Gavin Smith - The Age of Scorpio

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.

There was screaming, the thrum of a bowstring, and the screaming stopped. Tangwen lowered the bow. She stood on the rampart looking out down the hill and over the vast fertile plain, so different from the sea of swaying reeds in which she had grown up. The morning mists mingled with dirty smoke from the campfires, from the smouldering remnants of the third hill fort, and smoke from the pyres the Corpse People were using to burn their captives in plain view. If they’d wanted them to suffer, they should have tried burning them out of bow range , Tangwen thought. There were four Corpse People around the pyres. They had died with arrows in them trying to light the fires, but Tangwen was running short of arrows coated with the poison that was Fachtna’s blood.