The Age of Scorpio

by Gavin G. Smith

  The Age of Scorpio

  Gavin G. Smith

  Of all the captains based out of Arclight only Eldon Sloper was desperate enough to agree to a salvage job in Red Space. And now he and his crew are living to regret his desperation. In Red Space the rules are different. Some things work, others don’t. Best to stick close to the Church beacons. Don’t get lost. Because there’s something wrong about Red Space. Something beyond rational. Something vampyric…

  Long after The Loss mankind is different. We touch the world via neunonics. We are machines, we are animals, we are hybrids. But some things never change. A Killer is paid to kill, a Thief will steal countless lives. A Clone will find insanity, an Innocent a new horror. The Church knows we have kept our sins. Gavin Smith’s new SF novel is an epic slam-bang ride through a terrifyingly different future.

  Gavin G. Smith

  THE AGE OF SCORPIO

  To Evelyn & Grant Smith (or Mum & Dad as I like to call them) without whom none of this would have been possible (though someone had better tell Mum about this as she doesn’t like Science Fiction very much).

  1. A Long Time After the Loss

  The deep-space salvage tug looked like it was made of hundreds of years of patched-together scrap parts. The original parts of the ship were buried underneath layers of barely functioning detritus. It was a scavenger ship, a space-going parasite that fed on the misfortunes of others. Just like everything else in Known Space.

  Forward was Command and Control, the crew area, workshops and a small internal hold, but much of the rest of the craft was exposed to vacuum. The massive towing apparatus, tools for use in vacuum, rolls of high-tensile net to carry externally salvaged cargo, detachable boosters to attach to towed hulks and hangars for the various drones, including Nulty’s own hangar. The rest of the crew had long since given up trying to guess Nulty’s original race and gender. A long time ago Nulty had uploaded himself into a deep-space salvage drone and chosen to live in a machine body in the vacuum.

  The tug was called the Black Swan. Few names could have been less fitting. None of its current crew knew what a swan was and none of them had the inclination to find out.

  The oversized engines, used for towing hulks many times larger than the Black Swan, were on heavy-duty manoeuvrable pontoons that looked like muscular arms reaching out from the tug. The engines were old and didn’t function optimally, like everything else on the Black Swan. Only the bridge drive was new. This was because of all the captains based out of Arclight, only Eldon Sloper was desperate enough to agree to a salvage job in Red Space.

  ‘Where are we?’ The question irritated Eldon. Most things had for many years now. It was the irritability of your life not working out the way you wanted it to. He hadn’t asked for much, he thought, just a thriving salvage business, but that had been too much apparently.

  ‘Space,’ the small weasel-looking man with the pockmarked face and thinning hair answered. Eden had often wondered why someone who looked like that hadn’t had themself extensively redesigned a long time ago. Nulty, during one of his rare fallings-out with his captain, had suggested that Eldon had been sculpted, but his personality had bled out and turned him back to his original form.

  Eldon didn’t have to look at Eden to know his sarcastic answer to her question had irritated her. It had been designed to. After all, she’d had neunonic access to the co-ordinates since they’d left Arclight.

  The tug was old enough to still have manual displays and controls, though it was, like nearly all spacecraft in Known Space, piloted via neunonic interface. The pilot and co-pilot/navigator’s seats were raised to give a better view of the subjective front of the tug, which the hull’s smart matter had rendered transparent, providing them with a panoramic view of outside. Information cascaded down the vista of black and pinpricks of light. The view was repeated in the minds of each of the crew along with pertinent information for their specific job roles.

  ‘We’re not quite off the charts but this is pretty much the edge of Known Space. Much further and I expect we’d have to explain ourselves to the Church.’ The cheerfulness, implying as it did that Brett felt this was some kind of adventure, further irritated Eldon. It was symptomatic of his overall irritation with the handsome younger man – life hadn’t ground the hopes and dreams out of him yet. Well that and the way that Melia looked at him.

  ‘Eden, wake up Melia,’ Eldon said.

  ‘Oh, is kitty going to do some work for a change?’ Eden said, not even trying to hide the acid in her tone.

