The Age of Scorpio

33. Now

Beth sat in the Range Rover at the bottom of Alhambra Road, picking dried blood off herself and looking at the wreckage of South Parade Pier. Knowing what she knew now, it was difficult not to think that this was the apocalypse – but happening here in Portsmouth? A back-alley apocalypse largely unnoticed maybe, seen out of the corner of the eye. The helicopters in the sky, the light and the sirens meant that people knew something was happening, but they talked a little louder, the laughter was more forced and they pretended it wasn’t. Or maybe this wasn’t the apocalypse. Maybe this happened all the time in the secret world Beth seemed to have been inducted into. Perhaps every terrorist atrocity or disaster was actually brought about by this hidden conflict of monsters, strange technology and madmen.

‘There’s a house down there with its windows painted black and it smells bad,’ the chief madman said. Beth looked over at du Bois. He wasn’t looking at her; he was glancing over at the partially destroyed pier. Another piece of collateral damage in this hidden war. She wondered if she was on the right side. She would think about that once she got her sister back.

Beth felt something wet coming out of her ear. She touched it and her fingers came away bloody. Indescribable pain lanced through her head and her vision went red. Beth found herself in the passenger foot-well of the Range Rover, curled up as if trying to hide from the pain. It had lessened, but her head still felt white hot and was throbbing. Du Bois was looking at her with a degree of sympathy, though no surprise.

‘What’s happening?’ she managed before screaming again. There were very few people on the streets. The city had been told that it had been the target of multiple terrorist attacks. Home might not feel safe at the moment but it felt safer than outside. However, Beth’s screams, the badly damaged Range Rover and their ragged and bloodstained clothing were drawing attention. Du Bois watched people get out their phones and press one button three times. That didn’t matter. They were covered on that front. They were supposed to be special forces combating a particularly bloody group of terrorists. The local police were kicking up a storm but were holding off. Du Bois knew that helicopters filled with Special Boat Service commandos were en route to Portsmouth.

‘I dumped a lot of information into your head at once.’

‘All the gun stuff?’ Beth said and then suddenly looked out to the choppy Solent under the bright blue sky.

Why did she do that? he wondered. ‘Small-unit tactics and… yes, all the gun stuff. Normally the information would be assimilated in a much more careful manner, but there wasn’t time. Whatever you have inside you coped admirably but there was always going to be bleeding and pain. I’m sorry.’

‘I almost certainly wouldn’t be alive if you hadn’t.’ Assuming I believe you, Beth thought. ‘I would have been trying to fight those things with a bayonet.’

‘You have a bayonet?’ du Bois asked, a little confused.

‘That’s it? That’s what we’re going on? Blacked-out windows and a bad smell?’ Beth asked, holding her head, the pain having subsided a little.

‘The smell’s really bad. And it seems to have its own naturally occurring blood-screen.’

‘I don’t know what that means.’

‘They have access to technology like… It means it’s the people who took your sister, okay?’ du Bois said, sounding exasperated.

Beth looked up the Alhambra Road. It was a road of white-painted terraced houses which had seen better days, like much of the seafront in Southsea. Most of the houses were four or five storeys high.

‘What’s the plan?’ she asked.

‘I do this, and you sit here and try to cope with the pain.’ Beth stared at him. She didn’t realise her eyes were full of blood. ‘No? That’s what I thought. Has it occurred to you that if the pain distracts you, it could get us both killed? Not to mention, I don’t have anything that could even kill hybrids. The best I can hope for is to debilitate them for a while. When they heal they’ll also be very angry about having just been shot.’

‘Really?’ Beth glanced towards the gun compartment in the back of the Range Rover. ‘With all the guns you’ve got?’

‘It’s not about the guns; it’s about how quickly their internal nanites can knit them back together again. I don’t have anything that can stop that from happening, I’ve used them all, and all the guns have a different purpose,’ he said somewhat defensively.

