The Age of Scorpio

25. A Long Time After the Loss

Even with the window polarised, the light pollution spilling into the large sparsely furnished marble office turned the two figures into shadows, like the negative of an old photograph.

‘You know what you are asking me?’ the Elite demanded.

‘I’m not asking you,’ the tall figure behind the desk said.

‘Because my copy demands it?’

‘No, because slavery is the price of great power.’

The Elite turned and walked to the window looking out into brightly-lit orbital space. Inter-starscraper vehicles looked like tiny black bugs lost in the sea of light.

‘This is a waste,’ the Elite said, and then sought his way through the glass. There was pain. His master was well defended.

A grotesque, an outlander, reaching for her, the needle in his hand, and she knew he was going to wipe her. Kill all her achievements in the Game, make the Absolute lose interest, deny her communion. Why was she helpless? She had her bone knife, a discreet thorn pistol, her body was laced with elegant and deadly virals; but the needle got closer until it filled her vision.

‘Zabilla?’ Dracup said gently. Her eyes flickered open. Internal narcotics dealt quickly and efficiently with the rising panic. Dracup was gazing down at her, but there was some vestige of paranoia from the dream that had her mistrusting how he looked at her. Beneath the concern, she thought she saw something new – towards her, anyway. A callousness. She bit back the anger. He was a fool if he was growing tired of her now while she was so close to such a major triumph in the Game.

More worrying was that the Absolute could not have failed to monitor the dream now that she was so important to the research into the cocoon. She wondered if the dream was a warning, the price of failure. Then she wondered if such thoughts were treasonous, if for no other reason than not being entertaining enough. Besides, she could not imagine that the punishment for failure would be so mundane, so private and over so quickly. She would surely become a public spectacle, entertainment, and the most galling thing would be that all those she had beaten to get where she was today would be there to enjoy her fall.

The fear was gone now, thanks to the drugs, and had been replaced with irritation.

‘A dream, nothing more,’ she told Dracup as she got up. She missed her old apartment. A not unattractive sculpted root structure made up two walls of their well-appointed apartment in the bunker down among the roots, but it could not make up for the loss of the view. She could not see the other atmosphere-piercing arcology trees. There was not that green quality to the light as the sun shone down through the translucent leaf canopy above, nor the bioluminescent glow at night. There was little of the Game to amuse her, just research. Down below the black leaves, she might as well have been one of the morlocks who served her. She got up and made her way towards the shower nook. The roots shifted, opening at her approach.

‘Be careful that your subconscious does not betray you,’ Dracup said.

Zabilla spun to face him. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

He was immediately conciliatory. ‘Just that we are being monitored closely…’

‘Do you not think I know that?’ Why are you saying this out loud? she left unspoken.

‘And now is not the time for a treasonous subconscious.’

‘And what exactly would you like me to do about it?’

‘More drugs?’ he suggested. Again he sounded reasonable, but again his suggestion just irritated her. Like everyone in the Game, she was used to altering her mood with chemicals, whether to enhance sensation, as a less controllable alternative to immersion theatre, to enhance performance, or just to remain seemingly calm in the face of other players’ moves. But other than performance enhancers, which would eventually make her crash, she needed to be able to focus without distraction. Mood-changing drugs dulled her wits.

Now she was wishing for a calming agent, a way to slow her racing brain as she strode rapidly towards her lab. Dracup was next to her, and they were flanked by two heavily armed human guards, four security satellites – S-sats, better-armed and larger versions of the P-sats that some of the more modern and gauche players favoured as familiars – and their two morlock retainers/assistants. The morlocks were frighteningly human-looking, Zabilla had to say. Dressed in what were apparently fabricated copies of pre-Loss servant finery, they looked like small pale people with skin where their eyes should be. Despite their blindness, they never seemed to have any problem finding their way or assisting with often quite delicate procedures.

She was getting nowhere. The cocoon was resisting all but the most invasive means of investigation, and the most invasive means seemed to threaten some sort of self-destruct impulse or were simply so ruinous that they would harm it. What they were not doing was getting any closer to discovering the secret of bridging to Red Space.

