Gavin Smith - The Age of Scorpio

They said that the really damaged could talk to Red Space. Vic wondered if Scab was communing. Vic, on the other hand, had red fatigue. The constant light was making him angry. He had tried to immerse as much as possible. Experiencing his favourite colonial immersions starring his namesake Vic Matto, letting experimental soundscapes wash over him. None of it was really helping.

The bridge point to Pythia was one of the busiest points in Red Space. Ships were queueing at the bridge-point beacon, sending their bids through to transponders in Real Space for their place in the line. Coming to Pythia was always expensive.

Engines glowing, the Basilisk flew down canyons of parked ships. There were vessels from all the main corporate interests in the Consortium, each jockeying for more market position despite ultimately serving the same organisation – competition for the sake of it. Odd-looking craft from the various Monarchist systems, part works of art, part throwbacks to eras that were probably mythical anyway, and part external manifestations of decadent and broken minds. Massive military ships, brooding tonnes of armoured potential violence, moving slowly and majestically through the red, the well-armed beacons tracking their movements. It would not be the first time there had been violence at a bridge point. Then the smaller ships, private yachts of the super-rich, broken-down vessels belonging to info prospectors and gamblers looking for their big break, craft so anonymous that they screamed some intelligence agency or company, a heretical sect looking for enlightenment or whatever the opposite of enlightenment was. The poorer ships containing plenty of supplies for the months or years of waiting their turn.

And bounty ships. People like us , Vic thought. Small, fast, well armed, mostly ex-military ships. If they could afford what Pythia charged then they were good, the sort of people that the Queen’s Cartel might send after them. Even before getting in-system, the Pythia bridge point was a reasonably good place to mine data, and neither Vic nor Scab could find details of any bounty on them. Vic gave this some thought. It either meant that there wasn’t one, or it had been done carefully and contracted to professionals.

On the first day they saw some junk ship come apart under the barrage of a garish Monarchist pleasure barge. There hadn’t been any reason that Vic could see. It was probably just to relieve the boredom. The Pythia bridge-point beacons responded immediately. An AG-driven autonomous suicide drone was launched. Its AI system had it dancing around the beams of the pleasure barge’s defence systems. At the same time the beacons were broadcasting their automated admonishment of the pleasure barge publicly, along with how much property damage the suicide drone was about to do and how much it was going to cost them.

The suicide drone was destroyed as it closed but not before it fired its sub-munitions, clustered high-yield lasers, which lit up the barge’s energy displacement grid, and low-yield fusion warheads, which blossomed blue against the red. Massive reactive armour plates blew out. New matter poured like sentient tar from the chagrined pleasure barge’s carbon reservoir.

‘Thank goodness they didn’t kill anyone important,’ Vic muttered as he watched the engraved murals self-etch across the pleasure barge’s new armoured skin.

It was the only interesting thing that happened while they waited, though Vic kept checking for bounty ships.

It was two days before their turn came up. Two days was pretty quick. Again Vic marvelled at the resources behind this job. It was still, however, two days of being bathed in red. Two days of Scab lying naked and unmoving on the sofa. Some of the time Vic was pretty sure that he was data-mining, but not all the time. Fortunately Scab was using the smart chair’s catheter and cleaning facilities. He was also smoking enough to make the ship smell despite otherwise excellent atmosphere scrubbers. Although furious with Scab, Vic eventually got bored and started talking to him, but Scab did not answer.

Bridging back into Real Space was cool relief.

With unaugmented vision Vic could make out the burn of the engines of other ships making for Pythia. Pythia itself was a disc of shadow deep in a cloud of particulate matter thought to come from one or more long-destroyed planets. The cloud glowed gold, illuminated by light refracting from the system’s giant yellow sun. The star had a number, probably of interest to navigation systems and ship AIs, but nobody had ever named it. Pythia was the only thing that mattered in this system.

Closer to Pythia, the planet’s long-range orbital defences let the Basilisk know that it was extensively covered. Scab ’faced his privacy bid over. Privacy was like everything else: you either fought or paid for it. When a mote of dust could spy on you, then those with the best tech and the most money got the best privacy. Vic had been told of a time where privacy was a right, before the Loss. He suspected that it was as mythical as the Naga. If there were people around to make money from it, he couldn’t understand why they wouldn’t exploit it. One of Pythia’s hospitality contractors got back to them. The contractors were one of the lesser-known branches of the mystery cult, but they seemed competent and had accepted their bid. Scab changed course and made for their habitat after clearing it with the defence systems.

‘So are you going to put some clothes on?’ Vic asked. Scab still ignored him. For fuck’s sake , the ’sect thought, I’m supposed to be angry with him and he’s the one doing the ignoring . At the back of his head he knew this was because Scab didn’t care. They weren’t friends or even partners really; he was a resource, like the ship.

Space was more and more crowded the closer they got to Pythia. Vic could see the various habitats in orbit run by the subcontracted cult of Pythia employees. They went from garish, over-the-top, neon-lit luxury hotels to zero-G coffin stacks. Shuttlecraft and heavy maintenance automatons flew between the habitats and the heavily armed orbital fortresses with their rings of weapons satellites and static AG smart munitions. Vast fields of orbital solar panels absorbed light from the star, and along with various massive power-generating stations, dipped tethers into Pythia’s cloudy upper atmosphere. Occasionally ghost fire could be seen flitting around the far end of the tethers. The tethers were the only thing other than sacrifices allowed through the atmosphere.

Scab banked the Basilisk over one of the super-hotel habitats. Vic looked down through the commercial holography displays, through the ornate transparent hull designed to look like crystal with iron supports, at the sculpted island landscape of the pool area. As they passed, the hotel’s weapons batteries tracked them across its territory. The habitat they were making for was supposed to be mid-level and anonymous. Scab hadn’t paid for luxury; he had paid for secrecy and security.

An incoming comms warning was ’faced from the Basilisk to Vic and then promptly disappeared as if it had never existed. Vic checked the Basilisk ’s systems. The message had disappeared from there as well. Vic turned to look at Scab in his chair.

‘What was that?’ he demanded. At first Vic didn’t think Scab was going to say anything. He was lying perfectly still, a long head of ash on the cigarette held in his fingers. Finally Scab turned to look at him. The ash didn’t fall.

‘If I tell you, do you promise not to go on at length?’ The vibrations of his voice sent the ash tumbling to the floor, which quickly absorbed the waste.

‘It’s the St Brendan’s Fire , isn’t it?’ Vic asked, referring to the Church frigate that had tried to accost them as they were leaving Arclight. Vic crossed all four of his arms. Scab just sighed. ‘Did they say what they want?’