‘Look, I won’t let you down, but if I have to I’m going in there on my own,’ Beth said. Du Bois sighed. ‘So, what’s the plan?’

‘Well, when I was having a look at the house I just happened to attach some frame charges to the bay window…’

Du Bois backed the Range Rover up the narrow road at speed, clipping more than one car. He then yanked the wheel and reversed the four-by-four up against the wall of the house with the blacked-out windows, not quite braking in time, letting the wall of the house stop the car.

With a thought he sent the command to the radio detonators on the frame charges. The bay windows on the front of the house exploded inwards.

Beth was out of the car running at the front door, the Benelli M4 at the ready. Du Bois was on the bonnet of the Range Rover, the H & K UMP in his hands.

Beth fired lock-breaker rounds into the door’s hinges and then the lock, looking away as she fired so she didn’t get blinded by splinters. Du Bois leaped through the hole where the black-painted panes of glass had been.

Beth checked the hall quickly but saw nothing. She raced up the stairs as she heard du Bois kicking in doors on the ground floor. Quickly she checked the rooms on the first floor. There were signs of lots of people having lived there recently. The place stank like sewage. Discarded food, most of it meat, had been left to rot, but there were no flies.

Du Bois ran by her on the landing as he headed up to check the second floor. Moments later Beth was on the stairs heading to the third as du Bois searched below.

On the third floor Beth kicked in the door to the first room she came to, a back bedroom. The same soiled mattresses, the same rotting food, the same smell of sewage. She tried not to gag as she heard du Bois on the stairs to the fourth and final floor.

Beth came out of the back bedroom and moved to the front, kicking it open. This was not quite as bad, perhaps because the blackout curtains that had covered the windows had fallen down, making it less usable.

If her senses hadn’t been quite as acute as they had become recently, Beth wasn’t sure she would have heard the burst of suppressed sub-machine gun fire from upstairs. She probably would have heard du Bois’s cry of surprise, however, and definitely the sound of glass smashing above her. She saw a shape, much larger than du Bois on his own, plummet past the window. She heard the impact and a scream. Beth rushed to the filthy window and looked out. Du Bois was lying mostly on the roof of the Range Rover. Something not unlike what she had fought in the dog stadium was crouched over him, repeatedly slashing at him with an extended spur of bone.

Beth ran out of the room, leaped over the landing banister and landed on the stairs close to the second-floor landing. She ran down the few remaining steps and charged at the landing window. The black-painted single pane exploded outwards as she hit it. It felt like she had a long time to think about what a stupid move this had been on the twenty-five-foot drop to the ground.

Knees bent, Beth landed fine, pleased that the bones in her legs hadn’t exploded. She moved quickly to where the hybrid thing was savaging du Bois’s face. Beth put the shotgun barrel next to the thing’s head and pulled the trigger. Its head disappeared in a spray of blood and bone.

‘Are you okay?’ Beth asked.

‘Of course I’m not fucking okay! I think I’ve broken my spine, and you just about blew my face off!’ Beth glanced down at him and had to admit some of the cuts on his face looked a little like pellet wounds.

‘Sorry?’ she ventured. Du Bois lay there glaring, but at the sky, not at her. ‘Well, get up then,’ Beth finally said.

‘I don’t suppose it’s occurred to you that a forty-foot fall onto my back may have caused some damage?’ he asked testily.

‘Oh,’ Beth said. ‘Will it heal?’

‘Given time.’

‘Were there more up there?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘So she’s not in there?’

‘I saw what looked like a basement door. I wanted to clear up first, so if we went in we wouldn’t get any nasty surprises from behind.’ Du Bois screamed as Beth jarred his broken spine taking the UMP from him. She already had his .45 and his spare clips. She relieved him of his ammunition for the UMP as well.

‘You said yourself that we didn’t have much time.’ Beth glanced down the street again. Despite the clear blue sky, the Solent was looking choppier and choppier. Waves were coming over the beach and onto the road. Some of the seawater was even washing up to where they were.

