The Age of Scorpio

by Gavin Smith

  As Cruibne somehow ran towards her, he leaned down and picked up a discarded longspear without breaking stride. Cruibne did not understand. He was about to attack Britha, and the arm that picked up the spear was not his.

  ‘Noooooo!’ The scream broke Britha out of her bloody reverie. Her head whipped around. Ettin was sprinting towards her, axe in one hand, longspear in the other. He looked less off kilter. He had two heads now. His original head was laughing. The new one was screaming, begging, threatening. She recognised Cruibne’s voice.

  ‘I’ll kill you! I’ll cut you open and shit in the wound! I’ll have your corpse raped by dogs! No please! Don’t!’ Cruibne begged. Never in his life had he felt so helpless. Ettin just laughed. There was something else though: Cruibne could feel what Ettin felt. The creature’s pleasure. He knew things, like that Ettin had an erection and where he came from. He just couldn’t understand. It felt like it was his arm that threw the spear. Did he want it now? To see her corpse. No, that was Ettin. Cruibne prayed to gods who had not heard his people’s prayers in an age. If they heard, they chose not to respond.

  Britha had a moment to wrestle with trying to understand why Ettin wore Cruibne’s head and then the spear was flying towards her. She tried to leap it. She had done so many times this night, but somehow Ettin had anticipated this, as if he had known what she would do. The spear caught her in the stomach. It felt almost as hungry as her sickle. She felt it grow inside her like a tree of iron tearing through her body. The force of the blow carried her through the air and she hit the sand hard. She lay still, looking at the spear sprouting from her. The shaft was moving slightly as the head continued to grow through her body.

  Ettin appeared over her. Cruibne’s head was sobbing.

  ‘I’m sorry, so sorry,’ her mormaer’s head said from Ettin’s shoulder.

  It was getting darker and colder, like something wrapping its wings around her. Britha was pretty sure that she was going to like death. She wasn’t feeling pain now. It had to be better than this, the death of her people.

  Bress appeared over her. So, so pretty, she thought, even with his dead eyes.

  ‘I’m going to wear your head so you can see what I do to your corpse,’ Ettin told her. There was more wailing from Cruibne’s head. That’s no way for a mormaer to act, Britha thought faintly. Bress just shook his head. He grabbed the haft of the spear. Britha actually felt the spearhead contract back to its normal shape. Then nothing.

  9

  Now

  A police officer ran towards the Range Rover waving at du Bois to stop. He understood the necessity for a cordon and supposed that the self-important look the policeman had on his face made him feel he was part of this. Du Bois had to remind himself that this would go more smoothly if he was a little patient and not too rude.

  ‘Turn this round now!’ the florid-faced and fleshy policeman demanded when du Bois rolled the window down. He sighed and handed the officer his warrant card. The officer stared at it. ‘Right, you stay here, I’ll have to check this.’ The policeman turned away with the card.

  Fuck it, du Bois thought. ‘Excuse me, lowly paid civil servant.’ The police officer turned around. It took a moment for the anger to come as he processed what du Bois had said. ‘Please imagine, if that’s not beyond you, that the card in your hand just has the words “Yes, I can” written on it. It is not for you to check that, question me, or even talk to me. You are here only because it is more cost-effective than training a monkey to do your job. A job, that despite its simplicity – keeping the people who are not allowed in, out, and letting the ones who are allowed in, in – you are still somehow managing to screw up.’

  The officer’s face seemed to lumber through increasingly severe stages of fury. He opened his mouth to retort but du Bois got in there first.

  ‘If someone is to question me it will be the highest-ranked monkey on the scene, do you understand me? Or should I have your extended family murdered for emphasis?’

  The policeman snapped his mouth shut. In his heart he knew that the threat was idle but there was something about the casual delivery that made him believe that du Bois was capable of this. Du Bois reached out of the four-by-four, took his warrant card back and drove towards the inflatable hazardous-material isolation tent. He glanced at the near-identical rows of terraced housing on either side of the road. He was already not enjoying being in Portsmouth.

