The Age of Scorpio

by Gavin Smith

  Beth had noticed Maude get a few looks and there had been whispers behind hands. Maude had pretended not to notice. Uday had looked relieved when some drunk arsehole came over to the table and asked Maude if she was the porn girl, and Beth had been the one to see him off with some serious threats. Beth guessed Uday usually had to do that. She suspected Uday’s comments would have been more cutting.

  ‘. . . and then we can find a nice girl for Beth.’ She hadn’t been paying any attention, but the sound of her name broke into her art appreciation.

  ‘I’m not a lesbian,’ she said just a little too loudly, getting some looks of amusement from nearby tables. She was a little pissed off but saw Uday was smiling mischievously.

  ‘Are you sure? Then why’d you dress like one?’ he asked.

  ‘Stop it!’ Maude scolded him.

  ‘Perhaps clothes and make-up and stuff aren’t as important to me as they are to other people.’

  Uday clamped his hand to his heart dramatically. ‘Oh my gosh, you are so right. I am so shallow. I shall immediately change my ways and start wearing dowdy things. What is that, homeless chic?’

  Beth felt herself colouring. She hated conversations like this. She flicked Uday a V-sign.

  ‘Don’t mind him,’ Maude told Beth between giggles. ‘He’s just being a bitch.’

  ‘He certainly is,’ Beth muttered.

  ‘Oooo! I know!’ Maude said, grinning and clapping her hands. Beth was watching the young goth with suspicion. ‘Makeover!’

  Uday’s eyes widened with glee. Beth suspected it was more out of pleasure at her discomfort than sharing Maude’s genuine enthusiasm.

  ‘Maude, what a marvellous idea! It’ll be like a gruff Yorkshire Pygmalion!’

  Beth shifted defensively, like she was getting ready for fight or flight.

  ‘I will beat up both of you,’ she warned. Mostly joking.

  ‘Darling, not everyone can be as pant-creamingly beautiful as the likes of Maude and I,’ Uday began. Maude smiled graciously at Uday, who gave her a mock bow in return. ‘But with some effort even the dowdiest caterpillar can become a beautiful butterfly.’ Uday considered his own statement while studying Beth. ‘Well, a beautiful moth anyway.’

  Uday was enjoying Beth’s discomfort but Beth didn’t like where it was taking her. She had never liked the way she looked. Neither had anyone else, so it seemed, so she had made it unimportant to her.

  ‘Look, the whole being-pretty thing, it’s really not me. That was more Talia’s kind of thing,’ she said, then turned away, taking a mouthful of her drink. Uday looked awkward, apologetic, Maude concerned. Then Maude smiled again.

  ‘I think you’re pretty,’ she said. Her apparent sincerity almost made Beth believe her.

  ‘And I concur. There is beauty there, no doubt, though we may need to dig deep to find it.’ Beth gave him the finger this time. ‘But I am, after all, the archaeologist of gorgeousness.’

  From all over the pub came the sound of bleeping as people received text messages almost simultaneously. Uday’s phone sounded. He took it out of his pocket, a look of concern on his face. He opened the text. In the distance they could hear the sound of sirens.

  ‘What is it?’ Beth asked as Uday read the message, his face darkening as he did so.

  ‘Someone’s just blown up Weightless,’ he said. Horror crept over Maude’s face.

  ‘Weightless?’ Beth asked.

  ‘It’s a club on Guildhall Walk,’ Uday said quietly. ‘We’ll know people who were there tonight.’ A pall was settling over the pub.

  ‘It’s happened again, hasn’t it?’ Maude said. Beth looked at her. ‘It’s like what happened to Talia.’

  ‘Maude, we don’t know. Anything could have happened.’

  ‘How do I get there?’ Beth asked.

  There was rubble and a hole in the shadow of the neoclassical Guildhall where a building used to be. The hole was illuminated by the multiple flashing lights of numerous emergency vehicles and inhabited by police, ambulance people and fire officers, all of them vastly underqualified to deal with the situation.

  Was this how it started? du Bois wondered. One small morsel at a time. No, this was too localised, too specific. He tried to murder the feeling of hope; he wanted to connect this to the prodigal. It was too much of a coincidence for there to be two incursions in such a short period of time.