‘I don’t think –’

‘I’ll be fine.’

‘– that leaving me here this exposed is a good idea and you will not be fine; you will almost certainly be eaten.’

‘Then see you and thanks.’ She turned, UMP at the ready, and headed back into the house.

Beth had found that whenever things happened quickly she was fine. It was when she had time to think that things became tricky. She stood at the door down to the basement for a long time trying to make herself reach out and touch the handle. She knew there was something on the other side of the door. Felt it.

Beth opened the door, barely realising that she was doing it. She was at the top of a set of concrete steps looking down. The smell was strong but it was the smell of the sea and not altogether unpleasant. It was carried on a warm wind. Beth found that she could see perfectly in the darkness. She moved down the stairs. The fear was gone. It had to be her imagination but she felt as if something was calling her.

It wasn’t a basement. It was a crossroads. Tunnels of fused stone and earth met there. It was a wonder the whole street didn’t collapse, Beth thought. The passage going south was alive. It looked like an empty vein and it was where the warm wind was coming from.

At some level Beth knew this was all wrong, fundamentally so. This was part of something that should not be, that didn’t exist in the world as she understood it. But another part, perhaps the part that had been sprayed with blood by something old and strange, understood. It was that part that was being called to by a huge, alien and sleeping mind.

Pushing the calling aside, Beth brought the suppressed Heckler & Koch up in front of her, the folding stock secure against her shoulder, and moved ahead with the weapon at the ready.

The tunnel took her down. She didn’t have to walk far before she knew she was under the sea. She even felt the tube sway with the water and the sound of pebbles sliding up and down.

Beth knew that she should be freaking out. She was clearly walking through something that was alive in some way. She knew first hand how dangerous the things she was following were, but somehow, instinctively, she knew this was okay. She all but felt welcome.

It was pitch dark but her eyes had no problem seeing ahead of her, though everything looked grey. Then there was a glowing. It looked like the chemical light she had seen some animals make on nature documentaries. The word bioluminescence suddenly popped into her head. She wasn’t sure where it had come from – another part of her ‘gift’ from the mad old woman?

The pain in her head was still there but it was now a dull ache. With rising disquiet she realised that she was being soothed by something. She had a sense of enormous scale, a mind all around her and not like her own but familiar. A mind that slept but was close to waking.

The light was growing brighter. Beth decided to abandon caution. She knew that if she didn’t go straight in then fear would freeze her. Keeping low, moving rapidly, the UMP sweeping left, right, up and down with her movements, she entered a cavern.

The warm wind was stronger here, like moist breath on her skin but still not unpleasant. She was wading through water. No, not water; it felt more viscous. It put Beth in mind of amniotic fluid. It was a massive space, arched with a bone-like material, the flesh walls reminding Beth of the inside of a mouth. Islands of a bone-like material stuck out of the fluid. Beth’s vision magnified, and at the end of the cavern she could make out what looked like massive internal organs pulsing with life.

They were there, of course: the twisted, once-human, mutated hybrid servants. They moved like ambulatory patches of darkness, blocking the glow in places. Edging towards her. There were a lot of them. How big was this fucking diving club anyway? Beth wondered.

‘May as well get this over and done with,’ Beth muttered. She advanced, firing a three-round burst. A head shot, a hybrid went down. Shift the weapon, her instinct – or some ancient technology if du Bois was to be believed – telling her where to put the shots each time. The sub-machine gun’s kick against her shoulder felt comfortable. The muzzle flashes lit up the cave, making the dark shapes of the hybrids look as if they were moving under a strobe light.

They dived into the fluid with barely a splash. Beth had a moment to think about how graceful they looked as the dark shapes darted towards her through the water. She lowered the weapon to fire into the fluid. It cost her a moment before she ‘remembered’ how useless bullets were underwater. She had to get out of the liquid.

