A Quantum Mythology Read Free Page B

for the best.’ As he spoke, the Knight used his Far-Eastern knife to open a wound in his hand. He squeezed some of the blood from his wound into a small silver cup he had produced from somewhere on his person.
    ‘What are you doing?’ the Hellaquin demanded.
    ‘Just a touch of necromancy.’
    The Hellaquin crossed himself. ‘I have no taste for this.’
    The Knight looked up at the Hellaquin. ‘We need to know where he got the gun. If you don’t want to bear witness, go upstairs and set the fire.’ Then he poured the blood from the cup into the dead man’s mouth.
    The dead body started to convulse and writhe, flesh flowed like hot wax and the screaming started as the demon in the dead man’s flesh fought with the devils in the Knight’s blood. The Hellaquin climbed the curved marble staircase, trying not to look down, trying not hear the twisted words wrenched from the corpse.
    ‘Where on Steelhouse Lane?’ the Knight shouted at the writhing carcass.
    Upstairs, the Hellaquin found the bodies. All he could offer them was a pyre on a hot summer’s night.
     

 
     
    2
    A Long Time After the Fall
     
    Vic lay dead on the deck of the Church frigate the St Brendan’s Fire . Scab was watching the most valuable uplifted monkey in Known Space die. She was dying because foreign nanites were trying to colonise every last bit of her body.
    Even as she gasped for breath, Scab was able to appreciate how beautiful she was. He might have felt nothing, but he understood aesthetics. If there was artifice in her genetic make-up, then it was old, powerful and elegant. She did not look sculpted like most in Known Space. She looked like she had been born with perfect bone structure, dark eyes and thick brown hair. She was tall, slender to the point of gauntness. Her skin had a porcelain quality to it, or at least it had until the advertising virals started crawling across it when she fell victim to the ambient nanite pollution from which most people were protected by their nano-screens.
    Scab watched her die. He understood that she was a nat, unaugmented. He’d seen them before. They were bred in protected environments for study, as pets, kinks or food – curiosities, little more. So why was this one so sought-after? The Church, the Monarchist systems, the Consortium – they all wanted her. Why was this nat so important? He felt sure she was from before the Fall, but there had to be more to it than that. How could she be the key to bridge technology? Why had she been aboard the strange S-tech craft? Why had the Church monk’s hand opened the cocoon?
    Absently he noticed that the red steam in the air was coming from his blood meeting the still burning-hot energy dissipation grid woven into his clothes. More smoke billowed as some of his corrupted blood dripped onto the frigate’s deck. Vic had done more than his fair share of damage before Scab had driven the – very illegal – S-tech energy javelin through the other bounty killer’s chest. The powerfully built, hard-tech-augmented insect’s chest cavity was now a hollow fused mess.
    The codes Vic had ’faced to Scab before Vic chose to attack him gave the human bounty killer complete control of the Church frigate the ’sect had stolen on Scab’s orders. The ship’s AI was putting up a fight against the high-end control-virus program attacking it. Their erstwhile employer had been generous with the expenses, but that arrangement was at an end now as Scab intended to double-cross his employer.
    Most of the few surviving crewmembers aboard the frigate were locked down. Scab absently reprogrammed the frigate’s security nano-screen, weaponising it, turning it into a self-replicating flesh-eating nano-swarm.
    He looked down at the girl. The closest thing he had to a sense of humour was tempted to let her die there. Let it all have been for nothing. On the other hand, that wouldn’t help him get what he wanted.
    Scab watched her for a moment longer. Then he picked her up,