  He supposed he should do something. Find out who was in charge and throw some weight around. At least get them away from the hole before they dosed themselves with lethal levels of cosmic radiation, though it was probably too late. They were in there because they were hoping for survivors, trying to help people. Sometimes we seem worth saving, he thought.

  Control would start putting the cover story in place. Another terrorist incident. He felt sorry for whichever community was the scapegoat this time around. There would be response teams on their way from Porton Down to seal the area. He already knew what they would find.

  If Natalie wasn’t dead, then he needed to find her. He looked around the street. There were a number of CCTV cameras. Du Bois sent instructions to his phone. If the CCTVs were attached to the net in any way, he would be able to download the footage and run it through sophisticated intelligent facial-recognition software. Moments later he received a message saying that nobody fitting Natalie Luckwicke’s description had been anywhere near the club for the last week. Du Bois sighed, though he had known that it wasn’t going to be that easy.

  He turned to look at the crowd. Many of them were drunk or high, clubbers evacuated from the clubs along Guildhall Walk. A lot of them were sailors, du Bois guessed. Something caught his eye – someone backing into a narrow alleyway between one of the pubs and a Chinese restaurant. He wouldn’t have thought anything of it except the figure moved furtively, suspiciously, and there was something off about it. Something about the glimpsed figure suggested that it was misshapen in some way.

  Du Bois ran to the alley, drawing looks from some of the assembled police. The passage ran for about twenty feet, ending in a high fence with a gate in it. The fence was topped with broken glass. Du Bois tried the gate. It was locked. Feeling slightly absurd, he drew his pistol and kicked the gate in. It led into a small courtyard at the back of the restaurant. Some of the restaurant’s employees came out of the open back door to look at him but said nothing when they saw the gun.

  Du Bois shook his head and returned to the street. Scanning the crowd again. Disconcerted. Then he found at least one face in the crowd that he recognised.

  Uday and Maude had gone home. Maude hadn’t wanted to add to the chaos at the scene. They would use social networking sites to try and find out if the people they knew were okay.

  Beth had circled the taped-off police perimeter trying to get the best view. She’d ended up leaning on one of the lion statues on the steps that led up to the Guildhall itself. She’d watched the blond man run into the alleyway and then reappear moments later with a gun in his hand. The man had been scanning the crowd. He stopped as he looked in her direction. Beth felt like he was staring at her, though she thought she was too far away for him to make out her features. Nevertheless she ducked behind the statue of the lion.

  ‘I think your sister’s been here, don’t you?’ The bag lady’s face was inches from Beth’s. Sweat, piss, stale smoke and cheap alcohol emanated from her. Beth’s face crumpled in disgust. It was the same woman she’d seen on Pretoria Street.

  ‘What do you mean? My sister’s d—’

  The bag lady blew smoke all over her. Beth coughed, her eyes watering, and turned away. By the time the smoke had cleared, the woman was nowhere to be seen.

  Beth sat down hard on the steps. It was just a weird coincidence, she told herself, the ramblings of someone with mental health problems. Her sister was dead. This had nothing to do with her. She could work hard, get on with her life and be normal. At the back of her mind, the question What if Talia is alive? just wouldn’t leave her in peace.

 
‘Well?’ Baron Albedo asked. Both of them had their hoods up. They liked the look and were only peripherally aware that it would draw attention to them rather than away.

  ‘Our journey might not be quite the waste of time that the pimp made it out to be,’ King Jeremy mused. The pair watched the response to the destruction of Weightless. It was kind of cool because it was like a disaster movie, but a bit lame because it was British, which made it look low-budget.

  16

  A Long Time After the Loss

  The flickering black wound in Red Space at the bridge point to Pythia looked soothing to Vic. Scab had made as much of the hull transparent as he could. Vic wouldn’t have minded so much but Scab had retracted the walls to Vic’s room to make the ship as open plan as possible. Vic’s psychotic partner reclined in one of the smart chairs. The light of Red Space made his naked form look like he was covered in blood.