It didn’t help that an avatar was there daily. She could feel its hollow, empty eyes on her as she worked, somehow disapproving. Her reports went directly to the Absolute.

They went through one security checkpoint after another, each more thorough and invasive than the last. Zabilla reflected that all her research was being conducted against a backdrop of one security breach after another. There had been a number of breaches – electronic, nano and, most worrying and the most effective so far, biotechnological. It was whispered that the Consortium almost certainly had people on the ground, and it seemed unlikely that the Church was not making some attempt to secure its bridge monopoly. The sophistication of the biotech attempts, however, pointed to the Living Cities on Pangea. The avatar had told her that more than one of the Monarchist systems’ Elites was within response distance if anything happened.

Zabilla and Dracup walked through the final security and anti-infection field. They had to retract and lock down their nano-screens before they were allowed in and then were assigned S-sats designed to project a sterile field around them. The lab was as nanite-free as any place could be made.

The airlock system to the lab opened. They cycled through and Zabilla once again found herself looking at the cocoon with the realisation that she was starting to hate the thing. The avatar was already there. If indeed it had ever left.

‘There was another security breach last night. An attempt was made to gain access to the genetic files kept on base personnel,’ the avatar neunonically ’faced to them both. Dracup looked up, interested.

Zabilla wondered what possible interest security matters could have for her. Too late she realised that any conversation with an avatar was almost certainly monitored through its experiential ware by the Absolute. The automaton with the fixed face of beaten gold seemed to be staring at her. She should have said something loyal, explained her thoughts. Instead she was thinking that they should know that all she was interested in was solving the puzzle of the cocoon.

She knew that it had come from some sort of recently functioning Seeder craft. She knew that it was made from an incredibly tough biological material that shared characteristics with both bone and enamel. Initially she had thought that the name cocoon was misleading and that what she was dealing with was a kind of biological computer laced through the incredibly strong material, but one of the more invasive scanning procedures had pointed to it having a cavity of some sort inside. That was before they had to shut the procedure down, as according to the more passive scans they seemed to be adversely affecting the cocoon.

Brilliant, she congratulated herself. In more than a month of research, all she had managed to do was confirm that the cocoon was hollow. Though they also knew that it had some sort of internal power supply or store, again laced throughout the cocoon. If it was capable of drawing power from elsewhere then it was probably due to the complex entanglement effect that they had seen with other pieces of S-tech. If this was the case, then who knew what it was capable of?

They had tried introducing other forms of S-tech in attempts to interface with it. They had tried uplifted races’ versions of technology derived from S-tech, ’sect derivatives of Seeder tech from the Hive Worlds being the most sophisticated, and actual S-tech itself from the small collection of working xeno-archaeological finds present on Game. Even the smallest S-tech find was enough to turn a planet into a conflict-resolution world. There were graveyards of ships in some sectors of space that had come about due to similar space-borne finds. It was all to no avail. Like most modern nano- and smart-matter-based technology, S-tech was designed to be adaptable and have more than one use, but for some reason what they had did not seem compatible. Perhaps, like the Church, the Seeders had wanted to limit bridge capability. That suggested that the cocoon, or whatever was inside it, was a highly specialised application of S-tech.

Zabilla wished that she had a Church bridge-tech expert to torture but knew they were rarely allowed to leave the Cathedral, and when they did they were heavily protected. An Elite probably could have extracted one, but the Church had made it clear that any attempt to do so would lead to an immediate ban on the provision of bridge technology to the faction in question. There were rumours that one had escaped from the Cathedral but that its knowledge of bridge tech had been protected by some very dangerous and deeply implanted suicide routines. Any attempt to extract the information would result in the wiping of the tech’s mind followed by their death.

In short, she was attempting to reverse engineer something from a position of near-total ignorance. In fact, the clearest thing about her research so far was that the ability to create nth-level perversions was not going to help her.

The avatar was watching her again. She had been aware that Dracup and the avatar had been discussing the security of the facility over the secure ’face link. She had been standing there staring at the cocoon for ten minutes now.

‘Perhaps some kind of stimulus will help?’ the avatar suggested.

