The fire from both craft had severely lessened after Scab had blasphemously murdered the Seeder spawn, but now both were trying to fire on Fallen Angel. The exotic, some said dark, matter of the Elite’s armour phased the kinetic shots that hit it. An entanglement effect transported the solid-state munitions elsewhere. Lasers hit the armour creating a prismatic effect as the beams of killing light were redirected away from the Elite and back at the two cruisers.
Longing drowned Scab’s joy. Once the Elite’s power had been his; now he was nothing more than a spectator, soon to be like every other piece of biological waste in Known Space, a victim.
He watched enviously as Fallen Angel lifted its weapon to its shoulder. The smart matter of the spear it held reconfigured into a wide-barrelled rifle/cannon weapon. Scab knew that all the weapon really was, was a conduit for an entanglement effect connecting it to munitions in the Citadel, their hidden base, and also, like the rest of the armour, to the vast network of primordial black holes that powered the Elite’s armour and weapons.
Scab’s neunonics chose to interpret the focused particle beam from Fallen Angel’s weapon as a thick line of blue light. Fallen Angel played it across the Consortium’s Free Trade Enforcer-class cruiser. The beam disrupted the craft at its molecular level – disassembling it, changing the signal, sometimes removing molecules, sometimes agitating molecules into an explosive reaction. The result was the craft started to come apart. To Scab it was a slow, ponderous yet strangely beautiful death as the ruptured craft spilt crew out into the swirling clouds of Red Space.
Fallen Angel continued to cut at the hull a long time after it needed to. Scab could identify with that. It wasn’t so much that they wanted to kill by the time they were chosen, though most of them did. He had. But once you merged with the armour you felt its need to destroy life. Scab had always been told they were weapons that understood their own nature rather than being just tools for killing. Their ancient creators apparently hadn’t been hypocrites. Fallen Angel was painting with the particle beam. Scab remembered what it was to hate life and crave destruction, to be one with a poisoned and violent technology.
Scab was remaining very still. Trying not to be noticed. Wondering how best to get the cocoon back to the Basilisk. Then he noticed that the Church cruiser had stopped firing as well. Augmented soft-machine biotech eyes searched space. He only saw the disruption in the Red Space clouds because he knew what to look for. Surprise was another emotion he was unused to.
The CR worlds were a game, nothing more, R & D, a way of keeping score and training executives or minor nobility. When it was serious, when the outcome actually mattered, the Elite were sent. One being sent was rare. The number of times that two were sent in the entire history of Known Space since the Loss could be counted on one hand, even if you were a lizard.
The Monarchists had sent a second Elite. He saw it through the butterfly-wing shape of its disruption of the Red Space clouds. It was squat, roughly cylindrical with various strange technological components attached to its external body, and covered in the same liquid obsidian-looking armour that all the Elite merged with. Ludwig was the only automaton Elite. Ludwig was a supposedly ancient S-tech automaton that had continually upgraded itself from scavenged tech as it had drifted through Real Space. It had been a ‘found weapon’ during the Art Wars in the Monarchist systems.
Ludwig was heading towards the Church cruiser.
Scab glanced back at Fallen Angel. It had become bored with the particle beam. Fallen Angel’s wings were a manifestation of its coffin. The coffin acted as a personal satellite, a slaved extension of the Elite’s weapon systems. The morphic nature of the exotic material the coffin was made from could also turn it into what was basically a tiny one-man ship. Fallen Angel had made its wings very sharp and was dancing among the remains of the Free Trade Enforcer-class cruiser. Using its wings to slice through wreckage as it went.
Scab turned back but Ludwig had gone.
They had mostly stopped firing. Ludwig was barely aware of taking hits from automatic close-in weapon systems as it drifted close to the Church cruiser. The ancient machine mind shifted out of phase, vibrating its molecular structure to become intangible. It felt the resistance of some of the cruiser’s defensive screens but combat was a bidding war and more resources had gone into Ludwig’s creation and augmentation than had gone into the cruiser.
Many options on how to destroy it presented themselves to Ludwig. It was not about the most efficient way of dealing with the cruiser; it was about relieving countless millennia of boredom.
Ludwig dropped into the areas of smart matter in the hull. It became solid again and infected the smart matter with itself. Effectively becoming a material virus.
Most of the crew who weren’t extensively hard tech-enhanced were still reeling. Their knowledge and stranglehold on S-tech aside, they had not expected to hear the scream of the dying S-tech craft in their head. Bloody tears leaking from their eyes blinded many. Blood seeped out of their ears and noses.
Ludwig made the cruiser’s smart matter grow organically, like a tree, if a tree was made of spikes and edges. The smart matter grew through the heavy cruiser, impaling, rending, seeking out soft flesh and lifting it up into its branches, turning the very ship itself on its crew. Through his new viral smart matter branches, Ludwig got to taste the crew.
When Ludwig rose through the dormant Church cruiser’s hull, the liquid-like coating of his armour bubbled with the crew’s screaming faces.
Vic was sitting on one of the so-called smart chairs in the minimalist lounge that doubled as the Basilisk’s Command and Control, though most of the ship’s systems were handled neunonically. After a brief interface squabble with the chair to get it into an even vaguely comfortable shape, Vic was now just waiting for death, his head cradled in his upper pair of arms. He hoped the Elite would make it quick.
Vic was still receiving the external feed into his neunonics. Without using active scans it had taken him a while to find Scab clinging to the package they had apparently been paid a lot to retrieve.
Vic glanced up to the ship’s hull and sent the signal to magnify that piece of space. For a moment there was just a spark of hope. Perhaps Fallen Angel would kill Scab but ignore him, Vic thought. Maybe, just maybe he would be free of his insane ‘partner’. After all, he was small fry – he didn’t matter in the big scheme of things. On the other hand, if Scab was any indication of how the Elite thought – and this was after the neuro-surgical spaying he had relieved upon leaving the Elite – then who was to say what they would do?
Scab stared into the featureless black glass face of Fallen Angel and saw himself reflected. The Elite hung there motionless in front of him. Subjectively below him was the corpse of the Seeder ship. Above him the dead Church cruiser was slowly mutating into another form; the Consortium cruiser was now little more than a field of debris.
For some reason Scab saw sadness in the Elite. Almost like a child’s. He wondered if it was because Fallen Angel hadn’t been the one to kill the Seeder craft. He also wondered if this death – anonymous, body never found – would be enough.
As Fallen Angel reached to take the cocoon, Scab decided it wouldn’t be a good enough death. His employer would have no reason to fulfil his part of the deal. Fighting Fallen Angel would have been foolish, nothing more than an empty gesture, still it galled Scab to just hand the cocoon over. It was the feeling of powerlessness.
With a flap of his wings, an affectation, Fallen Angel propelled himself back from Scab and then soared up towards the Church ship. Suddenly, in a series of jerky moves that somehow looked panicked to Scab, Fallen Angel wrapped his massive wings around himself and they morphed into a rectangular shape that looked like a mixture between a coffin and an arrowhead. Both Fallen Angel and Ludwig disappeared into the clouds.