Gavin Smith - The Age of Scorpio

He saw her wings. She was beautiful, her armour made her look like she was encased in living obsidian. He would miss her scream. The rifle-shaped weapon in his hands was a focus point. Nothing more. He fired. For a moment her flesh became an event horizon.

She was staring at the cocoon. Had been for a while. Scab studied her. She was soon to be a victim but despite himself Scab was starting to find her intriguing. Suddenly it occurred to him that this was important to her, personally. This almost automatically meant that Scab would struggle to understand the reasoning. He understood wants but only really in terms of the id. This was something else. It clearly wasn’t just a job to the Monk.

‘Does monopoly mean that much to you?’ Scab asked.

‘Any degree of control is a possibly misguided attempt to stop the uplifted races from tearing themselves apart,’ she told him distractedly. It was obviously something that she’d heard before.

‘Fuck it. Let them.’

The Monk sighed and looked up at him.

‘What a wonderfully constructed facade of nihilistic luxury,’ she said. For some reason Scab thought she sounded a little uncomfortable with the words.

‘Huh?’ he asked.

‘You have neunonics. Don’t pretend that you didn’t understand what I said.’

‘I know what the words mean. I’m just not sure of their relevance.’

‘There’s too much beauty and wonder in Known Space for there not to be people there to bear witness.’

Scab nearly laughed in her face.

‘Leaving aside that nobody cares enough to stop and look beyond whatever their next personal fix is, that’s just narcissism. Stop trying to convince yourself you matter. It’ll be there long after we’re gone.’

‘We’re not so sure.’

Scab stared at her hard. She wouldn’t meet his look. That hadn’t seemed quite such a calculated thing to say, unless she was getting better at faking it. It was also clear that short of killing her and interrogating her neunonics, he wasn’t going to get any more. He didn’t want to kill her, yet. He wanted to see her way out, because he certainly didn’t have one. They lapsed into silence again.

‘What is this?’ Scab finally asked, tapping the cocoon. She looked up at him. Suddenly she was guarded. It was like watching someone slam a polarised visor down.

‘It’s what you think it is. Money, power, chaos.’

‘What’s it to you?’ he said evenly.

‘The fall of the Church.’

‘No, really.’ The Monk did not answer. ‘I know that Church neunonics are good and that you’ll have a time bomb in there to wipe them when you die, but we… I’ve been pretty well resourced for this. I wonder if it’ll still be there when I interrogate your corpse’s neunonics. The answer, I mean.’

‘And if I told you it didn’t matter, or rather it wouldn’t matter to you or anyone else involved?’

‘Then I’d say you’d have no reason not to tell me.’

Scab hadn’t been expecting the smile.

‘You’re right.’ But she said nothing more, to Scab’s slight irritation.

Then behind them the red sky went black. The planet shook and everything around them came apart, a silent explosion of ash.

It was a slow bullet, a magic bullet that killed him. Fallen Angel had fired it seconds ago, a ghost bullet on a discrete carrier wave. He’d not so much fired at Elite Scab as seeded space with them. Each bullet fired at his weapon’s impossibly fast cyclic rate was a mixture of Land S-tech. The bullets carried a payload of high-end nanites and virals designed, at great expense, with one purpose in mind: kill the other guy’s Elite.

Fallen Angel had linked his weapon’s aiming system to a chaos fact/probability targeting routine. The bullets travelled through vectors where Elite Scab could be. The bullet hadn’t hit Elite Scab. He’d moved into its path. It was fate’s bullet. It was the inevitable bullet.

There was literally no room for tear ducts in the redesigned physiology of an Elite. When he got back to the Citadel he would try and weep for Horrible Angel. He knew that the black exotic matter would leak out of him like black tears only to be absorbed back in through his pale skin. There was, of course, less than no body. Her armour was gone as well. They were down one Elite.

Elite Scab had a body, though. Fallen Angel moved gracefully through the debris, heading for Elite Scab’s corpse as his own systems came back online. Even though his systems were hardened with ancient alien technology, they had still been knocked out. His wings expanded out of his back again.

The planet below was dead now. It looked like an apple someone had taken a bite out of. Some of the orbital platforms and ships on the other side of the planet might have survived. He couldn’t hear them yet. They were probably desperately trying to get their systems online as the dead planet pulled them down towards its surface. He couldn’t hear the Absolute either. He hoped it was dead. It had repelled him. It had not been a worthy master for them. It had turned an entire planet into a form of masturbation.

He found him. Elite Scab hung there in space. His armour looked undamaged. Soon his coffin would form around him. Fallen Angel would try and stop it, capture the tech, but it would be for nothing. The coffin would open a bridge at the beacon and start its autopilot funeral procession through Red Space back to the Consortium Citadel.

Hate and wishful thinking conflicted within Fallen Angel. All he could have asked for was a body to mourn. Like him, she hadn’t backed herself up. It was a cheat for light that burned as brightly as they had. And hate. He could never kill Scab enough.

They had felt the force of whatever had happened as it passed through them. It was a sensation rather than something real, an echo with only slightly more physical presence than a hologram, and now they were floating up through a blizzard of ash. Through the gentle blizzard Scab could make out the expression of worry on the Monk’s face.

‘Did your diversion just destroy a planet?’ she demanded.

It seemed unlikely, Scab thought, even for an Elite. On the other hand, there was nothing but ash now.

‘Why do you look so worried?’ he asked.

‘What, the apparent destruction of a planet and the death of billions is not a sufficient cause for worry?’ she demanded. It occurred to her that human emotions couldn’t handle this sort of atrocity as anything more than an abstract. At least that was what she told herself, because she couldn’t deal with the thought that she’d had a part to play in this crime. Scab shrugged. ‘Red Space navigation isn’t a precise science, well, at least not without a nav comp. Landmarks would have helped,’ she finally told him.

‘Maybe if you tell me what you’re looking for?’

The Monk ’faced a command from her neunonics to stop the cocoon’s rise. Scab could see it now through the gentle ash storm. The St Brendan’s Fire was perfectly still in the black blizzard. His neunonics showed multiple weapons locks.

‘Going to kill me with a blade now?’ the Monk asked.

‘Shit,’ Scab said.

‘It can’t be done,’ Morfudd said. Britha had to admit that she was probably right. They didn’t have nearly enough people. They would need ships and they had no way to kill giants.

‘We have to try,’ Fachtna said grimly, but Britha could see that he did not hold out much hope. To have come this far , she thought helplessly.

‘We are all going to die,’ Teardrop said, matter of fact. ‘Come to terms with that.’

‘For nothing?’ Morfudd asked.

‘Stay here if you want,’ Fachtna said.

Tangwen was leading the way. Behind them, riders crested the hill. They were Corpse People. The horses they rode were large and well built, their coats white in colour, their mouths and lower legs red – steeds from the Otherworld.