The Age of Scorpio

7. A Long Time After the Loss

Scab hugged the cocoon like a lover as he watched Eldon Sloper get torn apart. The crew of the Black Swan had played their part. The Basilisk, Scab’s ship, had tapped into the Swan’s sensor data. The suggestion he had implanted when he had meat-hacked them had sent them on board despite the stupidity of such a move, and they had provided a distraction. Now there was a race on to see if they were going to be vented into Red Space or torn apart by the Seeder-augmented human throwbacks.

When they had given him the viral they had described it as some kind of song. The Scorpion, an ancient and very illegal piece of S-tech, had drunk it like it was milk. Scab had felt the weapon’s excitement as it dug its legs deep into his arms, making them bleed again. He’d had to reseal the wound before anything too toxic had leaked out of him. As the scorpion had fed the poison into the Seeder ship he had shared the weapon’s near-sexual pleasure at the murder. After all, it wasn’t every day you got to kill a genuine alien as opposed to just another fucking uplifted animal, Scab thought, unable to prevent his lips curving into a smile. Scab wished he were naked. Pleased that the only people who could possibly see this were his soon-to-be-dead dupes.

Scab had absently wondered how old the song the Scorpion was singing to the Seeder craft was. Had humanity’s lost sun even been born then? The first stage of the viral song the Scorpion had sung had got him in. It had felt like being pushed back in after being born. Or so he imagined. The second stage had started killing the ancient creature/craft. The third stage had delivered the message to sever the craft’s hold on the cocoon as high above him preset explosives fed on the matter of flesh, turning it into fire and force.

There was pain as the Scorpion sank into the flesh of his arm. He was more aware of than actually felt it scraping against bone as it wrapped itself around his radius and ulna.

More pain when he heard the Seeder spawn’s death scream in his head as he was pulled into vacuum. Scab felt blood trickle from his ears. It all but exploded from his nose, covering the visor of his suit as he rode the cocoon out into a Red Space strobing in violent light.

‘Well shit,’ was all that Vic could muster. The eight-foot-tall insect was extensively hard-tech-augmented, initially for work in gravity and then after a stint in the military for combat as well. He looked through the transparent smart-matter hull as he searched through his neunonics for accounts of combat in Red Space. Very few people did it. It always ended badly. ‘Well shit,’ Vic tried again, speaking out loud to nobody. He then followed that up with ‘Fuck.’

He was receiving more information on the full-scale space action from the ship’s sensor suite. Both cruisers were ponderous but graceful as they simultaneously tried to use the Seeder craft for cover while manoeuvring for a clear shot on the other.

Laser batteries fired so rapidly that they looked like arcing curves against the black, their beams lighting up energy dissipation matrices like neon. Battery after battery connected the two ships with lines of bright light. Various kinetic harpoons hit armour so hard they heated it white-hot as the reactive plate exploded out, trying to lessen the force of the impacts. Carbon reservoirs fed the assemblers with the raw material to regrow and replace the reactive armour. Broad-pattern DNA hacker beams lit up disruptive countermeasure screens. AG-driven autonomous suicide munitions hunted for each other and openings to the enemy ship. Meanwhile, both craft tried to bring their big guns to bear: the Church cruiser’s D-guns, the Consortium cruiser’s fusion and particle-beam cannons.

While in the Thunder Squads, Vic had personally carried enough ordnance to severely damage cities and with his team had done so on various conflict resolution worlds; this, however, was on a different scale. Outside everything was fire and force. Night turned to day.

The ship’s upgraded stealth systems would keep the Basilisk hidden while this mess was going on. However, when one side won they wouldn’t be hiding from a beaten-up old salvage tug like the Black Swan. Red Space or no Red Space, Vic doubted that Basilisk’s systems could hide them from military-grade scanners.

