Gavin Smith - The Age of Scorpio

The wing display made Horrible Angel’s flight look almost graceful. The orbital weapons platforms fired, reaching into the atmosphere, destroying anything in their line of fire as, like angry gods, they reached for Elite Scab.

Elite Scab had a moment to think that it had been perfectly timed. Then the force of many impacts drove him deep into the crust of the planet beneath him. And he remembered pain again.

The Red Space echo of Game seemed to be coming down all around them. They tried to avoid the worst of the falling debris as the expressionistic simulacra trees crumbled, but much of the debris had the consistency of ash by the time it reached them.

‘I don’t suppose you want to share your exfiltration plan with me?’ Scab asked. The Monk didn’t dignify the question with an answer. Instead she watched him almost curiously as it rained ash out of a red sky.

‘You know that Vic’s dead by now, don’t you? I’m sorry, but he was probably your best weapon,’ she told him with the same searching expression. Scab just nodded. ‘Will you even miss him?’

‘Who are you to ask me that?’ He wasn’t angry. It was another question he didn’t quite understand. It was almost as if he expected her to answer it somehow.

‘I was just curious, I guess. Vic was the only life form you regularly and closely associated with. I just wondered if you’d developed some kind of connection to him.’

‘Do you want me to take revenge now?’

The Monk looked down at the small cocoon they were riding.

‘If you want. Or you could mourn.’

‘Do you find emotions help being a killer?’ This time there was genuine interest in his voice.

‘No. No, I really don’t.’ The Monk seemed lost in thought for a while. ‘Having something to believe in does.’

There was more laughter, and the Monk didn’t like it any better this time.

‘I think that makes you more dangerous than me, certainly madder.’

‘Maybe just less cynical.’

They rode up again for a while, watching the echo of a world being destroyed by unseen forces. Scab was wondering if there was an exfiltration plan. Perhaps she was hoping to fly the thing all the way to the H-space beacon. After all, she had said that Red Space was smaller and governed by different physical laws.

‘While we’re sharing, where’s the Cathedral?’ Scab asked. The Monk ignored him yet again.

Scab looked around. He was starting to get bored. The slow ascent. Nothing to see but crumbling black skeletal trees and ashen-rain-obscured red sky. It took a while, but then he realised there was movement among the branches. There were indeterminate forms that seemed to be made out of some kind of deeper blackness than their surroundings. Faceless and roughly humanoid in shape, they had large bat-like wings and what looked like stinger-tipped tails. They crawled over the trees in a way that looked less like a flock and more like a swarm. They seemed somehow parasitical to him.

The other movement was more difficult to pin down: a suggestion of a quadruped, an off-kilter, almost canine lope to it, but whatever it was – or they were – it seemed to come from places where there shouldn’t be anything. It hurt Scab when he caught the movement and actually tried to look at it. He had the idea that it was formed of tiny multifaceted crystals that moved together like a machine doing an impression of biological life.

Scab brought the laser rifle up to bear. Targeting graphics appeared in his vision as he tried to understand what he was seeing through the cross hairs. The Monk was watching him with an expression of bemusement on her face.

‘What are they?’ he asked eventually, lowering the rifle. They didn’t seem any threat, and although he fancied killing something that he’d never killed before, particularly the crystalline things that made his head hurt, there were too many unknowns.

The Monk shrugged. ‘We don’t know. Aliens maybe. Real ones, not just uplifted animals like you and me. Maybe they’re technology or weapons or ghosts. Maybe just some Red-Space-imprinted manifestation of what we have up here,’ she said, tapping her head. ‘Maybe we should think better thoughts?’

Scab stared at her, trying to decide if she was making fun of him or not. He had not found her answer particularly satisfying.

It wasn’t enough. It hurt, it hurt so much. He imagined that every one of his cells was undergoing the white-light pain of a nuclear birth. There was no him, only agony. Suddenly he felt a connection. Something out of sight. Something appalling. For the first time he felt kinship, a connection, an empathy. He was a messenger, a herald, a harbinger.

The armour’s integrity had held. Much of the energy had been sent elsewhere, a light show bleeding out into empty space. His shields were down, but he was being fed the energy to rebuild them.

It happened in moments – Elite Scab rebuilt himself – but moments were a long time for people like them. They must have assumed he’d been destroyed. Which meant for moments they weren’t aware of him. Had he gone somewhere else? The contact had made him feel dirty. It made him feel alive and wish for death. He wondered if this was what having a purpose felt like.

He hit the atmosphere like a comet. There was flame to the horizon. He bathed in energy-weapons fire from a surprised orbital defence network. He rose into space, looking like he was made from a vast spectrum of light, a humanoid prism. Space felt cool to him.

He heard Horrible Angel screaming. It was an infrasound weapon for mortals in an atmosphere. Here it was a special effect. He liked it. It was suitably dramatic. The electronic warfare attacks were a disappointment, a silent duel, a distraction beneath them. They did, however, mean that for the first time he became fully aware of Fallen Angel’s presence. He was manipulating the forces of higher-dimensional physics in an attempt to cut off the complex entanglement effect. The amount of energy they were using must have been putting an enormous strain on the carrier signal from the primordial black hole network. Scab fought back. A conceptual sword-and-shield battle fought through other dimensions. It was science that only the ancients who had developed the technology understood. Fortunately their technology had been user-friendly.

Horrible Angel flew at him, cycling rapidly through her weapon’s various flavours of attack. Focused particle beam, DNA hack beam, ghost bullets fed to her through the entanglement effect from vast magazines in the Monarchist’s Citadel. Fired at a cyclic rate far in excess of anything a mechanical device could manage, the intangible bullets sought his flesh. They wanted to become tangible inside him. Elite Scab flickered through the frequencies of his coherent energy shields unimaginably fast to stop the bullets, as each one was keyed to a different vibration. He changed physical state at the same time, drawing on vast amounts of energy to do so, always trying to be in a different state from the bullet that was passing through where his body should be.

He knew something now. He sent a command back through the entanglement link. He knew that in the Citadel alarms would sound as his override code gave him access to a weapon that required full board permission to use. There would be a silent panic as those who supposedly could make that decision neunonically sought to stop his override signal. It had never been used. It was a massive escalation that if used they could never walk away from. Fuck them , Scab thought. He could see his death from here. This would be his goodbye.

Circling around distant suns, networks of orbiting crucibles made of ancient alien technology came alive and drank their respective suns. He became the triangulation point for the energy of three suns sucked dry in an instant.