If anything she was a better fighter than Scab, but Scab would always win. Viciousness went a long way towards victory.
She was putting her leg through its paces, helping to integrate the recently grown new flesh with the rest of her body.
‘What do you want, Vic?’ Elodie asked without missing a beat of her pattern. ‘You looking for an advantage?’
‘I don’t want to fight you. I like you,’ the ’sect said. ‘Y’know, as a person.’
‘Really?’ A series of quick kicks rising higher and higher until the final one had her practically doing vertical splits. ‘Good. Tell me what’s going on.’
Vic didn’t answer. Elodie practised in silence for a while. Her breathing wasn’t laboured; her feet barely made a sound on the replica wood of the deck.
‘Church trouble? Who’s the whiny hairless monkey?’ she asked. Vic still didn’t say anything. ‘If I hand her over to the Church, does my life get easier?’
Elodie executed a spinning kick in the air, landed into a leg sweep and then delivered a series of fast kicks from the ground.
‘You rely on kicks too much,’ Vic said. ‘They’re too slow, particularly the ones in the air. And he can hear you. Not just Church trouble. Board-level Consortium, Monarchist nobility and Elite involvement.’
She was good, but Vic caught the moment of hesitation when he mentioned the Elite.
‘Leg muscles are stronger than arm muscles, so kicks are my best hope against anyone with serious augments.’ She came to a halt and looked at the ’sect. The smart matter in her chamber started to reformat the room back to luxurious living quarters. ‘Like you. And fuck him.’ She concentrated for a moment and then smiled. ‘So I’m in.’
Vic saw the security warning from the Basilisk II’s systems that Scab had allowed him access to. He also saw Scab’s response – a hydra of seek-and-destroy programs, some subtle, most not, Pythian-designed programs which he used to counter-attack rather than defend. Some of the heads of the counter-attack program would cripple her; others would burn out her mind, subject her to meat-hack slavery or kill her, painfully. He wasn’t holding back.
‘A test.’ Elodie smiled. ‘Tell me, if it comes down to him and me, whose side are you going to be on?’
Vic felt a tickle of excitement. Together they just might stand a chance against him. But just as quickly as the optimism came, it was gone again.
‘You’ll do what he wants in the end as well. Don’t fool yourself.’
‘You want to fuck me, Vic?’
Vic gave the blunt question some thought. She was moments away from being crippled, enslaved or dead thanks to the heavily converted yacht’s systems.
‘Yes—’
‘But only to get back at him.’
‘Yes.’
‘I’m not enough of a hairless monkey for you to find fuckable?’
‘Close, though.’
‘Brave. I’m not Scab’s woman, but I think he believes he’s sprayed me.’
‘I can certainly smell him on you.’
‘It wouldn’t make any difference to him anyway.’
‘As I said, I like you.’
‘You think you like anyone who’s not him,’ she told him. Vic wasn’t convinced she was wrong. ‘What happened to you?’
‘I don’t care any more.’
‘That’s what I mean.’
The conflict between Scab and Elodie in the yacht’s systems went beyond what Vic’s clearance allowed him to see. He opened his mandibles to speak but Elodie held up her hand. He waited, only slightly resentful. Finally she blinked, obviously dealing with some pain, and spat out blood, which the now plushly carpeted floor absorbed. The tailored enzymes in her saliva would have destroyed any DNA and then self-destructed before it even touched the carpet. That wouldn’t stop Scab making the yacht’s systems analyse it.
‘So what have we got here?’ she muttered to herself. ‘There you go.’ She gave Vic open access to the yacht’s systems, presumably just to annoy Scab. Moments later, a worm ate that access and he found himself limited again. ‘Petty. So we’ve got a high-performance yacht with frankly illegal stealth systems, and it’s armed to the teeth. Hmm. A little above you guys’ pay grade. A spayed AI – typical control freak Scab. Medical systems. Want to tell me who she is now?’ Vic still didn’t answer. She concentrated for a moment longer, then she was looking at Vic. ‘She’s pre-Loss, and she’s carrying pure-strain S-tech.’ Vic still didn’t say anything. There was nothing to say. ‘I already don’t like her. I don’t like the venomous looks she gives me, as if she thinks she matters. I don’t like the sobbing, or the whining. Felines have sensitive hearing, you know? I don’t like her smell, and frankly her clothes are fucking stupid. What sex is she, anyway? Girly girl?’