  Eldon turned in the flight chair to look at the engineer. He had always assumed that the glorified mechanic was jealous of Melia, though why she didn’t just sculpt herself to look more pleasing to the eye he had no idea. It wasn’t as if he didn’t pay her enough and she didn’t have the crippling financial responsibilities of trying to run a ship, well, a tug anyway. Eden was neither one thing nor another. He was pretty sure that her base uplift was human, though she’d had some lizard DNA in her somewhere along the line as much of her visible skin was scaled. She’d obviously had both soft-machine biological and hard-machine tech augments, whereas most people tended to go for one or the other. Eldon wasn’t even sure of her gender: he was pretty sure she was base female but from one of the more masculine female genders.

  ‘Eden, just for once could we pretend that I’m the captain and we’re about to do something really—’

  ‘Fucking stupid?’ Eden asked. Eldon felt a vein on his forehead start to twitch as Brett laughed, good-naturedly, of course.

  ‘Eden, Melia’s our bridge drive specialist – we’ll need her,’ Brett said. Oh go and fuck yourself, you supercilious little prick, Eldon thought. But it didn’t matter, Melia was all his, a fully bonded concubine bought and paid for. He’d paid for her training and neunonics so she could help with the ship’s systems. So she wasn’t just an ornament and sex toy.

  Eden glared at Eldon. He was just as capable of waking the fucking cat, she thought as she ran through the pod’s shutdown sequence on her neunonics. Strictly speaking, as the ship’s engineer the pod’s systems were her responsibility but Eden was pretty sure that Eldon had just got her to do it because he knew how much she hated the cat.

  The pod creaked open. It needed maintenance but Eden was putting it off as long as possible in the hope that Melia died in a horrible cryogenic accident. Eden had sent the cursory, bordering on rude, wake-up call to the cat’s neunonics. Melia hadn’t responded but the pod’s systems reported that the cocktail of drugs required to bring the cat to fully functioning consciousness had been administered.

  Melia sat up in the pod and made yawning a performance that allowed her to show off all her sculpted assets. Eldon turned to watch the show. Even Brett, healthy polysexual though he was, looked around briefly.

  ‘That is so fucking demeaning,’ Eden muttered under her breath.

  ‘And yet everyone does what I want,’ Melia said, smiling. The lightly furred feline humanoid’s smile was of course predatory.

  ‘Only because you pander to some xenophile pornographic fantasy hard-wired into the wannabe masculine since before the Loss.’

  ‘Come on, Eden.’ Brett said. Eden normally liked Brett, but his want for everyone to get on was starting to irritate her as well.

  Eldon was looking at Melia with an expression that bordered on worship. His adoration was shattered by the grateful smile that Melia shot Brett.

  It was short walk from the pod to Eldon’s flight chair, but the naked feline made a performance of that. Eden tried not to grind her teeth as Melia put her arms around Eldon and jumped into his lap.

  ‘We’re in space, baby?’ Melia said, rubbing against Eldon and purring gently.

  ‘Oh put some fucking clothes
on!’ Eden said. Melia bared her teeth and hissed at the human – mostly – woman.

  ‘Go and fuck yourself, you puritan bitch!’ Eldon snapped at the engineer.

  ‘Eden, you know that they have different social mores to us,’ Brett said in a conciliatory tone.

  ‘Would those social mores include manipulating the fuck out of every halfwit with a penis?’

  ‘They like being looked after,’ Brett said.

  ‘They like other people doing shit for them, you mean.’

  Eldon’s mood had improved with Melia waking up but was now beginning to sour again. He needed to replace Eden but needed to find someone of her calibre that came at her price. He tried his best to ignore her. Instead he focused on the wriggling naked feline in his lap.

  ‘Will we be docking soon so we can go and do something fun?’ Melia asked.

  ‘Baby Doll.’ Eldon ignored the gagging sound that Eden was making. ‘We need you to do some work.’ Melia pouted. ‘Did you look at the data packet I ’faced you?’ Eldon had to suppress his irritation as Melia shook her head.

  ‘I figured that if it was important you’d tell me when I woke up.’ Melia concentrated for a bit. ‘We’re in the middle of nowhere, baby. Why’d you want to go into the Red here?’

