The Age of Scorpio

24. Now

Du Bois opened the door to the interrogation room.

‘I’ve got your—’ Then he saw Beth sprawled on the floor. He dropped her brass knuckles and the Balisong knife on the table and knelt by her. Working quickly, he checked for signs of life. Satisfied that she was just unconscious, he rolled her onto her back. His nano-screen was picking up trace signs of something else just having been in the room, but its attempts to find out more were being frustrated.

Consciousness returned to Beth with an immediacy she had never felt before when waking up. She was not surprised to find herself lying with du Bois kneeling over her. She was aware of her surroundings with a new totality. She was also conscious of the pain from her injuries receding, aware of the wounds healing. Something was very different about her. Her hand reaching up to her face was a reflex action, nothing more. She knew that the blood the strange earth-smelling figure had spat at her was gone.

‘What happened?’ du Bois asked, looking at her strangely.

‘I think I must have passed out,’ Beth answered, her hard-earned suspicion of authority figures kicking in. ‘Bit embarrassing really. I guess I took more of a kicking than I thought I did.’ She stood up. She felt better than she had in a long time, but there was something strange, a heat under her skin. It didn’t feel wrong but it was certainly different. Du Bois was watching her carefully. Beth noticed her knife and knuckles on the table. ‘You’re giving me them back?’

Du Bois seemed lost in thought for a moment before answering. ‘Everyone should be able to defend themselves.’ He took his wallet out of his pocket and removed a handful of twenty-pound notes. ‘Go home, Beth, before this city kills you.’ Because it’ll be time soon enough, he added silently. Beth would have loved to be able to refuse the money but she didn’t. She needed to look her father in the eyes one more time.

‘Am I free to go?’ she asked. Du Bois nodded.

The noise that Inflictor Doorstep was making with the corpse of the dead dealer was beginning to get on King Jeremy’s nerves. As well as turning his body into grey armoured flesh inscribed with spirals, Inflictor had also rewired his own brain to mimic the more bestial of his favourite villains from various media sources. Even Jeremy was wondering if he’d gone too far.

‘Well?’ Baron Albedo asked.

King Jeremy was looking at what seemed to be a tab of acid, a little red stain on a piece of blotting paper. He touched a lost-tech-modified glove against the stain. The molecule-sized machinery that infused the glove took a sample of the red smear and the result of the diagnostic appeared in Jeremy’s vision.

‘It’s blood.’

‘Nanites?’

Jeremy just nodded, trying to ignore the wet ripping noises. He would leave part of his nano-screen behind to replicate itself and then seek out any forensic evidence they had left and destroy it.

‘Biological or machine?’

There were thought to be two distinct forms of the lost tech. Jeremy believed they were from two disparate, ancient and probably long-dead alien civilisations. One technology was biological, the other seemed to be machine-based.

‘Biological,’ King Jeremy said. ‘It’s her blood. Some fucking simpleton can’t see beyond their own petty drug dealing.’

‘There’s a hunger…’ Dracimus said. He was lying in a pool of blood on the filthy floor next to the corpse Inflictor was shredding. He had adopted a different diagnostic approach and just taken some of the Red Rapture. Given that it might open gates, that had been a bit rash, Jeremy thought. ‘… behind the sky… waiting for us.’

‘Inflictor?’

The demon-headed boy swung round to face Jeremy, his face and arms red. Hard to believe that he had once been a weedy kid from Iowa with an off-the-chart IQ and a distinct lack of empathy. Still, now he could be more than the next school shooter, Jeremy thought. ‘I hope you’ve left the brain, mouth and larynx attached.’

Inflictor nodded.

Albedo pulled a syringe from a hardened case on his belt. The blue glow from the material inside the syringe was nothing more than an affectation. Dracimus leaned down and pushed the syringe into the dead dealer’s eye.

‘Run a current through him,’ Jeremy said.

It felt like a static shock, only more so. Then it was constant. Something wasn’t right. Was he being electrocuted? Then there was the feeling of drifting away from himself. Like good ketamine. Dissociation.

The previous few moments came back to him as a red memory. The knock on the door. The four guys in hoodies. American accents. One of them had been a demon. Jaime panicked. His instinct was to flail about, but he couldn’t feel his body.

Jaime opened his eyes. They were still there. There were two guys leaning over him. Both with handsome chiselled features. Crossbreeds of American high-school alpha males and Greek gods, Jaime decided.

Jaime opened his mouth.

‘I don’t care,’ the one on the left said. ‘You’ll try to reason, bargain and then beg. I don’t care. I just need to know who gave you the Red Rapture and where I can find them.’

‘Look, you don’t understand. I’m scared of you, I really fucking am. I think you’ve put some horrible shit in me, but this guy… this guy… he does things, y’know?’ Jaime didn’t like the way his voice sounded. It seemed to lack depth, resonance.

The one on the left looked saddened. It was mockery.

‘Albedo, can you provide some perspective, please?’

The one on the right reached down and Jaime felt fingers grab his hair.

‘Hey, what the fuck!’ He felt himself being lifted, very light. There was something wrong with his neck, as if there was something hanging from it. Jaime looked down on his decapitated body. He started to scream. He screamed until they unplugged him.

