Scab said, meaning the planet. This was after a period of silence as they rose through the red light towards the black leaf canopy covering the lower levels – or that’s what they would be in Real Space anyway. ‘There’s gravity?’
‘We don’t know why. It’s some kind of simulacra, a smaller echo of our universe with different physical laws and coterminous points. Perhaps the ghost planets exist as navigation aids.’
‘Navigation aids?’
‘Red Space is constructed space – it’s artificial.’
It took a long time for what she had said to sink in. Scab’s view of Red Space had just been radically altered, if he chose to believe what she had said.
‘Constructed by who?’ he finally asked.
The Monk shrugged. Scab resisted the urge to kill her for making a gesture so significantly lacking in grandeur after what she had just told him. Later he would come to the conclusion that he did not cope well with having his universe altered at such a radical level.
‘We’re not sure, Seeders would be our best guess. Perhaps the Lloigor.’
‘Who’re the Lloigor?’
There was no answer. Instead the Monk smiled in a way that infuriated Scab so much his finger inched towards the bone blade still at his hip.
‘These are Church secrets, right?’ Scab asked suspiciously. The Monk nodded. ‘Why are you telling me this? You must be pretty confident that you’re going to come out on top of our double-cross.’
‘How are you going to get out?’ the Monk asked, meaning from Red Space. She had a good point. She gave him some time to think on this. ‘Churchman likes you,’ she finally said.
So that’s it, Scab thought. He was being given a taste. It was an obvious manipulation but it still angered him. ‘The Consortium thought I could be used as well, when I was Elite.’
‘You still are,’ the Monk said.
‘A copy is.’
‘I don’t mean to be offensive, Mr Scab, but on the other hand I’m not afraid of you, so fuck it, right? But it seems a lot more likely that you’re the clone.’ She caught his face hardening. He wasn’t a tolerant man, and she’d pushed what little tolerance he had beyond his normal limits. ‘Now you can try and kill me, maybe even succeed, but I assure you it’s mutually assured destruction. Or you can listen to me.’
‘Everybody wants their own pet psychopath, someone to frighten the other children with. It’s a sad state of affairs for Known Space,’ Scab said through gritted teeth, controlling his anger, barely.
‘We don’t want you because you have a head full of rabid squirrels, and frankly if the Church Militia and the monks don’t scare people then our ability to embargo bridge technology should. Churchman wants you because you have an enquiring mind. You question. Have you any idea how rare that is?’
‘A head full of what?’