by Gavin Smith
Beth couldn’t believe how good the kebab was. She had been hungrier than she thought. Maude was picking at pitta bread with some salad in it.
‘Were you part of this Black Mirror?’ Beth asked.
‘They were considering me.’ Beth rolled her eyes. Arseholes. ‘But they scared me a little bit as well. Talia was the nicest of them – she was really friendly.’ Beth was surprised to hear this. Perhaps she had grown up a bit since she had last seen her.
‘She didn’t have anything to do with terrorists, did she?’ Beth asked. Maude just laughed and shook her head. ‘Were they making drugs in the house or anything?’ Maude shook her head and looked sad again. Beth was worried that she was going to cry again. Her make-up was smeared enough as it was.
What are you doing here? Beth asked herself. You’re not going to learn anything good about Talia. What you need to do is think of something to tell Dad that isn’t going to break his heart.
‘How did you become friends?’ The question just popped into her head. She just hoped that it didn’t bring more tears. Maude seemed to be struggling with an answer.
‘Well, I’d known her to say hi to ever since I came here for uni, but . . . well, she helped me through a difficult time.’ Maude wouldn’t look at her. She seemed embarrassed about something. This was sounding less and less like the Talia Beth had known.
‘What?’ Beth asked and then groaned inwardly as she saw tears start to well again. It’s a wonder she has any eyeliner left.
Suddenly Maude looked up at her. ‘How much do you want to know?’ she asked.
‘Go on.’
‘I got into something well over my head.’ Her face crumpled.
‘Look, don’t cry; just tell me.’
‘Well, he said it was upmarket stuff – tasteful clients who would pay a lot of money, you know, help me get through my course a little less in debt. But then when I saw him and he was old and fat and wanted to do . . . things . . . It wasn’t like the films, you know, champagne and a few Js.’
Beth stared at her. ‘You were turning tricks?’
‘Just one. I couldn’t handle it. But Talia . . . she helped me deal—’
‘Was Talia?’ Beth asked despite herself. She knew the answer but it wasn’t real until someone else told her it was. Maude nodded.
‘It was horrible, but she really looked after me,’ she managed through the sobs and the gulping for air.
‘Did she get you into it?’
Maude looked stricken. She probably hadn’t thought about it like that.
‘She introduced me to William, but only after I asked about it.’
And how did you know to ask? Beth wondered.
‘She did porn as well, didn’t she?’ Maude looked guilty but nodded.
She actually thinks she’s betraying Talia. ‘Who’s William?’ In her mind Beth was screaming Go home to herself.
10
A Long Time After the Loss
Arclight was a mess, the result of expansion without regulation. The black market in Arclight, however, was very tightly controlled by the insect-run Queen’s Cartel. Originally the hollowed-out asteroid had been a hive ship, and it was still run by ’sects, Vic’s people, though he hated dealing with them. Vic had abandoned their caste society a long time ago. In the centre of the rock he knew there would be a metal and hardened carbon-fibre, honeycomb-style construction where the augmented ’sects lived. Once upon a time, steel and carbon fibre would have extruded resin and chitin.
No part of the surface of the original rock could be seen; it was buried beneath layer after layer of haphazardly added habitations forming a massive warren that had been centuries in the making. All of this orbited a distant fading sun that nobody had ever taken the time to name.
There was no traffic control on Arclight; you just tried to find a safeish place to dock and hoped for the best. Almost the entire surface of the asteroid was covered in animated holograms, though few were still functioning properly. Many of them offered safe places to dock, though plenty of those were bottom-feeding wreckers.
The Basilisk’s comms should have been flooded with similar offers of safe haven. However, Scab had broadcast the ship’s I-dent over the Arclight ’face to let them know who was coming aboard. That significantly cut down on the time-wasters and wreckers. Even the most hardcore hijack crew was going to think twice about taking on Scab, the bounty killer who worked without clone insurance. It was times like these that Scab’s rep paid off, Vic thought. Besides, when Scab announced he was coming to a place everyone thought the same thing: Is it me he’s after? After the I-dent they started taking in reasonable bids for docking, security and privacy.
