The Age of Scorpio

by Gavin G. Smith

Dracup landed next to Zabilla behind the cocoon, finding he had the Toy Soldier’s aesthetically overdesigned, double-barrelled laser rifle in his hands. Dracup’s augmented hearing filtered sounds, so he could make out Zabilla farting very audibly, which explained the look of concentration on her face, he thought, as she released the virals into the air. Almost immediately the bunker ’faced viral warnings to their neunonics.

  ‘Send the signal,’ Dracup ’faced to her.

  ‘Not yet. We need a diversion,’ she replied.

  Dracup popped up from behind the cocoon and fired several double-barrelled bursts of red light at the closest Toy Soldiers. The pitiful energy dissipation grid on his armoured clothing went neon and threatened to overload. Half the flesh on his face superheated and blew off down to the bone from a hit, but it gave the tactical software in his neunonics the time it needed to assess the situation. He started firing grenades from the underslung launcher, shifting aim, firing again. Each grenade was programmed with timed air-burst commands fed from the tactical software to explode where they would cause the most damage. Another moment’s glance showed the automated strobe guns cutting swathes through the Toy Soldiers.

  Dracup ducked back behind the cocoon next to Zabilla. Half his face was just hot armoured bone now and still smoking. The problem with virals was that they took too long to kill. Dracup put together a fast and messy hack. The idea was to use the bunker’s defence nano-swarms as carriers for the targeted virals to speed things up. He wasn’t sure how useful they would be but it was worth a try.

  When his Toy Soldiers started to die, the Absolute decided that he didn’t like this any more. They might well be trapped but perhaps they would be content with simply destroying the cocoon. Particularly if they were working for – or had been co-opted by – the Church. He sent one of his favourite toys. He sent Fallen Angel.

  They were mostly cowering behind the cocoon now. They had kept low, crawled towards a wall and sandwiched themselves there. The Absolute didn’t dare fire on the cocoon, though Zabilla was reasonably sure it was more than capable of taking laser fire. The beams from the strobe guns looked like a near-solid wall of red as they repeatedly stabbed down into the Toy Soldiers. Dracup had S-sats firing from concealed locations at any Toy Soldiers that tried to charge their position. Zabilla had a thorn pistol in each hand; Dracup still had the laser rifle; now all they had to do was watch either side of the cocoon for Toy Soldiers trying to flank them. They were helped by visual feeds from the S-sat and the bunker’s systems. The feeds also showed that the Toy Soldiers were starting to fall. The virals were taking effect as Dracup and Zabilla started to remember who they really were.

  Scab and the Monk had smuggled themselves onto Game in the stomach of an imported piece of livestock, some kind of large grazing lizard from a Rakshasa-held feline park world. They had then spent two days completely still, clinging to a mostly deserted part of one of the arcology trees close to where their targets lived, waiting for the results of some very subtle and well-programmed trace nanites.

  They had already had themselves modified to look like their prey, and copies of the Game’s experiential ware had been implanted into them. They had also had some very interesting subconscious neunonics routines put into their systems. These were designed to be very well hidden, as the Absolute, by its nature, had some of the most sophisticated mental auditing systems in Known Space. All of this had been provided by the Living Cities, who had a lot of experience in finding ways to infiltrate the Game.

  Sophisticated trace nanites had allowed Monk and Scab to plot a time when their targets would be most vulnerable and – more importantly – when they would be relatively lightly monitored.

  The targets had put up a fight. Both might well have been experienced duellists, but neither were born killers or Church-trained monks. Their virals had caused a bit more trouble, however. Scab and the Monk had wiped them and junked their DNA. Their personal belongings had either been taken or disassembled. Scab and the Monk had then used a customised anti-forensic nano-swarm to destroy other traces of their identity. They had downloaded all the information from Zabilla and Dracup’s neunonics and then wiped them as well.

