‘Pythia has agreed to host. The invitations have been sent. The price for tickets alone will put me into credit – you, too, if you want.’
Vic found he didn’t care because he couldn’t believe it would work. Though Pythia did make sense – most of the negotiations could be handled remotely. Pythia, despite being theoretically in Consortium space, would be impartial. It was one of the few entities in Known Space that was not interested in bridge tech. It could use its impressive orbital system and bridge-point defences to keep everyone in line. If those didn’t work, Pythia wielded the more serious threat of an information embargo.
‘Who?’ Vic asked, but Scab ignored him. The ’sect knew the answer – the great and good of the Consortium and Monarchist systems, and of course the Church.
‘I’ve never told you this, but I’ve always enjoyed your rudimentary attempts at human seduction,’ Scab said. Vic stared at his partner/captor. He would have been less surprised if Scab had offered to orally pleasure him. ‘They are’ – Scab gave his next words some serious consideration – ‘amusing to me.’ The human looked as if his own words had surprised him. Vic knew it was an affectation but he was still staring at Scab, his mandibles agape.
‘Wh … what?’ he managed.
‘I’m missing something, with the girl. You want to have sex with her. Talk to her. Give me some insight.’
‘What are you looking for?’
‘I don’t know … insight, something strange in her life.’
‘She was melded to a Seeder vessel. How strange do you want? She was a moon-fucking giant centipede?’
‘I thought you’d enjoy this,’ Scab said, and even he sounded a little confused.
‘Why don’t you speak to her?’
‘I might kill her.’
‘Of course you might. Fine.’ Though Vic had to admit it was one of the less unpleasant tasks Scab had given him over the years.
Scab had made his presence known in the back of Vic’s mind. He was watching Vic’s efforts with Talia through the ’sect’s own senses. Vic found he couldn’t even get angry at the violation any more.
‘Where are we going?’ Talia asked as they climbed the helical stairway cut out of the asteroid’s rock.
‘It’s a surprise,’ Vic told her. He had spent a lot of time researching how to do this in various immersions. Not the colonial or humanoporn immersions he favoured, but the more gentle romantic immersions preferred by housewives and husbands of the more decadent upper-mid-corporates who could afford such luxuries. He’d even found some pre-Loss examples but they weren’t immersions. There was no interaction. You were just supposed to watch them. They hadn’t been very satisfying.
‘Is it some sort of observation place?’ the human asked.
Not that much of a surprise, then, Vic thought.
‘Am I going to see space?’
Still, she sounded excited, he thought. The drugs appeared to have taken the edge off her fear a little, and she’d been allowed to use the assembler to make some narcotics and cigarettes, though she maintained that Scab’s cigarettes were better. Her eyes were glassy at the moment. Vic hoped her narcotic haze wasn’t the only reason she’d agreed to come with him.
The steps brought them out in a circular stone chamber with a transparent smart-matter domed roof. Vic realised his mistake as soon as he reached the observation chamber. He remembered approaching the asteroid habitat in the Basilisk the first time. He hadn’t liked the look of space in the system then, either. It was inky, impenetrable.
‘Where are the stars?’ Talia asked. There was disappointment in her voice.
Vic was still staring through the dome. It was claustrophobic, somehow, closing in on him. The databanks in his neunonics provided him with the word ‘malevolent’. Perhaps he was going too far to the human-side, he thought, if he had started investing natural phenomena with meanings they couldn’t possibly have.
‘You can see a better night sky out on the moors,’ she said, and she sounded miserable.
Vic showed her the bottle he was carrying. She glanced at it, and then at him. She looked like she was about to start crying. Again.
‘It’s all gone, isn’t it?’
Vic’s studies into human culture aside, he wasn’t really equipped for this sort of thing. Instead he nodded, deciding the tears were inevitable, and just stood and watched her. He spent a moment neunonically ’facing a command to the habitat’s decidedly odd systems to grow something they could both sit on from the rock. The habitat was doing so but the item of stone furniture it was creating didn’t look terribly comfortable.