Vic nodded to himself. ‘Well shit,’ he said again. Yes, Scab had properly fucked them this time. Then he saw part of the Seeder craft’s hull burst. Basilisk was kind enough to zoom in on the area and pick up the bodies tumbling into Red Space. Vic was peripherally aware of a tiny white light coming from the Black Swan moments before the Seeder craft exploded. Actually, Vic thought with a sort of hysterical calmness, it was less like an explosion, more like it had just burst. Vic completely reset his initial estimation of just how much Scab had fucked them both this time. There wasn’t enough meat left in his brain to hear the Seeder ship’s death scream. Still, Vic thought, the intensity of the fight between the Church and the Consortium cruisers had slackened off considerably.

Vic let off the pheromone equivalent of a human shitting himself when Fallen Angel tore through space. He wasn’t sure if the enormous wingspan of the hermaphroditic figure armoured in liquid obsidian was some sort of hologram or shadowy exotic material. Fallen Angel was shorter than Vic, though not by much, but its wings seemed to cast a shadow over both the cruisers.

The Elite were the ultimate expression of armed force. Extensively augmented, each was armed with fully integrated S-tech weapons of near-unimaginable sophistication that allowed them to go toe to toe with entire fleets. There were only six of them in existence at any one time. In part this was because of the tremendous expense of keeping them operational. And in part it was due to the worry of what would happen if one of them ever broke its extensive conditioning and turned against its master. Three Elite served the Consortium and three served the Monarchist systems, and an uneasy balance was maintained. Fallen Angel served the Monarchists. Mostly the Elite acted domestically. For the Monarchists to break the uneasy cold war and utilise one of their Elite against Consortium interests like this was all but a declaration of war.

They couldn’t hide from the Elite, Vic knew. If bounty killers were celebrities then the Elite were celebrity killer gods. It wasn’t a case of sophisticated sensors. They understood their surroundings on an instinctive level as if they were somehow connected to the very fabric of time/space itself. Vic suddenly found himself envying the human ability to weep. He wanted to weep like the little hairless monkey infants wept. Underneath the panic, the combat veteran of more than a dozen CR worlds and hardened bounty killer had just enough presence of mind through the fog of rapidly administered calming drugs to feel awe, as once again Scab reset the bar on just what a total fucking shit-magnet he was.

Tumbling into a storm of fire and light, at first Scab thought he was seriously ill as a foreign sensation flooded through him. He had forgotten what joy was. Then he saw Fallen Angel. They had actually sent an Elite. He wondered if this would be a good enough death.

The fire from both craft had severely lessened after Scab had blasphemously murdered the Seeder spawn, but now both were trying to fire on Fallen Angel. The exotic, some said dark, matter of the Elite’s armour phased the kinetic shots that hit it. An entanglement effect transported the solid-state munitions elsewhere. Lasers hit the armour creating a prismatic effect as the beams of killing light were redirected away from the Elite and back at the two cruisers.

Longing drowned Scab’s joy. Once the Elite’s power had been his; now he was nothing more than a spectator, soon to be like every other piece of biological waste in Known Space, a victim.

He watched enviously as Fallen Angel lifted its weapon to its shoulder. The smart matter of the spear it held reconfigured into a wide-barrelled rifle/cannon weapon. Scab knew that all the weapon really was, was a conduit for an entanglement effect connecting it to munitions in the Citadel, their hidden base, and also, like the rest of the armour, to the vast network of primordial black holes that powered the Elite’s armour and weapons.

Scab’s neunonics chose to interpret the focused particle beam from Fallen Angel’s weapon as a thick line of blue light. Fallen Angel played it across the Consortium’s Free Trade Enforcer-class cruiser. The beam disrupted the craft at its molecular level – disassembling it, changing the signal, sometimes removing molecules, sometimes agitating molecules into an explosive reaction. The result was the craft started to come apart. To Scab it was a slow, ponderous yet strangely beautiful death as the ruptured craft spilt crew out into the swirling clouds of Red Space.