  ‘We’ve been given a tip on a some salvage, Baby Doll.’

  ‘In Red Space?’ Melia’s purring baby talk had gone; now she sounded more businesslike. ‘Isn’t that like, really dangerous?’

  ‘Yes. There’s a reason the Church has us stay on the routes marked with the beacons,’ Eden snapped.

  ‘They’re paying a lot, Baby Doll – they even installed a new bridge drive,’ Eldon continued. Greed and the need to be safe warred within the feline.

  ‘Enough money to have fun?’ she asked. Eldon nodded. ‘A lot of fun?’ Eldon looked pained but nodded. Eden groaned as she saw her bonus getting smaller. Melia smiled.

  ‘I’ll go and put some clothes on before what’s-her-face expires in a puddle of jealousy.’

  ‘While you’re at it, why don’t you fuck yourself?’ Eden suggested.

  ‘Only with Eldon watching, darling.’

  Nulty didn’t want to miss this. It had been so long since the Black Swan had gone into Red Space. His hangar door slid down as he disconnected himself from his immersion link. In aperture configuration, Nulty scuttled out of the hangar on deceptively spindly looking insectile legs. Even living as a machine he felt the vertigo of being alone out in the stars and embraced it. He hoped he never grew tired of it. Though he had to cut off the comms chatter from the rest of the crew. He wondered how they could just bicker at times like this.

  In front of the Black Swan space was ripped open, though Nulty did not appreciate it as violence. To him it looked like a tear lined with a silk ribbon of blue pulsing radiation. Through the tear it looked like space was bleeding, the bright crimson of Red Space. As incredible as this sight was, there was something about the fabric of Red Space that made him feel uncomfortable. He knew Red Space was dangerous. He knew much of it was uncharted territory, and in his several hundred years of spacefaring he’d heard all the stories, though like most people he’d never seen anything. Deep in his metal shell he just couldn’t shake the feeling that it was wrong at a fundamental level. If he were forced to put a word to it, the word would have been vampiric, though every time he thought it the rational part of his brain scoffed at him.

  As they moved through into the eddying, seemingly living crimson smoke of Red Space, Nulty retreated back into his hangar. Reconnecting, Nulty went looking for solace in immersion fantasies.

  ‘Sorry, boss. Nothing but glitches,’ Brett told Eldon.

  ‘Baby, I’m bored,’ Melia said. Her tone suggested that she wasn’t just bored, she was more than a little worried.

  ‘Wow, so this is what Red Space looks like,’ Eden muttered to herself sarcastically.

  ‘Everyone fucking shut up!’ Eldon shouted. He was trying to concentrate. He even ignored Melia’s pout, which this time wasn’t just for effect. They’d been in Red Space for the better part of twenty hours, running every conceivable sensor sweep they could. Different rules applied in Red Space, though none of them had ever thought to investigate those rules and find out how they worked. Normally it was just enough to know that some things worked, others didn’t, and stick close to the Church beacons so you didn’t get lost. Those different rules, however, were playing havoc with their sensor sweeps. They had been chasing glitches and sensor ghosts, some of them terrifying in scale, for the last twenty hours.

  Despite the uppers, most of them were tired. Because of the uppers, most of them were jittery and even more irritable than normal.

  ‘What’s that?’ Eldon asked, sharing information with Brett.

  ‘Another glitch,’ Brett answered wearily. Eldon sighed and then highlighted more of the sensor information. ‘Okay, so it’s a repetitive glitch.’

  ‘If it’s that regular then there’s a reason. Nulty?’

  Nulty had been quiet but he’d been monitoring the sensor sweeps through neunonic interface with his own liquid-software brain.

  ‘That’s called cause and effect,’ Nulty said over the interface.

  ‘The signal’s so weak,’ Brett pointed out.

  ‘Baby, are we moving?’ Melia practically mewed. She sounded frightened.

  ‘It’s okay, Baby Doll. The Red plays tricks with your perception, just like with the sensors. We’ve got the engines compensating for a stationary position.’

  ‘Does it play tricks on the bridge drive as well?’ the feline asked.

