Gavin Smith - The Age of Scorpio

‘You are a drug dealer, Mr Arbogast. Do you have a syringe in the house?’

Arbogast’s eyes went wide but he was desperate enough to try anything. There was pointing and searching. Du Bois found the reasonably well-hidden drug paraphernalia stash. Arbogast was a careful man. The syringe was still in its sealed packet. Du Bois walked out of Arbogast’s sight. He suspected what he was about to do would give Arbogast hygiene and contagion issues. Du Bois concentrated momentarily, programming his blood. He tapped the vein and then slid the needle in, removing a very small amount of blood. It was all he needed.

Arbogast tried to protest around a mouthful of his own fingers but du Bois slid the syringe into his neck and depressed the plunger. Then he sat down opposite Arbogast, his .45 held in one hand, resting on his leg, pointed in Arbogast’s vague direction.

He waited for the nanites in his blood to eat the nanites that had been used to control Arbogast. Someone else was playing. Someone in the know. But who? This wasn’t the City of Brass’s style and they had more to cope with. All over the world the Circle was mobilising to utterly annihilate them. After all, they’d doomed humanity, so why not use your not-inconsiderable resources with a final act of revenge? The Eggshell was little more than a myth, even by the time he had joined the Circle.

Arbogast stopped trying to eat his fingers.

‘I realise you’d probably prefer to die at the moment, but I need you to tell me everything that you told everyone else. Only quicker.’

The stairway was made of glass. It gave him a commanding view of the harbour. He could see the neon-lit Spinnaker Tower, designed to look like a sail. He could see the real sails of historic ships and, as he rounded the corner, the cranes in the naval dockyard.

Du Bois attached the vial containing a sample of Arbogast’s blood to the bottom of the phone. He texted the info sent from the nanites in the vial to the phone, which then sent the info on to Control. Then he hit speed dial to Control. The phone ran a biometric check on his fingertip, and one of the most secure telecommunications links in the world connected him to the soothing female voice.

‘Kids in monster masks – who else is in town?’

Beth felt like shit. They had let her into their place; they didn’t know her but they had shown her kindness. She was repaying them by washing blood off a family heirloom in their bathroom sink. She had to take her madness out of their life.

The bathroom door burst open.

‘What! The! Fuck?’ Uday demanded. Beth had thought she’d locked the door properly. ‘Omigod! Have you actually killed someone?!’ He was still too angry to be frightened of the woman with a bloody knife yet.

‘I’ll go,’ Beth said. ‘Please don’t tell Maude about this.’

She could see Uday lose some of his certainty. The fear start to crawl in.

‘What have you done?’ he asked more quietly.

‘It’s Arbogast’s. I… I… didn’t kill him.’ You wanted to , she told herself savagely, just to lash out.

Uday nodded. He was still not quite sure what to do. He could see Beth’s face crumpling. The tears came.

‘My sister’s dead,’ Beth managed before the sobs racked her body. She slumped to the bathroom floor. Uday stared at her, not sure what to do. Finally he knelt next to her and hugged her.

Maude appeared in the doorway.

‘What’s all the noise?’ she asked sleepily. ‘Oh…’

Uday beckoned her in. Maude knelt down and held Beth as well as she cried. She didn’t even notice Uday hide the knife.

One of the problems with being a petty criminal is that there are always people higher up the ladder. Still, there were always people lower as well, and the beating he had taken at Beth’s hands had not done his self-esteem any good. The likes of Beth were supposed to be prey, not predator. It was thoughts like this that made Jaime think he was quite the street philosopher. However, as the BMW took him closer to Bucklands, self-pity was fighting with fear as the dominant emotion. Nobody in the drugs game wanted to hear the words ‘Mr McGurk wants to see you’ from any of his large and violence-capable business associates. Jaime just hoped he didn’t piss himself on the leather seat. He couldn’t see that going down well.

The underground garage under the long wall-like block of flats smelled of sweat. None of the inhabitants of the flats above had been stupid enough to park a car in the garage for years. The vehicles that weren’t burned-out husks had come for the fight. Their headlights were used to provide illumination. They cast long and violent shadows from the two combatants.

Even relaxed, resplendent in his shell suit and gold, leaning on his cane, McGurk still had an air of barely contained violence. His constantly moving, sparsely-haired jaw and eyes bloodshot from lack of sleep accentuated his cadaverous, weasel-like features. He was watching, bored, as two desperate young men beat the crap out of each other to the cheers of the surrounding crowd. It no longer even interested him, let alone excited him. It was just a taster for the real excitement. He glanced over at the Transit van parked in the corner.

‘Mr McGurk?’ Markus said. McGurk turned around. Markus was a solid, slab-like piece of meat and steroids with a shaved head and rings in either ear. He looked away as McGurk looked him in the eyes. McGurk liked that.

Markus had hold of some scruffy-looking ponytailed specimen who smelled of fear and low-level drug dealing.

‘I know your name,’ McGurk said in his thick Pompey accent, cockney two generations removed. Jaime wasn’t sure what to do except stare and try and control his fear. ‘Imagine how pissed off that makes me?’ McGurk continued. Jaime felt his bowels loosen. ‘I mean, you’re so down far down the food chain, Markus here wouldn’t bother with you, isn’t that right, Markus?’

‘No, Mr McGurk, I wouldn’t,’ Markus rumbled, playing his part in the pantomime. McGurk looked at the young man properly for the first time, taking in his bruised and cut face.

‘Someone give you a bit of a kicking?’ he asked. The kid nodded. ‘With knuckledusters by the look of it.’ The kid nodded again. ‘Who?’

‘I don’t know her.’

‘“Her”? What are you, fucking queer? You got beat up by a girl?’ McGurk laughed. It was the kind of laughter that Markus felt he should join in. Jaime just looked miserable. ‘Son, you don’t ever want to go to prison, let me assure you.’ Jaime just nodded miserably. He was so frightened he wanted to cry, but he was pretty sure that would be unacceptable. ‘So who is this girl with brass knuckles then?’

‘I don’t know her name, sir,’ Jaime started. McGurk turned to fix him with a stare. Jaime shut up, swallowed hard and pissed himself just a little bit.

‘But I know your name, yes? Give me something I can fucking use.’ This was punctuated by the flat hard sound of meat hitting meat.

‘She was looking for her sister. Talia, she was looking for Talia.’

‘What’d you tell her?’

‘That we’d gone out together for a while. That she liked gear. I’d binned her when I found her using H, and she liked to hang around with those emo arseholes who blew themselves up.’

‘That all?’ McGurk demanded. The fight was over. One of the combatants was lying unconscious in a pool of his own blood. The other was standing over him, not looking much better, gasping for breath.

Jaime nodded.

‘I swear, Mr McGurk, I didn’t know you had any interest.’

McGurk stared at him for a while. Jaime tried desperately not to piss himself further.

‘You know how I enforce loyalty?’ McGurk asked. Jaime swallowed, nodded and a wet stain started appearing on the front of his jeans. McGurk leaned towards him. ‘Imagine how I enforce silence.’ Jaime could smell the eucalyptus on McGurk’s warm breath. Jaime had his eyes closed tight. ‘You say nothing about this, nothing at all. You hear any more, you call Markus and tell him, understand?’ Jaime nodded, tears streaming down his face. ‘Get the fuck out of my sight.’