Gavin Smith - The Age of Scorpio

‘We don’t know why. It’s some kind of simulacra, a smaller echo of our universe with different physical laws and coterminous points. Perhaps the ghost planets exist as navigation aids.’

‘Navigation aids?’

‘Red Space is constructed space – it’s artificial.’

It took a long time for what she had said to sink in. Scab’s view of Red Space had just been radically altered, if he chose to believe what she had said.

‘Constructed by who?’ he finally asked.

The Monk shrugged. Scab resisted the urge to kill her for making a gesture so significantly lacking in grandeur after what she had just told him. Later he would come to the conclusion that he did not cope well with having his universe altered at such a radical level.

‘We’re not sure, Seeders would be our best guess. Perhaps the Lloigor.’

‘Who’re the Lloigor?’

There was no answer. Instead the Monk smiled in a way that infuriated Scab so much his finger inched towards the bone blade still at his hip.

‘These are Church secrets, right?’ Scab asked suspiciously. The Monk nodded. ‘Why are you telling me this? You must be pretty confident that you’re going to come out on top of our double-cross.’

‘How are you going to get out?’ the Monk asked, meaning from Red Space. She had a good point. She gave him some time to think on this. ‘Churchman likes you,’ she finally said.

So that’s it , Scab thought. He was being given a taste. It was an obvious manipulation but it still angered him. ‘The Consortium thought I could be used as well, when I was Elite.’

‘You still are,’ the Monk said.

‘A copy is.’

‘I don’t mean to be offensive, Mr Scab, but on the other hand I’m not afraid of you, so fuck it, right? But it seems a lot more likely that you’re the clone.’ She caught his face hardening. He wasn’t a tolerant man, and she’d pushed what little tolerance he had beyond his normal limits. ‘Now you can try and kill me, maybe even succeed, but I assure you it’s mutually assured destruction. Or you can listen to me.’

‘Everybody wants their own pet psychopath, someone to frighten the other children with. It’s a sad state of affairs for Known Space,’ Scab said through gritted teeth, controlling his anger, barely.

‘We don’t want you because you have a head full of rabid squirrels, and frankly if the Church Militia and the monks don’t scare people then our ability to embargo bridge technology should. Churchman wants you because you have an enquiring mind. You question. Have you any idea how rare that is?’

‘A head full of what?’

‘See?’

‘Who is Churchman? Your leader?’ The Monk didn’t answer, but Scab knew the name-drop had been carefully calculated. ‘So let me see if I understand you properly. You’re trying to avoid the double-cross by recruiting me?’ Very few people had ever heard Scab laugh. There was genuine humour in the laughter, but no warmth. The Monk found the noise grated on her. She didn’t like it.

Suddenly they were in the shade. They looked up to see huge chunks of wreckage plummeting towards them from high above. Both tried to neunonically order the AG motors to take what was going to be very languid evasive action. Eventually the Monk desisted, realising that Scab was stubborn enough to get them both killed if he didn’t have his way.

The wreckage rained down around them. Where it hit, the tree broke like delicate ceramic. The wreckage that hit them just seemed to shatter, causing the cocoon to bob slightly on its motors.

‘What’s happening?’ Scab asked, though he was beginning to guess.

‘I think it’s your diversion. The Game is being attacked.’

‘That’s happening in Real Space?’

‘I would imagine it’s considerably worse in Real Space.’

‘And it has an effect here?’

The Monk didn’t bother to answer.

You had to understand things on a quantum level to see the particle beam cutting through the Necronaught . Elite Scab knew that to penetrate the heavily armoured hull of a capital ship, even as it was breaking its back as it hit the atmosphere belly up, would be taking the Monarchist Elite’s weapon close to the exotic material’s tolerance levels, as it drew energy from a network of micro-black holes. A network harnessed by civilisations long dead.

Elite Scab closed his eyes, savouring this, standing on the lip of the split in the ship as impacts made the two parts of the ship fall away from each other. There was fire all around. Beneath, he knew there would be lightning as the atmosphere ionised around the debris. He had created an extinction-level event plummeting towards the day side of the planet. Is this the diversion I want? Elite Scab wondered.

He felt rather than saw the black wings. Heard the screaming. There would be no electronic warfare. This was no silent duel of nanites and biologicals. Elite Scab smiled. They would light up the skies.

He lifted his feet and flew down through the ship, wreathing himself in flames as he pierced the atmosphere. He was sure it was Horrible Angel after him. She was always the furious one. Tearing through burning wreckage after him, Fallen Angel would be setting an ambush, calculating trillions of possibilities to make the best shot and then leaving it to chance and chaos.

Down through the branches of the arcology trees at hypersonic speeds. Through the black leaves. Pulling up and flying through dark canyons of massive roots. Angel’s wings spread out wide high above him, the particle beam a near-constant lance stabbing through branch and leaf, creating waves of destruction running parallel with his erratic flight path as he wove in and out of the city-sized trees, wishing he had time to play genocidal lumberjack.

Far behind them the sky went black as the first wreckage hit the ground and thousands of tonnes of debris were thrown into the air. Through the black cloud the fires were almost invisible. The ground shook, Elite Scab only registering this through the shaking of the massive arcology trees.

He turned corkscrew at speed, letting his own particle beam lash out, carving scars on trees, cutting chunks out of them. He knew that Horrible Angel would be running a completely randomised set of evasive manoeuvres designed to not be where any sane mind would assume she was.

Crystalline receivers embedded deep inside Elite Scab detected the first attempts at sorcery. Imported higher-dimensional physics designed to block the complex entanglement effect, or in other words cut him off from his energy and ammunition.

It angered him. He wanted the Game as his funeral pyre. This was not how it should be done, but he knew she would be concentrating on the higher-dimensional physics. He used his own sorcery, rode the carrier beam back to find her. Angling all coherent energy shields forward, he aimed for her and accelerated. He went straight through one of the arcology trees, exploded out the other side and hit Horrible Angel. Materials that probably shouldn’t touch, touched, and physics struggled to catch up.

The other Elite recovered instantly. Blades extruded from both their armours, appearing and disappearing where they needed them as they fought at bewildering speeds. The debris cloud engulfed them, but it meant less than nothing to these people, with their heightened senses and their instinctive understanding of everything around them.

Horrible Angel broke contact first. She was vulnerable for a moment. Elite Scab risked a shot. His weapon became a rifle in an instant in his hands, and he fired a subtle DNA beam, hoping the low-energy beam on the strange frequency would sneak past her shield and armour to rewrite her genetic code into something less god-like.

It was a fire-and-hope because he knew what was going to happen next. He had felt Fallen Angel take control of the orbital defence platforms above Elite Scab’s area. He knew they had been fired.