Gavin Smith - The Age of Scorpio

Fachtna watched it rise from the water, almost oblivious to the screams of panic from below. It was overkill. After all, what could one warrior do against such power. He felt gratified that Bress or his master felt that he warranted such a grand death.

Then he smiled and reached for the case on his back as his internal targeting systems locked on to the dragon, plotting targeting solutions and preparing to transmit them. He took the case and opened it. It was heavily shielded and constantly transmitting narcotic, soporific programs to the spear inside.

Fachtna lifted the drowsy spear out of its case. A demonic face formed in the smart matter of the lower part of the weapon’s long bladed head. The haft of the weapon extended to over six feet. He felt the psychotic AI in the weapon start to wake. The Lloigor had always felt that function followed form. If you were to make a weapon, then the weapon, to fully fulfil its purpose, should hate because its purpose was carnage. Even allowing for that, the AI in the spear, which some called Lug, had far exceeded its initial programmed hate and gone into the realms of near-uncontrollable madness on battlefields eternities ago. If some of the stories were true, then the weapon – like its makers – could have been older than this universe. Fachtna himself was nearly overwhelmed by the weapon’s hunger for slaughter. He almost lost himself in its myriad rage-filled psychoses.

The dragon breathed and engulfed the top of the wicker man’s head in fire. Superheated plasma turned the smart-matter-seeded metal into a melted and fused mess.

Fachtna’s leap took him high above the wicker man just as where he had been standing moments before was turned to slag. Fachtna was aiming for the wicker man’s shoulder. He almost overshot. His bare feet failed to grip as he slipped painfully onto his arse and started to slide off. He grabbed the framework of the wicker man with his left hand and used it to swing around until he was facing the dragon again. The Naga ship tilted to one side as it circled the wicker man, looking for another shot.

Fachtna pulled his right arm back and threw the spear at the dragon. He transmitted his targeting ware’s firing solutions to the insane AI at the same time. The spear’s AG drive kicked in, accelerating it to hypersonic speeds, the resultant boom deafening the screaming captives below. The thermal head superheated to white hot as it hit the Naga craft in an explosion of burning biotechnological armoured skin and flesh.

Through conduits and corridors that had more in common with veins and arteries, the spear sought out the Naga symbiotically fused with the craft and the other semi-autonomous organisms/weapons that lived within it and killed them all.

Fachtna drew his sword again, cut through the framework and dived into the now-empty seventh level of the wicker man. He rolled forward onto his feet and ran. The dragon breathed once more. Fachtna felt the heat on his back; his hair caught fire as the shoulder of the wicker man was turned to slag.

Through the layers of psychoses, the spear recognised the craft as a manifestation of its ancient enemy. It sought out the craft/organism’s beating heart and slew the dragon.

Fachtna glanced behind him. The Naga craft was listing badly to one side. Then the disruption in the air at its tail, caused by the craft’s Real Space drive, simply stopped, and it plummeted towards the sea.

Fachtna stopped running and headed back to the edge of the fused area of the wicker man’s seventh level, patting out the flames in his hair as he went. He ignored the burning sensation from his feet and the smell of flesh cooking as he looked out and watched the dragon crash through one of the curraghs below. Even frightened, even deafened, the captives still managed to cheer.

Now comes the hard part , Fachtna thought. The program had taken up an enormous part of the memory within his internal nanite headware. The program was complex, intelligent, ancient and had its own personality. It was designed to do just one thing: soothe the spear enough for it to return and be replaced in its case. To the spear this would feel like the betrayal of a lover played out in moments that for the AI stretched out for lifetimes.

Possession by the spear was a definite threat. Fachtna activated protective programs, mystic sigils that would look after his internal systems; he dropped calming narcotics into his augmented systems to try to suppress the psychotic rage spillover into his consciousness. He ran through calming mental and physical exercises taught at warrior camp and later by the technomantic dryw .

The spear returned to Fachtna’s hand, its haft receding. Fachtna tried not to hurry as he sent the various codes designed to make the AI sleep. He placed it in the case and with a pronounced sigh of relief closed it.

The foot caught him dead centre in the back with a force that would have snapped a non-augmented spine. Instead it sent him sprawling across the soiled boards.

Bress let go of the framework he’d used to swing in and dropped down onto the floor behind the prostrate Fachtna. Behind him the framework that had opened for him with a thought was growing shut.

‘You’re a long way from your Eggshell, little man,’ he said evenly. Fachtna rolled over to face him. He felt a little thrill of fear. He wished he hadn’t used the riasterthae frenzy to kill the giant. He couldn’t withstand another frenzy today. He wished his arms and shoulders weren’t still in agony despite the best efforts of his augmentations to repair them.

‘I thought we were a myth to the likes of you?’ he asked for the sake of something to say.

‘Long gone perhaps, but Crom has a long memory.’

Besides fear, Fachtna also felt excitement. He really wanted to kill this man. He was less happy when Bress leaned down and picked up the case with the spear in it.

‘What’s this?’ he asked.

Fachtna skipped up onto his feet, sword in hand.

It was warm in here. Her internal breath felt like the dry desert wind from a hundred lives ago. Except in her breath was moisture. He stood in a cave of bone and flesh, his hands and the side of his head sunk into the wall. He shared the thoughts and feelings of a creator. He was perverting them. He had fed her pain and fear and hatred, and she had given that form. From her womb they had grown like blisters through her skin. Skin that was strong enough to survive the deepest abysses the oceans had to offer. Slowly she was waking. Unlike her sisters, her creator had not driven her irrevocably insane, but the pain of the sacrifices would be enough to harm her mind. That would allow him to influence her to open the way.

The pain and the fear lessened significantly. She could still feel it, even asleep, but it was not being fed directly to her via the transmissions of crystal parasites. He had felt the interference but thought nothing of it. Small people with small minds. They could not be allowed to stop the sending, however.

Smoke poured up through the planks in the floor of the fourth level, obscuring most of their view and the people waiting by the steps. They were just coughing, sobbing shadows now, cursing those who moved so slowly beneath them.

Teardrop was a bleeding mess, still sitting cross-legged, his arms held out, no part of him unwounded. If his skin was not cut then it was burned. His gibbering had long ago ceased to be language, and blood came from his mouth as crystal oozed from his eyes. He was now just making a rasping rattling noise.

The first thing she noticed was that the cursing, sobbing and coughing had stopped. The captives came through the smoke towards them, arms outstretched, enslaved by the magic of the crystal seeds in their heads again. Britha moved in front of Teardrop. She heard him coughing and spitting out blood behind her. Crom apparently wanted Teardrop and Britha dead more than he needed the captives’ fear.