Gavin Smith - The Age of Scorpio

It was a blissed Vic who managed to sit on one of the couches and let it grow to envelope his awkward and now partially eaten ’sect frame. Blissed or not, the sight of the Scorpion dug into flesh just behind the dolphin’s artificial gill, sting buried deep in the navigator’s skin, was horrific. Its legs had grown to form what looked like a skin-tight cage clamped into the cetacean’s flesh. The navigator was still alive, his eyes full of pain.

Vic shut down the ship. There were still people in there. Those he couldn’t trap, he turned the ship’s remaining security systems on. The rest Scab could kill. Vic didn’t mind killing, but Scab actually liked to be a monster. Scab liked hide-and-seek. Vic stationed the P-sat outside the hole in the door to C and C to watch his back.

Open access showed him the St Brendan’s Fire ’s rendezvous point in planetary Red Space with the Monk.

‘You’re not supposed to be able to do that,’ Vic mused. But then you weren’t supposed to be able to take a Church frigate on your own, no matter how good you were. You also weren’t supposed to be able to break a Church navigator’s conditioning so easily. You certainly weren’t supposed to get away with it, and he didn’t imagine he would.

Scab stared at the frigate. He got a very good look at the ship’s batteries, most of which were pointed at him.

‘And of course you know how to navigate in planetary Red Space,’ he said grimly.

‘It’s over. I’m sorry. It’s up to you: we can put you back into Real Space if you want, but you should know we had to destroy your ship and kill Vic. Your employer will be after you. It might be better if we kill you now.’

Scab looked down with a half-smile on his lips. ‘You have to earn the right to kill me,’ he said, and then looked at her, grinning savagely.

‘I think we’ve just done that. I’m talking about what’s best for you. We harbour no ill will towards you, but you’re a very dangerous person to leave in play as an enemy.’

‘Even for the Church?’

‘Even for the Church.’

‘I’m not your enemy.’

Vic was holding the ship in a blizzard of black ash in a red sky. He wasn’t sure what was happening, but he was reasonably sure that he was in some kind of Red Space simulacrum or echo of the planet Game. He had watched the massive blackened skeletal trees collapse like they were made of burned paper.

In his neunonics he could see Scab in his disguised form and the Monk in hers sitting on the strange coffin-shaped cocoon thing. Somehow Scab’s face behind his visor dominated the image from the ship’s external visual sensors. Vic locked weapon system after weapon system onto Scab as he counted the ways in which he hated that man. There would never be a better time than now. There was no way Scab would survive and he did not have clone insurance. Scab wanted to die – he was daring everyone in Known Space to do it – but nobody had the balls. Now with a thought Vic could kill him. No comebacks. Except. Vic glanced over at the Scorpion in the tank. The navigator that the Scorpion appeared to have fused with was staring at him.

‘Leave me something of her,’ Scab ’faced over their secure link.

He wanted to scream, weep, tear at what little remained of his flesh, thrash around, engage in all the human melodrama he’d experienced in immersions. Instead he just sagged in the couch and cursed himself for a coward. He heard the Monk ’face the St Brendan’s Fire , wondering what was taking so long.

‘I’m sorry,’ Vic ’faced her back.

The Monk’s head whipped around to look at Scab. She was moving for her bone blade. Scab grabbed her wrist. A laser cannon on one of the beam batteries fired. The Monk’s torso turned to red steam which then promptly froze. Scab was still holding her upper arm.

He stared at the St Brendan’s Fire until the forward airlock ramp lowered from the head of the craft like a mouth. With a thought Scab commanded the three AG motors to take him into the airlock.

Scab cut the fused flesh off the Monk’s severed hand and attached the warmer to it, returning it to simulated life. He stared at Vic all the while. Vic would not look at him, could not meet his murky lifeless eyes. He didn’t need to look at him to feel the disdain.

‘Why were the weapons on me?’ Scab finally asked.

‘Dramatic irony?’ Vic suggested.

Scab was not disdainful of Vic for wanting to kill him. He was disdainful of Vic for not going through with it.

Scab stripped the spacesuit gauntlet off the reanimated hand, then he put the hand on the cocoon. It was warm, and he cut the flesh to let some blood leak out onto the cocoon’s strange shell. Slowly the cocoon started to dissolve. Vic stared at it in horror.

Falling through smoke. Falling through a clear blue sky, the churning red water of a feeding frenzy below her. Britha told herself that she couldn’t hear all the screaming. That she couldn’t hear how much she had failed these people. The thing crawling through her head recoiled from the violation of the sky hanging above them like an angry living black sun.

The water hit her hard, tasting of salt, copper and meat. Shapes writhed over each other like a basket full of eels. The sea seemed full. The force of her impact carried her down. To part of her the ocean seemed home, to another part the bloodlust seemed right and proper. The thing in her head howled and sent unimaginable pain lancing through her.

Something grabbed her arm. She did not fight. It pulled her deeper. What was left of her real mind told her that she was not of the sea as the pressure mounted, but somehow she did not die.

It was there, through silted water, down under the mud, something huge, ancient, alive and suffering. Something trying to wake but waking into a world of fear, pain, burning and slaughter. It was so large as to be difficult to comprehend, like a mountain, a living mountain.

The energy in the water was palpable. Patches of its flesh glowed through the murky water, making patterns, lightning playing across those patterns. Britha knew somehow that this was the energy that violated the sky, letting the Hungry Nothingness in.

Someone, something, took her deeper. She should be drowning now. Britha felt the touch of the living mountain’s hard flesh. It felt like rock or a shell but then it opened to softer flesh. She was not being consumed, she told herself. It was more like the births she had helped with over the years. It was like going home. It was not just the blood, the blood which had granted Britha power and magics, that called to this creature. Something at a much more primal level recognised the creator of life.

Now falling again. Britha landed on something warm, wet and alive. She felt a hot wind, like breath, on her skin. She tried to cope with the pain, tried to ignore the horror of what she had just done. She felt feverish. Her body was fighting itself, it wanted her to give in to fury and destroy life, but she was home and would be safe.

Britha opened her eyes and tried to make sense of things. It looked like a tunnel but she knew that she was in a living thing. Living stalactites of translucent white flesh dangled from the ceiling, giving off a faint glow and moving with the warm wind and of their own accord. The long corridor had regular arches of bone. The walls and floor remind her of the dimpled flesh on the inside of a mouth. The flesh rippled with movement.

And Cliodna stood over her. She too seemed to sway with the warm wind. Crouched over like a predatory animal, she did not look like her lover any more. She was all armour and hard edges. She looked like a warrior. No, Britha corrected herself, she looked like a weapon. The other woman seemed to seethe somehow.