‘Base human female. There were only two, possibly three genders originally.’
‘If I kill her, do my problems go away?’
‘In that Scab will kill you, permanently, then I suppose so,’ Vic told her. Elodie nodded as she considered this. ‘She’s under my protection.’
Elodie snorted with laughter. ‘Oh, Vic,’ she said, grinning. ‘Is it love?’ Then her face hardened. ‘Don’t be so fucking stupid. If she’s here, she’s a commodity.’
‘You think you’re not?’ Vic asked.
Elodie strode across the room to him and reached up to hold his face in her hand. Vic felt claws hard enough to do some damage tap against his armoured chitin.
‘I may have to dance for a while but that’s all. You can’t make him jealous. The only thing he cares about is if something inconveniences him, and then he’ll just destroy it.’
Vic removed Elodie’s hand from his face. ‘Stay away from her.’
‘No,’ Elodie told him. ‘You keep her out of my way.’
Vic turned to go. He was wondering how he, someone who’d helped destroy cities on CR worlds as part of a Thunder Squad, who was half of the most feared bounty killer duo in Known Space, had somehow managed to end up even further down the pecking order on a ship with only four people on it.
‘I like you, Vic. It’s probably the contrast,’ Elodie said as he left, the room sealing behind him.
Vic found her curled up in one of the corridors on the plush, wine-red carpeted floor. Half the wall was similarly carpeted, and above that the smart matter had taken the form of dark wood panels. It was odd, the ’sect thought as he looked at the sobbing pre-Loss nat human. She was visibly miserable but had decided to be out in the corridor rather than inside her chamber, which at least gave the illusion of providing solitude even though she was monitored at all times.
Vic watched her cry for a while. Her sobs were wracking her body in a way that looked positively painful, and as a humanophile, he was slightly envious of them. He wandered off again, the carpet deadening the sound of his heavy armoured frame. He ’faced some instructions to the yacht’s assembler – it had kept his preferences from previous attempts. This time, instead of having the assembler attempt to re-create a real flower, he had the Basilisk II construct one from surgical steel.
He returned a few minutes later with the tray of assorted drugs. Talia was still curled up on the carpet, sobbing.
‘I’m not sure what the human protocol for this is,’ Vic said. Few of the human genders were this emotional and vulnerable these days, not even in immersions, although some of the historical ones suggested an early human predisposition towards hysteria. ‘I have chocolate, red wine and morphine,’ he said cheerfully.
She looked up at him with a tear-stained face, her make-up running. Scab didn’t understand the make-up. He was getting better and better at judging human aesthetics, and the make-up just obscured her actual attractiveness.
‘Do you want to get fucked-up?’ he asked hopefully. He was learning that direct sexual enquiries were not always the way forward. They only worked for mo
nsters like Scab, apparently.
‘So it’s just, like, every guy I choose is a bigger wanker than the previous one.’
Vic accessed the pre-Loss lexicon he’d been building to look up ‘wanker’. If his information on human mores was correct, then he was pretty sure that most humans, and indeed most uplifts bar the ’sects, were ‘wankers’ unless they belonged to some of the more extreme ascetic orders within the Church. He hoped it wasn’t a member of the Church she was looking for.