  Normally Melia liked it when she was the centre of attention. She did not like it so much this time as they all turned to look at her.

  ‘What do you mean?’ Eldon asked. He wasn’t sure if it was his mind playing tricks on him, but now Melia had said that, it did feel like the Swan was moving.

  Melia shared the pertinent bridge drive info over the neunonic interface.

  ‘Shit,’ Eldon said simply.

  ‘That’s weird. It looks like something’s pulling at it,’ Nulty said over the interface.

  ‘Ever seen anything like that?’ Brett asked.

  ‘No, never even heard of anything like that, and I thought I’d heard every bridge drive tale going.’

  ‘We could be about to start one,’ Brett said, his curiosity overriding his concern.

  ‘Maybe our mysterious benefactor gave us a dodgy drive,’ Eden said.

  ‘If something’s pulling at it, then there has to be some kind of measurable force or transmission,’ Nulty said. The rest of them just looked at each other blankly. Nulty had left human mannerisms behind a long time ago. He found himself missing sighing. ‘We’ve been looking for something solid, a wreck. Reconfigure the sensors to check every conceivable spectrum capable of carrying a transmission, then check the rest.’

  Much to Eldon’s irritation the others didn’t even check with him; they just followed Nulty’s suggestion.

  Eden didn’t say anything, but her expression changed to one of shock.

  ‘What?’ Eldon demanded. Eden shared the link. Over the ’face the transmission took life in the centre of their minds. At first it just sounded like a deeply unpleasant discordant noise that put them all further on edge. Then with the help of their internal systems they started to discern a pattern.

  ‘Is that a language?’ Brett asked. Even his normally positive attitude was being overridden by wariness bordering on fear. It felt like an ancient fear, like something he knew at some base instinctual level as an uplifted ape. One thing was clear: if it was a language then it was from a species very alien to any of the known uplifted races.

  ‘It’s singing,’ Eden said. There was something about it, drawing her to it.

  ‘Turn it off! Turn it off!’ Melia all but screamed. Melia could break the link any time she wanted and had in fact already done so. Eden just shook her head at the performance, but the others had broken their link to the horrific s
ounding ‘music’. Eldon was hugging Melia.

  ‘Boss, this is getting a little fucking weird,’ Nulty said.

  ‘I don’t like this. Let’s go back,’ Melia said.

  ‘We can’t, Baby Doll. We need the payoff, we really do.’ Eldon’s tone was pleading for understanding.

  ‘Shine any light on this, Cap’n?’ Brett asked.

  ‘Just these co-ordinates. Find the hulk and take it to a rendezvous point.’

  ‘Not back to Arclight?’ Nulty asked. Eldon shook his head. Nulty saw the gesture through C and C’s optics.

  Nulty ran some diagnostics on the signal, which was coming in from some exotic part of the EM spectrum. Eden had to scrub out the background noise of the Red to isolate it. Nulty shared the information and then did some further checking. That part of the EM spectrum matched some of the emissions produced by the bridge drive.

  ‘It’s talking to it?’ Brett asked when Nulty shared the information.

  ‘Don’t see how, it’s a drive,’ Eldon said. At this Nulty would have laughed but as an electronic uploaded consciousness it would have been an affectation.

  ‘No offence, boss, but the Church keeps their manufacture so secret we can’t really say anything about this for sure,’ Nulty said. ‘It might well be talking to something.’

  Even Brett looked horrified. Melia bolted away from Eldon and hissed at him, all submissive coquettishness forgotten now.

  ‘No way! Fuck that! I am not getting involved in any Church shit! You can take my contract and use it to sodomise yourself for all I care.’

  ‘Are we working for the Church?’ Brett asked more reasonably.

  ‘I don’t know, not as far as I know,’ Eldon said, as confused and frightened as the rest.

  ‘If this is to do with bridge drives then more likely it’s a Consortium bid to break the Church’s monopoly on their manufacture,’ Nulty said.

  ‘You fucking moron!’ Melia screamed at Eldon.

  ‘I didn’t know,’ he said defensively. ‘We’re jumping to conclusions.’