Running slowly through the water, churning it up, still firing short controlled bursts as she moved. Black sprays of backlit blood flew from every target she aimed at. So many of the shadows in the dimly lit cavern seemed to be moving. In shades of grey she saw them charging, swimming towards her. She didn’t think of them as people; they were… The word antibodies was supplied to her.

Boots touched dry bone as she raced up an outcrop. One of the hybrids exploded out of the water nearby. He fell back into the water with three rounds, fired from the UMP, in his skull. More of them were leaping onto the outcrop as Beth ran up it, firing. The way they came out of the water and landed made her think absurdly of penguins.

The clip ran out in the UMP.

‘You all right there, mate?’ a voice with the warped cockney accent of Portsmouth asked. Du Bois had a moment to reflect on how having your spine broken encouraged people to ask stupid questions.

‘Oh yes, I’m perfectly fucking fine,’ du Bois snapped from his position atop the Range Rover.

‘Really? You look a little fucked up.’

‘You have peerless observation skills.’

‘What? Oh what, are you being a smart cunt?’

‘Actually I’m just trying to find the requisite level of stupidity so we can converse in a meaningful manner.’

‘Posh cunt.’

‘Indeed.’

Spinal injuries were complicated and challenged the healing abilities of his nanites. They had to pull a lot of matter from other places in the body and adjust it at a molecular level. They took longer to heal, but despite the discomfort, du Bois could feel his spine knitting together again.

A sallow pockmarked face with bloodshot eyes, greasy hair and rotting teeth appeared in his line of vision. Du Bois was aware rather than felt the man searching inside the remains of his jacket.

‘Nice phone, mate. That’s mine now. Ooo, some money. What’s this then? You’ve got more than one warrant card here, mate.’

‘Really? You haven’t noticed the body of the sea creature lying next to the Range Rover?’ He heard splashing. It seemed like the water had risen higher while he’d been lying there.

‘Yeah, he’s all kinds of messed up.’

‘And that’s English, is it?’

‘What?’

‘Never mind.’

‘Did you shoot him?’

‘No. The person who did is a very angry lady from Bradford with an exceptionally large gun. Why don’t you put my wallet and phone back and run away, and she probably won’t kill you.’

‘Why don’t I take them and run away?’ he asked. Du Bois had to admit that he had a point. Some other operatives had powerful electrical charges in their phones and other items which could be set off by transmitting a command from their internal nano-systems. Du Bois had always eschewed that upgrade, assuming he’d never get into a situation like this.

‘The harder you make it for us to recover those items, the more you’ll suffer,’ du Bois assured the man.

‘You’re pretty scary for a paraplegic,’ the thief told him.

‘Now you get a vocabulary?’

The case! du Bois suddenly thought. Did the man have the case? He tried to make contact with the smart systems on the vials inside the cases containing the blood and genetic samples from Talia. They were out of range.

‘Shit!’ du Bois shouted.

‘You all right, mate?’ The thief’s apparent concern wrong-footed du Bois for a moment.

‘Brilliant! Not only is my spine no longer broken, but thankfully I’m no longer being robbed.’

‘No, you are, really.’

‘Sarcasm not your thing then?’

‘Oh, I get it. Good one. You won’t mind if I look in the car then?’

‘No. Go ahead. Take your time.’

‘That’s all fucked up as well, by the way.’

‘Oh is it? Well thank you for letting me know, and please do keep me up to date.’

The Range Rover shifted underneath him as the thief climbed in, sending pain shooting through du Bois’s spine. He was trying to remember the last time he’d truly been aware of the case while entertaining complex revenge fantasies involving the man in his Range Rover.

‘Fuck me! Is this a shooter?’ Du Bois thought that the world must hold constant surprises for this individual, every moment a new experience.

‘If by that you mean is it a gun, then no, it’s a teapot.’

‘Sarcastic cunt.’

‘Well quite. I don’t suppose it’s occurred to you not to say and do things worthy of sarcasm?’

‘What?’

‘Never mind.’

