Du Bois was standing nearly waist-deep in the sea, with much bigger waves on the way. The beach was covered now and the waves were over the ruined pier as he watched it rise, water pouring off it, concealing its true shape, that of a biomechanical, vaguely Piscean-shaped seed pod, larger than the largest aircraft carrier.
A hidden Seeder, here of all places, du Bois thought. The signs had pointed towards it, but even sleeping it beggared belief that the Circle had not known. He thought back to the presence beneath the family home. His family’s own secret. Had he known?
The sky was slashed open with a blade of pulsing blue light. There was the sound of air escaping on a massive scale as it was sucked through the wound in the sky. Du Bois had thought he would be asleep and never witness this himself.
The water seethed. Writhing tentacles of all sizes breached the surface. Du Bois didn’t even flinch as one lashed out and destroyed a building on the corner of Alhambra Road.
She was awake. It wouldn’t be long before her sisters realised this. Then they would wake. Their corruption, whatever had caused the fall of the Seeders, driven them mad, would pollute the one here. When they awoke, fully, then it was over.
Beth found herself in seething water, tentacles whipping all around her. Inside her head was a roaring, a near-deafening white noise that made her want to clasp her hands over her ears, though she knew that it would give her no respite.
Fully clothed, in rough water, weapons weighing her down – she just wanted to give in and sink.
Had the frigate been patrolling in the Solent because of the so-called terrorist activity? du Bois wondered. Or did the Circle have a hand in its presence? It was a Type 23, HMS Leicester, he thought. He saw the smoke and moments later heard the booming echo of the ship’s fore-mounted 4.5-inch gun. It fired again before the first shell had even hit.
The water exploded near her. The shock wave bounced her through the water, threatening to powder bone as the liquid magnified the force. Then again. She was not sure why she did, but she discarded the UMP, the Benelli and all her remaining ammo and started to swim. Above her part of the sky was red.
‘Fools,’ du Bois muttered to himself.
The frigate fired two Sea Wolf surface-to-air missiles. They shot out of their vertical launch tubes and headed for the seed as it rose towards the red wound in the sky. From the front of the ship two Sting Ray torpedoes sped through the water towards the flailing tentacles. From the pad at the rear of the ship, a Sea Lynx helicopter took off. It was an impressive display, du Bois thought as he shook his head.
Everything around her was fire and force. Her body was repeatedly battered, flung through the air and then driven under by successive explosions. Overpressure burst her eardrums and her bones were powdered.
The tentacle flicked out reflexively, responding to pain. It caught the frigate amidships, breaking its back, cleaving it in two with such force that the two halves crashed against each other before they started to sink, sliding rapidly beneath the muddied churning water.
The surface-to-air missiles hit the seed, battering it around in the sky, blackening and bloodying flesh designed to withstand the rigours of deep space, but it continued to rise. The energy matrices on its skin crackled with bioelectricity as it rose through the wound in the sky. Then the wound was gone.
The Lynx pilot was clearly having problems: the destruction of the Leicester, the strange air currents as a result of the wound in the sky and, du Bois guessed, probably just the strangeness of the whole thing. The pilot managed to steady the craft, and moments later the helicopter fired two Sea Skua missiles one after another. They impacted among the greatest concentration of tentacles. A huge amount of water was thrown upwards and some of the smaller tentacles were destroyed or severed and blown into the air. The response was inevitable, the whip-like tentacle flicking out with such force that the helicopter had disintegrated before it was driven down into the water.
Du Bois did not need the biohazard warnings he was receiving from his blood-screen. If the Seeder had woken then she was sporing. Suddenly every phone within earshot started to ring.
‘Well, it had to start somewhere,’ he said.
It had taken a lot of hacking. He had not even known what the RAF was at the beginning of the day. They’d shut down supposedly secure phone networks. They’d intercepted electronic communications, introduced viruses into air-traffic-control computers and sent fake commands.
They’d been up against someone else as well, someone with knowhow and access to lost tech. It hadn’t been as simple as fucking with the puny human computer systems, like normal.
And Baron Albedo was dead. Properly dead. Killed by the blond guy who wouldn’t die himself, and his bitch had shot Inflictor and Dracimus a lot. That shit was not supposed to happen, King Jeremy thought. And they hadn’t even got the goth bitch with the trippy blood.
‘Bad day,’ Jeremy said quietly as he toyed with the case that Baron Albedo had taken off the blond guy. The thing about bad days, King Jeremy reflected, was that they weren’t supposed to happen to him. Someone would have to pay for this.
34. A Long Time After the Loss
‘What are you doing?’ Vic demanded as he watched the cocoon slowly dissolve. Vic was reasonably sure that he had nailed a very human-sounding borderline hysteria in his voice. If not, he knew that Scab would pick up on his panicky pheromone secretions. ‘We’ve got no idea what’s in there. It could be viral; it could be dangerous Seeder tech – anything, something worse than the Scorpion. You can’t open it.’
‘And yet…’ Scab said. He hadn’t taken his eyes off the cocoon. He was getting dressed. He had injected himself with a chemical, given to them on the Living Cities, which was slowly returning Scab to his normal self, reversing the DNA process that had allowed him to disguise himself on Game. Vic had brought some of Scab’s stuff with him: his suit, hat, hand weapons, the energy javelin, his P-sat – though not the heavy combat chassis – a case of cigarettes, ear crystals with his music and the case for his works. The important stuff, Vic had guessed. Scab’s internal repair systems were still trying to regrow part of his face.
‘Look. Let’s just deliver it to your employer and retire, separately, rich, or at least almost out of debt, to a life of luxury, and wait for the Church, or some of these Monarchist crazies to, at best, assassinate us. If you’re bored you can hunt down the surviving crew members. You’ll enjoy that.’ He glanced up at Scab.
‘I’m tired of being a nightmare. You don’t have much imagination, do you?’
‘That’s really not true. I have lots of it, and all it’s being used for is to imagine the bad shit that’s going to happen to us as a result of this. Much of it involves very powerful people using a remarkable amount of resources to make me suffer.’
‘We’re not turning it over,’ Scab said. He was still staring at the cocoon as he pushed the javelin back into its hidden sheath in his right arm. The coherent energy blade glowed under his flesh for a moment. Once the shock of Scab’s statement had worn off, Vic realised that Scab actually had an expression on his face. Curiosity.
‘W-w-why not?’ Vic managed. He wasn’t sure he’d ever been so frightened, not even after he’d had his brain modified to be more human and he’d experienced his first dream. Apparently foreign images in his head while he slept – it had been terrifying.
‘What do you mean why not?’ An insect gaping is basically an insect with all its mandibles open. Scab looked up at Vic as if noticing him for the first time. ‘Everyone wants this.’