Gavin Smith - The Age of Scorpio

Vic had a second to realise that the dead guy looked a little like his partner before the shaven-headed women landed in front of Scab. She was a monk. She wore brown armoured robes. She was powerfully built but all high-end soft-machine augmentation, S-tech as well if the rumours were true, moving tattoos based on Seeder symbols. She was not carrying any weapons; her hands were open. Scab levelled the tumbler pistol at her face.

‘It’s stupid to martyr yourself for a faith that doesn’t even have an afterlife,’ he told her.

‘We’re just here to talk,’ she said.

A Church monk was probably more than equal to dealing with Scab, particularly with all the backup she had. The militants he had noticed were now all turning to focus on them. Nobody had drawn weapons yet except for Scab. Vic was surprised that he hadn’t drawn any either. The problem for the Monk and her militants wasn’t so much Vic and Scab as the bidding war that would be required to act in the Polyhedron. In that, Scab already had the drop on them, and they would have to fight him and the club’s automated systems.

‘Stop cloning him,’ Scab told her, and with his gun levelled at her continued heading for the door, Vic following him. The Monk just watched them leave.

He had had been waiting for them as they left the Polyhedron. He had the look of home- and ship-less excess humanity. He was someone who had failed in the life of economic Darwinism but hadn’t yet got round to dying. The one resource that nobody ever seemed to run out of, the one resource that the Consortium didn’t seem to care enough about to control with artificial scarcity, was so-called sentient biological life. This was presumably why you couldn’t use human matter in assemblers , Vic mused. Then there’d be no shortage of raw material for the Consortium to control . However, most of what Vic termed human refuse tended to come with only two eyes. The ’sect was more than a little surprised when two wrinkles on the man’s head opened. Vic wasn’t sure if they were eyes or not. Each looked like a biotech collection of nerve endings forming sensory organs. Still Vic couldn’t shake the feeling that they were staring at him.

‘What the fuck?’ Vic said, wondering when his capacity for surprise would wear out. The man reached up with a small-bladed, but obviously very sharp, anachronistically-steel-bladed scalpel and cut the two eye-like organs out of his head. Blood poured down out of the wounds into the man’s real eyes. All the while he stared at Scab and Scab watched the self-mutilation. ‘Street art?’ Vic wondered out loud.

Scab looked at the man expectantly as he drew an archaic-looking syringe from his jacket and stabbed it into Vic’s armour. The vibrating power-driven needle drove itself through to original flesh.

‘What are you doing?!’ Vic cried, mandibles clattering together, the panic in his voice belied by his calm, combat-ready stance.

‘It’s a vaccine. Relax,’ Scab said. Vic felt like an animal wanting to bolt but trapped in a cage.

‘I’ve been waiting,’ the man said. ‘They told me you would come and I was to do nothing but wait.’ The ragged, gaunt, dirty nobody finished cutting out the two eye-like organs and handed them to Scab. Scab continued to watch him as he slipped the organs into the pocket of his raincoat.

‘I am nothing now,’ the man said.

Scab nodded. ‘Few people fulfil their dharma,’ he said after a moment’s reflection.

Vic watched the man collapse to the ground, his flesh slowly being eaten away. Then his virus warning went off, and he turned to look at Scab as Arclight started broadcasting a viral contamination warning. Vic knew if the virus was powerful and new enough to defeat Arclight’s countermeasures and most people’s personal defences then it would have to have been very expensive.

Scab grabbed the extruded handle of his P-sat and allowed it to pull him quickly towards the ship. Vic found himself doing the same while covering their retreat.

The expressway sealed as Arclight tried to keep some of its wealthier denizens safe. The P-sat dragged them through the lower passageways. They were still quite crowded, but it was easy to push through corpses in zero G, particularly as a lot of their flesh was missing thanks to the nano-enhanced necrotic nature of the virus radiating from Scab like a bad smell.

‘They won’t let you get away with this,’ Vic said. He knew the cartel could not leave this unanswered. ‘We’re dead the moment we set foot on the Basilisk .’ The ’sect was quite looking forward to his death. More than anything else, ’sects were about efficiency. They wouldn’t make him suffer, just snuff him out. It would be a release, swimming through corpses as a virus ate their flesh was not his idea of fun.

However, Scab had already allowed for this. The Basilisk ’s recently upgraded sensors had thoroughly mapped their path into Arclight, and Scab had uploaded it into his neunonics. Since they had landed he had been planting the seeds of escape just in case things turned out bad. He had sent out stealth AI programs of his own devising to burrow quietly into the various weapons and security systems that could give him problems on the way out, be they on the station or on other ships.

‘You just killed a Church Militiaman,’ Vic said. ‘They have a frigate here.’ He had seen the craft on the way in – sleek, violent-looking, a minimum of statuary on it, the armour engraved with the fall of the Naga. Frigates were fast. The Basilisk was faster, but the frigate horribly outgunned them and would be manoeuvring into position at this very moment.

‘The Saint Brendan’s Fire . I saw it,’ Vic said as he concentrated on the virtual map in his mind, cracking systems that were readying to fire on the Basilisk .

‘Fear and desire,’ Scab said over the interface. It took a moment for Vic to realise that his partner was talking to the security force where the Basilisk was docked. They would be under a lot of pressure from the cartel to ambush Vic. ‘Leave now and you have cartel trouble. Stay now and we’ll take you down and take you with us. Your suffering can be my hobby for a week and then I’ll turn you over to a house of pain. You won’t die so your clone insurance won’t be valid.’ And he would do it too , Vic thought. He would have to, otherwise people would not take his threats seriously in the future.

When they got to the dock the door was open and the place was empty.

The pair of them strode onto the ship. Scab had left both airlock irises wide open. He closed them with a thought and the Basilisk began to scrub out the virals, its powerful nano-screen hunting down all the new guests. The Basilisk ’s skin was hardening so the external feed was coming straight through the interface along with all the sensor data. Sure enough, most of Arclight’s batteries capable of a firing solution on the Basilisk were aiming at the small craft. The St Brendan’s Fire was manoeuvring into firing position, its thrusters glowing against a background of black and neon.

‘Well, it’s been a pleasure,’ Vic said, ready to die and yet still absurdly proud of how much sarcasm he had managed to get into what he assumed was his parting shot. The ’sect felt the Basilisk disconnect from Arclight.

The night lit up as all the batteries on Arclight shifted to fire at the St Brendan’s Fire as per their hacked orders. So many batteries fired in such a small area that it looked like a grid of fiercely defined light. The ’sect was aware of the acceleration: constant sensor feed from the Basilisk made the ship seem more real than his own slaved body. The burn of the engine, the Basilisk ’s own batteries firing, the racks of kinetic shots silently emptying. All aimed at the St Brendan’s Fire . The Church ship’s energy dissipation grid lit up, making it look less like a solid, more like a ship of painfully bright light. Reactive armour blew out, trying to dissipate the energy of hypersonic kinetic shots, destroying the engraved scene as the carbon reservoir struggled to replace the armour.