  The hazardous-material suit was largely an affectation but appearances had to be kept.

  ‘Brilliant,’ du Bois muttered to himself. He was looking at a surprisingly small pile of rubble where a house used to be. The houses on either side looked as if they had chunks bitten out of them as well. The whole lot was underneath a large hermetically sealed tent. The place was crawling with scientists and technicians in similar yellow plastic suits. Most of them, however, were only engaged in spraying the area down with steam hoses and various chemicals.

  Professor Franklin Kinick was a distinguished-looking, rake-thin man whose prominent nose and bushy white eyebrows made him look like a bird of prey wearing a hazmat suit. The professor worked for the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory at Porton Down, near Salisbury. Professor Kinick wasn’t looking at the hive of decontamination industry going on around him; instead he was looking at du Bois as if he was something to be studied in a lab.

  ‘So imagine my surprise when I was asked to drive all the way down from Wiltshire and bring some very particular instruments designed to measure some very particular things? Particular things that don’t tend to be used in a counter-terrorism investigation. And then report all my findings to you, when, despite my clearances, I don’t even know your organisation or rank,’ the scientist finished.

  Du Bois turned to him, smiling.

  ‘How much would you like to know, Professor?’

  Kinick just looked at him. Du Bois knew that Kinick, who was probably more than a little curious and whose nose was more than a little out of joint, had been at this game long enough not to push the issue. He had narrowly avoided the purge in the late 80s. Kinick held du Bois’s gaze. He was convinced that he was looking at some kind of shadowy intelligence-operative cowboy.

  ‘Well, we found lots of interesting stuff. Pretty much traces of the entire electromagnetic radiation spectrum, dust, energetic charged subatomic particles, beta and gamma radiation. In fact, do you know where we would be most likely to find all these things at this level?’

  ‘Deep space?’

  ‘Yes. You don’t seem very surprised.’

  There was more than a little anger in Kinick’s voice. Du Bois had heard this before. This was people trying to cope with having their world view radically changed in a moment.

  ‘Pick an explanation you like and hold on to it for dear life,’ du Bois suggested. Not that it’ll matter, he thought. On the other hand they were so close to the end that at least Kinick wouldn’t be reprogrammed or assassinated, the latter being a lot less resource intensive.

  ‘Want to know something else interesting?’ the professor asked.

  No, du Bois thought sarcastically. Please keep all the interesting information from me. He tried to suppress his annoyance.

  ‘As far as we can tell, there is a lot of the house missing, and if there were people here then I can’t find any trace of them at all. It’s as if it all just disappeared.’

  ‘How much material?’

  ‘Initial estimates put it at about seventy-five per cent.’

  Du Bois nodded. Kinick noted that again there was not much in the way of surprise. Du Bois turned to leave but at the last moment he swung back to Kinick.

  ‘You won’t listen to me, but if I were you, enquiring mind or not, I’d try not to dwell on what you’ve seen here too much.’

  Kinick said nothing. He just watched du Bois head for the tent’s airlock.

  DC Nazo Mossa was not good at concentrating when there was a lot of background noise. This made her singularly badly equipped to work at Kingston
Crescent, the main police station in Portsmouth, or indeed any other police station. The mobile command centre that they had set up had been even worse, so she had found an empty house up for rent and had quietly broken in.

  As du Bois reviewed the second-generation Senegalese émigré’s file, this small crime was enough to endear her to him a little. He minimised her personnel record on his phone and brought up the narcotics and vice file she was looking at on her laptop as he entered the house. Mossa was a solid-looking, athletic black woman, her cornrowed hair tied back into a ponytail. She was sitting at a table in the front room. She looked up as he entered, recognising du Bois as the arsehole who had given PC Danes such a hard time.

  ‘Fuck off, you rude bastard. I’m busy,’ she told him, looking away.

  ‘I don’t care,’ du Bois said, his face wrinkling in a look of mock confusion. With a thought the screen on his phone displayed nine photographs of the inhabitants of the destroyed house and their most regular visitors, all of whom the drugs and vice squads had under occasional surveillance. Most of them were dressed in black, were pale and wore too much make-up. He placed his phone down on the table next to DC Mossa. She glanced over at it but went back to work.

