Gavin Smith - The Age of Scorpio

‘Yes, Mr McGurk.’

‘Right. Well why don’t you cuff her, take her downstairs and put her in the boot of the Beamer.’

‘Yes, Mr McGurk.’

‘I can’t see that happening,’ Beth said.

‘Then I break both your arms and legs and you get to watch me rape your friends to death.’

It was too much for Maude. She broke down. Uday looked angry enough to charge a gun.

As subtly as she could, Beth dropped her knuckles back into the pocket of her leather. Markus cuffed her and then put his overcoat over the cuffs to hide them.

McGurk stood up. He looked down at Trevor with disgust and delivered a vicious kick to his wound. Trevor screamed. Then he turned to the furious Uday and sobbing Maude.

‘I can find you any time I want. You understand me.’

Beth saw Uday swallow hard, bite back what he was going to say and nod. Then the three of them left, leaving the bleeding Trevor on the carpet.

Scab had described it as an anal tract but Vic had put that down to his partner’s natural unpleasantness. Vic preferred to think of it as walking down a massive bioluminescent artery. The translucent nature of the flesh of the floating city allowed him to see its internal workings, which looked like muscle, tissue and organs on a massive scale. He understood that felines, hairless monkeys and to a lesser extent some lizards could find this sort of thing uncomfortable, but he’d grown up in the chitinous environments of star hives which prepared him for this sort of biomechanics writ large.

They were moving along the artery/sphincter on the edge of one of the Living Cities. They did not know which one. They did not know how to differentiate or indeed if they could be differentiated.

The Living Cities were one of the most celebrated sights of the Monarchist systems and indeed Known Space, considered a triumph of bioengineering, though it was suspected that they had been built using illegal – under Church law – applications of Seeder tech.

Vic reached out to touch the flesh-like wall of the artery, running one of his upper hands down it, enjoying the sensation fed back from the tactile sensor on the mechanical appendage. Through the glowing translucent wall he could look down through the cloudless sky to the scarred grey rock of Pangea’s surface.

Tendrils hung out of the bottom of the city as it floated on massive gasbags supported by redundant AG systems. The tendrils burrowed into the surface of the ruined planet like parasitical insects. Vic knew that the tendrils would be breaking down and sucking up the very surface of the planet itself for conversion and processing as raw material. Deeper burrowing tendrils would be harnessing geothermal energy from the planet’s core. Frequent tectonic events would sever tendrils, spraying rock, heat or even lava into the sky, but the living city could always call on its massive carbon reservoirs harvested from the very matter of the planet and grow more.

Eventually Pangea would be exhausted and the Living Cities would either somehow have to move to another world or die. Other worlds were in short supply due to the limited number of systems that the Church allowed access to with their bridge technology, and the rapacious, exponential, almost viral level of expansion and colonisation of the sentient races. In other words, space was crowded, and almost every bit of it was claimed. On the other hand, even with Vic’s limited knowledge of geospatial politics, and allowing for his near-total lack of interest in the subject, he realised that breaking the Church’s monopoly could lead to the opening-up of more space to colonise.

The artery rose in a helix towards the living dome-like roof of this particular city, where massive cells photosynthesised the weak light of Pangea’s main-sequence G-type star. Some effect of the planet’s wrecked atmosphere made the star look white.

Much of the trip from Pythia to Pangea had been taken up with Scab trying to work out what the Church frigate had done to the Basilisk and upgrading the ship’s security. Elements of Pangea’s not inconsiderable navy were on the Basilisk the moment they opened the bridge from Red Space into Real Space. Security for Pangea was run by one of the largest private military contractors. Basilisk had been told to power down all weapon systems or be destroyed. Scab had done it without too much attitude – to Vic’s surprise. They had then been escorted through orbital defences comparable to Pythia’s. All of this was paid for through the export of biotech developed in the cities. Many of Scab’s soft-machine augments were derived from Living City technology. There were rumours that the Living Cities’ wealth came, in part, from illegal technology derived from their use of banned Seeder tech.

They had been extensively disarmed, much to Scab’s disapproval. There had been no chance to bid for weapons, just a blanket refusal, and it was made clear that any attempt to bring virals into the city would result in immediate death. Scab had undergone a complete blood transfusion with less than good grace. He had even cleaned under his fingernails, removing all the neurotoxins. During the docking and decontamination procedures, Scab had his cigarettes and old-school syringes of opiates removed.

They had also had to shut down their external ’face links. Any communication was going to have to be done the old-fashioned way. Their nano-screens had to be extensively reprogrammed and internalised. In short, they both felt naked, though Vic was just enjoying being in the city. The warm wind blowing through the artery somehow reminded him of a human womb immersion he had once done. It had left him wondering why the little hairless monkeys ever left.

P-sats had obviously not been allowed. Instead they were being guided to a meeting place by one of the inhabitants of the city. They all looked the same. Neutral-gendered, Vic believed they were actually grown from the city. It was nominally human, as most of the inhabitants of the Monarchist systems were, and naked, which made sense. Vic was starting to find something artistic and aesthetically pleasing about the translucent skin, the internal organs on display and the glowing violet-coloured blood that provided them with their own bioluminescence. Looking around through the arteries and the flesh of the massive city, he could see them moving around doing various tasks. It made Vic think of the nanites that suffused his own body. Scab, presumably still grumpy at being disarmed, had wondered out loud why people would want to turn themselves into glowing bowel parasites.

The helical artery brought them to the highest level of the city. Vic looked down on it. From the top the city looked like a roughly circular plain. It was constantly moving, constantly rippling. The chamber they had arrived at was the first bit of opaque flesh they had come across. The sphincter-like door opened with a distinctly organic sucking noise. Vic and Scab followed their guide through.

The boardroom table looked as if it was made from sculpted tooth enamel. The chairs had been grown from the floor and were covered in a moss-like substance.

There were two other people in the room. One of them seemed to be clothed in black glass, and was leaning against the transparent flesh of what passed for a window in the outer wall. The other was the hairless tattooed Monk from the St Brendan’s Fire . She was lounging on one of the chairs, feet up on the bone-white table.

The guide moved to one side, pushing himself against the flesh wall of the room. Scab was already moving towards the Monk. It looked like she was trying to say something.

Scab was in the air over the table. The Monk just leaned back and used one hand to flip off the chair and onto her feet. Vic sighed internally. He couldn’t be bothered.