Gavin Smith - The Age of Scorpio

The things crawling through the gates, dissipating the clouds they touched, were not black. They were the absence of colour – wriggling, hungry, maggot-like voids. Where they touched the debris of the two cruisers, the wreckage simply ceased to exist as if it had been consumed. It was beautiful, Scab thought, utter oblivion. Not just the antithesis of life but the antithesis of everything. Scab could hear their idiot song. An acidic tear traced its way down through the pale makeup, mucus and blood on his face. Then the sleek wedge of the Basilisk was in front of him.

‘What the fuck!’ Vic screamed at him hysterically when Scab was back on board. The tall hard-tech-augmented ’sect was pointing at the external display that took up one wall of the hull. Red Space was still being consumed.

With a thought Scab sent co-ordinates to the ship. The ship’s engines lit up as the view changed and the ship headed towards the co-ordinates. Outside, red was becoming black, or rather the absence of colour. If you focused hard enough you could see it wriggling like all-consuming bacteria.

Scab sent the ship into a series of rapid evasive manoeuvres to avoid being consumed, though the ship’s anti-gravity field compensated for this and both he and Vic remained comfortably standing.

Scab sat down on one of the two smart chairs, the only real furniture in the otherwise bare room. With a thought he peeled the arm of his spacesuit back. His arm hung limp. The Scorpion had reacted badly to something and squeezed, powdering his radius and ulna.

Vic was watching the screen on the edge of collapse as the Basilisk spun and banked, narrowly avoiding consumption or ceasing to exist or whatever was happening out there.

Scab coaxed the Scorpion out of his flesh, grimacing at the pain he allowed himself to feel. The lockbox rose through the carpeted floor at his neunonic summons. The room was suddenly bathed in blue light from the gate rip. In the lockbox was some fluffy, core-world pet creature designed to appeal to spoilt, mid-echelon corporate children. The Basilisk had already injected the previously hibernating creature with the wake-up. It looked up at Scab with big soulful eyes. Scab was more interested in the neunonic feed of the very fabric of Red Space being consumed by whatever it/these were. Scab absently dropped the brass-skinned Scorpion in with the pet. The Scorpion immediately reared up, sting coming over its head, as Scab gave the signal to close the box.

Scab had time to light a cigarette with his left arm and they were through the rip.

In Real Space Nulty was dancing on the hull of the Black Swan . He’d made it! Somehow, among all that, he had cut the Swan free and remained unnoticed until he could get out of there. Sure, he had a long ride home, but the Swan was his now!

The modified Corsair-class ship swept out of the rip, its engines on high burn. To Nulty it looked predatory and violent. He couldn’t even be bothered bringing the Swan ’s paltry weapon systems online.

‘Bollocks,’ the engineer said.

Lasers lit up the darkness; the Swan briefly became light before its energy dissipation matrix was overloaded, but it was the kinetic javelins that did the damage. Penetrating the Swan ’s hull, shredding it, scattering the remains, the vacuum cooling the heat from the friction of hypersonic impacts.

Nulty was still alive. He was damaged, missing limbs, but largely intact and spinning away from the wreckage.

‘Bastard!’ he screamed at the receding light of the Basilisk ’s engines.

Scab took a long drag of his cigarette, savouring his retro vice.

‘What the fuck!’ Vic screamed at him again, spoiling his contemplative mood. ‘The Consortium navy! The Church! And… and the fucking Elite! And what was happening there – it was like space was being eaten or something?!’ Vic paused for breath, for psychosomatic reasons Scab assumed. ‘What have you got us into?!’

Scab gave the question some thought. ‘It’s exciting,’ he finally said.

Vic stared at him with multifaceted eyes, his mandibles agape. Vic was a humanophile, a worker ’sect who had rejected the tightly regulated, genetically programmed, caste-based social structure of ’sect society and escaped into gravity, augmentation and, somewhat ironically to Scab’s mind, military service. Scab’s military service had been different. He hadn’t volunteered. Before he had been chosen to be an Elite he had been Legion. Offered the choice between serving the Consortium in the CR worlds as one of its most expendable troops or execution for his crimes as a street sect leader on Cyst.

The mandibles-agape expression wasn’t quite working for Vic, Scab decided. ‘Besides,’ he said as he started looking for the portable assembler, using the interface to send it his medical requirements and some more of his debt credits, ‘how often do you get to see two Elite in action?’

Vic’s mandibles clattered together tightly. ‘Oh yes, that was a real treat for me,’ he told his ‘partner’.

He cast his mind back to one terrifying night in the Abyssal Reaches. The destruction of an entire habitat. Their officers had told them that the subsidiary they had been fighting had gone rogue. However, a rumour had spread that they had found Seeder ruins in the Reaches, the Consortium board had done the maths and it had simply proved cheaper to use an Elite to bring the conflict to a rapid conclusion. Vic had never quite worked up the nerve to ask if Scab had been the Elite that had killed all those people. Women, children, larvae, it hadn’t mattered. Then he realised what Scab had just said.

‘Two! What do you mean two?’

‘Ludwig was there as well. What do you think took out the Church cruiser?’

Vic allowed more calming agent to mix with his neurochemistry.

‘But we’re out now, done, yes?’ Vic asked when the chemicals had calmed him enough. The ’sect was more than a little worried about how Scab would answer. He knew that Scab was psychotic and more than a little self-destructive but you didn’t go up against the Elite.

Scab finally nodded. ‘We’ve lost the package and we don’t have anything like the resources to retrieve it.’ Once , he thought, once I could have done it.

Surely the body cannot lose this much blood and live? she thought. It had felt painful at first. Now it felt like getting close to sleep. She was weak and tired.

Britha lay naked on the ground among the undergrowth. The surrounding oaks reached above her to form a canopy that the sunlight filtered through. The sunlight had a green look to it. She had been lying there for a while. Night was best for blood magic. She had been drifting in and out of consciousness dreaming of the night. She had dreamed of stars and then what the night sky would look like if there were no stars.

Britha had dug a small pit and lined it with a skin she had waxed to make waterproof. She had placed a framework of trimmed branches above the pit and hung clay pots filled with various herbs that she burned for their fragrant smoke. Then she had opened her veins with the sickle and worked the flow, covering herself in her own blood. She had lain on the cold earth, her arms over the pit in which she had placed the sickle, blood dripping onto the iron blade.

There should be more , she had thought. Normally rituals had various parts to them – words, movements, ingredients each designed to focus the will on what she wanted to achieve. She concentrated on the death of the invaders, who were not more than five miles from where she lay.

When Britha had returned to Ardestie she had found the village in chaos. Many of Cruibne’s guests had ridden back to their villages. Those who lived to the north, particularly on the coast or along major rivers, had returned with stories of destruction. There were a lot of very angry, grieving men and some women with swords and spears. Some felt that Cruibne was responsible and had lured them away from their homes; others pointed out that they paid tithes and swore oaths to Cruibne so that he and his cateran would protect them from such raids.