  ‘Who are these people?’

  Frowning, DC Mossa looked back at the phone and then her own laptop.

  ‘Did you just hack our systems?’ she demanded angrily.

  ‘Hacking suggests a degree of effort,’ he told her. ‘Look, I don’t mean to be rude, which is unusual, but this is going to go my way. How easy or hard do you want to make this on yourself?’

  Mossa stared at him.

  ‘You’ve got a small penis, haven’t you?’ she finally said.

  ‘Nice,’ du Bois said, smiling.

  ‘You like that?’

  Du Bois nodded. ‘But isn’t that just something that people with windsock-like vaginas say?’

  DC Mossa stared at him with mock confusion.

  ‘Oh I get it. I insulted your manhood, therefore I must be some kind of crazy slut. That’s really clever.’

  ‘Seriously though, I could sit here exchanging crude sexual insults with you all day, but I don’t want to get all buddy movie with you; I just want to expedite getting this information.’

  ‘Act and talk less like a wanker then,’ she suggested.

  ‘Please, will you answer my questions?’ he asked, mildly exasperated.

  ‘Such a pain having to deal with us little people, isn’t it? Answer me first. What’s going to happen?’

  Du Bois looked at her for a while, trying to decide how much to tell her.

  ‘D notice,’ he finally said. ‘Nothing goes out on the news; a cover story will be found for the locals. It’ll become an urban myth.’

  ‘It’ll go out on the Internet,’ Mossa said.

  No, it won’t, du Bois thought. The Circle had the resources to police even that. He shrugged.

  Mossa pointed at the nine pictures on the phone. ‘These kids weren’t terrorists.’

  Du Bois didn’t answer.

  ‘Look. You’ve got everything on the files, obviously, but that’s not what you want. You’re looking for a little bit of local info, right?’

  Du Bois nodded.

  ‘This wasn’t a terrorist incident?’

  ‘It seems unlikely.’

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘Drugs lab explosion,’ he told her, failing to sound even remotely sincere.

  ‘With deco? Hazmat? Techies from some agency I’ve never even heard of? You want to insult my intelligence, you can go and fuck yourself.’ She turned back to her laptop.

  ‘You know I’m not going to tell you, right? If it’s any consolation, the ongoing investigation is going to have nothing to do with you,’ he said impatiently. Reasoning with people is such a chore, du Bois thought.

  Mossa turned back to face him. ‘Fine. Level with me. Is this something I have to worry about?’

  Du Bois gave this some thought.

  ‘Yes. However, it’s not something you can do anything about. Feel better?’

  Mossa studied him for a moment.

  ‘That I believe. They’re a group of goths, or emos, or whatever unhappy white kids like to call themselves these days. They set themselves up as some sort of club of hedonists. Sex, drugs, ropey music, that sort of thing.’

  ‘A cult?’ du Bois asked.

  ‘Wouldn’t know, wouldn’t be surprised if they dabbled in that sort of thing, but I think their focus was on exterminating rational thought and getting laid. Though they were into the vampire thing.’ Du Bois raised an eyebrow. ‘Bloodletting.’

  ‘Why?’ he asked, mystified.

  Mossa shrugged. ‘Fun?’

  Du Bois wondered if that was how this had happened. Something in the blood, a sensitive enough mind would act like a beacon.

  ‘Is that significant?’ Mossa asked, watching du Bois’s reactions.

  ‘Why your interest?’ du Bois countered, ignoring her question.

  ‘Minor-league dealing. We were getting close to arresting one of the weaker ones, getting them to turn over and give us someone bigger. Vice caught just the slightest whiff of specialised prostitution.’

  ‘Specialised?’

  ‘Maybe the bloodletting,’ Mossa said, shrugging.

