The Age of Scorpio

by Gavin G. Smith

  ‘They call me Zadok. They say I wasn’t grown right, that the template was fucked, but they need the likes of me. All sorts of disease alchemy. I can heal as well as hurt. Put a disease in my tool though, so there’d be no more of me.’

  Brilliant, Brett thought. He appeared to have been kidnapped by a disease-spreading mutant dolphin bearing a grudge against their hosts.

  ‘They don’t have anything good for you here. They just want to get out of the dark and spread, like a disease. Everyone has to be the same, like. They are no friends to you and yours.’

  ‘Can you let me go?’ Brett asked.

  ‘If I let you go, you going to behave? Because I think you’re carrying some violence with you and I can’t get hurt before I tell you what you’re into here.’

  Brett just nodded. The dolphin shifted him around in the coils of his tentacles so he could examine him with one crusty eye.

  ‘You got any bottled fun on you, boy? You are a boy, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ Brett answered, trying to shift, the coils of tentacle tightening around him as he tried.

  ‘Yes to bottled fun or orifice fun?’

  ‘I’m a boy, man. I’m male. I don’t know what bottle fun is.’

  ‘See, they cut me off from the drug nipples, no more mother’s milk for me and I’m not an endorphin drinker, otherwise I could just suck it out of you. You wouldn’t like that though. It’s not fair, is it?’

  ‘Yes, I have drugs,’ Brett managed between gritted teeth. He kept to himself that they were part of his internal systems. He did not like the idea of being torn apart by some junkie dolphin looking for a fix. A thought occurred to Brett: ‘If they don’t wish us well then how come they let you live?’

  ‘Told you. They need me for maintenance. You, you’re just spare parts, some new information, maybe a top-up on the old gene pool, but most importantly you’re a key to this smoking red prison. I’ll be honest. I’d like to see the ocean that my ancestors saw. I ’members it up here.’ He tapped his skull with a tentacle. ‘But it’s far more important to fuck them. Ruin it for them. Just like they fucked me. They took my tool; they can all die.’ The little chamber of dead meat resonated with obvious anger and bitterness. Brett grunted as the tentacles started to tighten around him.

  ‘Drugs,’ he managed.

  ‘Oh sorry,’ Zadok said much more brightly and loosened his grip.

  ‘Where are your drugs?’

  ‘They’re in one of the suit’s internal pouches. You’ll have to let me out so I can get to them,’ Brett said in what he felt sure was a cunning manner. ‘No violence,’ he further reassured Zadok.

  Zadok eyed him with what Brett assumed was cetacean suspicion, but he felt the tentacles loosen round him.

  ‘That’s good. Just a little something to take the edge off. I’ve got a lot to tell you, boy.’

  Brett stood up among the serpentine uncoiling tentacles and wondered if they were looking for him. The bonded disc gun came off the back of his suit as soon as he touched the weapon. His neunonics sent the safety code to the gun instantaneously. Brett also sent the command to switch the weapon to pump action because he thought it was cooler.

  The butt of the weapon was snug against his shoulder. Zadok saw what was happening but obviously did not have the soft machine enhanced reaction augmentations that Brett did. The dolphin was only just starting to move when both barrels of the disc gun went off. To Brett it was like everything was happening in slow motion. The butt of the weapon contracted, cushioning the recoil as solid-state shot turned into razor-sharp, electromagnetically propelled spinning discs. Zadok’s flesh spread itself across the diseased chamber. Brett worked the pump mechanism on the weapon, chambering another two rounds from the tubular magazines under the side-by-side barrels. He fired again, just to be on the safe side. There was another display of dead flesh.

  ‘Fuck yeah!’ Brett said, trying not to dance a little. ‘That’s what you get!’ Then he remembered where he was. He looked around the chamber for further threats, expecting more junkie, mutant dolphins but finding none.

  Brett held the visor in place as he sent the signal to his suit and it grew out of his neck to cover his head the rest of the suit attached itself. He tried the interface again but got nothing. He reviewed the journey to the chamber in the memory of his neunonics. He was reasonably sure he could find his way back.