‘It would be a distraction,’ Zabilla answered in a more testy tone of voice than was generally considered wise when talking to a direct conduit to the Absolute.

An idea was beginning to form, but as ever the problem would be interfacing the cocoon with other forms of technology. What she hoped was that the cocoon understood its own purpose and would act accordingly. It was tenuous, but there was precedent for it with S-tech applications, particularly with biotech. There was a degree of intelligence in the alien flesh. Most likely nothing would happen, but the worst-case scenarios for what she had planned were catastrophic.

‘I have an idea,’ she told the avatar. ‘We need a ship with a bridge drive.’

Dracup turned to stare at her.

‘That is a bold request,’ the avatar said. ‘You are intending to try and interface a ship’s nav systems with the cocoon?’

‘If this cocoon holds the secret to bridge tech, then a nav computer is designed to interface with it.’

‘Except that ship nav systems have anti-tamper systems just like bridge drives.’ The Church provided both the nav systems and the drives. Both were intrinsic parts of the stranglehold the Church had on Red Space.

‘Yes, but if this is pure S-tech unmodified by the Church, then it shouldn’t have their countermeasures against tampering.’ Though it had remained pretty tamper-proof so far, she thought, but that could just be down to the nature of the forces it needed to survive to fulfil its purpose. ‘We won’t be tampering with the nav comp, just offering it another connection. The worst that can happen is we junk a bridge drive and a nav comp.’

‘No, the worst that can happen is that you succeed and open a bridge to Red Space, and the gravitational forces involved tear Pangea apart. Or perhaps you just decompress the entire planet and collapse the atmosphere.’

Zabilla looked pained. She had to admit that opening a bridge was her greatest fear due to the unknown interplay between the gravitational forces at play when opening a wormhole, and how that would interact with Pangea’s own gravity. All bridge drives had a fail-safe against bridging too close to planets. This was also the reason bridge points were always so far from planetary and stellar bodies. The Church had always warned of the catastrophic results of planetary bridge points. The comment about decompressing the planet, however, was sheer ignorance. Sadly, she thought that before she realised the Absolute would be monitoring her.

‘Would it perhaps be better to do it in space?’ she suggested.

‘Too much of a security risk. We would make ourselves vulnerable to attack by Consortium Elite.’

‘Seeder tech tends to be intuitive. I don’t think it would allow catastrophe.’

‘It is a lot to gamble on a guess.’

‘There’s some evidential basis for my guess, but I’ll be honest with you, I’m out of ideas. If you don’t want to do this then you may as well get Gilbert Scoular down here – perhaps he can make the cocoon look prettier.’ Assuming that Scoular had been cloned since I killed him, that is, Zabilla thought.

The avatar stared at her. Dracup did a good job of hiding his concern.

‘Very well,’ the avatar finally said. ‘The Absolute says that you play this Game well.’

Zabilla nodded. She didn’t even feel relief. If anything, she was more worried than she had been before. It was a desperate move to stay in the Game rather than anything approaching scientific method. She tried to suppress the feeling at the back of her mind that this was a searing indictment of just how irresponsible the Absolute was. It was willing to risk everything, all its people, the Game and itself on some pretty wild speculation.

The security was mostly human, as interlopers had hacked the heads in the past. They were some elite unit of the Absolute’s Toy Soldiers and there were a lot of them. Not to mention S-sats, though Zabilla could not understand why they would be any more secure than the heads. Perhaps they were on some kind of isolated control ’face. They were in the large open space where the G-car had first landed, a hangar made of poured reinforced concrete. The reinforcement in the concrete was a nano-process that bonded the individual molecules more tightly together. They were also protected or watched by the bunker’s automated weapon systems: turret-mounted strobe guns, smart munitions batteries, infrasonics, attack nano-swarms and virals. Zabilla didn’t see any Elite but assumed they could be there quickly if anything went wrong. It felt like overkill, but Zabilla was aware, intellectually anyway, that it was not.