  Then came the really clever stuff, the stuff that the Living Cities had been working on. Using a highly illegal application of S-tech, Scab and the Monk rewrote their own genetic codes to not only resemble Dracup and Zabilla’s, respectively, but at a given chemical signal to mutate back to their original forms. Then, using an intuitive AI program, they overwrote the information on their own neunonics with the information from Dracup and Zabilla’s neunonics. The intuitive program filled in the blanks as best it could and then, based on that information, used an adapted meat-hack program to overwrite Scab and the Monk’s personality. To all extents and purposes they had become Zabilla and Dracup.

  Scab had liked none of this, but he hadn’t seen another way. Their subconscious minds had subtly been doing all the work during their infiltration, waiting for the correct set of circumstances to signal their resurgent personalities.

  There was no feed from the bunker. Fallen Angel couldn’t be bothered to hack his way in to find out the tactical situation as he dropped through the branches of the arcology trees. He was feeling lazy today, not at all creative, positively bored. He was just going to turn up and destroy everything that wasn’t a cocoon. The Absolute might command him, but even it would never dare put experiential ware in an Elite so the phallic slug would have to find another way to enjoy the experience.

  Targeting information on the ware told the Monk where to aim the thorn pistols, going for the exposed flesh in the Toy Soldiers’ ridiculously impractical armour. Even so, it was taking too long for the virals on the splinter bullets to kill the soldiers. Things were getting more and more hairy. She played her penultimate trick.

  One of the things about players was that they never paid any attention to morlocks. The Monk didn’t control them, though Zabilla had had the biotechnical know-how to do so. She just released them from their programmed bonds. They didn’t need any encouragement to fall upon the Toy Soldiers from where they had previously been cowering. Their rage was a thing to behold.

  Scab continued to fire at the Toy Soldiers with the laser even as they were dying. He just liked shooting people.

  ‘Now?’ Scab ’faced. He was unable to talk as half his face was still a red smoking mess.

  The Monk shook her head. Scab was beginning to wonder if all the talk of getting them out was just nonsense. He was pretty sure that any moment now Ludwig or one of the Angels was going to turn up and destroy them at a fundamental level.

  It was a melancholy act of destruction. Not his best, but he was looking at destruction himself. Still, it was more than enough to herald his arrival after his coffin had bridged in all but unnoticed.

  The focused particle beam cut through the entirety of the top of the arcology tree. It was one of the smaller ones: only thirty or so storeys breached the atmosphere. Then he hit it like a meteorite. The force destroyed about half of it but sent the rest tumbling through the branches of other arcology trees towards the surface of Game far below.

  ‘Look upon my works,’ he muttered to himself as he watched the wreckage tumble down through the thick branches of the arboreal cities. It was carnage, but only abstract to him. It was so quiet where he was. He liked it up here in orbit. He liked looking down on the planet, seeing the branches spread out below him like a spider’s web.

  He shot up into high orbit. The beam stabbing out from his weapon – it was in a rifle configuration at the moment – was almost an afterthought as he cut one of the planetary defence battle cruisers in two. High above Game, the two halves of the cruiser slowly drifted apart.

  ‘Notice me,’ Elite Scab whispered to himself.

  He set the weapon to a wide-burst D-beam and played it up and down the top branches of one of the taller atmosphere-piercing arcology trees. The network of primordial black holes fed the weapon power via a form of complex
entanglement. The D-beam rewrote the genetic codes of anything the signal hit and cancerous mutations appeared all over the outside of the tree. Inside, the inhabitants were reduced to protoplasmic slime or mutated into forms that weren’t conducive to survival in this reality. Some became super-efficient alien predatory life forms. Others might even have evolved into higher forms, though they were probably destroyed by destructive slimes and super-predators before they had time to appreciate their enlightened nature.

  The Absolute flopped around violently in its nutrient bath. Ludwig was still out drinking suns, whatever that meant. Both the Angels were close but a Consortium Elite had just attacked them. He would need both of them to protect the Game. He sent the order to Fallen Angel. The attacking Elite was the priority.

  Planetary attack warnings appeared in their neunonics. Scab and the Monk stood up from behind the cocoon. The hangar area was carnage. Scab sent an instruction to the AG motors on each corner of the cocoon. The cocoon rose unsteadily into the air as one of the motors had been destroyed. They made their way quickly through the carnage and red steam, shooting anything that moved, though they tried to leave the morlocks alone as they were finishing off the wounded Toy Soldiers.