Du Bois pushed open the door to the coroner’s examination room.

‘Out,’ he told the assembled people gawping at the corpse of the creature he’d shot in the old dog stadium. One older man, presumably the coroner, opened his mouth to complain. ‘Either get out or I’ll have you arrested under the anti-terrorism laws and hold you indefinitely just to prove what a dick I am.’

Something in his tone, or the rumours which had been flying around Kingston Crescent about who he was and what he did, must have convinced them that he was serious. They left with as much dignity as they could manage. Du Bois didn’t fully understand democracy. It seemed pointless to give people the right to self-determination when so few had any interest in it. Now that humanity had reached a certain level of comfort and people didn’t really seem to want to think for themselves, he believed it was better that they just did what they were told. Then everyone would be happy. Hence he saw the far-reaching powers of the anti-terrorism laws as a step in the right direction, though why they had to be dressed up with the excuse of terrorism he had no idea.

The sheets had already been pulled back from the corpse. It had definitely been human once and probably not that long ago. The changes would have been brought on by thousands of tiny machines capable of reproducing and then rewriting the basic building blocks of life.

Du Bois held his phone over the body and shot footage of it from every conceivable angle. The base human had been modified to be aquatic by the look of it, and then overdesigned with claw-like nails, shark-like teeth and retractable spurs of bone to be someone’s idea of a weapon.

He took out a small leather case, unzipped it and pulled out a small vial. He neurally transmitted an order to the smart matter the vial was made from, and a needle grew out of its base. Du Bois stabbed the needle into the body with some force to break through the overlapping plates of exoskeleton. The blood that filled the vial looked normal enough. The needle retracted as du Bois attached the vial to the bottom of his phone. The screen of the phone showed the results of the blood analysis. It was filled with tiny nanites – an ancient design, the biotech of the Seeders. The worrying thing was that this particular strain of nanites was very rare. They had not come from the Pacific Source. He had only seen this type once before.

Du Bois thought of the secret deep below the family seat on the stormy coast of western Scotland, and transmitted the information from the blood and the footage he had shot to Control. He ran the footage of the creature through an intelligent forensic image program, which reconstructed what it would have looked like the last time it was human. Finally he took the reconstructed images and ran them through facial recognition software against every database currently on the Internet.

He sat down, lit a cigarette and gazed at the body, thinking about Beth going toe to toe with what was effectively a killing machine. It took the software just over twenty minutes to find some matches. This was due to Internet speeds and the slowness of the systems it had invaded, not the software itself. Du Bois looked at the possibilities, discounting them until he found one that seemed to match. Matthew Bryant had lived in one of the nicer parts of Portchester, near the castle, and worked at a large computer company in senior management. He had two kids in their teens, the eldest at a good university. His life story was a list of the successful, sensible and responsible choices you made in life if you wanted a happy one – from a conventional perspective anyway. He had also been a keen scuba diver. It had been during a dive in the Solent that he had gone missing. It was assumed that he had had some sort of mishap, and his body had been washed away by one of the nastier tides in the channel.

Things were starting to click into place for du Bois. He began to understand why he was struggling to seed the city. There were still pieces missing, however. He switched applications on the phone and checked the trace. The missing pieces would have to wait. There was still some unfinished business to take care of.

It took more courage for Beth to push open the door to the flat than it had to fight the monster. What made it worse was that Maude was so relieved to see her still alive. It didn’t occur to her to be angry with her new friend. Her reaction nearly overwhelmed Beth. She had grown up in a very cold environment. She wasn’t used to this. The tears came again.

It wasn’t lost on Uday, however, that Beth had brought violence into their home. He glared at her angrily.

The explanations had been difficult. How could she tell them what had happened? She settled for saying that she had just got a bit of a kicking. She found out that the muscle she’d knifed in the leg was called Trevor. They had bound up his legs as best they could, given him lots of painkillers, some vodka and, astonishingly, made him a cup of cocoa. Eventually he had thanked them and with some difficulty limped away, telling them he was going to A & E but he’d keep them out of it.

‘My bayonet?’ Beth asked. Uday and Maude looked confused. ‘The knife.’

‘Oh,’ Maude said in a small voice. Uday gave Beth a look of disgust.

‘It’s in the bathroom sink. It’s still… dirty.’

‘It’s an heirloom, my great-grandfather’s,’ Beth told them by way of an explanation. She didn’t think it had appeased Uday in any way, shape or form.

‘I told you.’ It was all he had to say. She’d brought it down on them. She was just a different flavour of trouble from Talia.

‘I’m sorry.’ It wasn’t nearly enough. ‘I’m gone now.’

‘You don’t have to,’ Maude said, but Beth had been speaking to Uday, and his face was made of stone.

‘Will they come back here looking for you?’ he asked. Beth considered. She didn’t want to lie to them, not after this.

‘They might,’ she finally said. ‘Can you get out of Portsmouth?’

‘Yeah, we’ll just leave our degrees, drop everything and go into hiding, or maybe we can return to our families, thousands of pounds in debt with nothing to show for it,’ Uday suggested acidly, every word hitting home. ‘I take it we can’t go to the police?’ Beth wasn’t sure how to answer that.