  They said that the really damaged could talk to Red Space. Vic wondered if Scab was communing. Vic, on the other hand, had red fatigue. The constant light was making him angry. He had tried to immerse as much as possible. Experiencing his favourite colonial immersions starring his namesake Vic Matto, letting experimental soundscapes wash over him. None of it was really helping.

  The bridge point to Pythia was one of the busiest points in Red Space. Ships were queueing at the bridge-point beacon, sending their bids through to transponders in Real Space for their place in the line. Coming to Pythia was always expensive.

  Engines glowing, the Basilisk flew down canyons of parked ships. There were vessels from all the main corporate interests in the Consortium, each jockeying for more market position despite ultimately serving the same organisation – competition for the sake of it. Odd-looking craft from the various Monarchist systems, part works of art, part throwbacks to eras that were probably mythical anyway, and part external manifestations of decadent and broken minds. Massive military ships, brooding tonnes of armoured potential violence, moving slowly and majestically through the red, the well-armed beacons tracking their movements. It would not be the first time there had been violence at a bridge point. Then the smaller ships, private yachts of the super-rich, broken-down vessels belonging to info prospectors and gamblers looking for their big break, craft so anonymous that they screamed some intelligence agency or company, a heretical sect looking for enlightenment or whatever the opposite of enlightenment was. The poorer ships containing plenty of supplies for the months or years of waiting their turn.

  And bounty ships. People like us, Vic thought. Small, fast, well armed, mostly ex-military ships. If they could afford what Pythia charged then they were good, the sort of people that the Queen’s Cartel might send after them. Even before getting in-system, the Pythia bridge point was a reasonably good place to mine data, and neither Vic nor Scab could find details of any bounty on them. Vic gave this some thought. It either meant that there wasn’t one, or it had been done carefully and contracted to professionals.

  On the first day they saw some junk ship come apart under the barrage of a garish Monarchist pleasure barge. There hadn’t been any reason that Vic could see. It was probably just to relieve the boredom. The Pythia bridge-point beacons responded immediately. An AG-driven autonomous suicide drone was launched. Its AI system had it dancing around the beams of the pleasure barge’s defence systems. At the same time the beacons were broadcasting their automated admonishment of the pleasure barge publicly, along with how much property damage the suicide drone was about to do and how much it was going to cost them.

  The suicide drone was destroyed as it closed but not before it fired its sub-munitions, clustered high-yield lasers, which lit up the barge’s energy displacement grid, and low-yield fusion warheads, which blossomed blue against the red. Massive reactive armour plates blew out. New matter poured like sentient tar from the chagrined pleasure barge’s carbon reservoir.

  ‘Thank goodness they didn’t kill anyone important,’ Vic muttered as he watched the engraved murals self-etch across the pleasure barge’s new armoured skin.

  It was the only interesting thing that happened while they waited, though Vic kept checking for bounty ships.

  It was two days before their turn came up. Two days was pretty quick. Again Vic marvelled at the resources behind this job. It was still, however, two days of being bathed in red. Two days of Scab lying naked and unmoving on the sofa. Some of the time Vic was pretty sure that he was data-mining, but not all the time. Fortunately Scab was using the smart chair’s catheter and cleaning facilities. He was also smoking enough to make the ship smell despite otherwise excellent atmosphere scrubbers. Although furious with Scab, Vic eventually got bored and started talking to him, but Scab did not answer.

  Bridging back into Real Space was cool relief.

  With unaugmented vision Vic could make out the burn of the engines of other ships making for Pythia. Pythia itself was a disc of shadow deep in a cloud of particulate matter thought to come from one or more long-destroyed planets. The cloud glowed gold, illuminated by light refracting from the system’s giant yellow sun. The star had a number, probably of interest to navigation systems and ship AIs, but nobody had ever named it. Pythia was the only thing that mattered in this system.

  Closer to Pythia, the planet’s long-range orbital defences let the Basilisk know that it was extensively covered. Scab ’faced his privacy bid over. Privacy was like everything else: you either fought or paid for it. When a mote of dust could spy on you, then those with the best tech and the most money got the best privacy. Vic had been told of a time where privacy was a right, before the Loss. He suspected that it was as mythical as the Naga. If there were people around to make money from it, he couldn’t understand why they wouldn’t exploit it. One of Pythia’s hospitality contractors got back to them. The contractors were one of the lesser-known branches of the mystery cult, but they seemed competent and had accepted their bid. Scab changed course and made for their habitat after clearing it with the defence systems.