Fallen Angel continued to cut at the hull a long time after it needed to. Scab could identify with that. It wasn’t so much that they wanted to kill by the time they were chosen, though most of them did. He had. But once you merged with the armour you felt its need to destroy life. Scab had always been told they were weapons that understood their own nature rather than being just tools for killing. Their ancient creators apparently hadn’t been hypocrites. Fallen Angel was painting with the particle beam. Scab remembered what it was to hate life and crave destruction, to be one with a poisoned and violent technology.

Scab was remaining very still. Trying not to be noticed. Wondering how best to get the cocoon back to the Basilisk. Then he noticed that the Church cruiser had stopped firing as well. Augmented soft-machine biotech eyes searched space. He only saw the disruption in the Red Space clouds because he knew what to look for. Surprise was another emotion he was unused to.

The CR worlds were a game, nothing more, R & D, a way of keeping score and training executives or minor nobility. When it was serious, when the outcome actually mattered, the Elite were sent. One being sent was rare. The number of times that two were sent in the entire history of Known Space since the Loss could be counted on one hand, even if you were a lizard.

The Monarchists had sent a second Elite. He saw it through the butterfly-wing shape of its disruption of the Red Space clouds. It was squat, roughly cylindrical with various strange technological components attached to its external body, and covered in the same liquid obsidian-looking armour that all the Elite merged with. Ludwig was the only automaton Elite. Ludwig was a supposedly ancient S-tech automaton that had continually upgraded itself from scavenged tech as it had drifted through Real Space. It had been a ‘found weapon’ during the Art Wars in the Monarchist systems.

Ludwig was heading towards the Church cruiser.

Scab glanced back at Fallen Angel. It had become bored with the particle beam. Fallen Angel’s wings were a manifestation of its coffin. The coffin acted as a personal satellite, a slaved extension of the Elite’s weapon systems. The morphic nature of the exotic material the coffin was made from could also turn it into what was basically a tiny one-man ship. Fallen Angel had made its wings very sharp and was dancing among the remains of the Free Trade Enforcer-class cruiser. Using its wings to slice through wreckage as it went.

Scab turned back but Ludwig had gone.

They had mostly stopped firing. Ludwig was barely aware of taking hits from automatic close-in weapon systems as it drifted close to the Church cruiser. The ancient machine mind shifted out of phase, vibrating its molecular structure to become intangible. It felt the resistance of some of the cruiser’s defensive screens but combat was a bidding war and more resources had gone into Ludwig’s creation and augmentation than had gone into the cruiser.

Many options on how to destroy it presented themselves to Ludwig. It was not about the most efficient way of dealing with the cruiser; it was about relieving countless millennia of boredom.

Ludwig dropped into the areas of smart matter in the hull. It became solid again and infected the smart matter with itself. Effectively becoming a material virus.

Most of the crew who weren’t extensively hard tech-enhanced were still reeling. Their knowledge and stranglehold on S-tech aside, they had not expected to hear the scream of the dying S-tech craft in their head. Bloody tears leaking from their eyes blinded many. Blood seeped out of their ears and noses.

Ludwig made the cruiser’s smart matter grow organically, like a tree, if a tree was made of spikes and edges. The smart matter grew through the heavy cruiser, impaling, rending, seeking out soft flesh and lifting it up into its branches, turning the very ship itself on its crew. Through his new viral smart matter branches, Ludwig got to taste the crew.

When Ludwig rose through the dormant Church cruiser’s hull, the liquid-like coating of his armour bubbled with the crew’s screaming faces.

Vic was sitting on one of the so-called smart chairs in the minimalist lounge that doubled as the Basilisk’s Command and Control, though most of the ship’s systems were handled neunonically. After a brief interface squabble with the chair to get it into an even vaguely comfortable shape, Vic was now just waiting for death, his head cradled in his upper pair of arms. He hoped the Elite would make it quick.

Vic was still receiving the external feed into his neunonics. Without using active scans it had taken him a while to find Scab clinging to the package they had apparently been paid a lot to retrieve.