Her chamber within the yacht was odd. It was very dark, for a start, and cluttered with many things she had fabricated in the assembler that looked unnecessary to Vic, but then he remembered that she didn’t have access to all the entertainment. She’d had the smart-matter hull create a circular porthole that reminded him of a spider’s web, and Red Space bathed the room in its deceptively warm glow. Her bed was very soft and extremely large for her small frame, which gave Vic hope. It also held a number of strangely inanimate stuffed toys, which he thought she was too old for, and all of which looked slightly grotesque. He’d been quite surprised to see actual paper books. In many ways she was lucky that the yacht’s entertainment libraries were equipped with old-fashioned audio and visual entertainments. He was less sure about the odd keening noise the room was playing. Talia had assured him it was music, though apparently it had no accompanying soundscape, either emotive, psychological or even visual.
‘It’s like I find the single biggest bastard I can in any given situation and latch on to him.’ This Vic could understand. She was smoking a cigarette made of tetrahydrocannabinol. She had offered him some, but his various filters would have made it pointless even if he inhaled like humans. Instead he had been trying to use his internal drug stores to synthesise a similar effect. He’d only succeeded in making himself lethargic and slightly paranoid – or rather, had caused a slight increase in his healthy baseline paranoia.
‘I think I do that, too,’ Vic told her. She nodded, though Vic suspected this had more to do with social conventions than her actually listening to him. Talia took another swig of red wine from the bottle. ‘Is that why you fucked Scab?’ Vic asked, more to try and coax out of her the next thing he was supposed to feel sympathetic about than anything else. He panicked when her face started to crumple again. He decided at this point he wasn’t going to say anything else until he had cross-referenced it with the human social-interaction library stored in his neunonics.
She started crying again. He tried patting her shoulder. It was one of the appropriate responses, apparently. She almost managed not to flinch away from his armoured chitinous touch this time.
‘Well, why did you?’ he asked, forgetting to cross-reference. He’d been a little hurt. He did feel sympathy for her. She was thousands of years away from anything she even remotely knew. The last thing she’d had any kind of relationship with was a living alien spaceship they’d murdered, she was going to be sold to the highest bidder, and if she was lucky, it wouldn’t result in vivisection. ‘Look, I’m sorry, I’m not really very good at this. Normally I just find a human female who wants to experiment, try not to crush her whilst we copulate, use a cocktail of drugs to fake an orgasm and then listen to her tell me it was just a phase she was going through.’
Talia was staring at him. Then she burst out laughing, much to Vic’s relief.
‘Oh my god, this is so weird! I’m in space, talking to a giant insect. This is like … I don’t know … William Burroughs or something.’ She reached out to touch him. Vic’s tactile sensors appeared to enjoy it. ‘Look, seriously, you don’t want to be involved with me—’
‘Do you mean get sexed-up?’
‘I’m a fucking mess, I really am,’ she carried on as if she hadn’t heard him. ‘I mean, the thing with Scab. It’s classic me, and we’re just too different.’ She glanced up at the big insect. Vic thought her eyes looked particularly big, for some reason.
‘But why Scab? I’m not trying to make you weep like an infant again. I’m much nicer than him, but I’ve also killed rather a lot of people as well.’
Talia stared at him for a while. ‘Well, he’s human. We don’t really think of insects as things we have sex with where I come from.’
‘Things?’
‘I’m sorry, people. And look at it from my perspective – I’m alone out here and everything’s strange. He appears to be the most dangerous person ever. I thought if I could get him to like me even a little—’
‘He doesn’t really like people,’ Vic told her. ‘So you weren’t really attracted to him?’ She didn’t answer. Instead she looked away from him and drew her legs up to hug them more tightly.
‘Oh,’ Vic said. She had told him about her boyfriends. The one who beat her, who her mean sister had killed. The one who had stolen her stuff and thrown her out. Another who wouldn’t share his drugs with her. The last one had apparently pimped her out. Then she was kidnapped for her blood. Vic assumed it was for the strange application of pure-strain S-tech she contained within her. Then Scab. It made sense, he thought.
‘It sounds like the best one you were intimate with was the Seeder ship.’
This time the tears in her eyes were different. They weren’t coming from big body-wracking sobs. She turned away and lay down.