  ‘So are you going to put some clothes on?’ Vic asked. Scab still ignored him. For fuck’s sake, the ’sect thought, I’m supposed to be angry with him and he’s the one doing the ignoring. At the back of his head he knew this was because Scab didn’t care. They weren’t friends or even partners really; he was a resource, like the ship.

  Space was more and more crowded the closer they got to Pythia. Vic could see the various habitats in orbit run by the subcontracted cult of Pythia employees. They went from garish, over-the-top, neon-lit luxury hotels to zero-G coffin stacks. Shuttlecraft and heavy maintenance automatons flew between the habitats and the heavily armed orbital fortresses with their rings of weapons satellites and static AG smart munitions. Vast fields of orbital solar panels absorbed light from the star, and along with various massive power-generating stations, dipped tethers into Pythia’s cloudy upper atmosphere. Occasionally ghost fire could be seen flitting around the far end of the tethers. The tethers were the only thing other than sacrifices allowed through the atmosphere.

  Scab banked the Basilisk over one of the super-hotel habitats. Vic looked down through the commercial holography displays, through the ornate transparent hull designed to look like crystal with iron supports, at the sculpted island landscape of the pool area. As they passed, the hotel’s weapons batteries tracked them across its territory. The habitat they were making for was supposed to be mid-level and anonymous. Scab hadn’t paid for luxury; he had paid for secrecy and security.

  An incoming comms warning was ’faced from the Basilisk to Vic and then promptly disappeared as if it had never existed. Vic checked the Basilisk’s systems. The message had disappeared from there as well. Vic turned to look at Scab in his chair.

  ‘What was that?’ he demanded. At first Vic didn’t think Scab was going to say anything. He was lying perfectly still, a long head of ash on the cigarette held in his fingers. Finally Scab turned to look at him. The ash didn’t fall.

  ‘If I tell you, do you promise not to go on at
length?’ The vibrations of his voice sent the ash tumbling to the floor, which quickly absorbed the waste.

  ‘It’s the St Brendan’s Fire, isn’t it?’ Vic asked, referring to the Church frigate that had tried to accost them as they were leaving Arclight. Vic crossed all four of his arms. Scab just sighed. ‘Did they say what they want?’

  ‘They want us to stop searching for a way to break their bridge monopoly.’

  ‘Which I’m comfortable with.’

  ‘See, I just didn’t want to have the same conversation again.’

  ‘Well, I’ll just do as I’m told then.’ Despite the angry clattering of his mandibles, Vic was sure he nailed the intonation of human sarcasm.

  ‘Good,’ Scab said. Vic was a little annoyed that Scab appeared to have missed it.

  Scab put a hat and sunglasses on. In the centre of the lounge a holographic picture of an augmented, heavyset feline male appeared. Vic looked over the feline. He wore utilitarian clothes that looked heavy enough to have significant built-in armour and an energy dissipation weave. The weapons he wore on display were similarly functional – no show, just utility.

  ‘That Jide?’ Vic asked, and then increased the magnification of the image, paying attention to the striping on the feline’s fur. ‘I didn’t realise he was a Rakshasa.’

  Scab nodded. The Rakshasa were an aristocratic warrior elite found on some of the more hidebound feline planets. As individual combatants they were very dangerous because of their warrior philosophy. As soldiers they were difficult to lead.

  More detailed holographic images were appearing in the air. Rotating images showed. A human half-and-half whose slender androgynous beauty even Vic was able to admire. S/he was their kick-murder specialist, their silent killer.

  Two humans, over-muscled man-plusses. They were either genuine twins, genetically altered to become twins or just cut to look the same. Obvious conflict-resolution world veterans, both of them sported significant levels of hard-tech augment. The twins were all scar tissue, metal and hardened composite. Either one of them could give me a run for my money if they know what they are doing, Vic thought.