  The hatch to the Rapier fighter/bomber opened at a neunonic command as they approached. The Monk reached in and ferreted around for a bit. She came back with two rather vintage-looking emergency spacesuits.

  ‘Really?’ Scab asked, becoming more and more suspicious of the escape plan.

  ‘You don’t have to wear it if you don’t want to.’

  Reluctantly Scab put his hands into the black bubble of the suit and let it grow over him before fixing the visor to it. His neunonics interrogated the suit. It was old but functional, so he dropped some updated ‘ware into its systems. The Monk did the same. As she did, she hacked the Rapier’s systems and started them up, running rapid diagnostics on those that she needed.

  ‘You’ll do,’ she muttered to herself.

  ‘What, you’re going to fly us out of here?’ Scab asked, both confused and mildly interested, which was arguably more emotional than he’d been for a good long while, not counting his time as Dracup, and he was trying to forget about that. He was deeply uncomfortable with the emotional dependency Dracup had on Zabilla.

  The Monk sent the heavily coded and very secure override command. Immediately after, she sent a time-bomb self-destruct routine. She was determined to leave as little trace as possible.

  ‘Fuck!’ Scab was unused to genuine surprise and had only just sealed the spacesuit as reality tore open and revealed the red beneath. The Rapier had just opened a bridge point. Even Elites couldn’t do that. Scab turned to look at the Monk.

  ‘Its all bullshit, isn’t it, about not being able to open in a planetary gravitational field?’

  ‘There’s a fail-safe device on every bridge drive. Any attempt to open a bridge point in a strong gravity field junks the drive.’

  ‘But you have an override for the fail-safe?’

  ‘Obviously. Imagine the carnage if people knew they could pop in and out of Red Space, sneak up on their enemies. Also, we’re genuinely not sure of the effects of repeated openings of wormholes in gravitational fields on the fabric of space-time. You coming?’

  The Monk stepped forward, the cocoon floating behind her.

  ‘But it’s all right for the Church to have the knowledge?’

  ‘Which we can’t use because then people would know. You won’t tell anyone, will you?’ She was heading straight for the rip. Scab grabbed another laser rifle, a bandolier of grenades and some spare batteries and followed.

  ‘No, I’ll keep the information and use it for myself.’

  ‘I like the way you volunteer for death, or at least total personality erasure,’ the Monk said. ‘Or maybe it’s too late for that.’

  The Monk climbed over bodies to step through the tear. Scab followed her into the red.

  26. Southern Britain, a Long Time Ago

  There was screaming, the thrum of a bowstring, and the screaming stopped. Tangwen lowered the bow. She stood on the rampart looking out down the hill and over the vast fertile plain, so different from the sea of swaying reeds in which she had grown up. The morning mists mingled with dirty smoke from the campfires, from the smouldering remnants of the third hill fort, and smoke from the pyres the Corpse People were using to burn their captives in plain view. If they’d wanted them to suffer, they should have tried burning them out of bow range, Tangwen thought. There were four Corpse People around the pyres. They had died with arrows in them trying to light the fires, but Tangwen was running short of arrows coated with the poison that was Fachtna’s blood.

  The defenders had said little as the four had entered the fort the previous night. Fachtna was still steaming, too hot to approach, Britha, a blood-soaked nightmare, carrying Teardrop. They had thought them gods or perhaps demons and had sunk to their knees – much to Britha’s contempt. Tangwen was afraid that they would let these people down, that they were not what the Atrebates believed them to be, but then she had spent her whole life in the presence of a living god and knew how helpless and how much like everyone else they could be, child of the Great Mother or no.

  ‘Fools,’ Britha said as she appeared at Tangwen’s side. She used that word a lot, Tangwen thought, but said nothing. The defenders either showed Britha great deference or gave her a wide berth. The warriors who wore stripes of black and blood vertically down their faces and braided crow and raven feathers into their hair, thought her a messenger from their bloody warrior goddess. ‘A man called Feroth taught me to fight and he taught me about battles as well. If you want an enemy to surrender then you show mercy, you give them a reason to. If they think that surrendering will lead to burning then they will fight to the last.’

