The other movement was more difficult to pin down: a suggestion of a quadruped, an off-kilter, almost canine lope to it, but whatever it was – or they were – it seemed to come from places where there shouldn’t be anything. It hurt Scab when he caught the movement and actually tried to look at it. He had the idea that it was formed of tiny multifaceted crystals that moved together like a machine doing an impression of biological life.
Scab brought the laser rifle up to bear. Targeting graphics appeared in his vision as he tried to understand what he was seeing through the cross hairs. The Monk was watching him with an expression of bemusement on her face.
‘What are they?’ he asked eventually, lowering the rifle. They didn’t seem any threat, and although he fancied killing something that he’d never killed before, particularly the crystalline things that made his head hurt, there were too many unknowns.
The Monk shrugged. ‘We don’t know. Aliens maybe. Real ones, not just uplifted animals like you and me. Maybe they’re technology or weapons or ghosts. Maybe just some Red-Space-imprinted manifestation of what we have up here,’ she said, tapping her head. ‘Maybe we should think better thoughts?’
Scab stared at her, trying to decide if she was making fun of him or not. He had not found her answer particularly satisfying.
It wasn’t enough. It hurt, it hurt so much. He imagined that every one of his cells was undergoing the white-light pain of a nuclear birth. There was no him, only agony. Suddenly he felt a connection. Something out of sight. Something appalling. For the first time he felt kinship, a connection, an empathy. He was a messenger, a herald, a harbinger.
The armour’s integrity had held. Much of the energy had been sent elsewhere, a light show bleeding out into empty space. His shields were down, but he was being fed the energy to rebuild them.
It happened in moments – Elite Scab rebuilt himself – but moments were a long time for people like them. They must have assumed he’d been destroyed. Which meant for moments they weren’t aware of him. Had he gone somewhere else? The contact had made him feel dirty. It made him feel alive and wish for death. He wondered if this was what having a purpose felt like.
He hit the atmosphere like a comet. There was flame to the horizon. He bathed in energy-weapons fire from a surprised orbital defence network. He rose into space, looking like he was made from a vast spectrum of light, a humanoid prism. Space felt cool to him.
He heard Horrible Angel screaming. It was an infrasound weapon for mortals in an atmosphere. Here it was a special effect. He liked it. It was suitably dramatic. The electronic warfare attacks were a disappointment, a silent duel, a distraction beneath them. They did, however, mean that for the first time he became fully aware of Fallen Angel’s presence. He was manipulating the forces of higher-dimensional physics in an attempt to cut off the complex entanglement effect. The amount of energy they were using must have been putting an enormous strain on the carrier signal from the primordial black hole network. Scab fought back. A conceptual sword-and-shield battle fought through other dimensions. It was science that only the ancients who had developed the technology understood. Fortunately their technology had been user-friendly.
Horrible Angel flew at him, cycling rapidly through her weapon’s various flavours of attack. Focused particle beam, DNA hack beam, ghost bullets fed to her through the entanglement effect from vast magazines in the Monarchist’s Citadel. Fired at a cyclic rate far in excess of anything a mechanical device could manage, the intangible bullets sought his flesh. They wanted to become tangible inside him. Elite Scab flickered through the frequencies of his coherent energy shields unimaginably fast to stop the bullets, as each one was keyed to a different vibration. He changed physical state at the same time, drawing on vast amounts of energy to do so, always trying to be in a different state from the bullet that was passing through where his body should be.
He knew something now. He sent a command back through the entanglement link. He knew that in the Citadel alarms would sound as his override code gave him access to a weapon that required full board permission to use. There would be a silent panic as those who supposedly could make that decision neunonically sought to stop his override signal. It had never been used. It was a massive escalation that if used they could never walk away from. Fuck them, Scab thought. He could see his death from here. This would be his goodbye.
Circling around distant suns, networks of orbiting crucibles made of ancient alien technology came alive and drank their respective suns. He became the triangulation point for the energy of three suns sucked dry in an instant.
He saw her wings. She was beautiful, her armour made her look like she was encased in living obsidian. He would miss her scream. The rifle-shaped weapon in his hands was a focus point. Nothing more. He fired. For a moment her flesh became an event horizon.
She was staring at the cocoon. Had been for a while. Scab studied her. She was soon to be a victim but despite himself Scab was starting to find her intriguing. Suddenly it occurred to him that this was important to her, personally. This almost automatically meant that Scab would struggle to understand the reasoning. He understood wants but only really in terms of the id. This was something else. It clearly wasn’t just a job to the Monk.
‘Does monopoly mean that much to you?’ Scab asked.
‘Any degree of control is a possibly misguided attempt to stop the uplifted races from tearing themselves apart,’ she told him distractedly. It was obviously something that she’d heard before.
‘Fuck it. Let them.’
The Monk sighed and looked up at him.
‘What a wonderfully constructed facade of nihilistic luxury,’ she said. For some reason Scab thought she sounded a little uncomfortable with the words.
‘Huh?’ he asked.
‘You have neunonics. Don’t pretend that you didn’t understand what I said.’
‘I know what the words mean. I’m just not sure of their relevance.’
‘There’s too much beauty and wonder in Known Space for there not to be people there to bear witness.’
Scab nearly laughed in her face.
‘Leaving aside that nobody cares enough to stop and look beyond whatever their next personal fix is, that’s just narcissism. Stop trying to convince yourself you matter. It’ll be there long after we’re gone.’
‘We’re not so sure.’
Scab stared at her hard. She wouldn’t meet his look. That hadn’t seemed quite such a calculated thing to say, unless she was getting better at faking it. It was also clear that short of killing her and interrogating her neunonics, he wasn’t going to get any more. He didn’t want to kill her, yet. He wanted to see her way out, because he certainly didn’t have one. They lapsed into silence again.
‘What is this?’ Scab finally asked, tapping the cocoon. She looked up at him. Suddenly she was guarded. It was like watching someone slam a polarised visor down.
‘It’s what you think it is. Money, power, chaos.’
‘What’s it to you?’ he said evenly.
‘The fall of the Church.’
‘No, really.’ The Monk did not answer. ‘I know that Church neunonics are good and that you’ll have a time bomb in there to wipe them when you die, but we… I’ve been pretty well resourced for this. I wonder if it’ll still be there when I interrogate your corpse’s neunonics. The answer, I mean.’