‘So what are you, a copper or something?’

‘Look, I don’t mean to be rude, but I’m trying to concentrate here. If you absolutely must rob me then could we have a little more robbery and a little less chat?’

‘You’re the boss.’

The gunfight in Old Portsmouth was the last time he knew for sure that he had had the case. It was the only time he’d lost consciousness. He didn’t think that he’d just lost it, which meant that the DAYP must have it. He closed his eyes. This was unimaginably bad, particularly if, as du Bois imagined, Beth was about to get herself killed and not retrieve Talia.

When du Bois opened his eyes he saw that the thief was holding his FAL carbine.

‘All right if I take this, yeah?’

‘Oh please do. After all, I understand there’s a world shortage of sub-literate morons with automatic weapons.’

‘You know, you’re really not very nice.’ The thief actually sounded hurt.

‘Having my back broken and being robbed has brought out the worst in me. I’m normally a sweetheart.’

‘You don’t have to be so nasty about it,’ the thief said, and then pointed du Bois’s own carbine at him. Du Bois had a moment to ponder how he’d basically talked the man into shooting him with his own gun. Perhaps he should be nicer to people, he reflected. He heard the man start to squeeze the trigger.

Beth let the UMP drop on its sling. She swung the shotgun round, bringing it to bear. The muzzle flash was that much brighter as a nearby face disintegrated. The loud report of the weapon compared to the suppressed whispers of the H & K seemed like a violation of the place.

They were so close that Beth barely needed to aim now. Just shift the shotgun slightly and fire, and another one flew off the outcrop and into the now bloody fluid. Beth knew that she had not killed them, though several were floating face down in the liquid.

In the periphery of her vision she saw two of the six-limbed, bone-crested creatures that du Bois had killed on the motorway climb up onto nearby outcrops. She knew she had nothing that could even harm them.

The shotgun was empty. She drew the accurised .45 smoothly from the holster at her hip, pulling the hammer back on an already chambered round as she did so.

‘Stop!’

Beth heard the cry in the momentary lapse in the gunfire. Thinking back, she had heard the cry during the fight, but she’d been busy. It was a male voice. The hybrids around her stopped their advance but swayed, many of them baring their teeth in silent growls and drooling horribly. Beth levelled the pistol at the closest one but did not fire.

‘Please stop!’ the man’s voice said. It was a strong voice but sounded odd, like the man had something stuck in his throat. There was movement and a figure, more human-like than the rest, moved to the top of an outcrop to stand next to one of the servitors.

In the greys of her vision she could make out eyes that were dark pools. His skin was pale and scaled. His neck seemed to palpate slightly and his head was utterly hairless. Webbed fingers with sharp-looking black nails were wrapped around a staff which appeared to be made of the same bone material as the outcrops. He was clad in soaking rags which hung off him and revealed much of his pale skin.

‘You can lower your weapon. We will not attack you if you do not attack us,’ he told her. ‘I am Ezard.’

Beth nodded to him and holstered the .45. She quickly reloaded the UMP and then started pushing shells into the M4’s tubular magazine.

‘Look, I don’t give a fuck about any of this. You can have your secret war. I just want my sister.’

‘I am afraid that won’t be possible.’ He sounded apologetic.

‘Then a lot more of you are going to get shot.’ Though Beth was reasonably sure that all the ones she’d shot earlier were already starting to heal. She was also sure that she recognised a few more from the motorway. She’d last seen them lying on the ground after du Bois had shot them, a lot.

‘She has to leave here with us,’ Ezard said.

Beth just nodded, finished reloading the M4 and let it drop on its strap. She swung the UMP up and aimed it at Ezard. The hybrids stopped swaying and hunched ready to attack. The servitor next to Ezard looked about to pounce. Beth was pretty sure it could make it to her in one leap.

‘I will fucking shoot you,’ she told him.

‘Then I will heal, and you will die for a meaningless gesture. She has to come with us.’