  Brett rose out of the pool with the disc gun ready, scanning from side to side. This was the way the tac program in his neunonics told him to do it; more to the point it was the way he had done it in immersions. Playing legionnaire for fun.

  Brett was now sure he was lost. He was not sure how as the recorder facility on the route finder application in his neunonics should have taken him back to the main chamber.

  He rose, dripping, into a large chamber with a gently curving roof. The chamber was formed of what looked like thick, smooth, rubbery, but not unpleasantly so, skin. It reminded Brett of Zadok’s skin if Zadok hadn’t looked diseased and crusty. He retracted part of his spacesuit, which dragged the visor off his face and up onto his head.

  The chamber was dimly lit. A warm wind blew though it and he could hear the sound of water gently lapping against the walls. It gave Brett a dimly remembered sense of well-being.

  Then he saw the growths in the wall. He waded through the shallow water towards them. Drawn by curiosity, his sense of well-being bled off him the closer he got.

  At first Brett thought it was some kind of organic waste sack or tube. Then he realised it was a massive distended pregnant belly, not unlike the ones on the few fetishist weirdos he had seen go in for natural births. Only this one ended in a biomechanical vaginal orifice. Brett followed the tube up. It was part of something that had once been very clearly human – more human than Ezard and his friends in the main chamber.

  He/she, gender did not matter, was merged with the flesh of the chamber. No eyes, no ears, these were extraneous – why would it need them? Instead of a mouth there was a translucent tube. Matter could be seen moving sluggishly down it. This was not pregnancy. This was flesh as a material, storage, an incubator. Somehow Brett knew that the Mother and the Father were the ship. He knew that the passengers and crew were raw material. Their minds were only of use as inspiration. All over Known Space, human flesh was used as a raw material in more base ways – labour, sex, sustenance – but this had nothing to do with humanity. To Brett this was abomination. He looked around, his eyes brightening the darkness and magnifying what he saw. The abomination was repeated on either side of the chamber many times. Through the gloom he could see more chambers.

  The plop it made sliding out of the closest stomach’s orifice was almost comical. Brett’s features contorted as he looked down at the utterly inhuman thing uncurling in the water in front of him. Even the flesh sculptors on Cyst could not have invented such a departure from humanity using the same basic material. Humanoid disgust overwhelmed Brett as for the first time he was confronted by something that, although hybridised, was genuinely alien and not just another uplifted animal like himself.

  He raised the disc gun to his shoulder and aimed it at the newborn crime against human flesh. The safety was already off.

  Brett’s neunonics recorded the flight of his head through the air, its impact on the surface of the water. As Brett’s head sank before his systems registered brain death and became inert, the neunonics recorded the hazy image of a full-grown version of the newborn Brett had just seen, vomiting something onto his headless corpse. The final thing Brett’s systems registered was the enzyme breaking down his flesh for the thing to start sucking up his corpse.

  Eldon looked down into the pool that Brett had just been dragged into. Melia and Eden appeared on either side of him. Eden had her disc gun drawn and was pointing it into the pool. Eldon glanced between the women.

  ‘Well fuck,’ he finally said.

  ‘We need to go after him!’ Eden said.

  ‘Fuck that!’ Eldon and Meli
a said simultaneously.

  Ezard practically flew out of the water to land next to the three of them.

  ‘What the fuck?’ Eden demanded of the speaker.

  ‘I am very sorry. It is a malfunctioning maintenance creature. Do not worry. It should not hurt your crew member. We will find him quickly though and return him to you safely. We are already looking.’

  Eldon gave this some thought.

  ‘Well that seems fair enough,’ he finally said.

  Eden glared at him. ‘We need to find him!’ she snapped.

  ‘I’m sure they know what they are doing,’ Melia said. Though she would miss Brett. On a ship with a crew as aesthetically challenged as the Black Swan, he had been her one respite.

  Eden turned on the feline, but her angry retort was cut off by a shrieking cry from behind her.

  They swung round to see a woman walking towards them and pointing.