‘All my friends, my dad, even my fucking sister – all gone!’ she wailed.
‘Do you want some of this?’ Vic asked, feeling a little helpless.
‘What is it?’ Talia asked, wiping away tears and mucous and then searching through the purse she’d assembled for a cigarette.
‘Oh, right, we call this alcohol, we have this now.’
Talia stopped searching for a cigarette and stared at the big ’sect. Vic didn’t need the image-analysis software in his neunonics to tell him she was looking at him as if he was a moron. She eventually found a cigarette and lit it.
‘Don’t you have time travel, or something useful like that?’ she asked as she inhaled smoke from the cigarette.
Vic couldn’t stop the laughter quickly enough. She glared at him. He decided to change the subject.
‘Without soft-machine augments to scrub harmful substances from the smoke, won’t those cause harmful and potentially life-threatening mutations?’ he asked, pointing at the cigarette. Talia continued glaring at him. He decided this wasn’t going well.
‘Give me the “alcohol”,’ she demanded, and snatched the bottle of spirits, which had apparently been made here in the habitat using methods other than the aging assembler. The top of the bottle unsealed itself. Talia stared at it in wonder for a moment and then took a swig.
‘Jesus, that tastes like shit.’ She coughed, gagged a little and then took another swig.
‘Jesus?’
‘What are we doing here, Vic?’
‘I want to have sex with you,’ he blurted out, then took the bottle from her and let its sour ethanol taste flood his system as he neunonically turned off various toxin filters. She was staring at him.
‘This is like a horrible trip,’ Talia muttered. It was clear she was talking to herself. Vic wasn’t sure what ‘trip’ meant in this context, but he was certain that the inclusion of the word ‘horrible’ didn’t bode well for his chances.
‘I just thought you might like something a bit different,’ he tried. This sometimes worked with experimental types. The hard-core insectophile human women he favoured tended to be a bit more jaded. This was unfortunate, as insects weren’t renowned for their imagination.
‘You know that you’re a big, armoured insect, right?’
‘I can be careful.’
‘I’m less worried about the armour, more the insect.’
‘I’m an insect?’ Vic asked, trying levity. ‘Who’s been talking? My cock won’t fall off inside you.’ Then he laughed to make sure she knew it was a joke. Talia stared at him. He felt exasperated confusion in the back of his mind. Talia continued staring at him. Then she reached for the bottle, took it from him, swigged and carried on staring.
‘It’s a joke, see – some insects, not uplifted ones, when they procreate, their—’
‘Like a fly, I get it.’
‘We’re not having sex, are we?’
‘No,’ Talia confirmed. ‘Don’t take it the wrong way, you’re by far the nicest insect I’ve ever spent time with, but first contact is one thing. I’m not sure my reputation can take sleeping with the first alien I meet.’
‘I’m just an uplift. You were joined with a real alien. Its tech runs in your blood. There’s an argument
you’re more alien than I am.’
Vic saw her face crumple again and wondered if she would ever run out of tears. Talia sat down hard on the seats the habitat had extruded and took another long pull from the bottle before grimacing.
‘She was so beautiful. We sailed through the Red. There were things out there, you know? Not cold like the black. And now she’s gone, too.’ Then she turned on Vic, her face a mask of fury. ‘And your fucking friend murdered her!’ Vic thought she was going to throw the bottle of cleaning fluid, but she decided against it and took another swig.
‘He’s not my friend,’ Vic said, holding all four hands up in contrition.
‘He’s a cunt,’ Talia grizzled.
‘Believe me, I hate him more than you do.’
Talia looked up at him. ‘He killed part of me, the greater part of me, the best part of me. Sleeping, her in my mind, mine in hers … it was just the best thing that ever … better than any drug or fuck.’ She looked up at him. ‘Even with an insect.’
