Gavin Smith - The Age of Scorpio

He felt calm, tranquil. He had always resisted the idea of fate. He liked to believe that he had made his own path, but he had been a slave too long, he now realised. He had thought that the inevitability of his death would feel like a trap, but it was quite the opposite. He felt liberated.

He watched the ponderous yet somehow strangely balletic approach of the massive capital ship over the planetary horizon of Game. It didn’t eclipse the G-type sun but its outline obscured a significant part of the bright star.

Thick fingers of light reached out for him, bending slightly due to the gravity well. Kinetic projectiles burned as they were shot through the bubble of the atmosphere. According to his suit’s scanners, or rather its instinctual understanding of space and the information contained in his neunonics, the capital ship had just fired every one of its AG-driven smart munitions. The munitions were accelerating to the limit of material science.

He knew the ship. It was called the Necronaught , a childish name to Elite Scab’s mind. A powerful AI helped run it. The AI had bonded with the crew, making the ship almost alive to them. They had a relationship with it. The Necronaught had wreaked havoc on the Pangean fleet during the Art Wars. It had been among the first ships through the planetary blockade and the ship most significantly responsible for the death of one of the Living Cities.

What a waste , Elite Scab thought. He was in a different physical state by the time the first beams reached him, too different for them to harm him. He took his time making his way towards the craft. He wanted to appreciate the display of firepower. He could make out the burn of other smaller faster ships making their way towards him.

He remembered the last time that he had seen a display of the Necronaught ’s firepower, huddled in a crowded mercenary carrier broadcasting constant cries of surrender and pleas of clemency for independent contractors. He saw the bright lances reaching down from high orbit. Watched the sky become a canopy of fire as the kinetic payloads hit the atmosphere. Slowed down in his neunonics, he watched the AG smart munitions blossom into multiple sub-munitions and the wreckage of escaping craft start to rain down on the scarred rock surface. Scab, as he’d been then, had picked his escape craft based on the strength of its defences.

At some level all of them had felt the death of the Living City. Scab had disliked the violation, the suggestion that at some fundamental level there was an empathic connection between all living things. Instead he wondered if the crew of the Necronaught felt like gods. He wanted what they had.

He was not going to take revenge on the Necronaught . Those memories belonged to a different person, who should have been long dead. His ghost had been resurrected in the pathetic clone copy that even now he knew was down on the surface.

Some of the more exotic payloads tugged at him, harmed him, he supposed, as he made his way towards the ship. The shields, what most people thought were S-tech but what Elite Scab knew were L-tech, were more problematic. There was actual pain and loss. He was diminished, but he did not scream as he pulled his way through them. He was breathing hard, covered in sweat as he fell through the armour and hit the ship’s cold hard deck.

With less than a thought he sucked the sweat back into his skin. He would use the salt and water for something more useful. He stood up. To the terrified-looking crewman standing in front of him, it looked like he was clothed in black liquid glass. The crewman, a tall human, base male in gender, had seen the Elite in a moment of weakness. He died immediately.

Elite Scab released the virals and the nano-swarms, all Sand L-tech derivatives. They would be too much for the Necronaught ’s countermeasures. He gained access to the ship’s systems through the dead crewman’s neunonics and downloaded multiple crack and control AI programs based on a template of his own personality. Each of them had an inbuilt self-destruct code but they would overwhelm the Necronaught ’s security, possess the host AI and effectively sequester the ship.

While this happened, Elite Scab walked through the ship killing the old-fashioned way. Every time he ran an extruded blade through a crew member or legionnaire, he thought about their souls. He knew that the soul did not exist. It was an ancient idea from before the Loss that he had come across. So much more information was available to you when you became an Elite. He knew that ultimately they were all little more than biological automatons created by the Seeders, but as he watched the screaming faces of his victims appear momentarily in the animated exotic matter of his armour, it was difficult not to think that the living material of the armour was consuming their souls. What he felt sure of was that the exotic matter wanted to consume life.

He took control of the ship. He ’faced with the ship’s nano-field for an external view. The Necronaught was belying its dark name. It looked like it was made of light as every other ship in the vicinity fired on it. The carbon reservoirs struggled to remake the ship’s reactive armour quickly enough to cope with the multiple impacts of sub-munitions and kinetic shots. In the centre of the ship, as faces screamed out from all over his armour, Elite Scab was barely feeling the hits.

Scab ignored the rest of the fleet; instead he aimed the Necronaught at the surface of Game and fired all its beam weapons and the kinetic shots that the carbon reservoirs had managed to regrow at the planet’s surface.

‘Notice me,’ he whispered.

He felt the rip in time/space. I should feel exalted , he told himself. Angels were coming especially for him.

It was quite tranquil floating upwards in the red light through what looked like the roots of the arcology trees, except here everything, all matter, was black and skeletal with oddly exaggerated angles. The frameworks of the arcology trees looked like expressionist sculptures rendered in blackened bone. The only matter here was the trees. It seemed that you had to be of a certain size to be remembered in this red-world copy. None of the smaller details – G-vehicles, piles of assembler debris, extraneous buildings – seemed to be present, and there were certainly no other life forms, not even ghosts. With the exception of the two of them riding the cocoon, their flight capability provided by the three working AG motors, everything was still. It was like a dead world. Scab found himself liking it.

They were sitting opposite each other on the cocoon. Scab’s end was listing a little, as it was the end with the destroyed AG motor on one of the corners. He had held on to the ornate double-barrelled laser rifle he’d taken off the Toy Soldier. The Monk still had a thorn pistol in each hand.

‘So, should we be pointing guns at each other in some extended Mexican stand-off?’ she asked.

Scab gave this some thought. ‘I know what a stand-off is. What’s a Mexican?’

‘Never mind.’

‘If it helps, I’ll kill you with a blade when the time comes.’

‘Thanks.’

‘No thanks needed.’ He turned and looked her up and down. ‘It just seems like it would suit you more.’

The Monk resisted the urge to thank him again. Sardonic just didn’t seem to register with him. ‘So your double-cross is in place then?’ she asked instead. Scab looked at her. He’d left the visor of the spacesuit clear but his expression was unreadable.

‘The Game exists here,’ Scab said, meaning the planet. This was after a period of silence as they rose through the red light towards the black leaf canopy covering the lower levels – or that’s what they would be in Real Space anyway. ‘There’s gravity?’