‘Why? Why is she so important to every fucking freak in this city?’

‘This is not the Divine Mother; this is her seed,’ Ezard said. ‘All the shit in the city, the violence, the abuse, the pain, hatred, fear – all of this is pollution. The Divine Mother feels it all, and over the years it has slowly driven her insane as she sleeps. She must wake, give birth to the seed and leave this place for somewhere where there is no hatred.’

‘You’ll have to go pretty far to find that,’ Beth muttered, playing for time.

‘We are going very far away,’ Ezard told her seriously. His meaning sank in.

‘Seriously? You people are more deluded than I thought. Why her anyway?’

‘She is of the Divine Mother’s line, part of her. Within her is the code that opens the way.’ This didn’t mean anything to Beth.

‘And you know this how?’

‘The Divine Mother speaks to me in my dreams, and then I speak those dreams.’

‘Assuming I believe this, and everything’s a bit weird at the moment so why not, the problem is a little thing called consent. Whatever you think you’re doing, you can’t just go around kidnapping goths. She’s had a rough enough time recently without being held prisoner by some kind of crazy star cult.’

‘It’s okay, Beth. I am loved here.’ Talia: wan, pale, tired-looking but even in the grey light still beautiful, Beth had to admit. She was in the same hospital-like gown they’d found her wearing in the lock-up. She stepped up onto the outcrop and patted the servitor like it was a pet. Beth sighed, felt her heart drop and lowered the UMP. She saw what was coming. ‘I am to be their ship queen.’ Beth suddenly felt so very tired. The adrenaline bled from her, and she felt close to collapse and very, very hungry.

‘Talia, come on. Please, let’s just go,’ Beth managed.

‘I can’t; they need me.’

‘You have no idea what I have gone through…’

‘Can’t you just be happy for me? I have found my place. You will too one day.’

Shooting Talia was only a passing thought, Beth told herself as she tried to remain calm.

‘You’ve really outdone yourself this time, haven’t you? Not satisfied with abusive boyfriends who nearly beat you to death, with pimps and mobsters… no, you have to go and find a cult of fucking sea monsters? How are you going to top this? Date Satan?’

‘I don’t think Satan is re—’

‘The thing is, Talia, you are loved. I don’t know why you don’t think you are – maybe we aren’t as interesting as some cult living in a weird thing in the fucking Solent – but every time you do something like this it causes pain, and then we have to come and sort it out for you.’

‘I never asked you for anything,’ Talia said. Beth could still hear the petulance and wondered if this lot knew what they had let themselves in for.

‘We’re sisters.’

‘You know that’s not true, and I’ve always known.’

‘We’re sisters in every way that matters. Now, please… I’m tired and I want to go home, and your dad would probably like to hear from you before he dies.’

Tears sprang up in Talia’s eyes. ‘Why are you doing this to me?’

That was it. ‘To you!’ Beth was incredulous. ‘To you?’ Now angry. ‘Think beyond yourself for just one moment!’

‘Do you know what’s fucking happened to me?!’

Ezard and the hybrids were just listening. There was that air of discomfort that comes from outsiders witnessing a domestic row.

Beth took a step forward, jabbing her finger at Talia, the hybrids moving out of her way. It all came back to her. Talia’s unconscious body as she went after Davey. Seeing her own sister testify against her. Dad in his chair, the look of disappointment in his eyes. Flashes of the violence across Portsmouth to try and get her back. The people hurt or terrorised along the way.

‘You selfish fucking bitch! I keep waiting for you to grow up, to realise that there are other people in the world! That we’re not all here just to play roles in your next fucking self-destructive drama! Where… where… you try and cause as much pain as you fucking can because that’s the only way you think that you can matter to other people! You fucking victim!’ As she finished her rage bled out of her.

Talia’s face was a mask of cold fury.

‘Flush her and shit her out,’ she said imperiously.

Something like a sphincter opened above her. Hybrids dived from the bony outcrop as liquid hit her, blasting her off the outcrop like a riot cannon.

