Gavin Smith - The Age of Scorpio

The shot caught him in the shoulder, spinning him around. The ragged nano-fabric woven into the rags of his leather coat hardened, as did his skin. Had he been a normal man, the hydrostatic shock would have blown the limb off. One of the gunmen was firing through the rip in the side of the van. Du Bois turned on him, firing one-handed as he advanced, his left arm rapidly healing. Few of the shots were hitting but they had the desired effect of making the shooter keep his head down. When his left hand could move again, he pulled a fragmentation grenade out of his pocket and yanked the pin out with his right. He let the spoon flip off, his internal systems counting for him. Baron Albedo was firing as the grenade flew into the van.

The second was down but the third had made it to cover in front of the van and was returning fire. Beth was switching between suppressing him and putting more rounds in the two on the ground to prevent them from healing.

The van exploded. Beth prayed her sister hadn’t still been in there.

Du Bois had already turned and was sliding his last magazine home into the .45. The bus was beginning to pull away. He started running, trying to get an angle to fire on the driver. He risked two shots but they went wide. He fired the remaining six into what he was pretty sure was the engine block, but the bus kept on going.

He heard and his blood-screen told him that there was someone coming up behind him. He turned to see a man staggering across the tarmac, skin and flesh regrowing as he made his way towards him. Du Bois grabbed the punch dagger from his belt buckle and rammed it into Baron Albedo’s throat. The blade of the dagger disintegrated into nanites that surged through Albedo’s systems, quickly overcoming the young man’s own nanite defences as they sought ways to kill him.

Baron Albedo, aka Clifford Sharman, had once been a nice kid from a little town in north-western Idaho who got picked on for being clever. He died on a stretch of motorway a long way from home.

Du Bois holstered the .45, ran back to the Range Rover and jumped into the driver’s seat, throwing the shotgun in the back. A lot of the mutated people he’d shot were starting to get up. He could hear sirens and there was a helicopter in the air above them. Du Bois prayed it was police and not media.

‘Beth!’ he shouted. Beth jumped in. ‘They’ve got Talia.’

‘What the fuck were you doing?’ she demanded. He put the Range Rover into gear and gunned it forward. Du Bois ran over Inflictor Doorstep and Dracimus. King Jeremy ran for cover around the other side of the smoking van as they passed. Beth glared at du Bois. He felt her stare but did not acknowledge it. He’d failed her.

There was no door on du Bois’s side. He reached over and pulled his seat belt on as he drove. Beth did likewise and then loaded another magazine into the hot-barrelled FAL. Neither of them noticed that the tentacle that had exploded out of the earth to bring the van to a halt had gone.

Du Bois took the Range Rover up the bank at the side of the motorway and into farmland, taking it across country to a road that would get them heading back in the general direction of Portsmouth. As soon as they were on the road he had another one-sided conversation with himself, requesting that the police stay off his back. Then he was requesting more satellite footage.

‘Do you know where they are taking her?’ Beth asked. Du Bois nodded and then asked her to get something from the gun compartment in the back of the car.

Passing over the M27, they got a chance to see the carnage they’d help create, two severe pile-ups, one each side of the motorway. The emergency services were struggling to respond. It had happened so quickly and much of Portsmouth’s fire, ambulance and police personnel would be at the site of the gunfight in Old Portsmouth. Circle influence or not, du Bois didn’t think that he’d be able to get out of this one. Someone would be hung out to dry, and publicly. You couldn’t keep blaming the Muslims. On the other hand, Europeans had been doing that since the Crusades – he of all people should know that.

Up onto Portsdown Hill, looking down on Portsmouth and Hayling Island next to it, on the other side of the Solent the Isle of Wight, a beautiful fresh sunny day with barely a cloud in the sky. They were in a bus , he thought. How much further ahead could they be?

Past Fort Southwick, Control started sending the satellite footage directly into his skull. Not dodgy low-resolution, spy-satellite footage, but footage from the Circle’s own satellites, though they pre-dated the Circle; in fact, they pre-dated humanity. He saw the bus pulling into the lock-up at Fort Widley from high above.

There was no subtlety or stealth involved. Du Bois drove the Range Rover through the rickety wooden door of the lock-up in the Victorian fort, narrowly missing being impaled by splintering chunks of wood. He slammed on the brakes to avoid hitting the rear of the bus.

Beth and du Bois were out of the Range Rover. Checking all around them. Where their eyes went the barrels of their guns did as well. Beth still had the FAL carbine; du Bois carried the .45 calibre Heckler & Koch UMP sub-machine gun that Beth had got from the gun compartment in the back of the car.

The lock-up had the same feeling as it had the first time he had been there. Cavernous and empty. They moved through it quickly, searching. Beth found the sacrifices.

‘Is this what they want her—’

‘I very much doubt it. Focus.’

Beth shook herself out of it. Du Bois knew that she was very much playing a part at the moment. He’d dropped some high-end skills into her head, and her natural talents and level of fitness had allowed her to keep up and integrate them quickly, but she would pay for it later with migraines that would make her wish for death, and probably with internal bleeding as well.

He spotted misshapen footprints in the grime on the floor. He cursed himself. He should have checked this place more thoroughly. He should have been more emphatic to Control about the importance of following this up and dealing with it, regardless of whether Control needed every last resource at the moment. The footprints led him deeper into the racks of equipment and down into the tunnels that ran through the fort. He signalled Beth and she joined him. They followed the prints.

They found the entrance in a storeroom. The passage was seven feet high and five wide. It looked recently dug. The walls looked fused somehow, which to du Bois’s mind wasn’t structurally sound. He glanced at Beth.

‘What dug this?’ she asked. Something didn’t look right. There was something more animal than human about this. On the other hand, it might have been her imagination playing tricks, what with all the strangeness of the last week.

‘At a guess, the same thing that drove a tentacle through solid ground to stop a van.’

‘Everyone wants Talia,’ Beth muttered.

‘Stay behind me and watch your shots. The rounds in your carbine will rip straight through people and into your sister; the ones in mine won’t. Any doubts, grab the automatic from the holster at my hip and use that instead, okay?’

Beth nodded and tried not to think about how many rounds she had put into the air during the fight on the motorway.

Du Bois didn’t say that if they encountered any more of the armoured six-limbed servitors they were in trouble because he had no more nanite-tipped bullets.

They crept into the tunnel. Moving swiftly, weapons ready. Du Bois was sure he could hear noises from further down.

It was a bump in the tunnel floor that gave it away. The walls of the tunnel, the roof and the rest of the floor were so smooth. It looked like someone had kicked up a bit of the floor on purpose. He stopped.