Gavin Smith: The Age of Scorpio

‘We can’t, Baby Doll. We need the payoff, we really do.’ Eldon’s tone was pleading for understanding.

‘Shine any light on this, Cap’n?’ Brett asked.

‘Just these co-ordinates. Find the hulk and take it to a rendezvous point.’

‘Not back to Arclight?’ Nulty asked. Eldon shook his head. Nulty saw the gesture through C and C’s optics.

Nulty ran some diagnostics on the signal, which was coming in from some exotic part of the EM spectrum. Eden had to scrub out the background noise of the Red to isolate it. Nulty shared the information and then did some further checking. That part of the EM spectrum matched some of the emissions produced by the bridge drive.

‘It’s talking to it?’ Brett asked when Nulty shared the information.

‘Don’t see how, it’s a drive,’ Eldon said. At this Nulty would have laughed but as an electronic uploaded consciousness it would have been an affectation.

‘No offence, boss, but the Church keeps their manufacture so secret we can’t really say anything about this for sure,’ Nulty said. ‘It might well be talking to something.’

Even Brett looked horrified. Melia bolted away from Eldon and hissed at him, all submissive coquettishness forgotten now.

‘No way! Fuck that! I am not getting involved in any Church shit! You can take my contract and use it to sodomise yourself for all I care.’

‘Are we working for the Church?’ Brett asked more reasonably.

‘I don’t know, not as far as I know,’ Eldon said, as confused and frightened as the rest.

‘If this is to do with bridge drives then more likely it’s a Consortium bid to break the Church’s monopoly on their manufacture,’ Nulty said.

‘You fucking moron!’ Melia screamed at Eldon.

‘I didn’t know,’ he said defensively. ‘We’re jumping to conclusions.’

‘But that doesn’t make any sense,’ Brett said. ‘I mean, why us? After all we’re a bit…’

‘Crap?’ Melia suggested.

‘Rough and ready, I was going to say.’

‘Deniability and expendability,’ Nulty answered.

Melia turned on Eldon. ‘That’s it. Contract’s null and void. Get us out of here.’

‘But, Baby Doll—’

‘Don’t Baby Doll me, you repellent, cockless fucktard. Get us out of here before a Church cruiser turns up, kills us, destroys our backup and murders everyone we ever met. I may be the cheapest clone possible of the original, but I have no wish to wake up in one of their immersion interrogations!’

Eldon seemed to deflate. He’d lost his big score, through that probably the Swan and his only real pleasure in life in one brief moment. Brett’s look of sympathy wasn’t helping either. Then he realised that Eden had been uncharacteristically quiet throughout Melia’s outburst.

‘Are you still listening to that noise?’ he asked. Brett turned to look at Eden. Melia did as well, an expression bordering on horror across her feline features.

Eden just shrugged.

‘Shut it off, now,’ Eldon said. Eden did so.

‘There’s another signal,’ Eden said. She tried to share the second signal. She found that the others weren’t so swift to interface with her.

‘You’ll want to hear this.’

‘She’s right,’ Nulty said over the interface. The others relented. This message was much weaker, broken. ‘What the fuck is this? A radio wave?’ he mused to himself.

‘What’s a radio wave?’ Brett asked. Nulty ignored him.

The language was unknown but sounded like one of the uplifted races, probably human. Eldon started to ask if it was live but stopped as it repeated itself. It was some kind of recording. His neunonics searched for a translation program but came up with nothing despite the thousands of variant uplift languages and dialects in his systems.

‘I’ve got it,’ Nulty said over the interface. His voice didn’t sound right. ‘It’s a mayday signal in human common.’

‘Bullshit,’ Eldon started.

‘From before the Loss.’ The four of them on the bridge just stared at each other. Eldon was the first to smile. He looked over to Melia to see the cash signs mirrored in her eyes.

Nulty lived for extravehicular activity but he still wasn’t loving Red Space. Space should be really big. Somehow the strange gaseous-like nature of his surrounding environment seemed to be bearing down on him, making him feel claustrophobic. The living smoke effect of Red Space that he was used to was so much thicker here than on the normal Church-approved routes.

‘You got it?’ Eldon asked as Nulty scuttled over one of the detachable boosters, sending a diagnostic check as he did so. He’d sent some of the vacuum drones out but didn’t want to let them get too far from the drifting tug as he wasn’t happy with the ’face connection.

He reached the final spotlight and snaking tool limbs rapidly began repairing the ‘non-essential system’, as Eldon had called it when Nulty had suggested repairing it the last time they were docked at Arclight. He jury-rigged it and then stressed the repair by increasing the power output. The billowing red clouds were so thick here that the sensors were now next to useless, too much interference. It had rapidly come down to just what they could see with the optics.

They were letting the bridge drive pull them to wherever it was apparently going. Melia was running complex intelligent navigation programs that they hoped would be able to take them back to their initial position, or close to it, because they had no idea where they would end up with even a small amount of movement in Red Space.

The spotlight’s beam stabbed out into the living smoke with enough power to put some laser weapons to shame, illuminating swirling eddies in the red gases.

It appeared through the smoke like some primal leviathan.

They weren’t used to Nulty screaming. He just didn’t emote that much.

‘Turn on the engines! We’re going to hit it!’

Eldon and Brett reacted with a thought. It was a simple matter to swing the engine arms around to point subjectively forward and trigger the engines, halting and then quickly reversing the gentle forward momentum of whatever had been attracting the bridge drive.

Eldon was about to reproach Nulty for his overreaction, but Nulty chose that moment to trigger the rest of the spots and bring them to bear. Eldon saw just how close they had got to the other ship – thing – whatever it was.

‘How did we miss that?’ Eldon asked in awe. It was at least the size of a capital ship. He was pretty sure he’d seen smaller habitats.

‘Even now it’s barely there,’ Eden told him. She was just staring at it through the transparent smart-matter hull. All of them were using the ship’s sensors and feeds from the drone, Nulty and the external optics to get a more complete picture in their minds via their neunonic interfaces.

It was massive, dwarfing the Black Swan . The smoky Red Space seemed to stick to it somehow, helping to conceal it.

‘That’s not right,’ Melia said.

Eldon and Brett worked in conjunction to manoeuvre the Swan , tilting it subjectively downwards so they could get a better look at their find as they travelled down the length of it.

‘Can you clean up the resolution on the lenses?’ Eldon asked Nulty. ‘I think the gas is messing it up.’

‘No, you’re seeing what I’m seeing,’ Nulty said.

The hull of the ship, if that’s what it was, seemed to be made out of some kind of thick heavy-duty material which looked like the rubbery flesh of some sort of abyssal sea creature. It was so large that it was difficult to get an idea of its shape but it seemed aerodynamic enough for atmospheric operations. What he could see of the shape reminded Eldon of marine life, or maybe a seed pod. Then he saw the hull of the ship move. Like it was breathing. Melia, noticing this through one of the drones’ optics feeds, let out a little gasp.