Gavin Smith - The Age of Scorpio

‘A cult?’ du Bois asked.

‘Wouldn’t know, wouldn’t be surprised if they dabbled in that sort of thing, but I think their focus was on exterminating rational thought and getting laid. Though they were into the vampire thing.’ Du Bois raised an eyebrow. ‘Bloodletting.’

‘Why?’ he asked, mystified.

Mossa shrugged. ‘Fun?’

Du Bois wondered if that was how this had happened. Something in the blood, a sensitive enough mind would act like a beacon.

‘Is that significant?’ Mossa asked, watching du Bois’s reactions.

‘Why your interest?’ du Bois countered, ignoring her question.

‘Minor-league dealing. We were getting close to arresting one of the weaker ones, getting them to turn over and give us someone bigger. Vice caught just the slightest whiff of specialised prostitution.’

‘Specialised?’

‘Maybe the bloodletting,’ Mossa said, shrugging.

Du Bois reached down and touched the centre of his phone screen. The central picture expanded to fill the screen. The girl in the picture was not just attractive, she was beautiful, the sort of beauty that could stop a room and make people either desire or hate her. She was slender, pale, with high cheekbones, dark eyes. Her dyed-black hair was a travesty. Even through the surveillance picture he could see a sadness that was more than a subcultural affectation. This was an unhappy, isolated and lonely girl, and he thought he knew why.

Mossa knew her. ‘Natalie Luckwicke, twenty-one, from Bradford. She may be vice’s whiff of prostitution. Rumour has it that she does tricks for some of the better-paying and weirder johns in the area.’

Clear all that shit off her face and she could command a high price , du Bois thought. He tried to imagine what she would look like now, but he had no real frame of reference. It could be her. It could be any of a thousand girls her age.

‘Pimp?’ du Bois asked, still studying the picture as he downloaded all the information he could find about her.

‘Nothing so prosaic. Just a friend who knows people, can make the right introductions, that sort of thing. A real sleazy piece of shit called William Arbogast. Mid-level dealer to Portsmouth’s great and good, has fingers in some dodgy Internet sites as well.’

He was already downloading all the information on Arbogast. He quickly went through blinds and holding companies, found his connection to online porn sites and did a search through them with tightly defined parameters, found what he was looking for and cleaned up the image. Even with the wig, the make-up and the bad camera work, it was Natalie Luckwicke he saw in his mind’s eye. He didn’t like seeing her this way. Mossa watched him clench his fist. He cut the feed off.

‘Thank you,’ he said. Mossa just nodded. Du Bois turned and headed for the door.

‘Tell me something.’ Du Bois stopped. ‘Who do you work for?’ When he turned to look at her, Mossa was surprised to see that he was smiling. There wasn’t much humour in the smile.

‘Would you believe the druids?’

Mossa frowned. ‘You’re not funny.’ She went back to the laptop even as all the information on the Pretoria Road incident was being wiped from that computer and every other computer, regardless of security, all over the world.

Du Bois forwarded everything he had found out to Control. The question was, could she have survived an incursion, even one as small-scale as this?

King Jeremy stared at the manticore through the bars of its cage. It, or rather she, had the body of a red lion, rows of shark-like teeth and a scorpion tail that could fire its sting and quickly regrow it. The bat-like wings had been the most difficult. They allowed it to glide but not fly. It was of little use in the arena but he liked to remain true to the designs in the Shattered Skies Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game.

It was the face he liked the most though. She had been a model once, before she became graft meat. She had made the mistake of laughing at him at some party. It had been a matter of dropping something in her drink and programming her to kidnap herself. No way to trace it back to him. Beautiful face, monstrous body – difficult to imagine how he could be more like God, Jeremy mused. It was the misery on her face he liked. The desperately-trying-to-work-out-what-had-happened-to-herself. It wasn’t just her flesh he’d violated; it was everything she knew about reality. Pretty young women weren’t turned into monsters and forced to fight in an arena in her world. Bitch wasn’t laughing now , he thought.

Jeremy realised that he couldn’t remember her name any more. He shrugged and looked back at the monitor. He still found it easier to use high-spec monitors than do it entirely in his head. The situation in Portsmouth was very interesting and pointed towards more of the lost tech, as they had started calling it because it sounded cooler than super tech or alien tech. They still had no idea what it was or where it came from, though much of it seemed to be very old.

Jeremy had first heard rumours in the darker parts of the black market that dealt in technology far in advance of what people thought possible. Jeremy had been in his second year at MIT. Hacking, various data crimes and all-out electronic theft had not enabled him to afford the sort of prices that the lost tech commanded. They had, however, provided him with more than enough money to hire military contractors, as mercenaries were called these days, to hit one of the deals and steal the item.

Despite the multiple electronic blinds and go-betweens he had put between himself and the contractors, it had been the most frightening thing that Jeremy had ever done, but he’d hit the jackpot. As far as he could tell, what they had stolen was some sort of miniature nano-machine factory capable – assuming enough energy and raw materials – of producing the tiny machines that could create just about anything and alter matter at its molecular level. He’d named it Cornucopia after the magic item on the final level of Pagan Earth.

Once he had worked out how to use it, he no longer had to rely on contractors. King Jeremy could augment and hardwire the skills he required to mimic most of the characters he played in games. He had done this and then taken out the contractors just to be on the safe side. Since then he had got hold of more of the lost tech. Some of it was spectacularly advanced software, some biotech, but most of it was hardware. He had bought some, though rarely for money; most of the rest he had killed and stolen for, or arranged proxies to do so. In one spectacular case, an entire nanite-slaved battalion of the Chinese army had done his dirty work on a mountain plateau in Tibet.

Then through a series of games he had designed himself to psychometrically and intellectually test other gamers, he had recruited the rest of the Do As You Please Clan.

He was reading a blog about some emo kid with hallucinogenic blood on some vampire wannabe’s blog. As he watched, the words started to disappear.

‘What the fuck?’ he muttered to himself. He had set his systems to automatically save any information he came across on the Portsmouth situation. It was a minor AI search routine. Not only was the search routine violated, but when he checked his own internal systems he saw the scant information he did have being eaten.

‘No, no, no, no!’ The amount of time it had taken to violate his security, security far in advanced of what modern technology was supposed to be capable of, had been so small it had been difficult to measure. Only someone with access to lost tech would be able to do this, and they would either have to have better lost tech or be more skilled at utilising it than Jeremy was. He had been aware that other groups had access to the powerful technology but had always tried to avoid them unless he was stealing from them. Even then he tried to pick on people on the lower echelons, for example the ultra-rich who had just stumbled on the technology or poorer countries’ black science programmes that had found the technology purely by chance.