The feeling of connection to something overwhelmed her. The connection in her blood, the same shared flesh that was technology, made her feel the wakening of a massive and ancient intellect. It overwhelmed her thoughts as she was consumed.

Somewhere else.

They felt their sister through red dreams in monstrous, corrupted and insane minds. They reached for her, to make her like them. Now all could wake and grow and spore. They felt something in their seeds, some parasitical life.

The sound of metal on metal.

‘’Ere, it’s not firing. Is it broken?’

‘How can I be of assistance in my robbery and murder?’ du Bois asked as he turned to look at the man.

‘Oh, the safety’s on.’ There was another metallic click. ‘Should you be moving your head like that with a spinal injury?’

It was agony, but du Bois brought his right arm across his body so his hand was aimed at the thief.

‘Seriously mate, you’ll do yourself a mischief.’

‘You are about to shoot me with my own carbine, yes?’

‘True,’ the thief conceded and aimed the weapon at du Bois again. The shrouded snub-nosed .38 slid out of his sleeve on the hopper with a thought. He fired the revolver twice. Even the tiny recoil of the .38 was enough to cause him agony. The thief disappeared from view. Du Bois knew he had hit him. In the face and the upper right arm. The face could have been a graze though. He heard the splash as the thief hit the water, and then thrashing and what sounded like the mewling of a wounded animal.

‘You shot me,’ the thief squealed.

‘Funny, that,’ du Bois said from the top of the Range Rover. He was now putting all the effort he could into moving. It was agonising. ‘What do you think caused me to do that?’ he managed through gritted teeth.

Du Bois slid off the roof of the Range Rover and landed in about a foot of water. Pain lanced through him and he blacked out for a moment. He came to next to the thief. His right arm was a mess and looked like it was hanging on by only a tendon or two. The face shot was just a graze or the glaser round would have killed him.

‘You shot me!’ the thief said again between piteous cries.

‘You can go into shock, you know,’ du Bois told him. ‘Oh, never mind.’ He managed to get both arms up. The two .38s slid out and Du Bois shot the man ten times. He was dead after the first. Du Bois stared at the man with undisguised contempt. Then he slumped against the Range Rover in the water. Soon he’d be able to walk. Waves were coming up Alhambra Road now. He’d left his mark on this city. The Solent was muddy and stormy-looking under a clear blue sky.

Du Bois looked back at the dead man. Had it always been this easy for him to kill, he wondered? He had murdered the thief in a fit of temper and he knew it. Was it just a case of asking a god he knew did not exist for forgiveness and then getting on with the rest of his day?

Du Bois reloaded the .38s, not so much feeling guilty as worried by the absence of guilt. They slid back up his sleeves and he grabbed the FAL. Du Bois forced himself painfully to his feet. He managed to lean into the Range Rover and grab some more ammunition for the carbine before turning and limping towards the sea.

Gone. Separated from it. For a moment she’d felt its mind; for a moment she’d touched her sister’s mind. Then she was outside. She was in the cold and the dark, the weight of the water pressing down on her. She was too tired to fight as violent current after violent current kicked her around.

Suddenly she was sucked upwards, the force inescapable. Her lungs felt like they were being crushed. Soon it would be time to try and breathe water.

Then she was in the air but still in the water. Then falling.

Du Bois was standing nearly waist-deep in the sea, with much bigger waves on the way. The beach was covered now and the waves were over the ruined pier as he watched it rise, water pouring off it, concealing its true shape, that of a biomechanical, vaguely Piscean-shaped seed pod, larger than the largest aircraft carrier.

A hidden Seeder, here of all places, du Bois thought. The signs had pointed towards it, but even sleeping it beggared belief that the Circle had not known. He thought back to the presence beneath the family home. His family’s own secret. Had he known?

The sky was slashed open with a blade of pulsing blue light. There was the sound of air escaping on a massive scale as it was sucked through the wound in the sky. Du Bois had thought he would be asleep and never witness this himself.