Vic was about to ask her if she’d ever had sex with any other insects before he realised she was teasing him. He was coming to the conclusion that he didn’t understand pre-Loss humans. He certainly couldn’t keep up with them.
He sat down next to her and awkwardly put his two right arms around her. He’d seen this move in the pre-Loss media he’d assimilated. Though, as he understood it, it required some sort of communal room projecting two-dimensional moving images to be truly effective. He was gratified when she moved closer to him, leaning against his armoured thorax.
‘You’re really uncomfortable,’ she told him, but she didn’t move away.
‘Has anything weird ever happened to you?’ Vic asked, mindful of what Scab had told him to do. He felt more exasperation over the experiential ’face link Scab had downloaded into Vic’s neunonics.
Talia pulled away from him and stared at him as if he was mad. ‘No, this is perfectly fucking normal! All the girls in Bradford curl up with a giant insect and watch starless space of a Saturday night!’
‘Well, I don’t know, do I?’ Vic said in frustration. He got the feeling she was making this more difficult than it had to be. ‘I don’t know what’s normal for you. We have a queen, workers and warriors, and that’s it. I grew up in a hive. Humans have, like, five sexes alone, and every one of them is different, and weird, and really fucking difficult!’
‘Five sexes? Really?’
‘Some of them are fashion genders.’
‘In my day we had two, maybe three, max.’
‘I’m sorry I can’t relate to you.’
‘Look, this sea of fucking weirdness … I mean, there are no aliens, only uplifts …’ She gestured at him. ‘And you’re hitting on me. It’s just … everything’s been so weird, for so long, and it’s not going to get better, is it? Because you’re planning to sell me.’
‘I’m not,’ Vic told her. ‘If I could, I’d send you back to your own life, but I can’t.’
‘So you’ll be nice to me? We can be friends, right?’ She cocked her head to one side in a way that Vic found very attractive. Every bit of facial and voice-analysis software he had was telling him he was being manipulated. He didn’t care.
‘Yes.’
‘And you’ll protect me from him?’
‘I can’t.’
‘But you’re like a giant insect killing machine, aren’t you?’ she asked. The manipulation was gone. This was desperation.
‘You don’t understand …’ Vic was growing less and less sure of the benefits of his human psychosurgery as time went by. He was becoming more intimate with shame than he really wanted to be.
Ask her how the weirdness started, Scab ’faced to him.
‘How did the weirdness start?’ Vic asked.
‘Why do you want to know?’ Talia demanded suspiciously. ‘You’re communicating with him somehow, aren’t you?’
‘What? How’d you—’
‘I’ve seen you do it before … Oh, Christ, he heard me, he’s going to fucking kill me …’ She was so terrified that Vic thought she was about to be sick. ‘You fucking bastard!’
‘Look, that’s not what he cares about. Please, just answer me.’
‘I’ve always known I was different, special …’
The first thing that stood out, not her feelings. Vic didn’t like the sense of impatience he was picking up from Scab’s ’face.
‘Something specific.’
‘I was held by some sick crime boss—’
‘Why?’
‘Something happened. We were bloodletting. I was with a boy. Others had said my blood was odd. He drank some and … something happened.’ She shook her head violently. ‘I don’t … I can’t think about it … I don’t know. Please don’t make me think about this.’ She was pleading now. ‘Something terrible happened to him … oh, god, I can’t even remember his name.’
Was he a blank? Scab demanded in Vic’s head. It sounded like an odd question to the ’sect.
‘Was he a blank?’
‘What?’
Vic searched around for a way to explain it. ‘Was he biologically entangled with you?’
‘Of course – we were fucking.’
Vic tried to ignore the pang of jealousy. ‘No, I mean—’
‘He was so sweet, sensitive. He was an artist. What was his name?’
‘An artist? What? Like, he did porn or something? So what? Everyone does that.’
She looked up at him sharply. ‘You know what? You’re a fucking arsehole as well!’ Then she stormed out of the observation chamber, taking the bottle of cleaning fluid with her, leaving the smell of cigarette smoke in her wake.
