The Age of Scorpio

by Gavin G. Smith

  The Corpse People ran as the massive malformed creature toppled to the ground with a resounding thud in an explosion of mud. Britha landed easily on the soft ground, knees bent to take the impact. Teardrop stalked to the top of the second ridge in the knowledge that he had a role to play now. He sent the magic of fear ahead of him through the air despite the cost. The Corpse People recoiled, though he felt the protection that had been given to them by Crom Dhubh.

  ‘All those who oppose the will of the true gods will die!’ he screamed. Then, steeling himself, almost weeping with expectation of the pain, he closed his eyes. Inside, more of him died as he felt the other burrow deep into what was him and consume it. He saw the other, watched it reach out through places that shouldn’t be, and he watched the changes it made. Too long, too much, too soon. There was too little left of him now. Teardrop hit the ground. In a large semicircle around him the warriors of the Corpse People went down like wheat mown with a sickle. Reshaped bones had burst through flesh, killing them before they’d even had the chance to scream.

  Fachtna strode out of the ditch and onto the track. He was heading straight towards the remaining Corpse People.

  ‘Come and die!’ he screamed. ‘Come and die with me!’ Steam poured off him. He seemed to glow from within. A haze surrounded him, and where he stepped the mud hissed and more steam rose. Britha followed Fachtna, but only as close as the waves of heat would allow her to get. The two of them marched at the transfixed Corpse People backlit by the burning gate. As one the Corpse People took a step back. Any who raised a casting spear or a bow found themself with an arrow sticking out of somewhere vital as Tangwen covered Fachtna and Britha from the shadows.

  The Corpse People decided that they were not as ready for death as they thought. They found that there were still things to be afraid of. They turned and ran.

  Ysgawyn watched his army, with victory in its grasp, break and run. He could see perfectly in the night from where he stood before the other besieged hill fort. He could see what the two men and the two women had done.

  He turned to his second, Gwydyon. The older man was massively built, balding and wore a sheepskin cloak over his limed skin. His body was a patchwork of scar tissue earned from hundreds of hard-won battles and one-to-one challenges. He had been a tribal champion before he had become a leader.

  ‘I want examples made. We are dead. The dead do not fear the living. If they choose to be afraid again then let them fear me.’ Gwydyon nodded. Ysgawyn knew that Gwydyon would turn enough of the cowards over to the tribe’s most talented torturers to make his point.

  ‘This is good,’ he said. ‘I had thought all the heroes and those blessed by the gods gone, that we had killed them all, but these are powerful. We will feast on their flesh and steal that power.’

  Gwydyon did not answer.

  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.