She had watched the craft come down on the elevator platform. It was an old Rapier-class, three-person, long-range strike craft. The fighter/bomber was a decommissioned antique from the Art Wars that had been in the collection of one of the more successful players, though the truly great players frowned upon interests outside the Game. Zabilla thought the three nacelle-mounted Real Space engines made the craft look a little like the tridents she’d seen used by gladiators in the murder arcades. The Rapier fighter/bomber was one of the smallest classes of craft that had a bridge drive.

The cocoon was brought in on small AG motors and guided over towards the craft. Zabilla, with Dracup’s aid, had been using the full extent of her S-tech knowledge to repurpose and reprogram some of the Absolute’s S-tech collection. She also had a length of tendril-like biotech cable, the best money could buy, grown in a ’sect Hive habitat, to act as a connection. The avatar, who was there watching, did not want the cocoon going inside or even getting too close to the ship.

In theory, it was as simple as attaching the nav comp to the cabling, to the S-tech interface and then to the cocoon. That was the easy bit. Then they had to somehow make the nav comp give them diagnostic information on the cocoon. By this point Zabilla wasn’t even sure where this ridiculous plan had come from. She must have been desperate when she thought of it, though she was struggling to remember the genesis of the idea. It was now apparent that it was pointless. It wouldn’t work. She’d been clutching at straws.

The avatar turned to look at her.

‘Self-doubt is not an attractive quality, let alone in a player of your calibre.’

‘I… I’m… sorry,’ she said. Images were coming to the fore in her mind. Not images, memories that had been hidden from her. They had worn some sort of camo suits. The grotesques had seemingly come from nowhere. At first she had thought they were morlock-rights activists or even losers. She saw the needle and knew she was about to be wiped.

‘This is tremendous waste of resources, not to mention a security risk,’ the avatar continued.

‘There’s something wrong…’ Zabilla started.

Dracup turned to look at her. ‘Shit,’ he said. ‘Too soon.’

The Absolute actually shifted in its nutrient bath. More then fifty feet long and around ten feet thick, the Absolute resembled something between a slug made of human flesh and a giant phallus. What passed for its mind and its nerve endings were laced throughout the organism’s entire form. Once human, it had redesigned itself to take signals from hundreds of thousands of experiential broadcasts at any one time – the ultimate receptor of sensation. A creature designed specifically as a sensualist. It now realised that something was wrong. Something was terribly, terribly wrong.

It could feel its avatar neunonically give instructions to the AG motors suspending the cocoon to return it to the secure lab, to the automated defences to open fire and to the S-sats to do the same. All of them were ignored.

The Absolute itself tried to take control of Zabilla and Dracup if for no other reason than to find out what was happening. Even if they had been meat-hacked it would make an example of them. Instead it found that the experiential link was simply missing.

The Absolute squirmed and splashed around in its tank. This was exciting but it couldn’t be allowed to lose. It wasn’t what the Game was about. It was about pleasuring itself. The Absolute used the experiential link to take control of ten thousand of the best electronic security and warfare specialists on Game and in orbit. It opened the most secure computer system on the planet to all of them and had them move in unison to retake control of the bunker’s automated systems.

All the while it was playing back one of Dracup’s hidden memories before the experiential link had been severed. It saw Dracup programming diagnostic routines into the lab’s equipment. Even deep in his subconscious Dracup hadn’t been aware of writing the code after he had examined the bunker’s electronic security, also subconsciously. The sophisticated security hack had been laced throughout the new diagnostic routines that Dracup had been developing consciously.

It was a shame they hadn’t been players, the Absolute thought. They played well. Just as long as they didn’t win. It had to win. That was the only rule of the Game.

Dracup took control of the automated weapon systems and the S-sats. The avatar became a prism of light as every strobe gun targeted it. The rotating barrels of the fast-cycling lasers filled the air with lines of red and threatened to overwhelm the avatar’s energy dissipation grid. Then every AG-driven smart munition hit the avatar. The powerful automaton ceased to exist and was replaced with a sizeable crater.

The force of the explosion knocked Dracup and Zabilla to the ground. It only staggered the nearby armoured and augmented Toy Soldiers.