  ‘You did this!’ She shouted the words as if they were new to her. As if she had not used even this ancient form of common in a long time, if ever.

  Her skin was covered in jumbled words and patterns, some of them animated. Others glowed with their own luminescence. Eldon could not keep his eyes off her chest – the flashing and animated images looked like a collision between adverts for a soft drink and an insect brothel. They had apparently carried in a number of nanite advertising plagues. Plagues that their own screens would have stopped but against which those here would have no countermeasures.

  Nearby they saw other adverts growing out of the naked skin of the crew/passengers of the biological ship.

  ‘Shit,’ Eldon said. Eden was trying to explain the concept of nano-pollution to the angry women as more closed on them. Ezard was staring at them like he wanted an explanation.

  ‘You brought something else…’ Ezard started.

  Eldon drew the disc gun from his back and let Ezard have both barrels. Ezard’s abdomen almost ceased to exist as he flew back into the pool.

  The angry women with the virulent advertising disease grabbed Eden by the neck and lifted her off her feet. Nanites quickly laced through the skin and flesh of Eden’s neck, hardening it, protecting her windpipe, but her augmentations were strictly civilian and designed for industrial accidents. The woman’s fingers were still crushing her flesh. There was blood running down Eden’s attacker’s fingers.

  Eldon turned his disc gun on the woman holding Eden off the ground. His neunonics warned him that Eden’s position was within his field of fire but offered him the best target solution. He pulled the trigger. Both barrels fired. The discs tore chunks out of Eden and the woman. The woman staggered but did not drop Eden. Moments later Eden’s head just seemed to pop off. The headless corpse dropped to the ground and the angry and already injured woman turned towards Eldon. Melia’s double-barrelled disc blast tore the woman off her feet.

  Melia and Eldon moved back to back, trying to cover all around them as they were encircled by a mass of pale flesh sporting multiple adverts on their newly diseased flesh. All Eldon could see were their inhuman eyes, black nails and needle-like teeth.

  ‘What the fuck did you shoot Ezard for?’ Melia demanded, piteously aware of how few rounds the disc guns had in their tubular magazines.

  ‘Panicked,’ Eldon answered, thinking that this was not a good time for a domestic.

  ‘And Eden?’

  ‘Same thing.’

  ‘Are you panicking now?’

  ‘Yes.’ Though had Eldon been totally honest he would now have told her that panic was warring with irritation.

  ‘You going to shoot me?’ Melia demanded. Eldon gave it some thought.

  ‘You hold them off and I’ll make a run for help,’ he suggested. He looked up at the cocoon. He was surprised to see an ugly wiry-looking man with no hair and green-stained lips climbing around on it.

  The man’s spacesuit sleeve was halfway up his right arm. Clinging to this arm, its legs digging into his flesh, was an arachnid with pincers and a sting. The arachnid looked like it was made of living brass. The sting had extended and seemed to be deep in the material of the cocoon.

  Eldon recognised the man, or his neunonics did. He was famous. But there was something else, something familiar, as if he had actually met him but he could not remember when.

  There was a cry of pain from the man as the sting retracted from the cocoon and the brass arachnid sank into his flesh, moving underneath the skin. The man’s spacesuit covered him and the visor slid over his face. Then the man hugged the cocoon.

  Nulty didn’t like this at all. Red Space was starting to clear. The clouds were dissipating as if swept away by wind. Nulty had seen this effect before, watching ships gate from the red into real. Except this much cloud clearing away would mean either a very large ship or a lot of them simultaneously. Neither option seemed good for them.

  The repeated interface hail to Eldon and the others might as well have been screaming into a vacuum. He was now very sure that the sensor glitch that Eldon had found was a stealthed ship. It was showing some of the strange energy signature that the S-tech craft they had found was displaying.