‘You know I can’t remember it. I keep reaching for it. It feels so close but I can never get to it. I think I was at peace. I think it was beautiful. Imagine if you felt the universe, and it wasn’t all cold? Imagine if it sang, and you could hear it?’ She didn’t say anything else for a long time. ‘And then you guys murdered her, didn’t you?’ she said angrily.
Oh, fuck, Vic thought, and struggled to find a correlation in the library of human interaction to murdering the alien spaceship that the girl he fancied was bonded to. ‘Sorry,’ he hazarded.
She rolled back over and sat upright. Analysis subroutines in his neunonics told him she was struggling to control rage. She exhaled smoke at him.
‘Sorry? Sorry! It’s all just predator and prey to you guys, isn’t it?’
‘Yes,’ Vic answered honestly.
‘And now pussycat super-bitch is on board, the ultimate psycho has a new fucktoy, so screw you, Talia, you’re still going up on the block for auction.’
Vic reached over to touch her again. This time she flinched from him. This time she couldn’t hide the expression of disgust quickly enough.
‘I don’t want to hurt you,’ he told her. He was starting to think he’d pushed the whole human thing too far. It just wasn’t worth feeling like this.
Then she looked up at him and her expression completely changed again. He was pretty sure it was contrite. She reached out to touch his upper arm.
‘No, I’m sorry. Look, you have to understand this sort of thing doesn’t happen. I have a boring life. I’m from a boring family, in a boring town. To me this is like living a nightmare. Everyone I know is dead – my dad, my friends, my fucking sister, all gone. There’s not even some future Earth to go back to, and nobody seems to really know why. I’m doing the best I can, but can you help me?’
She sounded desperate. She was pleading. He reached down to place the hand of one of his lower arms on her shoulder. This time she didn’t flinch.
‘Yes,’ he told her.
‘Protect me from him. Please. Don’t let him sell me.’
There was pain but with no actual apparent physiological cause. He ran a diagnostic of all his physical and mechanical systems but found nothing amiss.
‘I can’t do that, Talia. I don’t think anyone can.’
She threw herself down on the bed and rolled away from him. ‘Please go,’ she said coldly.
Vic stood up and left the room. He knew Scab could have heard every word if he’d been monitoring them. He almost expected to find him out in the corridor, leaning on the wall, smoking. Holding something hard, sharp and pain-inducing in his hand. Wanting to mak
e it wet. But the corridor was empty.
Mr Hat sat in his temple. He was in his bath chair. The bath chair was on a jagged, irregular spike of glass rising from a blasted, blackened landscape into a starless, dark-purple sky.
Images of violence and atrocity cascaded down the glass of the temple to play across Mr Hat’s scaled features. They were visual representations of the history of his current prey, Woodbine Scab, uploaded as raw immersive audio and visual data. The display was completely unnecessary, of course, but it was a ritual he enjoyed at the start of a hunt. He felt it mimicked ancient lizard hunting rites that had involved the consumption of the image of the prey they intended to hunt.
As he assimilated the information on Scab, intelligent investigation programs began sifting through it using criteria he had selected. Far above him, black-immersion simulations of Scab howled in their cages as interrogation, torture and psychosurgical subroutines went to work on them. Mr Hat suspected only the psychosurgical programs would be of use against the shade of Woodbine Scab.
As the software sifted through the raw data, he relaxed in his bath chair and leaned back. The featureless dataforms of his automatons were naked and writhing all over each other, creating a living carpet on the floor of the temple as they debased themselves before him.
A while later he found something of interest. He dropped out of the illegal deification immersion and back into the black metal and brass of his ship’s Command and Control. He started ’facing instructions to the ship. He spared a moment to glance at the eyeless human blank seated in the tailored couch at the base of his command column. The blank’s S-tech-augmented, biologically entangled twin remained with his employer. Their means of instantaneous communication for the moment when Mr Hat found Scab.
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