Vic was less than pleased that Scab had decided to fly the ship under his own neunonic control. Scab was stood in the centre of the lounge/main room/Command and Control of the Basilisk. He had turned most of the ship’s hull transparent and was looking all around as he put on his brown suit and did up his tie. Scab wove his way through the parasitical suburban habitats attached to Arclight, heavily armed industrial assemblers, from one Consortium subsidiary or another, slowly eating away at tethered asteroids, past ships, the lowliest jury-rigged tramp traders to the massive Consortium bulk ore/carbon haulers, past salvage tugs and sleek scout craft belonging to xeno-archaeology prospectors, down-at-heel feline pleasure barges, scrap-built reptile fighting craft – there were even Consortium navy contractor ships and a Church craft berthed there. Scab took his time taking the Basilisk in, dancing it through the busy space, flying through the aging hologramatic displays, making them distort so it looked like Basilisk was pulling the dissipating light with it.
Vic tried to ignore the ’faced warnings from craft and parts of the habitat they got too close to. It was more difficult when they were flying near enough to see batteries, with sufficient firepower to obliterate them tracking the little craft.
Scab had finished dressing and was pulling weapons more socially acceptable than the Scorpion from the smart-matter storage compartment that the ship had extruded though the floor. He unloaded, checked and then reloaded each of the weapons before holstering them. To Vic’s mind this was still, arguably, Scab dressing.
Vic had already done the same, three handguns with seven barrels between them. Light armour was clipped onto his largely hard-tech chassis to augment the built-in protection. He clipped an autonomous blade disc to his armour. It was designed to seek out the EM fields of biological life, and like most brutal short-range weapons it had been designed by lizards. Vic still wasn’t sure it was enough, not with the people they’d pissed off. On the other hand, nothing would help if an Elite came looking for them.
The Basilisk seemed to give birth to two black globes that floated smoothly on silent AG motors into the air to hover close to Scab and Vic. They had cut right back on the personal satellites’ hardware but augmented their sensor packages. The P-sats would need the augmentation to sort through the clutter inside Arclight and provide them with accurate info. Both of them could extrude handgrips, and their AG motors were more than powerful enough to carry Scab and Vic if they had to.
‘We going to talk about this?’ Vic asked. Scab ignored him. ‘Apparently not. Is there anyone we didn’t piss off back there? I mean Consortium naval contractors, the Church and the fucking Monarchist Elite? Not one mind you – one’s not enough for Scab – no, two Elite.’
‘That’s vanity bordering on monomania,’ Scab finally said. He made it sound like a sigh. ‘None of them have any interest in us. They were after either the ship or the cocoon. The Angel or Ludwig could have destroyed us whenever they wanted.’
‘Comforting. You mean they knew we were there?’
Scab just nodded, remembering when he had been reliant on senses unknown to most biological life. Senses that spread out over hundreds of thousands of miles in space. Senses that meant he could feel the slightest movement in the fabric of space/time itself. Not for the first time Scab thought of how he missed being a god of destruction.
He preferred myth to what he thought of as the sordidness of flesh.
‘Has it occurred to you that the Consortium and the Church might want to know who our employers are?’
‘No, I’m a moron,’ Scab said.
Staring. In terms of human reactions this called for staring, Vic was sure of that. He didn’t blink, but staring he could do. He also let off a little fart of pheromones in surprise. Scab wasn’t known for humour, even sarcasm. Vic cursed himself: Scab’s soft-tech-augmented olfactory glands would pick up the pheromones. ‘I was not apprised of how dangerous the situation was otherwise I would have charged more.’ Vic was trying to work out the appropriate amount of time to stare to convey his shocked response. ‘Or said no,’ he finally suggested forcefully.
Scab stopped loading rounds into his tumbler pistol and turned to fix Vic with one of his looks. Vic didn’t like this look. He couldn’t quite read the expression, despite his studies and the help of onboard computer systems, but it did unnerve him.