Vic glanced up to the ship’s hull and sent the signal to magnify that piece of space. For a moment there was just a spark of hope. Perhaps Fallen Angel would kill Scab but ignore him, Vic thought. Maybe, just maybe he would be free of his insane ‘partner’. After all, he was small fry – he didn’t matter in the big scheme of things. On the other hand, if Scab was any indication of how the Elite thought – and this was after the neuro-surgical spaying he had relieved upon leaving the Elite – then who was to say what they would do?

Scab stared into the featureless black glass face of Fallen Angel and saw himself reflected. The Elite hung there motionless in front of him. Subjectively below him was the corpse of the Seeder ship. Above him the dead Church cruiser was slowly mutating into another form; the Consortium cruiser was now little more than a field of debris.

For some reason Scab saw sadness in the Elite. Almost like a child’s. He wondered if it was because Fallen Angel hadn’t been the one to kill the Seeder craft. He also wondered if this death – anonymous, body never found – would be enough.

As Fallen Angel reached to take the cocoon, Scab decided it wouldn’t be a good enough death. His employer would have no reason to fulfil his part of the deal. Fighting Fallen Angel would have been foolish, nothing more than an empty gesture, still it galled Scab to just hand the cocoon over. It was the feeling of powerlessness.

With a flap of his wings, an affectation, Fallen Angel propelled himself back from Scab and then soared up towards the Church ship. Suddenly, in a series of jerky moves that somehow looked panicked to Scab, Fallen Angel wrapped his massive wings around himself and they morphed into a rectangular shape that looked like a mixture between a coffin and an arrowhead. Both Fallen Angel and Ludwig disappeared into the clouds.

Scab glanced down as what had looked like a tumbling piece of inert wreckage lit up. The Black Swan’s main engines took it quickly away from the hulk of the dead Seeder craft. The tug’s bridge drive, that Scab had paid for out of this job’s expenses, tore a blue pulsing hole in space as the oversized engines propelled it through the rip into Known S pace.

‘Vic, come and pick me up,’ Scab said as he re-established the interface connection.

‘What the fuck!’ Vic screamed at him. ‘What the fuck!’

Scab was still wondering if something had startled the Elites when it happened. The holes that appeared subjectively above him didn’t so much look like gate rips, more like larvae eating through rotting fruit. More holes opened in space; white lightning seemed to spark and then flicker out as if consumed. The energy involved must have been colossal, Scab thought. More and more holes appeared until Red Space began to resemble a rotten honeycomb.

The things crawling through the gates, dissipating the clouds they touched, were not black. They were the absence of colour – wriggling, hungry, maggot-like voids. Where they touched the debris of the two cruisers, the wreckage simply ceased to exist as if it had been consumed. It was beautiful, Scab thought, utter oblivion. Not just the antithesis of life but the antithesis of everything. Scab could hear their idiot song. An acidic tear traced its way down through the pale makeup, mucus and blood on his face. Then the sleek wedge of the Basilisk was in front of him.

‘What the fuck!’ Vic screamed at him hysterically when Scab was back on board. The tall hard-tech-augmented ’sect was pointing at the external display that took up one wall of the hull. Red Space was still being consumed.

With a thought Scab sent co-ordinates to the ship. The ship’s engines lit up as the view changed and the ship headed towards the co-ordinates. Outside, red was becoming black, or rather the absence of colour. If you focused hard enough you could see it wriggling like all-consuming bacteria.

Scab sent the ship into a series of rapid evasive manoeuvres to avoid being consumed, though the ship’s anti-gravity field compensated for this and both he and Vic remained comfortably standing.

Scab sat down on one of the two smart chairs, the only real furniture in the otherwise bare room. With a thought he peeled the arm of his spacesuit back. His arm hung limp. The Scorpion had reacted badly to something and squeezed, powdering his radius and ulna.

Vic was watching the screen on the edge of collapse as the Basilisk spun and banked, narrowly avoiding consumption or ceasing to exist or whatever was happening out there.

