‘I didn’t want to be a slave,’ he told them both. They both looked impassive. Maybe they believed him, maybe they didn’t, maybe he had inadvertently guessed the truth. It was the ultimate irony of the Elite. They were undoubtedly the most dangerous and physically powerful people in Known Space but their masters were not stupid. Their loyalty was conditioned and programmed to the nth degree, it was absolute. The killer gods were the ultimate servants.
‘What did you think you could do here?’ Horrible Angel asked.
‘He fought me,’ Fallen Angel said redundantly.
‘Did you think to use our arrogance against us?’ she asked. Scab couldn’t see the point in answering. ‘What if it’s not arrogance?’
‘I just want the cocoon?’ He felt the burning itch in his flesh, under his skin, coming from patches all over his body.
‘It is gone from here,’ Horrible Angel said. Her voice was little more than a sigh. ‘We know where and we know why but we will not tell you. As you pointed out, we are all the servants of contemptible gods.’
Scab’s chuckle sounded like dry paper being crumpled up.
‘Not me, not any more.’
‘You more than all,’ Horrible Angel said.
‘You are the most puppet of puppets,’ Fallen Angel said, almost brightly. ‘I can see your strings from all the way over here.’
He watched as the first lesion appeared. It looked like patches of skin were caving in. A fast-acting, flesh-eating nano-virus.
‘You’ve made his flesh necrotic,’ Horrible Angel said.
‘For you.’
‘It’s beautiful.’
All Scab could do was watch. A guest at his own consumption. Both of them turned back to him.
‘It was the connection,’ Horrible Angel said. Some feeling prickled Scab. He did not like this, did not want to hear her words.
‘At some base level we are attached to creation,’ Fallen Angel continued. It was true: the uplifted races understood very little about S-tech except how to use it, but the Seeders must have understood the universe at a fundamental level. The technology the Elite wore connected them to this somehow. Scab remembered Vic describing it as a gun being taught physics. He almost smiled at the memory.
‘It’s not slavery you fear. We are all slaves, even our shadowed undying masters, the Lords and Ladies of Monarchist and Consortium space,’ Horrible Angel said.
‘Even the Church. You are still a slave, you have always been a slave; everything else is just so much thrashing around signifying nothing. Little more than desperate cries for attention,’ Fallen Angel said.
‘You feared the truth,’ Horrible Angel said.
Scab wanted to tell her to be quiet. He opened his mouth to issue a pointless threat.
‘Don’t threaten her,’ Fallen Angel said. ‘If you threaten her I have to act.’
‘And you are more plaything than victim still.’ Filed teeth clamped together in Scab’s mouth. ‘Fear made you lose your wings, not the wish for false freedom,’ Horrible Angel continued. Then she stared at the necrotic patterns the virus was drawing in his flesh as if transfixed.
‘You cannot remember that destruction is your only birthright. You search endlessly not realising that the only freedom you have left is to come to terms with your slavery to grotesqueries. The freedom to realise that everything is meaningless. You don’t fear slavery, you’re a more sophisticated version of everyone else; you crave slavery. You were shown the truth and panicked. It is freedom you fear.’
Un-Scab-like retorts and denials filled his mind, but he just lay there and watched them. He could not know if what they were saying was true. That secret had long since been eaten from his mind. Connected though they were, with access to the highest levels of intelligence the Monarchist systems could gather, they could not have known the truth of his expulsion from the Elite. But there was something in their words that Scab did not like at an unconscious and possibly instinctual level. If this was what empathy felt like then he did not like it.
Again it was the sympathy on Horrible Angel’s face that got to him the most.
‘Throw him out,’ she told her brother. ‘Ludwig is killing his friend now.’ She turned and walked silently away, leaving Scab more than a little confused. He was about to die now but it wouldn’t be enough.
‘I don’t have any friends,’ he told Fallen Angel. It seemed very important that Fallen Angel understand this before he died.
Scab liked vacuum – he had been exposed before and felt a kinship with it. He was still alive. The virus had been trying to eat his flesh back to his skeleton when they flung him into space. Somehow the Basilisk had found him. The ship’s medical systems were able to counteract the virus but only because the virus allowed it. They had tested him but let him live. Scab could only imagine it was because they thought it crueller this way, but he couldn’t forget the look of sympathy on Horrible Angel’s face.
Vic opened his eyes to the inside of a clone tank in some faceless insurance company laboratory. He had never expected to see this again. Vic had used up the last of his insurance money when Scab had last killed him. More than anything, it annoyed Vic that Scab would not tell him why he had killed him the last time. He said that if Vic knew he would just have to kill him again. So someone else had paid for him to be cloned.
Vic felt the itch of the nano-sculpting of raw flesh as they rebuilt him. This was the cheap part, the flesh. The expensive part would be putting his hard-tech augments back in. The gear fetishist part of his custom-designed humanesque personality hoped that whoever was footing the bill would opt for upgrades. He felt the crawling beneath his vat-grown chitinous skull as neunonic-filled liquid software and hardware was implanted. This comforted him. Soon he would be able to communicate.
He had almost been free, he thought, free of Scab, but someone had brought him back again.
The memory upload of his last minutes hit him. Terror had overwhelmed him. He had been sat in the C and C/lounge of the Basilisk, feeling enough tension to make an augmented heart explode. The walls of the ship had been transparent but space was a blank canvas. There had been something behind him. It had ghosted through the hull of the ship. He had done the pheromonic equivalent of shitting himself. He did not want to turn around. He knew the machine was waiting for him.
They had taken everything from his mind, where he had been, what he had been doing. All they had left him with was the memory of the machine’s ability to kill him in a moment and make it feel like eternity. A lifetime of agony. That was their message for him.
What he couldn’t understand was why he still lived. Ludwig would have sensed the memory download application in his neunonics. Neunonic viruses that could be carried through the download process to wipe the victim’s mind utterly were among the most difficult and expensive to create, but an Elite, particularly a machine Elite, would certainly have access to them.
Through the gel he could make out unfocused grey eyes staring at him. Vic ignored his partner and as soon as the neunonics were installed set up a secure interface to the Basilisk. Even lobotomised (the ship had lost a disagreement with Scab), trying to talk to the ship’s AI felt like trying to coax a frightened animal out of hiding. Ludwig had hurt the ship as well and removed the relevant part of its memory.