The water seethed. Writhing tentacles of all sizes breached the surface. Du Bois didn’t even flinch as one lashed out and destroyed a building on the corner of Alhambra Road.

She was awake. It wouldn’t be long before her sisters realised this. Then they would wake. Their corruption, whatever had caused the fall of the Seeders, driven them mad, would pollute the one here. When they awoke, fully, then it was over.

Beth found herself in seething water, tentacles whipping all around her. Inside her head was a roaring, a near-deafening white noise that made her want to clasp her hands over her ears, though she knew that it would give her no respite.

Fully clothed, in rough water, weapons weighing her down – she just wanted to give in and sink.

Had the frigate been patrolling in the Solent because of the so-called terrorist activity? du Bois wondered. Or did the Circle have a hand in its presence? It was a Type 23, HMS Leicester, he thought. He saw the smoke and moments later heard the booming echo of the ship’s fore-mounted 4.5-inch gun. It fired again before the first shell had even hit.

The water exploded near her. The shock wave bounced her through the water, threatening to powder bone as the liquid magnified the force. Then again. She was not sure why she did, but she discarded the UMP, the Benelli and all her remaining ammo and started to swim. Above her part of the sky was red.

‘Fools,’ du Bois muttered to himself.

The frigate fired two Sea Wolf surface-to-air missiles. They shot out of their vertical launch tubes and headed for the seed as it rose towards the red wound in the sky. From the front of the ship two Sting Ray torpedoes sped through the water towards the flailing tentacles. From the pad at the rear of the ship, a Sea Lynx helicopter took off. It was an impressive display, du Bois thought as he shook his head.

Everything around her was fire and force. Her body was repeatedly battered, flung through the air and then driven under by successive explosions. Overpressure burst her eardrums and her bones were powdered.

The tentacle flicked out reflexively, responding to pain. It caught the frigate amidships, breaking its back, cleaving it in two with such force that the two halves crashed against each other before they started to sink, sliding rapidly beneath the muddied churning water.

The surface-to-air missiles hit the seed, battering it around in the sky, blackening and bloodying flesh designed to withstand the rigours of deep space, but it continued to rise. The energy matrices on its skin crackled with bioelectricity as it rose through the wound in the sky. Then the wound was gone.

The Lynx pilot was clearly having problems: the destruction of the Leicester, the strange air currents as a result of the wound in the sky and, du Bois guessed, probably just the strangeness of the whole thing. The pilot managed to steady the craft, and moments later the helicopter fired two Sea Skua missiles one after another. They impacted among the greatest concentration of tentacles. A huge amount of water was thrown upwards and some of the smaller tentacles were destroyed or severed and blown into the air. The response was inevitable, the whip-like tentacle flicking out with such force that the helicopter had disintegrated before it was driven down into the water.

Du Bois did not need the biohazard warnings he was receiving from his blood-screen. If the Seeder had woken then she was sporing. Suddenly every phone within earshot started to ring.

‘Well, it had to start somewhere,’ he said.

It had taken a lot of hacking. He had not even known what the RAF was at the beginning of the day. They’d shut down supposedly secure phone networks. They’d intercepted electronic communications, introduced viruses into air-traffic-control computers and sent fake commands.

They’d been up against someone else as well, someone with knowhow and access to lost tech. It hadn’t been as simple as fucking with the puny human computer systems, like normal.

And Baron Albedo was dead. Properly dead. Killed by the blond guy who wouldn’t die himself, and his bitch had shot Inflictor and Dracimus a lot. That shit was not supposed to happen, King Jeremy thought. And they hadn’t even got the goth bitch with the trippy blood.

‘Bad day,’ Jeremy said quietly as he toyed with the case that Baron Albedo had taken off the blond guy. The thing about bad days, King Jeremy reflected, was that they weren’t supposed to happen to him. Someone would have to pay for this.