The Age of Scorpio

by Gavin Smith

  ‘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.

  34

  A Long Time After the Loss

  ‘What are you doing?’ Vic demanded as he watched the cocoon slowly dissolve. Vic was reasonably sure that he had nailed a very human-sounding borderline hysteria in his voice. If not, he knew that Scab would pick up on his panicky pheromone secretions. ‘We’ve got no idea what’s in there. It could be viral; it could be dangerous Seeder tech – anything, something worse than the Scorpion. You can’t open it.’

  ‘And yet . . .’ Scab said. He hadn’t taken his eyes off the cocoon. He was getting dressed. He had injected himself with a chemical, given to them on the Living Cities, which was slowly returning Scab to his normal self, reversing the DNA process that had allowed him to disguise himself on Game. Vic had brought some of Scab’s stuff with him: his suit, hat, hand weapons, the energy javelin, his P-sat – though not the heavy combat chassis – a case of cigarettes, ear crystals with his music and the case for his works. The important stuff, Vic had guessed. Scab’s internal repair systems were still trying to regrow part of his face.

  ‘Look. Let’s just deliver it to your employer and retire, separately, rich, or at least almost out of debt, to a life of luxury, and wait for the Church, or some of these Monarchist crazies to, at best, assassinate us. If you’re bored you can hunt down the surviving crew members. You’ll enjoy that.’ He glanced up at Scab.

  ‘I’m tired of being a nightmare. You don’t have much imagination, do you?’

  ‘That’s really not true. I have lots of it, and all it’s being used for is to imagine the bad shit that’s going to happen to us as a result of this. Much of it involves very powerful people using a remarkable amount of resources to make me suffer.’

  ‘We’re not turning it over,’ Scab said. He was still staring at the cocoon as he pushed the javelin back into its hidden sheath in his right arm. The coherent energy blade glowed under his flesh for a moment. Once the shock of Scab’s statement had worn off, Vic realised that Scab actually had an expression on his face. Curiosity.

  ‘W-w-why not?’ Vic managed. He wasn’t sure he’d ever been so frightened, not even after he’d had his brain modified to be more human and he’d experienced his first dream. Apparently foreign images in his head while he slept – it had been terrifying.

  ‘What do you mean why not?’ An insect gaping is basically an insect with all its mandibles open. Scab looked up at Vic as if noticing him for the first time. ‘Everyone wants this.’

  ‘Yes, I’ve noticed that,’ Vic said, sounding a lot calmer than he felt. ‘I think the being killed by an Elite drove it home. So what – and I want to know the answer to this question less than any question I’ve ever asked before – do you intend to do with it?’

  ‘Well, to get the best price, we should auction it,’ Scab said as he ensured that all his weapons were sitting properly in holsters and sheaths.

  Vic nodded, shutting down certain of his mental faculties and transferring their running to his neunonics, while he drowned himself in tranquillisers so he wasn’t utterly overwhelmed by hysteria.

  ‘And who do you envision coming to this auction?’

  ‘I’d imagine the main bidders will be the Church, the Consortium and representatives from the Monarchist systems, but anyone who can meet my price is welcome.’ Everything in place, Scab lit up a cigarette. His neunonics were cycling through his collection of pre-Loss music trying to find something appropriate for the cocoon’s big reveal.

  ‘Please, Scab, don’t misunderstand me. I have delusions of ruling Known Space as well, but we don’t have the power to back it up. We’re just a couple of guys with guns is all.’

  ‘It’ll be difficult, but I’ll find a way to make it easier for them to just give me what I want.’

  ‘They’ll track us down and kill us afterwards.’

  ‘I’d welcome that.’

  ‘What about me? I don’t have a fucking death wish.’

  ‘What about you?’

  ‘They’ll kill me.’

  ‘At best.’

  ‘That’s what I said!’

  ‘So?’

  Vic stared at him for a moment. He saw this was going to be problematic.

  ‘You can understand why I don’t want to be killed, right?’

  ‘I guess. I just don’t see what it’s got to do with the plan.’ Scab was getting angry.

  ‘Fuck you, Scab.’ It might have been one of the bravest things he’d ever done. Scab looked at him like he was studying some kind of new phenomenon.

  ‘What do you think our arrangement is?’

  ‘Slave.’

  ‘Don’t give me that. You are very well paid.’

  ‘Can I leave now?’

  ‘Obviously not. You are a resource, a very well-paid resource. Don’t ever forget that. You have had a good run and been well paid for it, but nothing is for ever.’

  ‘Motivating.’

  ‘Would you prefer to be slaved?’

  ‘What are you asking for from the three most powerful groups in Known Space?’

  ‘Would you prefer to be slaved?’

  ‘I deserve an answer.’

  ‘You deserve what I choose.’

  ‘The problem with you, Scab, is you don’t leave people with anything. It’s all very well being the most hard-arsed cunt in Known Space, but you’ve left me with nothing to lose, so either kill me, slave me, go fuck yourself or answer the fucking question.’ Vic was pretty sure he had killed himself.

  Scab was staring at him. His face seemed impassive again but Vic knew the human well enough to recognise the anger.

  ‘Nobody’s spoken to me like
that since the Legion.’

  Vic just spread out all his limbs, palms up, fingers open in a kind of multi-limbed ’sect, I-don’t-care shrug.

  ‘If I tell you, will you stop whining and be useful again?’

  ‘Oh, I apologise that my impending death is making me whiny.’

  The look that Scab then gave Vic let him know that the human was being indulgent. Vic guessed that retrieving the cocoon and double-crossing the Church had put his ‘partner’ in what passed for a good mood in Scab world.

  ‘Fine. Yes, then. I’ll stop “whining”.’

  ‘I want the surgery they did when they made me join the Legion undone. I know they have a full copy of my personality in the Psycho Banks. I want to be as I was, full and hole, not this weakened version of me.’

  ‘A monster?’ You had to work hard for that word to mean anything among the casual cruel brutalities of Known Space.

  ‘Whole.’

  ‘King Shit of Cyst?’

  ‘I’m missing something.’

  ‘That’s not much to ask.’

  ‘Then I want to be Elite again.’ Something cold ran through Vic as Scab said this. It was a very human feeling.

  ‘That will just put you under the control of whichever power agrees.’

  ‘Not if I don’t undergo the conditioning.’

  Vic stared at him. He thought he had known it was coming. He had heard stories about Scab: the street sect on Cyst, his kingdom of agony, the mountain of bones, from gang leader to world ruler under the Consortium’s nose. As an Elite with no control over him, he could do the same to star systems, perhaps even more than that.

  It wasn’t bravery. It was instinct. Vic was moving before he had even thought it through. If he had, he would have been too frightened to do anything, or he might have killed himself and hoped for the best.

  His top right limb drew the triple-barrelled shotgun pistol. The left was going for the reptile power disc. His lower limbs were drawing both double-barrelled laser pistols.

  Scab threw himself over the cocoon, the metalforma knife palmed into his left hand. He threw it as he rolled. His clothes turned into a red neon grid as four beams hit. The tripled-barrelled blast caught him in the back. The explosive rounds penetrated his armoured clothing and hit his hardening skin and then exploded, taking a chunk out of his back.