As soon as he touched the hilt of the weapon he heard its whispering as the ancient and corrupt AI nearly overwhelmed his neuralware. He dropped the evil old curved dagger as the gargoyle turned black and continued crumbling, dropping him in turn.
A moment’s respite was just enough time for more healing. The white blade opened up his cheek. Immediately addled and blurry, he threw himself to the side, scrabbling for his tanto. He found the blade as his internal systems fought off the tiny ancient machines that offered sleep and a gentle, peaceful end.
On his feet, he managed to dodge more of Hamad’s slashes. If the Nizari had had both blades he would be dead by now. He could not afford to get cut again. The nanites made by the assemblers in the hilt of the ancient weapons carried a lethal neural toxin. Anything more than a mild gash from either knife would overwhelm du Bois’ own internal defences.
Hamad came at him with the blade, his fist, open-hand attacks and a series of short kicks, each strike calculated to be the most efficient, to cause the most damage. A fighting system perfected across centuries.
Du Bois moved sinuously, swaying, his hands and feet moving to be where they were least expected, blocking punches with raised legs, checking Hamad’s blade with a hand to the wrist, slashing his leg open with the tanto when the Syrian tried to kick him, all the while the seductive urge to sleep becoming fainter as the alien nanites were hunted down and destroyed by his own defences.
Hamad was by far the better knife fighter, but mental fatigue had taken its toll. Du Bois never stopped moving, swaying, making debilitating finger strikes to his opponent’s eyes, groin, nerve clusters using rapid whipping movements, all the while looking for an opportunity with the blade.
He found one. The incredibly sharp folded-steel blade sliced across Hamad’s throat, opening it. Blood surged out. Hamad staggered away holding his neck. Du Bois backed off.
‘You fight like one of them!’ Hamad hissed when his throat had knitted itself back together enough for him to speak.
I should do, du Bois thought. One of them taught me.
Hamad saw what du Bois was slowly moving towards and charged. Du Bois threw himself back, grabbing the .45 from the floor. Blossoms of red appeared on Hamad’s soiled suit as impact after impact slowed his charge. He staggered to a halt over du Bois. The bullets’ nanite payloads were overwhelming Hamad’s own systems. Du Bois was breathing hard. The slide on the .45 was back, the magazine empty. Smoke drifted from the barrel. It seemed quiet and still in the destroyed church.
‘Would you do the right thing?’ Hamad asked and then collapsed.
Du Bois crawled over to Hamad’s body. He looked peaceful.
‘Sorry, brother.’ Du Bois drove the tanto into Hamad’s head, prised off a piece of skull, cut open his own thumb and pressed it against the brain. Du Bois downloaded yottabytes of information just before ephemeral electronic Ifreet destroyed it.
Then he sat back and looked at his friend’s cooling corpse. He could hear them if he concentrated. All the souls. He did not concentrate. He did not want to hear their voices.
Southsea seemed still, as if abandoned. It was a grey day. All the colour had been bleached out of the city as Beth made her way through terraced street after terraced street.
It wasn’t until she turned onto Pretoria Road that she saw signs of life. About halfway down, it had been sealed off. The middle part of the street was encased in an opaque tent-like structure with some kind of airlock leading into it. Police vehicles and officers prevented people from getting close. There were other official-looking vehicles behind the police cordon and Beth saw people wearing NBC suits going in and out of the airlock.
Beth could not see a connection between this strange sight and her sister but somehow couldn’t shake the feeling that Talia was involved. She headed down the street, head down, arms in the pocket of her leather jacket, trying to avoid drawing attention to herself. She did not have to go far before she realised that the address Billy had given her had to be in the tented area.
‘Hey, what’s going on there?’ she asked a slow-moving cyclist being trailed by a scruffy mongrel dog. The guy braked the bike and shrugged.
‘Don’t know. At a guess it’s some kind of terrorist thing. Maybe a germ bomb or one of those dirty bombs. Makes you think though. Be lucky if we don’t all end up with cancer or a head growing out of our neck or something.’
He wittered on for a bit as she stared down the street at the tented area. Eventually he said goodbye and headed off. Beth was wondering what to do. The thought of her sister as a terrorist actually made her laugh.
‘God is a prude.’ The voice was all but a croak. Beth had to replay the words in her head until they made sense, or not as it turned out. Very little of what the bag lady actually looked like could be made out through the layers of clothes, the dirt and the tangled mess of hair. She was crouched beside a nearby garden wall. She could have been anything from thirty to ninety for all Beth knew, and she stank. Beth’s initial reaction was to move away. What stopped her was the night she had just spent on the cold concrete.
‘He can’t stand nudity. Hawkings said that.’ The bag lady pushed herself up on the long stick she was leaning on. Even with the stick she was still hunched over.
‘Are you talking to me?’ Beth asked. She genuinely wasn’t sure. The answering dry chuckle sounded like twigs being snapped. The chuckle turned into a cough and the bag lady spat up something red or black that Beth did not want to think too much about.
‘God abhors a naked singularity because that’s when things stop making sense. Predictability breaks down. That’s why the universe takes all its dirty little secrets and hides them in the centre of a black hole.’
The woman laughed to herself and began to shuffle away. Beth watched her go. She turned back to the tented area and found a policewoman watching her. She’d been there too long, she decided, and left. She wasn’t sure where she was going.
By the time du Bois left the church it was his clothes rather than himself that were the worse for wear. His phone started ringing the moment he was on the street. In the distance he could hear sirens. They would be intercepted, he imagined, and a clean-up crew sent to the church.
Du Bois ignored the phone until he had changed his clothes in the back of the Range Rover.
‘Report,’ Control’s voice said placidly as soon as he answered. As tersely as possible du Bois explained what had happened, including him taking the souls from Hamad’s neuralware. Control asked pertinent questions and even remonstrated with him slightly for wasting resources when he requested a new punch dagger and a magazine of nanite-headed bullets.
‘We have godsware that needs harvesting and two L-tech artefacts,’ du Bois told Control. Nightmare had tried to hack his systems the moment he picked the evil weapon up. He had locked both weapons in a strongbox. ‘Nightmare and Gentle Sleep, assemblers in the handle and AI aware. Nightmare’s AI is badly corrupted; both will need containment.’
Control gave him a cache drop where he could pick up what he needed and leave the two artefacts. They would even cut the Marduk Implant, the two extra eyes, out of Hamad’s head.
‘What do you want done with the souls?’ he finally asked.
At first there was silence.
‘They are surplus to requirement and may already have been corrupted by the Brass City,’ Control finally told him. The pause had meant some kind of consultation, du Bois knew. ‘Erase them.’
Du Bois said nothing.
‘Du Bois?’
‘It’s done,’ he said.
Du Bois wasn’t sure why he’d lied. He would have to find a way to hide them for the next neural systems audit if he wanted to keep them. He was not sure why he would even bother; after all, the Brass City had doomed them all.