‘We’re staying,’ Maude said firmly. Both of them turned to look at her. ‘I don’t care how scared we are, I’m not going to drop my life for these… bullies!’ The small goth was angry. Beth guessed it was this resolve that had stopped her from leaving university when evidence of her fledgling porn career had surfaced.

‘I’ll sort it,’ Beth said. She said it almost out of desperation and then realised that she meant it. She just didn’t know how to go about it. ‘I have to go up north then I’ll come back and sort it.’

‘Yeah?’ Uday demanded sarcastically. ‘You going to go up against some Pompey hood? Just like in a film? I’ve a better idea. Why don’t you just fuck off back to Bradford and stay there? In fact, leave us your address just in case any more arseholes come looking for you.’

‘Uday—’ Maude began.

‘No. She’s no better than her fucking sister. Worse. Talia brought drugs and exploitation with her; at least she didn’t bring violence! Didn’t have us taken hostage in our own house!’

Maude looked like she was about to cry. Beth knew that if Maude cried, she would.

She turned and left the lounge. In the bathroom, the sink looked like it belonged in a slaughterhouse. Beth cleaned the blood off her great-grandfather’s bayonet. She had a train to catch.

Du Bois parked the Range Rover outside Fort Widley on Portsdown Hill, another of the Victorian structures built to defend Portsmouth from a French invasion that had never come. A massive red-brick edifice built into the chalk of the hillside, the fort provided a commanding view of the suburbia and commercial estates below, then Portsmouth, the Solent, the Isle of Wight and beyond, though much was obscured in the murk of low cloud on the grey morning.

He checked the trace again. It was almost irrelevant now that they had an address. It was more a question of timing rather than anything else. He still had more than enough time to make the drive.

Du Bois climbed out of the four-by-four. It had been too late to make enquiries last night after he had let Beth go, but this morning he had rung around Mr Bryant’s friends and family, particularly other members of the Solent Sub-Aqua Exploration Club based at Fort Widley. He had discovered some interesting things. Anna Bryant was scared of something, something that she was not prepared to go into over the phone. When he’d tried to speak to friends of Bryant from the diving club he discovered a lot of the numbers were disconnected. Entire families had disappeared with only a few missing-persons reports filed.

Du Bois finally got hold of a spouse. Through tears and anger he was told that all the members of the club had begun to act strangely. They were spending more and more time either diving or at the fort, though they had become very secretive about what they were doing. The woman’s husband had become less communicative. He had been nasty, even with his children. His diet had changed. He had started to ‘smell funny’. Eventually he had announced that he was leaving his job and his family. The estranged spouse hadn’t used the word cult, but it sounded a bit like that.

The club had a large lock-up at the fort behind a huge arched doorway with two iron-reinforced doors. The padlock proved no challenge for du Bois, and he pulled one of the doors open. Inside was a dark cavernous space and the stench was overwhelming. It was the reek of people living rough, using the place as a toilet, and the smell of the sea at low tide.

Du Bois moved cautiously. The place was a mess. Most of the equipment hadn’t been touched in months. His eyes cut through the darkness, amplifying the light from outside. The crates of diving equipment made it somewhat labyrinthine, but he could see no signs of life. There was a scattering of bedding and camping equipment, but something about their arrangement made them look more like nests than an area where people were sleeping rough.

Du Bois stopped and looked up. Dangling from one of the exposed roof beams, suspended on a chain with a meathook through its lower leg, was a body. It had clearly been there, rotting, for a while. Du Bois knew what a partially eaten corpse looked like.

Behind it was a large tank of murky green water containing a dark shape. Du Bois approached cautiously. He had the urge to draw the .45 but resisted. He still had the sense that there was nobody else in here, an intuition confirmed in part by his blood-screen. He magnified his vision and improved the resolution. It was an effigy made of scavenged bits of driftwood and marine detritus, and looked like a Sheela-na-gig, a fertility statue, an exaggerated and swollen pregnant female form. But there was something warped and wrong about the figure. All around the tank were the bodies of rats, birds, dogs, cats, various other small animals and even two sheep, a pig and a cow. None of them showed signs of having been eaten.

Du Bois had had enough. It was clear the place had been abandoned long ago. With a thought he linked to his phone and texted a request to Control for a clean-up crew. Normal people couldn’t be allowed to know how weird the world actually was. Then with another thought he started a search on material relating to Fort Widley, putting it through various filters to harvest the information he was looking for, though he wasn’t sure quite what that was.

Walking out into the murky morning light away from the stench was a blessed relief. The result of the search came back. Despite a mild feeling of being violated by information, du Bois sifted through the material in his mind rather than externally on the phone. The closest he came to what he was looking for were unsubstantiated urban myths about tunnels that led from the Palmerston forts on Portsdown Hill, down into the city and even as far as the sea defences on the front at Southsea.

Du Bois thought tunnels unlikely in engineering terms. He double-checked against online Ministry of Defence files. According to documents from the Victorian era, they had looked at tunnels but found them to be ‘unfeasible’. He didn’t have time to go searching for legendary tunnels. He added a search request to the clean-up crew request and then climbed into the Range Rover. He headed north.