‘It was an interesting job,’ Scab finally said. Vic did some more staring.
‘And the Church! Really?!’ Vic eventually responded. Scab had done some truly stupid things, more than borderline suicidal, and pissed off some genuinely dangerous and powerful people, but in Vic’s opinion he’d gone too far this time.
Vic followed Scab as he picked up his homburg and placed it on his pale-skinned hairless head. Part of the Basilisk’s hull opened and they stepped into the airlock. The hull sealed shut behind them.
‘I fucking hate zero G,’ Vic muttered.
‘You grew up in it,’ Scab pointed out.
‘I grew up drinking synthetic mother’s milk out of a wall nipple; doesn’t mean I don’t prefer steak.’
‘That’s just something you heard in a colonial immersion.’
The hull opened out in front of them into what looked like a bunker made of patched and corroded armour plate. They were facing five heavily armed scum. Scab had accepted their bid for docking and security. He ’faced them the amount of debt relief he was prepared to pay along with the obligatory ritual threats that went with doing business.
They stepped out of the Basilisk’s AG field and let old instincts and hard-wired zero G routines take over as they drifted towards the ceiling.
‘If the Church does take you and torture you, you can feel good about having no actual information to give them,’ Scab ’faced over their secure link.
‘What is that? A joke?’ Vic demanded. Confusion, Vic thought, he was pretty sure that Scab’s expression was one of mild confusion.
The passageway Vic and Scab took was relatively new and a luxury express route. Scab paid the high price demanded to use it. Vic guessed the fact that the tube was transparent and they could look down on the non-toll routes deeper in the labyrinth of Arclight was supposed to make them feel better. People were packed in so tightly they had to wriggle past each other. Scab could see ’sects, little more than grubs, working the packed passage as his P-sat pulled him along. As he watched, one of them started screaming as some nasty countermeasure took him out as he tried to lift a pistol belonging to a reptile wearing luminescent body-paint gang colours.
‘So why come back?’ Vic ’faced over the secure link.
‘It’s close; we’re unemployed.’
‘We could have looked for bounties from the Basilisk.’ Vic was starting to sound confused as he watched a fight break out in the packed transport tube below. It looked desperate. Someone had probably panicked and the crowd had turned on them. It looked like he was being torn apart. ‘What if Sloper had friends who saw you talking to him?’
‘Then I would imagine we’ll have to do some free killing, but I chose Sloper because he didn’t have any friends and both he and his crew were malleable,’ Scab ’faced back.
You mean programmable, Vic thought but said nothing. Then it dawned on him.
‘Seeder’s sake, Woodbine,’ Vic said. Scab looked over his shoulder in irritation at the sound of his first name, but it was one of those moments when Vic just didn’t care. ‘Are you looking into this?’
‘It’s interesting,’ Scab said.
‘Are you fucking mad?!’ Vic asked before realising that it was a stupid question. Though it had occurred to Vic in the past that Scab was a new iteration of sanity, a psychological evolution designed to help the naked monkeys cope. Maybe one day all humans would be like Scab. The thought had frightened Vic.
‘I was offered a good deal,’ Scab said. He almost sounded wistful.
‘Debt relief’s a bit fucking difficult to spend when some Elite’s rewritten your DNA to see what you’d look like as protoplasm!’ It had taken Vic a while to learn to shout over the interface; it was mainly a human talent though lizards were good at it as well. He had been proud when he’d finally managed it. It was very useful for conversations like this with Scab.
‘It wasn’t money,’ Scab said. He didn’t say it over the interface. He didn’t even say it aloud. Vic’s hearing through his antenna had been excellent before it had been augmented by the ’sect’s hard-tech retrofit. Scab had just moved his stained lips as he sub-vocalised it.
‘Are you using us as bait?’ Vic demanded.
He always becomes difficult to manage when he’s frightened, Scab thought.