Scab coaxed the Scorpion out of his flesh, grimacing at the pain he allowed himself to feel. The lockbox rose through the carpeted floor at his neunonic summons. The room was suddenly bathed in blue light from the gate rip. In the lockbox was some fluffy, core-world pet creature designed to appeal to spoilt, mid-echelon corporate children. The Basilisk had already injected the previously hibernating creature with the wake-up. It looked up at Scab with big soulful eyes. Scab was more interested in the neunonic feed of the very fabric of Red Space being consumed by whatever it/these were. Scab absently dropped the brass-skinned Scorpion in with the pet. The Scorpion immediately reared up, sting coming over its head, as Scab gave the signal to close the box.

Scab had time to light a cigarette with his left arm and they were through the rip.

In Real Space Nulty was dancing on the hull of the Black Swan. He’d made it! Somehow, among all that, he had cut the Swan free and remained unnoticed until he could get out of there. Sure, he had a long ride home, but the Swan was his now!

The modified Corsair-class ship swept out of the rip, its engines on high burn. To Nulty it looked predatory and violent. He couldn’t even be bothered bringing the Swan’s paltry weapon systems online.

‘Bollocks,’ the engineer said.

Lasers lit up the darkness; the Swan briefly became light before its energy dissipation matrix was overloaded, but it was the kinetic javelins that did the damage. Penetrating the Swan’s hull, shredding it, scattering the remains, the vacuum cooling the heat from the friction of hypersonic impacts.

Nulty was still alive. He was damaged, missing limbs, but largely intact and spinning away from the wreckage.

‘Bastard!’ he screamed at the receding light of the Basilisk’s engines.

Scab took a long drag of his cigarette, savouring his retro vice.

‘What the fuck!’ Vic screamed at him again, spoiling his contemplative mood. ‘The Consortium navy! The Church! And… and the fucking Elite! And what was happening there – it was like space was being eaten or something?!’ Vic paused for breath, for psychosomatic reasons Scab assumed. ‘What have you got us into?!’

Scab gave the question some thought. ‘It’s exciting,’ he finally said.

Vic stared at him with multifaceted eyes, his mandibles agape. Vic was a humanophile, a worker ’sect who had rejected the tightly regulated, genetically programmed, caste-based social structure of ’sect society and escaped into gravity, augmentation and, somewhat ironically to Scab’s mind, military service. Scab’s military service had been different. He hadn’t volunteered. Before he had been chosen to be an Elite he had been Legion. Offered the choice between serving the Consortium in the CR worlds as one of its most expendable troops or execution for his crimes as a street sect leader on Cyst.

The mandibles-agape expression wasn’t quite working for Vic, Scab decided. ‘Besides,’ he said as he started looking for the portable assembler, using the interface to send it his medical requirements and some more of his debt credits, ‘how often do you get to see two Elite in action?’

Vic’s mandibles clattered together tightly. ‘Oh yes, that was a real treat for me,’ he told his ‘partner’.

He cast his mind back to one terrifying night in the Abyssal Reaches. The destruction of an entire habitat. Their officers had told them that the subsidiary they had been fighting had gone rogue. However, a rumour had spread that they had found Seeder ruins in the Reaches, the Consortium board had done the maths and it had simply proved cheaper to use an Elite to bring the conflict to a rapid conclusion. Vic had never quite worked up the nerve to ask if Scab had been the Elite that had killed all those people. Women, children, larvae, it hadn’t mattered. Then he realised what Scab had just said.

‘Two! What do you mean two?’

‘Ludwig was there as well. What do you think took out the Church cruiser?’

Vic allowed more calming agent to mix with his neurochemistry.

‘But we’re out now, done, yes?’ Vic asked when the chemicals had calmed him enough. The ’sect was more than a little worried about how Scab would answer. He knew that Scab was psychotic and more than a little self-destructive but you didn’t go up against the Elite.

Scab finally nodded. ‘We’ve lost the package and we don’t have anything like the resources to retrieve it.’ Once, he thought, once I could have done it.