Scab changed the shape of the smart-matter vial into a pipette and the drop of blood ran down to the tip. He had been staring at it for more than an hour now. He lifted it up to his lips and opened his mouth. He held it there. He ’faced another instruction to the vial. All the smart matter connected with the heretical sect’s habitat was oddly truculent, but the pipette eventually changed back into a vial. Scab put the vial down on the bench.
He knew something. No, he sensed something that was just beyond his understanding, something that unsettled him.
As he looked at Talia’s blood in the vial, he felt something that had been foreign to him for a long time. He knew fear.
6
Ubh Blaosc
Cold metal on her skin. Britha’s brain was assaulted by memories from someone else. Something else. Contact with the Muileartach, her mother, the All-Mother. Its suffering. Crom Dhubh, so hard to look at. Her head splitting as the crystal crawled into it. Things she would never do: the taste of human flesh in her mouth. Throat after throat slit, the bodies tossed into the water. Killing the boy the Corpse People had captured.
‘No!’
She was in darkness. She tried to scuttle into a corner but found herself in a rounded chamber. Judging by the feel of the metal against skin, the inside of the metal chamber had been carved with various patterns or images. She curled up in a foetal position. She was frightened, but more than that she was disgusted with herself at what she had become. She would kill in battle, a necessary sacrifice to defend herself or to protect her people; but this time she had revelled in it. There was something inside her, speaking to her – the spear, the eaten flesh, Crom Dhubh’s whispers. Bress.
Teardrop was dead, Bress claimed to have killed Fachtna, she had abandoned Tangwen and the others, her people. Cliodna. She had killed Cliodna. The sobs wracked her frame as she remembered what it had felt like when the head of the spear had penetrated her lover’s flesh. Looking into her dark eyes. She had done that.
Sometime later she reached up to touch her head. It was no longer swollen. She felt different as well. Her sobbing had made her ache; she was no longer aware of everything around her. She felt weary. She felt like s
he always had before. Before Cliodna had done something to her. Before she had eaten of one of the Lochlannachs’ flesh. Before her magics had become so potent.
There was light above her.
She tried to collect her thoughts and cursed herself for her weakness. Bress had lied about Fachtna. She remembered now. There had been stones. She had walked with monsters, warped creatures born of the Muileartach’s womb, poisoned by Crom Dhubh’s great working. They had let her be. They had known her as sister. Then she had summoned great power from the earth. How did I do that? Lightning had danced for her among the stones. A star had gone out in the night sky. How did I know that? And she had been somewhere else. Different stones. There were people all around her, tall, well made, Goidel warriors, male and female. There had been dryw there, brown-robed, leaning on staffs, hoods masking their features. Fachtna was there, too – she had seen his face illuminated by the light they’d caged her in. He had looked sad. Then they had killed her.
She looked up. The light was faint, the grey light of the time-between-times, dusk or dawn. She stood up. It was only then she came to realise that she was in a massive cauldron. She wondered if they were planning to eat her, but it would be a poor meal. Then she remembered the magic of men, the metalworkers. How the rounded belly of a cauldron was supposed to be the stomach of a pregnant woman.
She reached up and felt the cauldron’s lip. She was not nearly as strong as she had been, but she managed to pull herself up over the lip and all but fell onto wooden boards.
Painfully she stood up and looked around. She was in a large wooden long hall any rhi could be proud of, though why they had covered good earth with wood was beyond her. The walls were ornately carved and stained with bright, vibrant colours. She saw knotwork, spirals, shapes she recognised as women and men, animals, chariots and curraghs, and other things that she did not recognise or understand.
The cauldron was a massive bronze vessel with little external decoration. It had two handles on either side, though only a giant would have been able to lift it. She shivered at the momentary reminder of the giants that had walked and fought alongside the Lochlannach. No fire had been set beneath the cauldron. In fact, it looked as if the bottom of the cauldron had been sunk into the earth beneath the boards of the long hall.
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