The Absolute felt the excitement rising. This was the most alive it had felt in centuries. There was a genuine threat here to something it wanted, but it was going to win. It took control of every Toy Soldier in the bunker complex. All of them were now rushing towards the hangar area with the purpose of killing Dracup and Zabilla and securing the cocoon.

As one, the remaining Toy Soldiers turned to look at the prone forms of Zabilla and Dracup. The strobe guns and anti-personnel weapons from the S-sats were cutting swathes through them, but all the smart munitions had been used on the avatar. They would be vaccinated against the virals, their own nano-screens would be programmed to fend off the nano-swarms, and the infrasonic would do him and Zabilla more harm than good, Dracup thought.

It was sickening. What remained of Zabilla was only just starting to realise what she’d done, even as her personality started to recede, screaming in this new and alien mind. The Zabilla fragment remembered releasing the program into the system bit by bit. The intelligent program had been developed by the Living Cities from code sold to them by Pythia by way of the Consortium’s intelligence agencies. The idea was that it was nearly undetectable. Released in discrete parts, it then formed briefly to find and record information. It had been partially detected and part of it destroyed, but not before it had managed to record the genetic files of every person serving in the bunker. Zabilla had retrieved the information in a set of results from one of her apparently failed diagnostics. She had put it together in her deep subconscious. The information had then gone to the implanted targeted viral factory that ran through her small intestine.

Dracup grabbed one of the Toy Soldiers, its ornate armour giving him lot of purchase. He rammed the bone knife into the top of the soldier’s neck just below his jaw line. Neurotoxins flooded the soldier’s system. They probably wouldn’t be enough to kill an augmented soldier, but they wouldn’t help. He backed away, still holding on to the knife and the soldier, using him as a shield as the others all started firing at once. Dracup threw himself back over the cocoon as the Soldier he’d been using as a shield exploded into chunks of steaming superheated meat.

Dracup landed next to Zabilla behind the cocoon, finding he had the Toy Soldier’s aesthetically overdesigned, double-barrelled laser rifle in his hands. Dracup’s augmented hearing filtered sounds, so he could make out Zabilla farting very audibly, which explained the look of concentration on her face, he thought, as she released the virals into the air. Almost immediately the bunker ’faced viral warnings to their neunonics.

‘Send the signal,’ Dracup ’faced to her.

‘Not yet. We need a diversion,’ she replied.

Dracup popped up from behind the cocoon and fired several double-barrelled bursts of red light at the closest Toy Soldiers. The pitiful energy dissipation grid on his armoured clothing went neon and threatened to overload. Half the flesh on his face superheated and blew off down to the bone from a hit, but it gave the tactical software in his neunonics the time it needed to assess the situation. He started firing grenades from the underslung launcher, shifting aim, firing again. Each grenade was programmed with timed air-burst commands fed from the tactical software to explode where they would cause the most damage. Another moment’s glance showed the automated strobe guns cutting swathes through the Toy Soldiers.

Dracup ducked back behind the cocoon next to Zabilla. Half his face was just hot armoured bone now and still smoking. The problem with virals was that they took too long to kill. Dracup put together a fast and messy hack. The idea was to use the bunker’s defence nano-swarms as carriers for the targeted virals to speed things up. He wasn’t sure how useful they would be but it was worth a try.

When his Toy Soldiers started to die, the Absolute decided that he didn’t like this any more. They might well be trapped but perhaps they would be content with simply destroying the cocoon. Particularly if they were working for – or had been co-opted by – the Church. He sent one of his favourite toys. He sent Fallen Angel.

They were mostly cowering behind the cocoon now. They had kept low, crawled towards a wall and sandwiched themselves there. The Absolute didn’t dare fire on the cocoon, though Zabilla was reasonably sure it was more than capable of taking laser fire. The beams from the strobe guns looked like a near-solid wall of red as they repeatedly stabbed down into the Toy Soldiers. Dracup had S-sats firing from concealed locations at any Toy Soldiers that tried to charge their position. Zabilla had a thorn pistol in each hand; Dracup still had the laser rifle; now all they had to do was watch either side of the cocoon for Toy Soldiers trying to flank them. They were helped by visual feeds from the S-sat and the bunker’s systems. The feeds also showed that the Toy Soldiers were starting to fall. The virals were taking effect as Dracup and Zabilla started to remember who they really were.