  The violence done to the very fabric of Red Space was appalling in its scale. Nulty watched from the hull of the Black Swan, feeling exposed in the vacuum that he’d thought of as his home. As space was torn open, the craft coming through looked like a massive cliff of armour and technology from his perspective. It moved slowly, gracefully, through the pulsing blue tear, angry ribbons of white energy sparking off its hull. Nulty had the absurd urge to go and hide on the other side of it. Except that the sensor feed from the Swan was showing another bridge of similar size opening behind him. For a supposedly off-the-beaten-track part of Red Space, things were getting very busy. The second craft was of about equal size and similarly armoured, but unlike the smooth, angular lines of the first craft, its hull was ornate, even bearing statuary protruding.

  Nulty recognised both craft. The first was a Consortium Free Trade Enforcer-class heavy cruiser. The second was also a heavy cruiser but belonged to the Seeder Church. Nulty understood why they were here. Both would have an interest in the Seeder craft, if that was what it was, particularly if it held the secret of bridge tech. To the Consortium it could mean breaking the Church’s monopoly, a monopoly that the Church would not want to see broken.

  Despite the heavy interference, Nulty listened to threat and counter-threat rage through Red Space as the ships tried to lock weapons on each other through their glitching sensor systems.

  The odd thing was that the Church ship was showing the same or similar spectrums of energy that the Seeder craft was. It was similar to some of the readings he’d been seeing from the Swan since their mysterious employer had paid to get the bridge drive functioning. Their employer had also apparently paid for some other modification, which Nulty was less than pleased about. The Consortium craft was not showing anything from that part of the energy spectrum. In fact Nulty was getting exactly what he would have expected from sensor readings of a Consortium heavy cruiser.

  Nulty found himself praying to the Seeders, something that he had not done in a very long time, that both sides would want the Seeder craft intact. On the other hand, he could not imagine that whoever got the craft would have a good reason for keeping him alive.

  Nulty started the ship’s systems via interface. He would just have to skip into Real Space and hope he could find a way home. If the worst came to the worst, he could set a repeating mayday, point the craft in Real Space towards the closest planet or habitat and hibernate.

  Sorry, boss, he thought. He wasn’t surprised when the unpleasantly organic-looking docking tube would not relinquish its grip on the Swan. Nulty had already manoeuvred one of the torches into place. Just as he was about to start cutting, he noticed something in one of the optics and, with a thought, magnified it. The skin of the Seeder craft was changing, becoming more mottled, unhealthy-looking, diseased.

  Seeder’s sake, Nulty thought as the two cruisers
began to stab bright beams of energy at each other, what kind of viral had Eldon taken in with him?

  One of the ship/thing’s inhabitants moved too close to Melia and she fired. Eldon also fired as they closed on him. To Eldon it looked like black veins of disease were crawling across the walls/flesh of the ship/creature. Eldon cursed himself roundly. The virals he had brought on board were the most potent he could find in Arclight. He had never imagined that they would be as potent as this. He had killed his prize.

  ‘You’ve done this!’ one of the women screamed at him with a larynx designed for a different language.

  ‘I didn’t mean to,’ he cried, and then shot her with both barrels. The craft bucked under his feet. It felt like an impact, a powerful one. The ripple that surged through the craft and knocked him off his feet reminded him of dry retching. In the ceiling above he watched as the flesh transformed itself into fire. A chemical reaction as explosives fed on flesh until it reached fusion and breached the outer hull.

  Eldon did not see space. It was his torn-up constituent parts that were sucked through the hole in the ancient creature’s flesh and into Red Space’s clouded starless night.

  5. Northern Britain, a Long Time Ago

  She felt the heather against her cheek, under her, providing a soft warm bed. Normally bleary in the morning, she was sharp. Britha was aware enough to remember the expectation of being cold and stiff after a night in the heather. She was not. She felt fine though it was a strange awakening. Like she had just woken from a fever to find that it had broken. She felt better than she could remember feeling in a long time – fit, strong, aware and more attuned to her surroundings. However, she had a strange sense of disconnection that she could barely put a name to, let alone explain, and a taste in her mouth that for some reason reminded her of Cliodna.

  Britha unwrapped her robe from around herself. She had been using it as a blanket. She belted it in place as she watched the others rise. Talorcan had already been awake. It had been his turn on watch, his features as impassive as ever.