Gavin Smith - The Age of Scorpio

The one on the left looked saddened. It was mockery.

‘Albedo, can you provide some perspective, please?’

The one on the right reached down and Jaime felt fingers grab his hair.

‘Hey, what the fuck!’ He felt himself being lifted, very light. There was something wrong with his neck, as if there was something hanging from it. Jaime looked down on his decapitated body. He started to scream. He screamed until they unplugged him.

Du Bois pushed open the door to the coroner’s examination room.

‘Out,’ he told the assembled people gawping at the corpse of the creature he’d shot in the old dog stadium. One older man, presumably the coroner, opened his mouth to complain. ‘Either get out or I’ll have you arrested under the anti-terrorism laws and hold you indefinitely just to prove what a dick I am.’

Something in his tone, or the rumours which had been flying around Kingston Crescent about who he was and what he did, must have convinced them that he was serious. They left with as much dignity as they could manage. Du Bois didn’t fully understand democracy. It seemed pointless to give people the right to self-determination when so few had any interest in it. Now that humanity had reached a certain level of comfort and people didn’t really seem to want to think for themselves, he believed it was better that they just did what they were told. Then everyone would be happy. Hence he saw the far-reaching powers of the anti-terrorism laws as a step in the right direction, though why they had to be dressed up with the excuse of terrorism he had no idea.

The sheets had already been pulled back from the corpse. It had definitely been human once and probably not that long ago. The changes would have been brought on by thousands of tiny machines capable of reproducing and then rewriting the basic building blocks of life.

Du Bois held his phone over the body and shot footage of it from every conceivable angle. The base human had been modified to be aquatic by the look of it, and then overdesigned with claw-like nails, shark-like teeth and retractable spurs of bone to be someone’s idea of a weapon.

He took out a small leather case, unzipped it and pulled out a small vial. He neurally transmitted an order to the smart matter the vial was made from, and a needle grew out of its base. Du Bois stabbed the needle into the body with some force to break through the overlapping plates of exoskeleton. The blood that filled the vial looked normal enough. The needle retracted as du Bois attached the vial to the bottom of his phone. The screen of the phone showed the results of the blood analysis. It was filled with tiny nanites – an ancient design, the biotech of the Seeders. The worrying thing was that this particular strain of nanites was very rare. They had not come from the Pacific Source. He had only seen this type once before.

Du Bois thought of the secret deep below the family seat on the stormy coast of western Scotland, and transmitted the information from the blood and the footage he had shot to Control. He ran the footage of the creature through an intelligent forensic image program, which reconstructed what it would have looked like the last time it was human. Finally he took the reconstructed images and ran them through facial recognition software against every database currently on the Internet.

He sat down, lit a cigarette and gazed at the body, thinking about Beth going toe to toe with what was effectively a killing machine. It took the software just over twenty minutes to find some matches. This was due to Internet speeds and the slowness of the systems it had invaded, not the software itself. Du Bois looked at the possibilities, discounting them until he found one that seemed to match. Matthew Bryant had lived in one of the nicer parts of Portchester, near the castle, and worked at a large computer company in senior management. He had two kids in their teens, the eldest at a good university. His life story was a list of the successful, sensible and responsible choices you made in life if you wanted a happy one – from a conventional perspective anyway. He had also been a keen scuba diver. It had been during a dive in the Solent that he had gone missing. It was assumed that he had had some sort of mishap, and his body had been washed away by one of the nastier tides in the channel.

Things were starting to click into place for du Bois. He began to understand why he was struggling to seed the city. There were still pieces missing, however. He switched applications on the phone and checked the trace. The missing pieces would have to wait. There was still some unfinished business to take care of.

It took more courage for Beth to push open the door to the flat than it had to fight the monster. What made it worse was that Maude was so relieved to see her still alive. It didn’t occur to her to be angry with her new friend. Her reaction nearly overwhelmed Beth. She had grown up in a very cold environment. She wasn’t used to this. The tears came again.

It wasn’t lost on Uday, however, that Beth had brought violence into their home. He glared at her angrily.

The explanations had been difficult. How could she tell them what had happened? She settled for saying that she had just got a bit of a kicking. She found out that the muscle she’d knifed in the leg was called Trevor. They had bound up his legs as best they could, given him lots of painkillers, some vodka and, astonishingly, made him a cup of cocoa. Eventually he had thanked them and with some difficulty limped away, telling them he was going to A & E but he’d keep them out of it.

‘My bayonet?’ Beth asked. Uday and Maude looked confused. ‘The knife.’

‘Oh,’ Maude said in a small voice. Uday gave Beth a look of disgust.

‘It’s in the bathroom sink. It’s still… dirty.’

‘It’s an heirloom, my great-grandfather’s,’ Beth told them by way of an explanation. She didn’t think it had appeased Uday in any way, shape or form.

‘I told you.’ It was all he had to say. She’d brought it down on them. She was just a different flavour of trouble from Talia.

‘I’m sorry.’ It wasn’t nearly enough. ‘I’m gone now.’

‘You don’t have to,’ Maude said, but Beth had been speaking to Uday, and his face was made of stone.

‘Will they come back here looking for you?’ he asked. Beth considered. She didn’t want to lie to them, not after this.

‘They might,’ she finally said. ‘Can you get out of Portsmouth?’

‘Yeah, we’ll just leave our degrees, drop everything and go into hiding, or maybe we can return to our families, thousands of pounds in debt with nothing to show for it,’ Uday suggested acidly, every word hitting home. ‘I take it we can’t go to the police?’ Beth wasn’t sure how to answer that.

‘We’re staying,’ Maude said firmly. Both of them turned to look at her. ‘I don’t care how scared we are, I’m not going to drop my life for these… bullies!’ The small goth was angry. Beth guessed it was this resolve that had stopped her from leaving university when evidence of her fledgling porn career had surfaced.

‘I’ll sort it,’ Beth said. She said it almost out of desperation and then realised that she meant it. She just didn’t know how to go about it. ‘I have to go up north then I’ll come back and sort it.’

‘Yeah?’ Uday demanded sarcastically. ‘You going to go up against some Pompey hood? Just like in a film? I’ve a better idea. Why don’t you just fuck off back to Bradford and stay there? In fact, leave us your address just in case any more arseholes come looking for you.’

‘Uday—’ Maude began.

‘No. She’s no better than her fucking sister. Worse. Talia brought drugs and exploitation with her; at least she didn’t bring violence! Didn’t have us taken hostage in our own house!’