The train pulled into the grey stone and concrete valley that was Bradford in the late afternoon. Never pretty, the murky weather had leached all the colour from the city. Beth had the money for a bus but felt better than she ever had before, her wounds all but healed during the journey. She almost ran up the Otley Road, past the cemetery where she’d spent many hours either with friends or alone, and turned into the familiar street of rain-slick-grey, stone terraced housing. It was only when she put the key in the lock that she knew this was for the last time.

After all the life and movement in Portsmouth, after feeling content, however briefly, for the first time, after the possibility of an actual life and then the screaming red violence, the dusty dirty house where cigarette smoke hung constantly in the atmosphere seemed so still and dead. The smell of a human being rotting away added to the feeling. The thing was, Beth couldn’t remember a time when that hadn’t been the case.

Her father was in the lounge, as ever, his oxygen mask hanging down as he sucked on a cigarette. The glow of the cigarette tip was the only point of light in the room.

‘Hello, Dad.’

‘Did you find her?’ he asked, his voice little more than a rasp. Beth shook her head and watched disappointment spread across his face. She tried to muster sympathy for him, even pity. All she could do was try not to be any crueller than she had to. He had made his choices. He had to live with them.

‘Who is she?’ She watched her father swallow hard. Saw the fear replace disappointment.

‘I…’ he started. It would have been easier if he had been a better liar. Then he could have told her that he loved her as much as Talia, or even just loved her at all.

‘I’ll go back and look… I’ll find her, but you have to not lie to me. If you lie, I swear you’ll never see either of us again and I’ll go to the police.’ It was a gamble, a bluff, but prison had made her a better liar than her dad.

‘The police will be the least of our problems.’

‘You’re dying. It doesn’t matter now.’ It wasn’t said unkindly. The saddest thing, for Beth anyway, was that there was just no feeling there at all. ‘You stole her, didn’t you? You took her from some nice people, destroyed their lives and brought her to this dead place?’

‘You don’t know what you’re talking about!’ Beth was surprised by the anger in his voice, though it quickly subsided into a hacking cough.

She watched him for a while and then realised that this was the cruelty she was trying to avoid. She stood up, took the cigarette from his yellow-stained fingers and stubbed it out in the overflowing ashtray. She was careful to make sure there were no sparks from the cigarette left before she put the mask over her father’s face and spun the wheel on the oxygen tank. She went and sat down, letting her father recover, until he took the mask off and spoke.

‘When you were born, you were too big, odd-looking. You did something to your mother, tore her up inside so she could never have children again, and we’d wanted to have a big family. It was you that killed her in the end, you know? Complications from your birth.’

And there it was, Beth thought, the reason for all the resentment she’d endured growing up. A crime she’d committed while she was being born. She said nothing.

‘And we were left with this strange little girl who didn’t look like other little girls, didn’t want to be like other little girls.’ He put the mask back over his face and took more gasping breaths. Wasn’t treated like other little girls, Beth added silently, wasn’t loved like other children.

‘So you stole a child?’

Her father shook his head and removed the mask from his face.

‘No! We’re not monsters, not kidnappers. We saved that child. Saved Talia. And because we did something good, we got the daughter we deserved.’

He put the mask back on. What Beth realised then was that he wasn’t actually trying to hurt her. He never had been. As far as he was concerned, this was just the way that things happened.

‘It was a friend of your mother’s from school. Not a close one, mind. She picked us because there was little connection between her and us. Beautiful woman, bright too, very intelligent and good at sports.’

Not like us then.

‘She’d heard that we wanted kids but were having trouble. You know how small this town is. Someone had offered her a lot of money to get pregnant with a view to adopting the child when it was born. Rich people. But she found out that wasn’t what they had in mind. They were some kind of cult. They thought she was important somehow – something to do with genealogy, bloodlines, selective breeding, all that nonsense. They had a place high up on the moors. She told us they were breeding children to be sacrificed.’

Beth was shaking her head.

‘No, it’s true! I didn’t believe it at first either, but she was scared, really scared. Not for her – she knew she was dead – but for the baby.’

What was clear was that her father believed this stuff. A week ago she would have dismissed it as nonsense, but it had been a busy week.

‘She had arranged to take the baby out – to Helmsley – and they’d let her, though they’d sent someone with her. We left you with your gran and actually disguised ourselves. We took a carrycot the same as Natalie’s and put a doll in it. Then in a tearoom we made the swap – in the bathroom. Scariest thing I’ve ever done in my life.’

And then you got your proper little girl. But she’d known, somehow she’d always known, and she’d resented us for it. It occurred to Beth that they’d got away with it probably because they were so inconsequential.

‘They killed her, you know,’ he said between rasping gasps of oxygen. ‘Ran her down up on the moors shortly after we got Talia.’

Beth just nodded. She thought about saying all the things that she wanted to say. That it wasn’t her fault her mum couldn’t have children. That it shouldn’t have mattered that she was big. That she wasn’t actually ugly. That she had loved them unconditionally. That she missed her mum as well. That Talia was a horrible person who didn’t care about anyone but herself. But she knew it wouldn’t help. He genuinely wouldn’t understand. He was just a stupid, selfish, dying old man. He might as well have been a stranger. She stood up.

‘Where’s Talia?’ he demanded.

