Gavin Smith - The Age of Scorpio

Arguably the example could have been made without destroying Jide and his crew’s chance at being cloned. Vic guessed that Scab had decided that it wouldn’t be enough. He wanted other crews to know that if they came after him it was permanent death. He didn’t want any distractions on this job.

It was too much for Vic though. Even if they got the cocoon, he still had no idea what it was about or how it connected to bridge technology. They also had the three most powerful organisations in Known Space about to squash them like bugs. They would probably let them experience the cutting edge of prolonged torture immersions first.

All of this contributed to Vic’s decision. He felt that it was the only rational thing to do, though he giggled a little, his mandibles clattered together and he got a little aroused when he thought about it.

He was going to kill Scab.

The Elite was a photographic negative, a human-shaped shadow after a nuclear explosion in the all-encompassing light.

‘Well?’ the man behind the desk asked.

‘I delivered your message,’ the Elite said somewhat belligerently. ‘Though I don’t think I understood it.’

The man behind the desk just smiled.

She felt his weight on her. His skin on her flesh was hot, almost feverish. The tang of copper in his mouth, he tasted like the air just before a spring storm. Her fingers traced down his skin. She saw the dark pools of his somehow sad eyes before he entered her and she closed her eyes, back arching as she cried out. Strong fingers against her skin, his arms wrapped around her as she opened herself to him.

But there was something else in the room, something just out of sight, little more than a shadow that whispered to her. Promised her this and so much more, if only she’d give in.

Britha sat up straight, flushed, hot, covered in sweat and gasping for breath. She had wrapped her robes around herself to go to sleep as she always did, but they were in disarray now. The intensity of the dream had shocked her. An intense heat burned through her body.

‘Britha?’ Her head shot round to stare at the deformed man. She narrowed her eyes. She could see perfectly even in the depths of the night. Something had changed in Teardrop’s eye: there was something in it now, a tiny glint of silver. ‘Bad dream?’

Anything but , she thought. That was the problem.

There was a dry chuckle from the other side of Teardrop where Fachtna lay wrapped in his cloak.

‘It didn’t sound like a bad dream,’ Fachtna said.

‘That’s what pleasure sounds like, boy. You’re unlikely to ever hear it as the result of anything you do,’ Britha spat.

The deck of the ship moved with the gentle lapping of the waves. They were anchored off a sandy beach below towering cliffs that should have been little more than shadows in this light, but she could make out every detail of them clearly.

‘Perhaps if you had the real thing, you wouldn’t need dreams to make you sigh?’ Fachtna suggested.

The sound of the waves against the wood of the ship was drowned out by the prayers of the god-slaves that had come aboard with them at the harbour beneath the Goddodin hill fort.

Their presence discomfited her. The ship was a strange place, peopled by stranger people. More than ever she was becoming aware of how small her world had been. It had been one thing to deal with traders not unlike these on her own terms, in her own territory; it was quite another to be thrown in among them. On the one hand she recognised them as folk like any other – they breathed, ate, drank, shat, fucked and had the same needs and wants; on the other hand she found so little similarity between how they acted and how her own people behaved that she struggled to find any common ground. Even Teardrop seemed less bizarre than the Carthaginians. All of this, along with her new capabilities, hungers, feelings and the dreams that haunted her sleep, left Britha wondering if she hadn’t somehow walked into the Otherworld.

It was obvious the experience was strange to Fachtna and Teardrop as well, but if they didn’t have any more experience of life aboard a Carthaginian ship then they certainly seemed to have more knowledge. Both of the visitors from the Otherworld seemed to be enjoying the experience regardless of how strange it was for them.

Britha was annoyed by the presence of the god-slaves on board. She was sure they hadn’t paid as much as Fachtna had for their passage. She also thought Hanno had since had cause to regret the deal as all they did was pray. It seemed they required little sleep. Their prayers sounded like nonsense even with her new-found understanding of languages. Teardrop said that they tried to talk in a tongue that their mouths were not made for. What she did understand sounded like appeals for secrets or knowledge or madness or death, perhaps all at the same time.

They had exhorted the crew to join in their worship but the sailors thought them all northern madmen, believing that the cold air had driven them insane. This was a belief held particularly strongly by Germelqart, the quiet navigator. A life at sea meant that he understood bits of many languages, but Britha only ever heard him speak the language of Carthage, which she now found herself able to understand. When he spoke it was tersely, his voice carrying to give orders to the two banks of thirty rowers. The rowers were all free men with massive upper bodies, from all over the known southern world. The colour of their skin went from light brown to almost black like Kush. Hanno said that free men cost just as much to feed but were more likely to outrun pirates if they had a share of the cargo.

Germelqart had made it clear that he felt the god-slaves were a curse, that he felt it was madness to invite onto the boat those who wished only destruction for themselves. Britha agreed with the navigator, whose magic was to direct them from one place to the next even though the next was far and out of sight. It was strong magic that to Britha’s mind required a great deal of skill, Hanno’s sacrifices to their god, Dagon, notwithstanding. Britha knew that the god-slaves’ prayers to their Dark Man in the south would interfere with Germelquart’s own workings.

Even if they hadn’t seen what they had seen as they left the harbour, she still would not have wished to travel with them. Her last glimpse of the field of the dead haunted her. She could see them dressed in white or naked, swaying backwards and forwards like barley in the wind, while one of their number, once a warrior judging by his size, walked among them cutting throats. Harvesting them. Leaving them slumped together, their life’s blood turning the sea red at the edge of the shore. She could not conceive of why, harsh as it was, people would not want to cling to life for all they were worth, as beyond this life they were at the mercy of gods who only cared for themselves.

They had been at sea for weeks now, hugging the coast. They had seen river mouths and massive inlets. Britha thought they had been travelling for so long that they must have reached another land, but Hanno, laughing, had assured her that it was still the same island that she had grown up on.

They had passed cliffs. On some of them they had seen beacon fires burning, warning of their passing. On others they had seen henges, some of stone, more of wood. There had been other wooden henges, half submerged, on some of the beaches they had passed.

Much of the land was heavily wooded, a lot of it very flat and nearly always marshy near inlets or the mouths of rivers that rivalled the size of the Tatha or the Black River. What few villages they passed were either abandoned or destroyed. The black curraghs were so far ahead of them now that the remains were not even still smouldering.