Gavin Smith - The Age of Scorpio

DC Mossa had told him that Arbogast moved in circles that had little to do with traditional criminals so he had got away with pretty much operating on his own. Somewhere, however, there was a connection between Arbogast and S-tech but du Bois just couldn’t see it at the moment.

Beth had been lucky. If he hadn’t been parked at the pointless roadblock on the bridge. If he hadn’t seen the lights at the greyhound stadium and checked on his phone and discovered it was supposed to have been deserted. If he hadn’t had the authority to task the armed police on the roadblock to follow him and to task helicopter support, then Beth would have been dead. The girl was tough, du Bois had to give her that. She had held her own longer than most. But he had put two nano-bullets in the chest of the hybrid and another two in its head to make sure it was dead.

As Beth sat there sipping another tea, wiping away tears and snot with the arm of her shredded jumper, her feeling of unease grew. She looked around the room for some explanation but found nothing. The longer she sat there the more frightened she became, and the sense that she was not alone grew stronger.

She stood up. She was the sort of person who, when she heard a noise in a house that she couldn’t explain, went looking for its cause. She moved as fast as she could, limping around the room.

The corner. The shadows in one of the corners of the room. They were just the result of the dim light in the interview room, she told herself. Nothing unusual there. But now the shadows in the corner seemed much darker than they had any right to be. Beth told herself that it was just her tired, pained and drugged mind playing tricks on her. That it was the result of the stress and the shock of the horrors that she had seen and experienced tonight. But the mounting certainty that there was someone there just wouldn’t go away.

She forced herself to take a step towards the corner. The shadows seemed to coalesce, solidify, move of their own accord in the way that shadows just don’t. Another step. She could see the dark shape of a figure now. She looked around for a weapon, her brain desperately trying to understand what was going on. Adrenaline flowed. Fight won over flight in the locked room. But the chair was bolted to the floor.

The figure lunged out of the darkness. The bag lady. Except she was something ancient, primal, ferocious. She smelled of the earth. Sharp teeth, too many sharp teeth, ragged nails outstretched. The hag-like creature bit her own tongue and spat the blood all over Beth’s face.

Beth could feel the blood move. Push itself into her face, through her skin. She opened her mouth to scream and hit the floor. She thought she heard someone whisper, ‘It’ll be okay.’

Vic knew that there was no reason for the beacon to be all the way out here. It wasn’t on any navigational chart. The information as to its whereabouts had recently been added to the nav systems by Scab. Vic liked nothing about this, but then he hadn’t liked anything for some time now.

The bridge drive made a cut in Red Space. The Basilisk emerged into blackness.

‘Where are we and where are the all the stars?’ Vic asked. Scab ignored him.

There was something wrong with the blackness. Vic couldn’t shake the feeling that the infinity of space was somehow closing in on him. He didn’t like the way space seemed to move in the periphery of his multifaceted vision. He didn’t like the feeling that somehow space was squirming.

‘Is that a monastery?’ Vic might as well have been talking to himself. He was receiving the image from the Basilisk ’s sensors straight into his neunonics. It showed an ancient-looking habitat built into an asteroid. It had the look of a Church habitat but a very old one. A search of his neunonics found nothing that matched it.

The sensors showed indications of life but no weapon locks from defensive systems. That wasn’t right. Vic couldn’t think of another habitat that had no defensive systems.

‘I don’t want to go there,’ Vic said firmly and crossed all four of his arms. ‘I mean—’ he started.

‘Can you not want to go there silently?’ Scab demanded, turning on Vic. This made Vic even more nervous as Scab seemed a little on edge.

The familiar clang of docking was followed by a grinding noise as the ancient docking arm tried to make a seal.

‘Maybe we’ll just be sucked out into space when we open the airlock,’ Vic said hopefully, but the docking arm finally made its seal. Scab ’faced opening instructions to the Basilisk and after decontamination procedures the wall opened. Vic didn’t like what he saw. It was difficult to tell their race or sex, but they were probably human or feline, as they were wearing voluminous red-hooded robes that covered their features.

Between the two red-clad monks was an ornate cylinder floating on an AG drive. The cylinder was a nano-fabricated tank designed to look like wood, brass and glass. A thick black fluid swirled around inside another clear liquid, seemingly with a life of its own.

It was with dawning horror that Vic realised what these people were.

‘This is a heretical cult!’ he cried, only to be ignored yet again. Were these his real employers? Surely they were too poor for the sort of resources that Scab had been throwing at this thing.

‘Night draws in,’ one of the monks said. Human, male, working hard to impart as little emotion as possible.

‘We have little time,’ the other said. Vic couldn’t be sure of its race, let alone gender.

‘I need a message delivering,’ Scab told them. ‘Tell him that we’re going to need a diversion.’

The monks nodded. Vic was coming to the conclusion that if he could work out a way to commit suicide without being cloned by Scab, it might be easier than this insanity.

The chimera reared on its cloven-hoofed rear legs, striking out with its claws as it surged forward, opening rents of red in the sculpted flesh of the tank-bred biomechanoid it was fighting. There was cheering from the various boxes grown out of the root-like wood that formed the arena.

Zabilla Haq turned away from the arena, distaste written all over her face. The bloodshed did not bother her. The biomechanoid was unimpressive in its modernity; she liked the classical elegance of the three-headed chimera, but then it had taken her a great deal of time and effort to grow it. Adapting and splicing pre-Loss genetic material from a goat, lion and snake had been the easy part. The dragon head had been difficult. It had meant the creation of an entirely new template, as she had not been prepared simply to modify an existing lizard template. Instead, using reptile DNA as a guide, she had written her own code. She was pleased with the result. The difficult part had been making the three heads co-operate while retaining a degree of individual function.

The chimera butted the biomechanoid and horns tore more flesh. The lion head ripped another chunk of meat away as the staggering biomechanoid tried to bring its weapon gauntlet to bear. The hooded serpent tail darted over the chimera’s body; fangs pierced mottled armour, and venom emptied into the biomechanoid’s flesh. The chimera all but climbed up its opponent, using its claws, rearing high. Despite being the creature’s creator, Zabilla couldn’t help but admire the haughty and proud set to the creature’s draconic middle head.

‘I like it,’ Gilbert Scoular said, sounding like he meant the opposite. ‘But it’s not terribly original, is it?’ the fat, ostentatiously dressed, self-proclaimed genetic artist said from his chaise longue. He was heavily made up, sweating and being fanned by a licensed and chipped morlock servant that, it was whispered, he had grown himself and used as a sex toy. ‘Good thing you didn’t give it wings after all. I shouldn’t like to see one of those nesting in the upper branches.’