Your perfect little girl’s been doing porn, turning tricks and is very probably dead. Beth very nearly said it.

‘I don’t know.’

‘Where are you going? I need help. Looking after.’

Beth’s laugh was without bitterness, but was devoid of humour as well.

‘I’m going upstairs to get my records and then I’m going back to Portsmouth to find my bitch of a sister and get her out of whatever shit she’s in, and then that’s it for me and this family.’ Beth thought about it for a moment or two. ‘I went to prison because I killed Talia’s boyfriend. I caught him beating her. It looked like he was going to murder her. She testified against me, and none of you even came and saw me, let alone said thank you.’

‘You helped put your mother in the grave!’

‘I don’t think I did. I don’t think this family deserves me.’

Beth turned away from her father for the last time. She went upstairs to get her records. It was so sad that they were the only things left for her in this house.

He heard the front door pulled shut. It was the sound of finality, an end. Tears rolled down his cheeks. It wasn’t that Beth was gone. She had never done anything but bring pain to the family. It was just that she had been the last faint hope he’d had of seeing his little girl Talia again. After all Beth had done, he still found himself surprised by her selfishness.

‘That’s a fine young woman you have there, Mr Luckwicke,’ du Bois said from the corner.

‘I knew you’d come.’ He closed his eyes. From the moment they had taken Talia from the tearoom in Helmsley, he’d been living in fear, waiting for this moment.

Du Bois stepped into view. Twenty years gone, and Natalie’s bodyguard hadn’t aged a day.

‘Oh, how we looked for you,’ the blue-eyed, blond-haired killer told him.

‘Nobody ever thinks to look here. We’re not needed any more.’

Du Bois nodded.

‘Talia?’

‘Is not your daughter. Your daughter just left.’

‘You’re going to kill her?’

‘Beth? I hope not.’

‘Talia.’

‘I’m going to kill you, but I’ve known that for more than twenty years. I’m relieved that you’re not a pervert. I think you probably did the best you could for Natalie, but after the little exchange I just overheard, I don’t think I’m going to feel very bad about it.’

‘You don’t know—’

‘No, you don’t know how hard Beth has been fighting for her sister. Now do you want me to make it look like murder, suicide, natural causes or an accident?’ Du Bois hadn’t asked the question unkindly.

The old man looked at du Bois, appalled. ‘I’m not going to choose!’

‘It’s your last chance for a bit of control in your life.’

The two men stared at each other for a while.

‘Suicide.’

Du Bois nodded. ‘Your guilty conscience does you some credit at the end.’

To Mr Luckwicke’s surprise, in his last moments he thought of Beth. He remembered her smiling and laughing when she was very young.

As du Bois walked across Peel Park to where he had left the Range Rover, he set his phone to checking mobile-phone call logs. When that didn’t work, he started cross-referencing traffic through cellular-phone masts.

He would have to drive quickly if he wanted to see any of Alexia’s concert. Gigs, she calls them gigs, he reminded himself. He had already arranged for her, the band and the gaggle of lackeys, parasites, sycophants and would-be lovers who followed her around to gain entry to Portsea Island through the roadblocks.

The Range Rover unlocked itself as du Bois approached, pulling off his leather gloves.

Du Bois had been right to bring his own whisky. The stuff they had behind the bar on South Parade Pier was horrible. Fortunately the bouncers had left him alone after he had shown them one of the warrant cards he habitually carried with him.

The venue was packed. He had made it back for the second half of the gig, though his driving hadn’t been terribly legal. Clearly Alexia’s band – Light – had something of a following, locally anyway. To du Bois’s eyes the audience all looked like they had gone out of their way to look either grotesque or as if they had next to no moral standards. The dancing looked more like the melee at the base of a castle wall during a siege. He watched as dancer after dancer scrambled onto the stage and then threw themselves back into the crowd, and wondered what the point was.

The music could have been worse. Du Bois could not deny the technical skill of both his sister and the musicians who played with her, and they definitely seemed to put feeling into their music. Their songs were much longer than the pop music he had come to expect in the last sixty or so years, but at ten to fifteen minutes were still much shorter than what du Bois considered to be proper music. There were moments of quiet melody and clean vocals that du Bois had to admit were quite beautiful. Alexia’s voice was still clear and pure but he struggled to listen to the incredibly heavy bits and all the screaming. Though he had to admit, in terms of endurance alone, the screaming was an extraordinary vocal performance, but if you were just going to scream like that he couldn’t see the point in writing any lyrics.

By the time he finished the whisky, he had overcome the guilt at taking the night off. Perhaps it was the darkness of the music making him pessimistic but it almost certainly didn’t matter now. He had a selection of possible numbers, all pay-as-you-go phones with no credit cards registered to them. He had phoned them en route from Bradford and managed to rule out four of the seven. The other three he had set his phone to ring on a regular basis, but they were all currently turned off. If there was an answer, it would connect through to him immediately and trace programs would triangulate the signal. There wasn’t much else he could do.

He waited until the venue was empty before he lit up a cigarette while he waited for Alexia. He assumed there were still staff from the pier somewhere, but the band had gone on and most of the venue had been swept up. The bouncers had left long ago.

