Gavin Smith - The Age of Scorpio

The Basilisk seemed to give birth to two black globes that floated smoothly on silent AG motors into the air to hover close to Scab and Vic. They had cut right back on the personal satellites’ hardware but augmented their sensor packages. The P-sats would need the augmentation to sort through the clutter inside Arclight and provide them with accurate info. Both of them could extrude handgrips, and their AG motors were more than powerful enough to carry Scab and Vic if they had to.

‘We going to talk about this?’ Vic asked. Scab ignored him. ‘Apparently not. Is there anyone we didn’t piss off back there? I mean Consortium naval contractors, the Church and the fucking Monarchist Elite? Not one mind you – one’s not enough for Scab – no, two Elite.’

‘That’s vanity bordering on monomania,’ Scab finally said. He made it sound like a sigh. ‘None of them have any interest in us. They were after either the ship or the cocoon. The Angel or Ludwig could have destroyed us whenever they wanted.’

‘Comforting. You mean they knew we were there?’

Scab just nodded, remembering when he had been reliant on senses unknown to most biological life. Senses that spread out over hundreds of thousands of miles in space. Senses that meant he could feel the slightest movement in the fabric of space/time itself. Not for the first time Scab thought of how he missed being a god of destruction. He preferred myth to what he thought of as the sordidness of flesh.

‘Has it occurred to you that the Consortium and the Church might want to know who our employers are?’

‘No, I’m a moron,’ Scab said.

Staring. In terms of human reactions this called for staring, Vic was sure of that. He didn’t blink, but staring he could do. He also let off a little fart of pheromones in surprise. Scab wasn’t known for humour, even sarcasm. Vic cursed himself: Scab’s soft-tech-augmented olfactory glands would pick up the pheromones. ‘I was not apprised of how dangerous the situation was otherwise I would have charged more.’ Vic was trying to work out the appropriate amount of time to stare to convey his shocked response. ‘Or said no,’ he finally suggested forcefully.

Scab stopped loading rounds into his tumbler pistol and turned to fix Vic with one of his looks. Vic didn’t like this look. He couldn’t quite read the expression, despite his studies and the help of onboard computer systems, but it did unnerve him.

‘It was an interesting job,’ Scab finally said. Vic did some more staring.

‘And the Church! Really?!’ Vic eventually responded. Scab had done some truly stupid things, more than borderline suicidal, and pissed off some genuinely dangerous and powerful people, but in Vic’s opinion he’d gone too far this time.

Vic followed Scab as he picked up his homburg and placed it on his pale-skinned hairless head. Part of the Basilisk ’s hull opened and they stepped into the airlock. The hull sealed shut behind them.

‘I fucking hate zero G,’ Vic muttered.

‘You grew up in it,’ Scab pointed out.

‘I grew up drinking synthetic mother’s milk out of a wall nipple; doesn’t mean I don’t prefer steak.’

‘That’s just something you heard in a colonial immersion.’

The hull opened out in front of them into what looked like a bunker made of patched and corroded armour plate. They were facing five heavily armed scum. Scab had accepted their bid for docking and security. He ’faced them the amount of debt relief he was prepared to pay along with the obligatory ritual threats that went with doing business.

They stepped out of the Basilisk ’s AG field and let old instincts and hard-wired zero G routines take over as they drifted towards the ceiling.

‘If the Church does take you and torture you, you can feel good about having no actual information to give them,’ Scab ’faced over their secure link.

‘What is that? A joke?’ Vic demanded. Confusion , Vic thought, he was pretty sure that Scab’s expression was one of mild confusion.

The passageway Vic and Scab took was relatively new and a luxury express route. Scab paid the high price demanded to use it. Vic guessed the fact that the tube was transparent and they could look down on the non-toll routes deeper in the labyrinth of Arclight was supposed to make them feel better. People were packed in so tightly they had to wriggle past each other. Scab could see ’sects, little more than grubs, working the packed passage as his P-sat pulled him along. As he watched, one of them started screaming as some nasty countermeasure took him out as he tried to lift a pistol belonging to a reptile wearing luminescent body-paint gang colours.

‘So why come back?’ Vic ’faced over the secure link.

‘It’s close; we’re unemployed.’

‘We could have looked for bounties from the Basilisk .’ Vic was starting to sound confused as he watched a fight break out in the packed transport tube below. It looked desperate. Someone had probably panicked and the crowd had turned on them. It looked like he was being torn apart. ‘What if Sloper had friends who saw you talking to him?’

‘Then I would imagine we’ll have to do some free killing, but I chose Sloper because he didn’t have any friends and both he and his crew were malleable,’ Scab ’faced back.

You mean programmable , Vic thought but said nothing. Then it dawned on him.

‘Seeder’s sake, Woodbine,’ Vic said. Scab looked over his shoulder in irritation at the sound of his first name, but it was one of those moments when Vic just didn’t care. ‘Are you looking into this?’

‘It’s interesting,’ Scab said.

‘Are you fucking mad?!’ Vic asked before realising that it was a stupid question. Though it had occurred to Vic in the past that Scab was a new iteration of sanity, a psychological evolution designed to help the naked monkeys cope. Maybe one day all humans would be like Scab. The thought had frightened Vic.

‘I was offered a good deal,’ Scab said. He almost sounded wistful.

‘Debt relief’s a bit fucking difficult to spend when some Elite’s rewritten your DNA to see what you’d look like as protoplasm!’ It had taken Vic a while to learn to shout over the interface; it was mainly a human talent though lizards were good at it as well. He had been proud when he’d finally managed it. It was very useful for conversations like this with Scab.

‘It wasn’t money,’ Scab said. He didn’t say it over the interface. He didn’t even say it aloud. Vic’s hearing through his antenna had been excellent before it had been augmented by the ’sect’s hard-tech retrofit. Scab had just moved his stained lips as he sub-vocalised it.

‘Are you using us as bait?’ Vic demanded.

He always becomes difficult to manage when he’s frightened , Scab thought.

The Polyhedron Club was specialised: it catered mainly to men of the heterosexual kink and women of the homosexual kink. Most of the six-armed, no-legged, zero-G dancers were either of the girly girl or ladyboy gender. Most of them were human though there were a few felines and one reptile. Whether it had been custom fabricated or originally something else, the Polyhedron was, as its name suggested, an area with numerous sides. The club made good use of all twenty sides of the cavernous red-mock-velvet-lined chamber: each triangle had tables and chairs with micro-hooks that could be neunonically controlled to fasten the clientele to their seats.

The supports for the superstructure provided poles for the dancers’ complex, gymnastic and erotic dances.

‘So, just to be clear,’ Vic asked over the secure interface, ‘the plan is to wait here until something bad happens?’

Scab took another suck from his drink bulb and ignored him. Vic went back to watching one of the human dancers. He was pretty sure she was attractive by human standards as he had run her through some comparison routines in his neunonics. On the other hand, it kind of spoilt the thrill of being a humanophile if they had the same amount of limbs as you.