Scab and the Monk had smuggled themselves onto Game in the stomach of an imported piece of livestock, some kind of large grazing lizard from a Rakshasa-held feline park world. They had then spent two days completely still, clinging to a mostly deserted part of one of the arcology trees close to where their targets lived, waiting for the results of some very subtle and well-programmed trace nanites.

They had already had themselves modified to look like their prey, and copies of the Game’s experiential ware had been implanted into them. They had also had some very interesting subconscious neunonics routines put into their systems. These were designed to be very well hidden, as the Absolute, by its nature, had some of the most sophisticated mental auditing systems in Known Space. All of this had been provided by the Living Cities, who had a lot of experience in finding ways to infiltrate the Game.

Sophisticated trace nanites had allowed Monk and Scab to plot a time when their targets would be most vulnerable and – more importantly – when they would be relatively lightly monitored.

The targets had put up a fight. Both might well have been experienced duellists, but neither were born killers or Church-trained monks. Their virals had caused a bit more trouble, however. Scab and the Monk had wiped them and junked their DNA. Their personal belongings had either been taken or disassembled. Scab and the Monk had then used a customised anti-forensic nano-swarm to destroy other traces of their identity. They had downloaded all the information from Zabilla and Dracup’s neunonics and then wiped them as well.

Then came the really clever stuff, the stuff that the Living Cities had been working on. Using a highly illegal application of S-tech, Scab and the Monk rewrote their own genetic codes to not only resemble Dracup and Zabilla’s, respectively, but at a given chemical signal to mutate back to their original forms. Then, using an intuitive AI program, they overwrote the information on their own neunonics with the information from Dracup and Zabilla’s neunonics. The intuitive program filled in the blanks as best it could and then, based on that information, used an adapted meat-hack program to overwrite Scab and the Monk’s personality. To all extents and purposes they had become Zabilla and Dracup.

Scab had liked none of this, but he hadn’t seen another way. Their subconscious minds had subtly been doing all the work during their infiltration, waiting for the correct set of circumstances to signal their resurgent personalities.

There was no feed from the bunker. Fallen Angel couldn’t be bothered to hack his way in to find out the tactical situation as he dropped through the branches of the arcology trees. He was feeling lazy today, not at all creative, positively bored. He was just going to turn up and destroy everything that wasn’t a cocoon. The Absolute might command him, but even it would never dare put experiential ware in an Elite so the phallic slug would have to find another way to enjoy the experience.

Targeting information on the ware told the Monk where to aim the thorn pistols, going for the exposed flesh in the Toy Soldiers’ ridiculously impractical armour. Even so, it was taking too long for the virals on the splinter bullets to kill the soldiers. Things were getting more and more hairy. She played her penultimate trick.

One of the things about players was that they never paid any attention to morlocks. The Monk didn’t control them, though Zabilla had had the biotechnical know-how to do so. She just released them from their programmed bonds. They didn’t need any encouragement to fall upon the Toy Soldiers from where they had previously been cowering. Their rage was a thing to behold.

Scab continued to fire at the Toy Soldiers with the laser even as they were dying. He just liked shooting people.

‘Now?’ Scab ’faced. He was unable to talk as half his face was still a red smoking mess.

The Monk shook her head. Scab was beginning to wonder if all the talk of getting them out was just nonsense. He was pretty sure that any moment now Ludwig or one of the Angels was going to turn up and destroy them at a fundamental level.

It was a melancholy act of destruction. Not his best, but he was looking at destruction himself. Still, it was more than enough to herald his arrival after his coffin had bridged in all but unnoticed.

The focused particle beam cut through the entirety of the top of the arcology tree. It was one of the smaller ones: only thirty or so storeys breached the atmosphere. Then he hit it like a meteorite. The force destroyed about half of it but sent the rest tumbling through the branches of other arcology trees towards the surface of Game far below.