  ‘They say that they kill and eat the warriors, those blessed by the Great Mother, but that the rest they take south towards the sea.’

  ‘I think that is where my people are,’ Britha said grimly and then lapsed into silence. The wounds she had taken last night had all but healed. The Atrebates had left the corpse of the bear at the gate. It would be another obstacle for the attackers. Tangwen had noticed how the carrion eaters, even the flies, stayed away from the corpse. ‘They are just children playing at being dead,’ Britha finally said. ‘They are liars.’

  ‘I think they believe it,’ Tangwen said. Though they hadn’t last night when the four of them had driven the corpse people away, but then she herself had wanted to flee when she had seen Fachtna and Teardrop’s magics, and Britha’s bloodlust.

  ‘You have done what was asked of you. Will you return to your people? I think a hunter of your ability would be able to sneak past them.’

  Tangwen wasn’t sure.

  ‘I think…’ She searched for the right words. She remembered the time before the black ships had come. They would hunt, they would raid or even more rarely they would go to war with another tribe. Things were hard, but looking back they seemed simpler: she had been much more carefree, even if she might not have appreciated it at the time. ‘… that it will not matter if I go back to my people. These –’ she nodded towards the Corpse People ‘– or the ones in the black ships, they want everything, like the tribes the traders tell lies of, who they say cover many lands across the seas.’

  ‘You’ll come with us?’ Britha asked. Tangwen wasn’t sure but she thought she heard something like gratitude buried deep in Britha’s words.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘This place is a trap. We stay here, we die. We must know what lies to the south and we must take an army.’

  ‘I do not think that the warriors of the Atrebates will—’

  ‘The king will see us now.’ Neither of them had heard Fachtna’s approach and Tangwen jumped at his words. They turned to look at the warrior who looked like a Goidel to Britha and claimed to be something called a Gael. He was not carrying his shield, but his armour, which Tangwen knew had turned many a spearhead, arrowhea
d and sword, looked almost good as new. The singing ghost sword was sheathed at his hip. Tangwen noticed that Britha was staring at the leather case strapped to his back. It was about half the length of a spear and Tangwen was sure she had seen it move as if something was struggling to get out. She knew that if Britha was interested in it, it was because she smelled power there, magics that she could use to help her people.

  Fachtna bore no scars, though he was walking with a slight limp. He had said the Corpse People must have painted their weapons with blood blessed by their gods. Like Britha he looked pale, gaunt and hungry. This was a siege. Regardless of how grateful the Atrebates were for their brief respite, or the awe in which they held the four of them, they could not allow Britha and Fachtna to gorge themselves. It must be the magic, Tangwen thought. It feeds on them when they use it.

  ‘How is Teardrop?’ the young hunter asked.

  ‘Dead,’ Fachtna said. He did not look at Tangwen, he just glared at Britha.

  Tangwen felt her stomach lurch and tasted bile in the back of her throat. She had liked Teardrop despite his strange appearance and outlandish dress. Fachtna might be a fine warrior, handsome, well made and worth a tumble, but she could talk to Teardrop and they had a bond of blood – they had saved each other’s lives. She reached up to touch the dressing on the side of her head. When one of the dryw had checked the wound this morning, they had told her that it was all but healed.

  ‘His power will be missed. It is much needed. Can it be taken from his body after death?’ Britha asked. Tangwen turned to look at the other woman. The hunter was offended but knew that the dryw tended to be a lot more practical than warriors.

  ‘He had a family, you know?’ Fachtna said with a voice full of contempt and anger.

  ‘The proper rituals will be honoured.’

  ‘A wife.’

  ‘Fachtna, I’m sorry, but people still live who can be helped.’

  ‘Three daughters.’ Britha sighed and looked impatient. ‘A fine young son, and all you care about is stealing power from his still-warm body?’