‘Well?’ Alexia asked. After all these years he still struggled to find something honest to say that wouldn’t hurt her feelings. ‘You hated it, didn’t you?’ She was laughing.

‘I liked bits of it. You know, the bits with melody and form.’ She laughed at him again. ‘You knew I wasn’t going to like it. All the roaring and screaming.’

‘You are so old,’ she said, laughing at him some more. She leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. ‘Thank you for making this possible, and thank you for subjecting yourself to it.’ Du Bois looked pained. ‘No, really it means a lot.’ She straightened up. ‘Just let me clean up a bit…’

‘Are you still not ready? Everyone else has gone.’

‘Hush now. I’ll change and then we’ll find a deliciously sleazy club somewhere. Perhaps we can find some muscle-bound young stud who can help pull the stick out of your arse and maybe, then, we might be able to get you laid.’ Du Bois looked less than happy at this.

‘Is sex your answer to everything?’ he asked disapprovingly.

‘It seems a healthy response to the impending end of the world.’ Alexia was suddenly very serious. She turned and wandered back towards the changing room.

Du Bois stood up and headed for the stage. One of the keyboards hadn’t been put away. He sat down in front of it and pressed a few keys. Nothing happened. He had to download the instructions straight into his mind before he was able to plug it in, turn it on, get it to make noise and find a setting that made the instrument sound vaguely like a piano.

Long steely fingers started with the opening strains of Debussy’s ‘Clair de Lune’. It didn’t feel the same as a real piano: there was something lacking in the personality of the instrument, no sense of exploration like you had every time you sat down at a new piano. However, he had to admit, as his fingers danced across the keys, that it sounded good. Quickly he was lost, playing the piece from memory. He remembered the first time he’d heard it – in a bar in Paris, played on a badly tuned upright as Europe headed inexorably towards its most ruinous war to date.

‘You’re much better than you give yourself credit for,’ Alexia said as he finished. He had known she was there and glanced over at her. She wore her long straight hair loose and had on a pair of tight jeans, ridiculously oversized boots and a sleeveless T-shirt with some horrible design on it that du Bois found difficult to approve of.

‘I’m not sure how much is me and how much is the blood,’ he said. Alexia came over and laid a hand on his shoulder. Du Bois could still remember the first time he had heard her – him, then – sing, the first time he/she had played the harp, in what seemed like a fleeting moment when their parents had been alive.

It got darker for a moment. A shadow had passed in front of one of the lights on the pier outside. It was a warning. Du Bois stood up, hand going into his jacket.

‘Malcolm?’ Alexia sounded worried. Outside the shadows seethed, coming to life like a swarm of black flies. Then the swarm was pouring in under the main doors to the venue.

‘Go!’ du Bois said.

‘But—’

‘Now!’ The .45 was in his hand as the swarm started to form into something resembling a solid shape. Du Bois ejected the magazine and replaced it with a magazine of nano-tipped bullets.

‘I’m not going to lea—’

Du Bois turned to her. ‘Alexia, please. I can’t fight and worry about you as well,’ he pleaded. The form was beginning to look like the bag lady they had seen at the hill fort.

‘It’s her, isn’t it?’

‘Go! Please.’

Reluctantly, Alexia left the stage. Du Bois moved towards the bag lady, the .45 held securely in a two-handed combat grip. She was a nano-form now, though he doubted she understood it in those terms. She probably thought she was some ancient thing of the earth.

‘So you’re not going to leave it alone then?’ she asked, her voice a gravelly rasp.

‘I can’t. Not until I hear a better plan.’

‘Stop trying to find the girl. Her mother is the sea. They tried to wake her once before and left only old night and chaos in their wake.’

Du Bois had no idea what she was talking about.

‘Are you here to kill…’ He began and then fired the pistol three times in quick succession, hoping to catch her off guard. His internal targeting systems showed him where each bullet was going to hit. Centre-mass, nearly perfect shots. She darted forward, turning into an animated cloud of black. Solid again, she lashed out with her stick even as it was elongating and starting to resemble something more like a spear. The .45 flew from numb fingers as the spear butt caught his hand. She brought the butt around again in a long but frighteningly fast sweep. Du Bois felt bones break in his leg as he was swept off his feet. It was more like the ground rushing up to hit him than him falling to the ground.

‘A gun!’ She was angry now. Fingers tearing through his flesh, even as it hardened. Fingers grasping ribs, rupturing internal organs. Happening too quickly. He felt himself picked up by his ribcage and flung through the air. The moment she let go, flesh started growing back, bones began to re-knit. He crashed through a window, thudding onto the wooden boards of the pier outside the venue.

She was a cloud again. Fortunately du Bois had the presence of mind to roll away as she solidified over him. She brought the spear down, breaking the railway-sleeper-thick beams of the pier’s walkway.

Du Bois rolled to his feet, the bones in his leg re-knitting just enough to support his weight again. He grabbed the punch dagger from his belt buckle and transmitted a desperate instruction to the assembler contained in its hilt.

