Gavin Smith - The Age of Scorpio

Jaime fled. McGurk watched him run out of the underground garage.

‘Find out,’ he said to Markus. Markus just nodded. McGurk turned to the winner of the bare-knuckle fight.

‘Brian, mate, you’ve made a bit of a mess here.’ Brian nodded, grinning savagely through the blood and the sweat. McGurk turned to Trevor, Markus’ counterpart muscle, who was standing over by the BMW, and nodded. Trevor leaned into the car, pulled out a briefcase and walked over to McGurk. Trevor opened the briefcase and showed Brian the neat rows of tens and twenties. ‘That’s ten thousand pounds, Brian. Do you want it?’ McGurk nodded to Markus, who started towards the Transit van.

‘Yes, Mr McGurk,’ Brian said, greed lighting up his eyes.

‘But how much do you want it?’

‘A lot, Mr McGurk.’

‘No holds barred with my man in the van, and I think he’s going to try very hard to kill you, yes?’ Brian looked nervous but nodded. ‘You don’t have to win, just fight.’ Brian looked unsure but his eyes kept flicking to the briefcase full of money. Finally Brian nodded. The crowd cheered.

‘Excellent!’ McGurk said, clapping Brian on the back.

‘Markus!’ Markus opened the back of the Transit. The van’s internal light spilled out of the back of the vehicle. Brian watched with mounting unease. Something shuffled into the light. Brian screamed.

Vic was no stranger to seeing or causing death. When he had been in the Thunder Squads his job had been property damage on a massive scale. One squad was enough to bring entire city sectors to their knees. He had been involved in the destruction of starscrapers, watching the weight of the buildings tear their top floors out of stabilised geosynchronous orbit. Collateral damage to sentient biomass had been inevitable but that had been on conflict resolution worlds. Though he had to admit that some of the CR worlds had been newly designated and the new designation had come as a shock to the civilian populations.

As the hard-tech-augmented insect watched his partner cut open the front of his own skull with a beam saw, he decided that it wasn’t the number of people that Scab had killed on Arclight with the virus just to get away, it was the context and quality of the killing. The Queen’s Cartel had a lot of money. If they let them get away with what had happened on Arclight then the cartel would look weak and their competitors would assume that they were prey. Vic didn’t even want to think about the ramifications of killing a Church Militiaman.

Travelling through one of the conduits in the exotic gasses of Red Space, Vic had been searching all the comms traffic on the beacons they were in range of, looking for bounties going down on him and Scab. It was okay for Scab – he would make a pile of bodies of any who came after him – but Vic knew it wouldn’t be the same for him. Vic was probably one of the top bounty killers, but the guys who they would send after them were at least his match.

‘At least it will be over soon,’ he actually said out loud. Then he found Scab staring at him. Oh now you’re listening , Vic thought.

So far there had been nothing. This meant that someone with an awful lot of resources to throw at this problem was running interference for them. What worried Vic the most, however, was that whoever their mysterious patron was, they had found a way to sufficiently motivate Scab into this insanity.

And this new madness. Despite the Basilisk ’s excellent life-support systems, the ship could not quite scrub the smell of burning bone and flesh out of the air. The argument had gone on for some time, but it hadn’t been much of an argument. It had mostly been Vic screaming at Scab. It was only after he had thought to do a scan of Scab that Vic realised that his partner had been listening to his favourite pre-Loss music on ancient crystal earrings. Scab preferred listening to music rather than downloading it directly into his cerebral cortex via his neunonics. He claimed it sounded better. Vic just thought it showed what a throwback Scab was.

Finally Vic had refused to help. He told Scab that he would have to slave him. Scab had said that he could not risk the drop in performance that came with slaving; Vic had to help him willingly. Scab’s idea of willingness was to slave Vic and put him in an agony immersion of his own design just long enough for Vic to agree. Despite his hard-tech augment, Vic had shaken for hours after Scab had let him out of the immersion – the things he’d seen, experienced, the things in Scab’s mind. Scab had only ever done something like it once before. Vic realised how important this was to Scab.

Scab removed two slits from the bone in the front of his skull and lit a cigarette, dragging deeply. The Basilisk extruded the cold storage drawer with the two biotech organisms in it. Vic had started thinking of them as alien eyes and was more and more sure they were S-tech. He watched, unease trickling through him at some base, instinctual level. Scab lifted the bioware towards his head. Scab’s P-sat was hovering just over the hole in the skull, projecting a sterile field, though Scab’s own bioware and nano-screen were probably more than enough to ward off infection. Scab took another drag on his cigarette and placed the bioware into his skull.

Vic had to admit that things never got boring working with Scab. The universe might be infinite, though the sparsely starred sky of Known Space had always felt claustrophobic to Vic, but after seeing and doing the things he had seen and done with Scab, he was impressed that he could still feel horror and fascination as he watched the things crawl into his partner’s skull. Trickles of sweat made rivulets through Scab’s white make-up. Vic realised that his human partner was shaking. The bioware flattened itself into the two slits Scab had made in his skull. Tendrils burrowed into the grey meat. Vic was even sure he had seen sparks of bioelectric energy. He must be in agony , Vic thought. Good, stupid cunt .

A chair extruded from the white-carpeted floor of the Basilisk ’s C and C/lounge and Scab sat down just a little too hard to make it look casual. The P-sat moved to continue projecting the sterile field. Scab reached into his suit and removed his works. Another pointlessly retro vice. Vic didn’t understand why he didn’t just download the drugs he wanted from internal storage. When he had asked Scab about this once, Scab had told him that as a child he had been the leader of a street sect on Cyst, his home planet. When they had captured him and sent him to the Legion, they had done neural surgery on him to remove some of his more dangerous traits. They had cut out the heretically religious aspect of young Scab, but ritual had remained important to him.

Not long after, Scab drifted away on a nod. Vic thought long and hard about extending a blade from one of his power-assisted limbs. Just pressing it into the grey meat. Scab’s P-sat would try and protect him of course, but good as it was, it was no match for Vic. Just a simple movement and all the madness and fear would be over.

He didn’t do it, of course. He didn’t like the way the two eye-like organs on Scab’s head above his human eyes seemed to stare at him. He felt like the coward he knew he was. He felt like he understood the politics of fear.

Instead of killing Scab, Vic went with his partner into Monarchist space, looking for the Citadel.

‘You didn’t kill me then?’ Scab asked when he awoke. Vic said nothing. ‘Good.’

The Citadel was out of phase. That much Scab was sure of. Entrance had required a different physical state. Technology, alien or not, was just something that made things happen when he wanted them to. The fragment of the god that lived with him in his skull had shown him the way. A different-coloured space. Reality was broken down to the level of subatomic particles, nothing more than a series of interlinked fields. The ancient technology meshed with human consciousness; science became instinct, matter merely vibration, and then his modified brain translated that information into something he could understand – physics as a waking hallucination. It felt like the defences of the Citadel were shredding him piece by piece, as he flitted between existences in different spaces.