The Polyhedron Club was specialised: it catered mainly to men of the heterosexual kink and women of the homosexual kink. Most of the six-armed, no-legged, zero-G dancers were either of the girly girl or ladyboy gender. Most of them were human though there were a few felines and one reptile. Whether it had been custom fabricated or originally something else, the Polyhedron was, as its name suggested, an area with numerous sides. The club made good use of all twenty sides of the cavernous red-mock-velvet-lined chamber: each triangle had tables and chairs with micro-hooks that could be neunonically controlled to fasten the clientele to their seats.
The supports for the superstructure provided poles for the dancers’ complex, gymnastic and erotic dances.
‘So, just to be clear,’ Vic asked over the secure interface, ‘the plan is to wait here until something bad happens?’
Scab took another suck from his drink bulb and ignored him. Vic went back to watching one of the human dancers. He was pretty sure she was attractive by human standards as he had run her through some comparison routines in his neunonics. On the other hand, it kind of spoilt the thrill of being a humanophile if they had the same amount of limbs as you.
Both of them felt the atmosphere in the room change. Their P-sats rose from where they had been hovering in one of the many faceted corners, and the club’s defence systems ’faced automated anti-violence warnings with graphic examples of the consequences to both of them if they disobeyed.
The dancers scrambled and swung out of the way. Vic could understand why as he tried to suppress feelings of hatred, anger and not a little fear. Fully armoured and armed in Thunder Squad gear, he could have taken them, of that he was sure; like this he wasn’t so sure. He couldn’t make up his mind whether or not he wanted Scab to start on them or not. It would be an interesting death for him and a fight that Vic would want to see. Scab, however, just sat at the table taking the occasional sip from the nipple of his drink bulb and annoying everyone who could smell near him by engaging in his smoking retro-vice, as he watched the two warrior-caste ’sects fly towards them.
Compared to the custom-evolved biomechanical killing machines, Scab looked positively spindly. Overlapping plates of chitin formed armour the match of high-grade military protection. It was rumoured that the armour’s energy dissipation matrix was an application of S-tech that had been bred into their line. Their lower limbs ended in bladed legs, the four upper limbs all ended in grafted weapons. Their oversized mandibles were knife-like blades attached to sinuous corded muscles designed for close-quarters combat.
The two warriors propelled themselves across the club on small armoured wings that moved so quickly they were a blur. Ideal for zero-G manoeuvring, they could b
e retracted into armoured chitinous sheaths. The two warriors held a human between them. He wore a white suit of some rendered linen analogue and a panama hat. Despite an androgynous quality, Vic was pretty sure the human was male. Skin grew across his eyes, adding to the expressionless look on his face.
Vic clattered his mandibles together, wishing he could whistle like he had seen surprised humans do in immersions. Even Scab raised an eyebrow. The warriors were towing a blank towards them. A very rare, very expensive and very illegal application of S-tech, it involved some kind of neural entanglement of identical clones. The neurology of blanks was altered by the ancient alien tech, allowing them to be used as transmitters and receivers. Some even whispered that it was an S-tech application developed by the Naga, the semi-mythical race of serpents, the so-called missing fifth and oldest uplifted race.
‘Do you think they could have drawn more attention to us?’ Vic wondered. Scab frowned slightly.
The warriors brought the semi-comatose drooling blank to their table as another chair grew out of the floor. Mandibles clattering together produced a series of synchronised clicks accompanied by scents as they released pheromones.
‘They feel, quite strongly, that we should talk to the blank,’ Vic translated, though he was sure that Scab would have understood. Scab was staring at the warriors. Vic wondered whether or not he should tell him that staring at them or any form of intimidation was a complete waste of time. He also considered provoking a fight just to see who would win.
Finally Scab just nodded. The warrior ’sects put the blank in the chair and retreated slightly to hover in the air. Everything else in the Polyhedron had stopped: the dancers, the bar staff and the other clientele where all staring at Vic, Scab and the blank.
Single-minded, privacy-enforcing nanites went looking for the inevitable surveillance nanites to eat. As the privacy cage grew up out of the floor to encompass them, the last thing Scab noticed was a shaven-headed human woman watching them. There was something about her, something that screamed Church to him. Then the privacy field started up.