The bag lady stalked after him and thrust out with the spear. Du Bois rammed the punch blade into some iron railings and jumped, grabbed one of the lamp posts on the edge of the pier and swung out over the water. The lamp post was bending dangerously, close to breaking. The spearhead just missed as she stabbed at where his back had been. He swung back round to the pier and let go, catching the bag lady with a kick to the head that sent her staggering back. She recovered quickly and delivered a stepping kick that drove him to the floor, then stabbed the spear down towards him. Du Bois rolled out of the way, using the momentum to bring him up into a crouch. The beams beneath where he had been exploded as the spear went through them.

Du Bois leaped as she swung one-handed at him with the spear, powerful augmented legs taking him high over her head. He knew that he needed to keep out of her reach until he had a weapon.

All along the pier the lights on the lamp posts flickered out. In the amusement arcade the fruit machines died. The surrounding streets and houses went dark. Lightning played across the white-painted iron railings of the pier. The assembler in the hilt of the punch blade was rewriting the surrounding matter at a molecular level, using a pre-programmed template to create something useful. It needed power to do that, and the weapon it was creating would need power as well.

Du Bois landed and twisted like a serpent, the head of the spear just missing him. He rolled forward and then back up onto his feet, sprinting for the wooden wall of a building. She chased. He jumped, put a foot against the wall and then kicked back into a somersault over the bag lady’s head. She stabbed out with the spear again, the head splintering panels in the wall. She raked it back, tearing through the wall like it was paper, trying to get at du Bois, but he was running back to where he had left his knife.

Du Bois tore the new form free of the railing, leaving a large hole where the assembler had utilised and subsequently transformed the surrounding molecules. When du Bois thought about such things, which was rarely, he considered it some kind of alien alchemy. The process hadn’t quite finished, but what he was holding looked like a broadsword of the type he had first used in the twelfth century. Except that it was shimmering, indistinct and making a humming noise. The blade was a millimetre thick, very sharp, very hard, oscillating at a furious rate and white hot. A super-efficient, solid-state battery, which had just drained half the power from Southsea, powered the sword.

Du Bois turned to face the bag lady, who immediately became a swarm and engulfed him. He felt his flesh open everywhere. She painted him red as he screamed. He felt like little more than meat as he hit the ground again. These were wounds that his internal systems would not heal quickly. The nanites that made them would war with his as they tried to fix the wound. It was over. He could not fight this. He was wondering why she was bothering with the spear.

She reformed a few metres away. Looking down at him.

‘I think you would have made the right decision given time, but there isn’t any. I think you’re just too weak.’

Du Bois pushed himself up onto all fours and then to his feet. He looked like he had been scribbled on with a razor.

‘If you’re going to do that,’ he managed, ‘then you can’t complain about me using a gun.’ He started shutting down his pain receivers. It would mean he would not know his limits. He would probably be dead before he was aware of it, but he knew he had to die on his feet fighting.

‘A fair fight?’ she asked. He nodded, though both knew it would never be fair. ‘A good death.’

‘I’ve lived long enough,’ he said quietly. Du Bois knew that she would hack the cloning process and he would not be coming back. He knew he would miss this world and the people in it. He would miss Alexia.

He brought the sword up into a two-handed guard. She came at him with a bewildering number of rapid spear strikes: she swung and stabbed at him, two-handed strikes, one-handed thrusts, the spear moving towards him as if it wanted his flesh. He parried and dodged, moving sinuously, always trying to be where she least expected him to be. Ancient moves taught to him deep in the rock. He moved around the spear and her blows but never gained the upper hand. His sword and her spear cut through or destroyed any part of the pier they touched.

He ducked, dancing sideways under the spearhead, a blow meant for the side of his head just missing him. She reversed the movement of the spear and tried a back swing. Du Bois moved forward, for the first time in the fight on the offensive. He blocked the haft of the spear with his left hand, reaching across his body. The force of the blow broke every bone in his hand, but he did not feel it and the bones quickly started to heal again.

He was close enough now, inside her reach. He spat blood in her face. The nanites in the blood immediately attacked her nano-defences. She cried out, although even momentarily distracted she still had the presence of mind to reverse the spear and hit him in the stomach with the butt. She hit him so hard that the blunt force trauma burst the skin and broke three of his ribs, sending splinters of bone into his internal organs. The force of the blow took him off his feet, and he landed on one knee.

Du Bois swung the sword. It was as near a perfect blow as he had ever landed. He cut easily through the haft of the wooden-bladed spear to slice her open from her hip, up her torso and across her face. Then he stood up, reversed his grip, and with all the strength he could muster brought the sword down straight through her, practically bisecting her head and torso. She staggered back. Somehow she didn’t split in two. In the horrific wound all du Bois could see was blackness. The wound started to seal itself like a zip.

He smiled.

‘I win,’ he told her and then lowered the shimmering, humming sword to his side. His phone told him that he had just received a text.

The bag lady spun the two halves of the spear around and jammed them together. The spear immediately healed itself. Then she stalked towards him and stabbed the spear into his foot. He felt the spear blade branch out and start growing up through his flesh, breaking out of and then back through his skin, climbing inexorably towards his heart, lungs and finally his brain to kill him.

Behind them, the wooden building they had wrecked collapsed.

The five distinct reports rolled across the water like thunder. The bag lady was solid when the bullets hit. The nanites infected her nano-form as powerful defences tried to track down each little machine and consume it.