  Du Bois reached down and touched the centre of his phone screen. The central picture expanded to fill the screen. The girl in the picture was not just attractive, she was beautiful, the sort of beauty that could stop a room and make people either desire or hate her. She was slender, pale, with high cheekbones, dark eyes. Her dyed-black hair was a travesty. Even through the surveillance picture he could see a sadness that was more than a subcultural affectation. This was an unhappy, isolated and lonely girl, and he thought he knew why.

  Mossa knew her. ‘Natalie Luckwicke, twenty-one, from Bradford. She may be vice’s whiff of prostitution. Rumour has it that she does tricks for some of the better-paying and weirder johns in the area.’

  Clear all that shit off her face and she could command a high price, du Bois thought. He tried to imagine what she would look like now, but he had no real frame of reference. It could be her. It could be any of a thousand girls her age.

  ‘Pimp?’ du Bois asked, still studying the picture as he downloaded all the information he could find about her.

  ‘Nothing so prosaic. Just a friend who knows people, can make the right introductions, that sort of thing. A real sleazy piece of shit called William Arbogast. Mid-level dealer to Portsmouth’s great and good, has fingers in some dodgy Internet sites as well.’

  He was already downloading all the information on Arbogast. He quickly went through blinds and holding companies, found his connection to online porn sites and did a search through them with tightly defined parameters, found what he was looking for and cleaned up the image. Even with the wig, the make-up and the bad camera work, it was Natalie Luckwicke he saw in his mind’s eye. He didn’t like seeing her this way. Mossa watched him clench his fist. He cut the feed off.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said. Mossa just nodded. Du Bois turned and headed for the door.

  ‘Tell me something.’ Du Bois stopped. ‘Who do you work for?’ When he turned to look at her, Mossa was surprised to see that he was smiling. There wasn’t much humour in the smile.

  ‘Would you believe the druids?’

  Mossa frowned. ‘You’re not funny.’ She went back to the laptop even as all the information on the Pretoria Road incident was being wiped from that computer and every other computer, regardless of security, all over the world.

  Du Bois forwarded everything he had found out to Control. The question was, could she have survived an incursion, even one as small-scale as this?

  King Jeremy stared at the manticore through the bars of its cage. It, or rather she, had the body of a red lion, rows of shark-like teeth and a scorpion tail that could fire its sting and quickly regrow it. The bat-like wings had been the most difficult. They allowed it to glide but not fly. It
was of little use in the arena but he liked to remain true to the designs in the Shattered Skies Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game.

  It was the face he liked the most though. She had been a model once, before she became graft meat. She had made the mistake of laughing at him at some party. It had been a matter of dropping something in her drink and programming her to kidnap herself. No way to trace it back to him. Beautiful face, monstrous body – difficult to imagine how he could be more like God, Jeremy mused. It was the misery on her face he liked. The desperately-trying-to-work-out-what-had-happened-to-herself. It wasn’t just her flesh he’d violated; it was everything she knew about reality. Pretty young women weren’t turned into monsters and forced to fight in an arena in her world. Bitch wasn’t laughing now, he thought.

  Jeremy realised that he couldn’t remember her name any more. He shrugged and looked back at the monitor. He still found it easier to use high-spec monitors than do it entirely in his head. The situation in Portsmouth was very interesting and pointed towards more of the lost tech, as they had started calling it because it sounded cooler than super tech or alien tech. They still had no idea what it was or where it came from, though much of it seemed to be very old.

  Jeremy had first heard rumours in the darker parts of the black market that dealt in technology far in advance of what people thought possible. Jeremy had been in his second year at MIT. Hacking, various data crimes and all-out electronic theft had not enabled him to afford the sort of prices that the lost tech commanded. They had, however, provided him with more than enough money to hire military contractors, as mercenaries were called these days, to hit one of the deals and steal the item.

  Despite the multiple electronic blinds and go-betweens he had put between himself and the contractors, it had been the most frightening thing that Jeremy had ever done, but he’d hit the jackpot. As far as he could tell, what they had stolen was some sort of miniature nano-machine factory capable – assuming enough energy and raw materials – of producing the tiny machines that could create just about anything and alter matter at its molecular level. He’d named it Cornucopia after the magic item on the final level of Pagan Earth.