‘Look upon my works,’ he muttered to himself as he watched the wreckage tumble down through the thick branches of the arboreal cities. It was carnage, but only abstract to him. It was so quiet where he was. He liked it up here in orbit. He liked looking down on the planet, seeing the branches spread out below him like a spider’s web.

He shot up into high orbit. The beam stabbing out from his weapon – it was in a rifle configuration at the moment – was almost an afterthought as he cut one of the planetary defence battle cruisers in two. High above Game, the two halves of the cruiser slowly drifted apart.

‘Notice me,’ Elite Scab whispered to himself.

He set the weapon to a wide-burst D-beam and played it up and down the top branches of one of the taller atmosphere-piercing arcology trees. The network of primordial black holes fed the weapon power via a form of complex entanglement. The D-beam rewrote the genetic codes of anything the signal hit and cancerous mutations appeared all over the outside of the tree. Inside, the inhabitants were reduced to protoplasmic slime or mutated into forms that weren’t conducive to survival in this reality. Some became super-efficient alien predatory life forms. Others might even have evolved into higher forms, though they were probably destroyed by destructive slimes and super-predators before they had time to appreciate their enlightened nature.

The Absolute flopped around violently in its nutrient bath. Ludwig was still out drinking suns, whatever that meant. Both the Angels were close but a Consortium Elite had just attacked them. He would need both of them to protect the Game. He sent the order to Fallen Angel. The attacking Elite was the priority.

Planetary attack warnings appeared in their neunonics. Scab and the Monk stood up from behind the cocoon. The hangar area was carnage. Scab sent an instruction to the AG motors on each corner of the cocoon. The cocoon rose unsteadily into the air as one of the motors had been destroyed. They made their way quickly through the carnage and red steam, shooting anything that moved, though they tried to leave the morlocks alone as they were finishing off the wounded Toy Soldiers.

The hatch to the Rapier fighter/bomber opened at a neunonic command as they approached. The Monk reached in and ferreted around for a bit. She came back with two rather vintage-looking emergency spacesuits.

‘Really?’ Scab asked, becoming more and more suspicious of the escape plan.

‘You don’t have to wear it if you don’t want to.’

Reluctantly Scab put his hands into the black bubble of the suit and let it grow over him before fixing the visor to it. His neunonics interrogated the suit. It was old but functional, so he dropped some updated ‘ware into its systems. The Monk did the same. As she did, she hacked the Rapier’s systems and started them up, running rapid diagnostics on those that she needed.

‘You’ll do,’ she muttered to herself.

‘What, you’re going to fly us out of here?’ Scab asked, both confused and mildly interested, which was arguably more emotional than he’d been for a good long while, not counting his time as Dracup, and he was trying to forget about that. He was deeply uncomfortable with the emotional dependency Dracup had on Zabilla.

The Monk sent the heavily coded and very secure override command. Immediately after, she sent a time-bomb self-destruct routine. She was determined to leave as little trace as possible.

‘Fuck!’ Scab was unused to genuine surprise and had only just sealed the spacesuit as reality tore open and revealed the red beneath. The Rapier had just opened a bridge point. Even Elites couldn’t do that. Scab turned to look at the Monk.

‘Its all bullshit, isn’t it, about not being able to open in a planetary gravitational field?’

‘There’s a fail-safe device on every bridge drive. Any attempt to open a bridge point in a strong gravity field junks the drive.’

‘But you have an override for the fail-safe?’

‘Obviously. Imagine the carnage if people knew they could pop in and out of Red Space, sneak up on their enemies. Also, we’re genuinely not sure of the effects of repeated openings of wormholes in gravitational fields on the fabric of space-time. You coming?’

The Monk stepped forward, the cocoon floating behind her.

‘But it’s all right for the Church to have the knowledge?’

‘Which we can’t use because then people would know. You won’t tell anyone, will you?’ She was heading straight for the rip. Scab grabbed another laser rifle, a bandolier of grenades and some spare batteries and followed.

‘No, I’ll keep the information and use it for myself.’

‘I like the way you volunteer for death, or at least total personality erasure,’ the Monk said. ‘Or maybe it’s too late for that.’

The Monk climbed over bodies to step through the tear. Scab followed her into the red.