‘Die, you fucking bitch! Die!’ There was more anger there than fear. Alexia attacked with more frenzy than skill with the two long-bladed Japanese fighting knives du Bois had had custom-made for her a long time ago. The weapons were balanced to contain tiny reservoirs in the hilt, the nanites delivered via grooves down the folded steel blades. The nanite virus that had cost Alexia a small fortune to obtain, helped the bullets to overwhelm the bag lady’s defences. It didn’t look like she died so much as turned to smoke.

As the roots retracted from du Bois’s leg, he collapsed to the ground. Alexia dropped her knives and ran across to him.

‘Thank you,’ he managed through a mouthful of blood, as she burst into tears.

Part of the pier collapsed into the sea. Alexia and du Bois were on that part. Alexia had to pull him out of the water. He found himself lying on the pebbled beach looking at the night sky, his view spoilt by the constant blue strobing from the lights of the multitude of emergency vehicles that had turned up.

There had been a heated discussion with paramedics. Du Bois could not afford to have them examine his body. In the end he’d had to show his special-forces warrant card to some high-ranking police officers and have them threaten to arrest the paramedics if they didn’t leave him alone. All the while, Alexia had fiercely stood guard over her brother.

Du Bois lit a cigarette. He’d managed to get a packet from one of the police officers. He reckoned he’d got the cigarettes because they thought he was about to die. Instead he was lying on the pebbles wondering how long it would take for his internal systems to repair themselves.

He pulled out his phone.

‘You know you can do that internally, with your systems? The phone’s just an external security filter and storage device,’ Alexia told him.

‘I got a text during the fight, but the phone’s systems quarantined it and didn’t pass it on.’

‘Someone was trying to hack you?’ Alexia asked and sat down next to him.

‘It’s from her,’ du Bois said, sounding confused. It had been sent moments before the bag lady had died.

The bag lady’s jamming during the fight had confused du Bois’s blood-screen but even through the jamming he had been aware of Alexia. The bag lady’s systems were more sophisticated than his; she too must have been aware of Alexia sneaking up on her with his gun.

Du Bois ran a security diagnostic on the quarantined message. There was nothing there as far as he could see. More to the point, the file was tiny. He opened the message.

‘I hope a good death is enough,’ Alexia read. ‘I don’t deserve a good death. I am a coward. I am too connected to leave. No, that is a lie. I am too frightened to leave and I do not want to become a ghost frozen in brass. There are so few of us left now. You must do the right thing. I have faith in you.’ Alexia stared at the screen and then at du Bois. The message was signed with an unfamiliar name.

‘Do you suppose that’s her real name?’ he wondered.

‘Couldn’t she just have committed suicide?’

‘She had to die in battle. She was a lot older than us.’

He took another drag on the cigarette. It was a long time since he had been this badly hurt, perhaps even back when he was just a normal human. He noticed one of the pay-as-you go phones he had been checking was switched on and his mobile had automatically called it.

He heard a ringing from behind him. Coincidence, surely. He craned his neck. Every movement hurt. Further up the beach he saw a figure he vaguely recognised. Du Bois magnified his vision, and DC Mossa, the detective who had first told him about Natalie, came into sharp focus. She was frowning as she looked at a ringing mobile. She pressed and held down a button. The ringing stopped and du Bois saw that the phone he had been calling had just been switched off.

‘Have you still got my pistol?’ he asked. Alexia handed him the .45. Water dribbled out of the barrel. He would have to strip it down and clean everything later. He dried it as best he could on the coat a paramedic had lent him and stood up, shrugging off the coat. He limped towards Mossa.

‘Malcolm?’ Alexia got up to follow him. Mossa looked up as he approached.

‘You look like shit.’ she said. Then she noticed the gun in his hand.

‘What’s… What the fuck?!’ Du Bois pointed the gun at her. Mossa had been loud enough to draw attention to herself. People saw the gun and came running. There were firearms officers present. They knew Mossa. They didn’t know du Bois, who found himself with MP5 sub-machine guns levelled at him. After the beating he’d just taken, they didn’t seem all that frightening.

‘I don’t care,’ he told her earnestly. ‘I just want a name, and it won’t get taken any further. You don’t give me a name and I’ll blow your head all over the beach.’ After all, she didn’t know that the gun was empty.

There was lots of shouting. Du Bois frowned. He wanted to hear what Mossa had to say.

‘It was you on the phone?’ she asked. He nodded. She looked at the gun and saw the resolve in du Bois’s face.

‘When I phoned in to re-task the police working the roadblock to help me raid the dog stadium, someone made a call from Kingston Crescent on your phone to another pay-as-you-go in the Tipner area, as close to the old dog stadium as triangulation could make out. You tipped someone off. I want to know who. Tell me and I’ll make sure that you don’t get prosecuted and you get to retire on full pension. Don’t tell me, and I blow your head off and find out anyway.’

There was more shouting. The only reason du Bois hadn’t been shot was that some of the senior officers on the scene thought they knew what he was.

‘McGurk,’ Mossa finally said. It was obvious from the reaction of some of the officers around them that what she had said made her dirty. Guns were lowered. Du Bois’s .45 wasn’t.

‘Where can I find him?’