Gavin Smith - The Age of Scorpio

Eldon looked down into the pool that Brett had just been dragged into. Melia and Eden appeared on either side of him. Eden had her disc gun drawn and was pointing it into the pool. Eldon glanced between the women.

‘Well fuck,’ he finally said.

‘We need to go after him!’ Eden said.

‘Fuck that!’ Eldon and Melia said simultaneously.

Ezard practically flew out of the water to land next to the three of them.

‘What the fuck?’ Eden demanded of the speaker.

‘I am very sorry. It is a malfunctioning maintenance creature. Do not worry. It should not hurt your crew member. We will find him quickly though and return him to you safely. We are already looking.’

Eldon gave this some thought.

‘Well that seems fair enough,’ he finally said.

Eden glared at him. ‘We need to find him!’ she snapped.

‘I’m sure they know what they are doing,’ Melia said. Though she would miss Brett. On a ship with a crew as aesthetically challenged as the Black Swan , he had been her one respite.

Eden turned on the feline, but her angry retort was cut off by a shrieking cry from behind her.

They swung round to see a woman walking towards them and pointing.

‘You did this!’ She shouted the words as if they were new to her. As if she had not used even this ancient form of common in a long time, if ever.

Her skin was covered in jumbled words and patterns, some of them animated. Others glowed with their own luminescence. Eldon could not keep his eyes off her chest – the flashing and animated images looked like a collision between adverts for a soft drink and an insect brothel. They had apparently carried in a number of nanite advertising plagues. Plagues that their own screens would have stopped but against which those here would have no countermeasures.

Nearby they saw other adverts growing out of the naked skin of the crew/passengers of the biological ship.

‘Shit,’ Eldon said. Eden was trying to explain the concept of nano-pollution to the angry women as more closed on them. Ezard was staring at them like he wanted an explanation.

‘You brought something else…’ Ezard started.

Eldon drew the disc gun from his back and let Ezard have both barrels. Ezard’s abdomen almost ceased to exist as he flew back into the pool.

The angry women with the virulent advertising disease grabbed Eden by the neck and lifted her off her feet. Nanites quickly laced through the skin and flesh of Eden’s neck, hardening it, protecting her windpipe, but her augmentations were strictly civilian and designed for industrial accidents. The woman’s fingers were still crushing her flesh. There was blood running down Eden’s attacker’s fingers.

Eldon turned his disc gun on the woman holding Eden off the ground. His neunonics warned him that Eden’s position was within his field of fire but offered him the best target solution. He pulled the trigger. Both barrels fired. The discs tore chunks out of Eden and the woman. The woman staggered but did not drop Eden. Moments later Eden’s head just seemed to pop off. The headless corpse dropped to the ground and the angry and already injured woman turned towards Eldon. Melia’s double-barrelled disc blast tore the woman off her feet.

Melia and Eldon moved back to back, trying to cover all around them as they were encircled by a mass of pale flesh sporting multiple adverts on their newly diseased flesh. All Eldon could see were their inhuman eyes, black nails and needle-like teeth.

‘What the fuck did you shoot Ezard for?’ Melia demanded, piteously aware of how few rounds the disc guns had in their tubular magazines.

‘Panicked,’ Eldon answered, thinking that this was not a good time for a domestic.

‘And Eden?’

‘Same thing.’

‘Are you panicking now?’

‘Yes.’ Though had Eldon been totally honest he would now have told her that panic was warring with irritation.

‘You going to shoot me?’ Melia demanded. Eldon gave it some thought.

‘You hold them off and I’ll make a run for help,’ he suggested. He looked up at the cocoon. He was surprised to see an ugly wiry-looking man with no hair and green-stained lips climbing around on it.

The man’s spacesuit sleeve was halfway up his right arm. Clinging to this arm, its legs digging into his flesh, was an arachnid with pincers and a sting. The arachnid looked like it was made of living brass. The sting had extended and seemed to be deep in the material of the cocoon.

Eldon recognised the man, or his neunonics did. He was famous. But there was something else, something familiar, as if he had actually met him but he could not remember when.

There was a cry of pain from the man as the sting retracted from the cocoon and the brass arachnid sank into his flesh, moving underneath the skin. The man’s spacesuit covered him and the visor slid over his face. Then the man hugged the cocoon.

Nulty didn’t like this at all. Red Space was starting to clear. The clouds were dissipating as if swept away by wind. Nulty had seen this effect before, watching ships gate from the red into real. Except this much cloud clearing away would mean either a very large ship or a lot of them simultaneously. Neither option seemed good for them.

The repeated interface hail to Eldon and the others might as well have been screaming into a vacuum. He was now very sure that the sensor glitch that Eldon had found was a stealthed ship. It was showing some of the strange energy signature that the S-tech craft they had found was displaying.

The violence done to the very fabric of Red Space was appalling in its scale. Nulty watched from the hull of the Black Swan , feeling exposed in the vacuum that he’d thought of as his home. As space was torn open, the craft coming through looked like a massive cliff of armour and technology from his perspective. It moved slowly, gracefully, through the pulsing blue tear, angry ribbons of white energy sparking off its hull. Nulty had the absurd urge to go and hide on the other side of it. Except that the sensor feed from the Swan was showing another bridge of similar size opening behind him. For a supposedly off-the-beaten-track part of Red Space, things were getting very busy. The second craft was of about equal size and similarly armoured, but unlike the smooth, angular lines of the first craft, its hull was ornate, even bearing statuary protruding.

Nulty recognised both craft. The first was a Consortium Free Trade Enforcer-class heavy cruiser. The second was also a heavy cruiser but belonged to the Seeder Church. Nulty understood why they were here. Both would have an interest in the Seeder craft, if that was what it was, particularly if it held the secret of bridge tech. To the Consortium it could mean breaking the Church’s monopoly, a monopoly that the Church would not want to see broken.

Despite the heavy interference, Nulty listened to threat and counter-threat rage through Red Space as the ships tried to lock weapons on each other through their glitching sensor systems.

The odd thing was that the Church ship was showing the same or similar spectrums of energy that the Seeder craft was. It was similar to some of the readings he’d been seeing from the Swan since their mysterious employer had paid to get the bridge drive functioning. Their employer had also apparently paid for some other modification, which Nulty was less than pleased about. The Consortium craft was not showing anything from that part of the energy spectrum. In fact Nulty was getting exactly what he would have expected from sensor readings of a Consortium heavy cruiser.

Nulty found himself praying to the Seeders, something that he had not done in a very long time, that both sides would want the Seeder craft intact. On the other hand, he could not imagine that whoever got the craft would have a good reason for keeping him alive.