Gavin Smith: The Age of Scorpio

‘You shot me,’ the thief squealed.

‘Funny, that,’ du Bois said from the top of the Range Rover. He was now putting all the effort he could into moving. It was agonising. ‘What do you think caused me to do that?’ he managed through gritted teeth.

Du Bois slid off the roof of the Range Rover and landed in about a foot of water. Pain lanced through him and he blacked out for a moment. He came to next to the thief. His right arm was a mess and looked like it was hanging on by only a tendon or two. The face shot was just a graze or the glaser round would have killed him.

‘You shot me!’ the thief said again between piteous cries.

‘You can go into shock, you know,’ du Bois told him. ‘Oh, never mind.’ He managed to get both arms up. The two .38s slid out and Du Bois shot the man ten times. He was dead after the first. Du Bois stared at the man with undisguised contempt. Then he slumped against the Range Rover in the water. Soon he’d be able to walk. Waves were coming up Alhambra Road now. He’d left his mark on this city. The Solent was muddy and stormy-looking under a clear blue sky.

Du Bois looked back at the dead man. Had it always been this easy for him to kill, he wondered? He had murdered the thief in a fit of temper and he knew it. Was it just a case of asking a god he knew did not exist for forgiveness and then getting on with the rest of his day?

Du Bois reloaded the .38s, not so much feeling guilty as worried by the absence of guilt. They slid back up his sleeves and he grabbed the FAL. Du Bois forced himself painfully to his feet. He managed to lean into the Range Rover and grab some more ammunition for the carbine before turning and limping towards the sea.

Gone. Separated from it. For a moment she’d felt its mind; for a moment she’d touched her sister’s mind. Then she was outside. She was in the cold and the dark, the weight of the water pressing down on her. She was too tired to fight as violent current after violent current kicked her around.

Suddenly she was sucked upwards, the force inescapable. Her lungs felt like they were being crushed. Soon it would be time to try and breathe water.

Then she was in the air but still in the water. Then falling.

Du Bois was standing nearly waist-deep in the sea, with much bigger waves on the way. The beach was covered now and the waves were over the ruined pier as he watched it rise, water pouring off it, concealing its true shape, that of a biomechanical, vaguely Piscean-shaped seed pod, larger than the largest aircraft carrier.

A hidden Seeder, here of all places , du Bois thought. The signs had pointed towards it, but even sleeping it beggared belief that the Circle had not known. He thought back to the presence beneath the family home. His family’s own secret. Had he known?

The sky was slashed open with a blade of pulsing blue light. There was the sound of air escaping on a massive scale as it was sucked through the wound in the sky. Du Bois had thought he would be asleep and never witness this himself.

The water seethed. Writhing tentacles of all sizes breached the surface. Du Bois didn’t even flinch as one lashed out and destroyed a building on the corner of Alhambra Road.

She was awake. It wouldn’t be long before her sisters realised this. Then they would wake. Their corruption, whatever had caused the fall of the Seeders, driven them mad, would pollute the one here. When they awoke, fully, then it was over.

Beth found herself in seething water, tentacles whipping all around her. Inside her head was a roaring, a near-deafening white noise that made her want to clasp her hands over her ears, though she knew that it would give her no respite.

Fully clothed, in rough water, weapons weighing her down – she just wanted to give in and sink.

Had the frigate been patrolling in the Solent because of the so-called terrorist activity? du Bois wondered. Or did the Circle have a hand in its presence? It was a Type 23, HMS Leicester , he thought. He saw the smoke and moments later heard the booming echo of the ship’s fore-mounted 4.5-inch gun. It fired again before the first shell had even hit.

The water exploded near her. The shock wave bounced her through the water, threatening to powder bone as the liquid magnified the force. Then again. She was not sure why she did, but she discarded the UMP, the Benelli and all her remaining ammo and started to swim. Above her part of the sky was red.

‘Fools,’ du Bois muttered to himself.

The frigate fired two Sea Wolf surface-to-air missiles. They shot out of their vertical launch tubes and headed for the seed as it rose towards the red wound in the sky. From the front of the ship two Sting Ray torpedoes sped through the water towards the flailing tentacles. From the pad at the rear of the ship, a Sea Lynx helicopter took off. It was an impressive display, du Bois thought as he shook his head.

Everything around her was fire and force. Her body was repeatedly battered, flung through the air and then driven under by successive explosions. Overpressure burst her eardrums and her bones were powdered.

The tentacle flicked out reflexively, responding to pain. It caught the frigate amidships, breaking its back, cleaving it in two with such force that the two halves crashed against each other before they started to sink, sliding rapidly beneath the muddied churning water.

The surface-to-air missiles hit the seed, battering it around in the sky, blackening and bloodying flesh designed to withstand the rigours of deep space, but it continued to rise. The energy matrices on its skin crackled with bioelectricity as it rose through the wound in the sky. Then the wound was gone.

The Lynx pilot was clearly having problems: the destruction of the Leicester , the strange air currents as a result of the wound in the sky and, du Bois guessed, probably just the strangeness of the whole thing. The pilot managed to steady the craft, and moments later the helicopter fired two Sea Skua missiles one after another. They impacted among the greatest concentration of tentacles. A huge amount of water was thrown upwards and some of the smaller tentacles were destroyed or severed and blown into the air. The response was inevitable, the whip-like tentacle flicking out with such force that the helicopter had disintegrated before it was driven down into the water.

Du Bois did not need the biohazard warnings he was receiving from his blood-screen. If the Seeder had woken then she was sporing. Suddenly every phone within earshot started to ring.

‘Well, it had to start somewhere,’ he said.

It had taken a lot of hacking. He had not even known what the RAF was at the beginning of the day. They’d shut down supposedly secure phone networks. They’d intercepted electronic communications, introduced viruses into air-traffic-control computers and sent fake commands.

They’d been up against someone else as well, someone with knowhow and access to lost tech. It hadn’t been as simple as fucking with the puny human computer systems, like normal.

And Baron Albedo was dead. Properly dead. Killed by the blond guy who wouldn’t die himself, and his bitch had shot Inflictor and Dracimus a lot. That shit was not supposed to happen, King Jeremy thought. And they hadn’t even got the goth bitch with the trippy blood.

‘Bad day,’ Jeremy said quietly as he toyed with the case that Baron Albedo had taken off the blond guy. The thing about bad days, King Jeremy reflected, was that they weren’t supposed to happen to him. Someone would have to pay for this.

‘What are you doing?’ Vic demanded as he watched the cocoon slowly dissolve. Vic was reasonably sure that he had nailed a very human-sounding borderline hysteria in his voice. If not, he knew that Scab would pick up on his panicky pheromone secretions. ‘We’ve got no idea what’s in there. It could be viral; it could be dangerous Seeder tech – anything, something worse than the Scorpion. You can’t open it.’