Gavin Smith - The Age of Scorpio

‘You don’t look like her.’ Beth turned back to fix her with an angry glare, and the girl shrank back. Beth was sick of the comparison.

‘What do you want?’ she demanded.

‘Talia was my friend,’ the girl said. She looked like she was about to cry. Talia didn’t have friends , Beth thought, just people she could use.

‘You got any money?’ Beth asked. The girl seemed taken aback.

‘A little.’

‘Buy me a kebab and we can have a bit of a chat.’

‘You’re just like her,’ the girl said, smiling. Beth clenched her fists. No, I’m just skint.

It had been a bit of a walk to where Elm Grove curved round onto another road with a theatre on the corner. It was lined with shops, closed pubs and open junk-food shops. Beth was tucking into the kebab before it occurred to her to ask for the girl’s name.

‘Leticia.’

‘Really?’ Beth asked sceptically.

‘Well, it’s really Maude.’

‘Maude’s a nice name.’ This time it was Maude looking sceptical. ‘Okay, it’s really not.’

Beth couldn’t believe how good the kebab was. She had been hungrier than she thought. Maude was picking at pitta bread with some salad in it.

‘Were you part of this Black Mirror?’ Beth asked.

‘They were considering me.’ Beth rolled her eyes. Arseholes . ‘But they scared me a little bit as well. Talia was the nicest of them – she was really friendly.’ Beth was surprised to hear this. Perhaps she had grown up a bit since she had last seen her.

‘She didn’t have anything to do with terrorists, did she?’ Beth asked. Maude just laughed and shook her head. ‘Were they making drugs in the house or anything?’ Maude shook her head and looked sad again. Beth was worried that she was going to cry again. Her make-up was smeared enough as it was.

What are you doing here? Beth asked herself. You’re not going to learn anything good about Talia. What you need to do is think of something to tell Dad that isn’t going to break his heart.

‘How did you become friends?’ The question just popped into her head. She just hoped that it didn’t bring more tears. Maude seemed to be struggling with an answer.

‘Well, I’d known her to say hi to ever since I came here for uni, but… well, she helped me through a difficult time.’ Maude wouldn’t look at her. She seemed embarrassed about something. This was sounding less and less like the Talia Beth had known.

‘What?’ Beth asked and then groaned inwardly as she saw tears start to well again. It’s a wonder she has any eyeliner left .

Suddenly Maude looked up at her. ‘How much do you want to know?’ she asked.

‘Go on.’

‘I got into something well over my head.’ Her face crumpled.

‘Look, don’t cry; just tell me.’

‘Well, he said it was upmarket stuff – tasteful clients who would pay a lot of money, you know, help me get through my course a little less in debt. But then when I saw him and he was old and fat and wanted to do… things… It wasn’t like the films, you know, champagne and a few Js.’

Beth stared at her. ‘You were turning tricks?’

‘Just one. I couldn’t handle it. But Talia… she helped me deal—’

‘Was Talia?’ Beth asked despite herself. She knew the answer but it wasn’t real until someone else told her it was. Maude nodded.

‘It was horrible, but she really looked after me,’ she managed through the sobs and the gulping for air.

‘Did she get you into it?’

Maude looked stricken. She probably hadn’t thought about it like that.

‘She introduced me to William, but only after I asked about it.’

And how did you know to ask? Beth wondered.

‘She did porn as well, didn’t she?’ Maude looked guilty but nodded.

She actually thinks she’s betraying Talia . ‘Who’s William?’ In her mind Beth was screaming Go home to herself.

Arclight was a mess, the result of expansion without regulation. The black market in Arclight, however, was very tightly controlled by the insect-run Queen’s Cartel. Originally the hollowed-out asteroid had been a hive ship, and it was still run by ’sects, Vic’s people, though he hated dealing with them. Vic had abandoned their caste society a long time ago. In the centre of the rock he knew there would be a metal and hardened carbon-fibre, honeycomb-style construction where the augmented ’sects lived. Once upon a time, steel and carbon fibre would have extruded resin and chitin.

No part of the surface of the original rock could be seen; it was buried beneath layer after layer of haphazardly added habitations forming a massive warren that had been centuries in the making. All of this orbited a distant fading sun that nobody had ever taken the time to name.

There was no traffic control on Arclight; you just tried to find a safeish place to dock and hoped for the best. Almost the entire surface of the asteroid was covered in animated holograms, though few were still functioning properly. Many of them offered safe places to dock, though plenty of those were bottom-feeding wreckers.

The Basilisk ’s comms should have been flooded with similar offers of safe haven. However, Scab had broadcast the ship’s I-dent over the Arclight ’face to let them know who was coming aboard. That significantly cut down on the time-wasters and wreckers. Even the most hardcore hijack crew was going to think twice about taking on Scab, the bounty killer who worked without clone insurance. It was times like these that Scab’s rep paid off , Vic thought. Besides, when Scab announced he was coming to a place everyone thought the same thing: Is it me he’s after? After the I-dent they started taking in reasonable bids for docking, security and privacy.

Vic was less than pleased that Scab had decided to fly the ship under his own neunonic control. Scab was stood in the centre of the lounge/main room/Command and Control of the Basilisk . He had turned most of the ship’s hull transparent and was looking all around as he put on his brown suit and did up his tie. Scab wove his way through the parasitical suburban habitats attached to Arclight, heavily armed industrial assemblers, from one Consortium subsidiary or another, slowly eating away at tethered asteroids, past ships, the lowliest jury-rigged tramp traders to the massive Consortium bulk ore/carbon haulers, past salvage tugs and sleek scout craft belonging to xeno-archaeology prospectors, down-at-heel feline pleasure barges, scrap-built reptile fighting craft – there were even Consortium navy contractor ships and a Church craft berthed there. Scab took his time taking the Basilisk in, dancing it through the busy space, flying through the aging hologramatic displays, making them distort so it looked like Basilisk was pulling the dissipating light with it.

Vic tried to ignore the ’faced warnings from craft and parts of the habitat they got too close to. It was more difficult when they were flying near enough to see batteries, with sufficient firepower to obliterate them tracking the little craft.

Scab had finished dressing and was pulling weapons more socially acceptable than the Scorpion from the smart-matter storage compartment that the ship had extruded though the floor. He unloaded, checked and then reloaded each of the weapons before holstering them. To Vic’s mind this was still, arguably, Scab dressing.

Vic had already done the same, three handguns with seven barrels between them. Light armour was clipped onto his largely hard-tech chassis to augment the built-in protection. He clipped an autonomous blade disc to his armour. It was designed to seek out the EM fields of biological life, and like most brutal short-range weapons it had been designed by lizards. Vic still wasn’t sure it was enough, not with the people they’d pissed off. On the other hand, nothing would help if an Elite came looking for them.