Gavin Smith - The Age of Scorpio

Du Bois leaped as she swung one-handed at him with the spear, powerful augmented legs taking him high over her head. He knew that he needed to keep out of her reach until he had a weapon.

All along the pier the lights on the lamp posts flickered out. In the amusement arcade the fruit machines died. The surrounding streets and houses went dark. Lightning played across the white-painted iron railings of the pier. The assembler in the hilt of the punch blade was rewriting the surrounding matter at a molecular level, using a pre-programmed template to create something useful. It needed power to do that, and the weapon it was creating would need power as well.

Du Bois landed and twisted like a serpent, the head of the spear just missing him. He rolled forward and then back up onto his feet, sprinting for the wooden wall of a building. She chased. He jumped, put a foot against the wall and then kicked back into a somersault over the bag lady’s head. She stabbed out with the spear again, the head splintering panels in the wall. She raked it back, tearing through the wall like it was paper, trying to get at du Bois, but he was running back to where he had left his knife.

Du Bois tore the new form free of the railing, leaving a large hole where the assembler had utilised and subsequently transformed the surrounding molecules. When du Bois thought about such things, which was rarely, he considered it some kind of alien alchemy. The process hadn’t quite finished, but what he was holding looked like a broadsword of the type he had first used in the twelfth century. Except that it was shimmering, indistinct and making a humming noise. The blade was a millimetre thick, very sharp, very hard, oscillating at a furious rate and white hot. A super-efficient, solid-state battery, which had just drained half the power from Southsea, powered the sword.

Du Bois turned to face the bag lady, who immediately became a swarm and engulfed him. He felt his flesh open everywhere. She painted him red as he screamed. He felt like little more than meat as he hit the ground again. These were wounds that his internal systems would not heal quickly. The nanites that made them would war with his as they tried to fix the wound. It was over. He could not fight this. He was wondering why she was bothering with the spear.

She reformed a few metres away. Looking down at him.

‘I think you would have made the right decision given time, but there isn’t any. I think you’re just too weak.’

Du Bois pushed himself up onto all fours and then to his feet. He looked like he had been scribbled on with a razor.

‘If you’re going to do that,’ he managed, ‘then you can’t complain about me using a gun.’ He started shutting down his pain receivers. It would mean he would not know his limits. He would probably be dead before he was aware of it, but he knew he had to die on his feet fighting.

‘A fair fight?’ she asked. He nodded, though both knew it would never be fair. ‘A good death.’

‘I’ve lived long enough,’ he said quietly. Du Bois knew that she would hack the cloning process and he would not be coming back. He knew he would miss this world and the people in it. He would miss Alexia.

He brought the sword up into a two-handed guard. She came at him with a bewildering number of rapid spear strikes: she swung and stabbed at him, two-handed strikes, one-handed thrusts, the spear moving towards him as if it wanted his flesh. He parried and dodged, moving sinuously, always trying to be where she least expected him to be. Ancient moves taught to him deep in the rock. He moved around the spear and her blows but never gained the upper hand. His sword and her spear cut through or destroyed any part of the pier they touched.

He ducked, dancing sideways under the spearhead, a blow meant for the side of his head just missing him. She reversed the movement of the spear and tried a back swing. Du Bois moved forward, for the first time in the fight on the offensive. He blocked the haft of the spear with his left hand, reaching across his body. The force of the blow broke every bone in his hand, but he did not feel it and the bones quickly started to heal again.

He was close enough now, inside her reach. He spat blood in her face. The nanites in the blood immediately attacked her nano-defences. She cried out, although even momentarily distracted she still had the presence of mind to reverse the spear and hit him in the stomach with the butt. She hit him so hard that the blunt force trauma burst the skin and broke three of his ribs, sending splinters of bone into his internal organs. The force of the blow took him off his feet, and he landed on one knee.

Du Bois swung the sword. It was as near a perfect blow as he had ever landed. He cut easily through the haft of the wooden-bladed spear to slice her open from her hip, up her torso and across her face. Then he stood up, reversed his grip, and with all the strength he could muster brought the sword down straight through her, practically bisecting her head and torso. She staggered back. Somehow she didn’t split in two. In the horrific wound all du Bois could see was blackness. The wound started to seal itself like a zip.

He smiled.

‘I win,’ he told her and then lowered the shimmering, humming sword to his side. His phone told him that he had just received a text.

The bag lady spun the two halves of the spear around and jammed them together. The spear immediately healed itself. Then she stalked towards him and stabbed the spear into his foot. He felt the spear blade branch out and start growing up through his flesh, breaking out of and then back through his skin, climbing inexorably towards his heart, lungs and finally his brain to kill him.

Behind them, the wooden building they had wrecked collapsed.

The five distinct reports rolled across the water like thunder. The bag lady was solid when the bullets hit. The nanites infected her nano-form as powerful defences tried to track down each little machine and consume it.

‘Die, you fucking bitch! Die!’ There was more anger there than fear. Alexia attacked with more frenzy than skill with the two long-bladed Japanese fighting knives du Bois had had custom-made for her a long time ago. The weapons were balanced to contain tiny reservoirs in the hilt, the nanites delivered via grooves down the folded steel blades. The nanite virus that had cost Alexia a small fortune to obtain, helped the bullets to overwhelm the bag lady’s defences. It didn’t look like she died so much as turned to smoke.

As the roots retracted from du Bois’s leg, he collapsed to the ground. Alexia dropped her knives and ran across to him.

‘Thank you,’ he managed through a mouthful of blood, as she burst into tears.

Part of the pier collapsed into the sea. Alexia and du Bois were on that part. Alexia had to pull him out of the water. He found himself lying on the pebbled beach looking at the night sky, his view spoilt by the constant blue strobing from the lights of the multitude of emergency vehicles that had turned up.

There had been a heated discussion with paramedics. Du Bois could not afford to have them examine his body. In the end he’d had to show his special-forces warrant card to some high-ranking police officers and have them threaten to arrest the paramedics if they didn’t leave him alone. All the while, Alexia had fiercely stood guard over her brother.

Du Bois lit a cigarette. He’d managed to get a packet from one of the police officers. He reckoned he’d got the cigarettes because they thought he was about to die. Instead he was lying on the pebbles wondering how long it would take for his internal systems to repair themselves.

He pulled out his phone.

‘You know you can do that internally, with your systems? The phone’s just an external security filter and storage device,’ Alexia told him.