Gavin Smith - The Age of Scorpio

Un-Scab-like retorts and denials filled his mind, but he just lay there and watched them. He could not know if what they were saying was true. That secret had long since been eaten from his mind. Connected though they were, with access to the highest levels of intelligence the Monarchist systems could gather, they could not have known the truth of his expulsion from the Elite. But there was something in their words that Scab did not like at an unconscious and possibly instinctual level. If this was what empathy felt like then he did not like it.

Again it was the sympathy on Horrible Angel’s face that got to him the most.

‘Throw him out,’ she told her brother. ‘Ludwig is killing his friend now.’ She turned and walked silently away, leaving Scab more than a little confused. He was about to die now but it wouldn’t be enough.

‘I don’t have any friends,’ he told Fallen Angel. It seemed very important that Fallen Angel understand this before he died.

Scab liked vacuum – he had been exposed before and felt a kinship with it. He was still alive. The virus had been trying to eat his flesh back to his skeleton when they flung him into space. Somehow the Basilisk had found him. The ship’s medical systems were able to counteract the virus but only because the virus allowed it. They had tested him but let him live. Scab could only imagine it was because they thought it crueller this way, but he couldn’t forget the look of sympathy on Horrible Angel’s face.

Vic opened his eyes to the inside of a clone tank in some faceless insurance company laboratory. He had never expected to see this again. Vic had used up the last of his insurance money when Scab had last killed him. More than anything, it annoyed Vic that Scab would not tell him why he had killed him the last time. He said that if Vic knew he would just have to kill him again. So someone else had paid for him to be cloned.

Vic felt the itch of the nano-sculpting of raw flesh as they rebuilt him. This was the cheap part, the flesh. The expensive part would be putting his hard-tech augments back in. The gear fetishist part of his custom-designed humanesque personality hoped that whoever was footing the bill would opt for upgrades. He felt the crawling beneath his vat-grown chitinous skull as neunonic-filled liquid software and hardware was implanted. This comforted him. Soon he would be able to communicate.

He had almost been free, he thought, free of Scab, but someone had brought him back again.

The memory upload of his last minutes hit him. Terror had overwhelmed him. He had been sat in the C and C/lounge of the Basilisk , feeling enough tension to make an augmented heart explode. The walls of the ship had been transparent but space was a blank canvas. There had been something behind him. It had ghosted through the hull of the ship. He had done the pheromonic equivalent of shitting himself. He did not want to turn around. He knew the machine was waiting for him.

They had taken everything from his mind, where he had been, what he had been doing. All they had left him with was the memory of the machine’s ability to kill him in a moment and make it feel like eternity. A lifetime of agony. That was their message for him.

What he couldn’t understand was why he still lived. Ludwig would have sensed the memory download application in his neunonics. Neunonic viruses that could be carried through the download process to wipe the victim’s mind utterly were among the most difficult and expensive to create, but an Elite, particularly a machine Elite, would certainly have access to them.

Through the gel he could make out unfocused grey eyes staring at him. Vic ignored his partner and as soon as the neunonics were installed set up a secure interface to the Basilisk . Even lobotomised (the ship had lost a disagreement with Scab), trying to talk to the ship’s AI felt like trying to coax a frightened animal out of hiding. Ludwig had hurt the ship as well and removed the relevant part of its memory.

Scab’s polite request to ’face sounded like someone knocking on his skull. Vic took the mental equivalent of a deep breath and then opened the link.

‘You got me fucking killed by an Elite! You don’t think this in-over-our-heads overkill bullshit has gone too far now?!’

‘It didn’t go well,’ Scab agreed. He was sitting on a chair outside the tank, hat in his hands, watching Vic in the tank as if looking for a clue or some sign of irredeemable weakness. Vic assumed he was engaging in the retro-vice of smoking just to annoy any of the insurance technicians who had olfactory glands.

‘I notice they didn’t kill you.’ Vic tried to put as much venom into the comment as he could manage. Scab was well known as one of the few bounty killers who never took out clone insurance. Vic was sure Scab wanted to die but on his own very specific terms. The ’sect was unsure what those terms were.

‘I had you cloned,’ Scab ’faced, the words soft and quiet in Vic’s mind.

‘Yes, thanks for that,’ Vic spat back. ‘You couldn’t leave me in peace then? Actually finally let me go?’ Vic had often thought that human tears looked very cathartic but were beyond him, and his pheromone-producing glands were not quite rebuilt yet. Scab seemed to be giving Vic’s words some thought.

‘You like life,’ he finally ’faced.

Vic gave this some thought. Scab was right. He like immersions, drink and drugs, partying, sex with experimental female-identifying humans, violence when he was in control; he sort of liked travel but was becoming more and more convinced that everywhere the uplifted races went was a shithole. Maybe it was all shallow stuff but Vic was happy with that. What he couldn’t cope with was the abusive, albeit well-paid, borderline slavery that was being Scab’s partner.

‘I’m seeking an end,’ Scab said.

Vic wasn’t sure what he meant. ‘And you have to take me along with you?’ Scab said nothing. ‘I take it we didn’t get the cocoon thing back?’ Vic just about made out Scab shaking his head through the thick opaque gel. ‘So we’re finished with this now? This is just so beyond us, even for you it’s just banging your head on a hull. There’s nothing we can do here.’

‘I got into the Citadel,’ Scab ’faced.

Oh shit , Vic thought. The insect knew this wasn’t over. He thought back to human tears. There was enough of Vic to push his way through the gel and press his chitinous features up against the tank’s transparent material.

‘So all that effort, the expense, the S-tech, the blanks, the viral attack on Arclight, the dead Church Militiaman… NOT TO MENTION MY FUCKING MURDER AT THE HANDS OF A SICK MACHINE MADE EONS BEFORE MY PEOPLE EVEN FUCKING EXISTED was for nothing?!’ He was absurdly pleased that he had managed to convey angry/shouty human across the interface.

Scab considered the outburst as a reasonably asked question.

‘I don’t know.’ He shrugged. He was still both worried and trying to make sense of the Elite’s words.

‘Look, this is about bridge technology. The Monarchists want it; the Consortium wants it so they can break the Church’s monopoly. It’s the key to Red Space. This is way out of our league.’

‘Fun though,’ Scab said. He almost meant it. He was healed, his hand regrown, but he still missed the graft. The eyes. What he had seen with them. ‘And you’ve said that before.’

‘We’re working for Consortium interests?’ Vic asked.

Scab said nothing, which to Vic meant he knew but was not going to say. Scab tried to avoid lying where possible.

‘What I don’t understand is why they haven’t sent their own Elite.’

‘Maybe they have. They are capable of acting with subtlety. Or maybe it’s a case of mutually assured destruction. The Monarchists are mad, the Consortium greedy. The Consortium know that sending their Elite will lead to a confrontation. A very expensive one.’