Gavin Smith - The Age of Scorpio

The deep-space salvage tug looked like it was made of hundreds of years of patched-together scrap parts. The original parts of the ship were buried underneath layers of barely functioning detritus. It was a scavenger ship, a space-going parasite that fed on the misfortunes of others. Just like everything else in Known Space.

Forward was Command and Control, the crew area, workshops and a small internal hold, but much of the rest of the craft was exposed to vacuum. The massive towing apparatus, tools for use in vacuum, rolls of high-tensile net to carry externally salvaged cargo, detachable boosters to attach to towed hulks and hangars for the various drones, including Nulty’s own hangar. The rest of the crew had long since given up trying to guess Nulty’s original race and gender. A long time ago Nulty had uploaded himself into a deep-space salvage drone and chosen to live in a machine body in the vacuum.

The tug was called the Black Swan . Few names could have been less fitting. None of its current crew knew what a swan was and none of them had the inclination to find out.

The oversized engines, used for towing hulks many times larger than the Black Swan , were on heavy-duty manoeuvrable pontoons that looked like muscular arms reaching out from the tug. The engines were old and didn’t function optimally, like everything else on the Black Swan . Only the bridge drive was new. This was because of all the captains based out of Arclight, only Eldon Sloper was desperate enough to agree to a salvage job in Red Space.

‘Where are we?’ The question irritated Eldon. Most things had for many years now. It was the irritability of your life not working out the way you wanted it to. He hadn’t asked for much, he thought, just a thriving salvage business, but that had been too much apparently.

‘Space,’ the small weasel-looking man with the pockmarked face and thinning hair answered. Eden had often wondered why someone who looked like that hadn’t had themself extensively redesigned a long time ago. Nulty, during one of his rare fallings-out with his captain, had suggested that Eldon had been sculpted, but his personality had bled out and turned him back to his original form.

Eldon didn’t have to look at Eden to know his sarcastic answer to her question had irritated her. It had been designed to. After all, she’d had neunonic access to the co-ordinates since they’d left Arclight.

The tug was old enough to still have manual displays and controls, though it was, like nearly all spacecraft in Known Space, piloted via neunonic interface. The pilot and co-pilot/navigator’s seats were raised to give a better view of the subjective front of the tug, which the hull’s smart matter had rendered transparent, providing them with a panoramic view of outside. Information cascaded down the vista of black and pinpricks of light. The view was repeated in the minds of each of the crew along with pertinent information for their specific job roles.

‘We’re not quite off the charts but this is pretty much the edge of Known Space. Much further and I expect we’d have to explain ourselves to the Church.’ The cheerfulness, implying as it did that Brett felt this was some kind of adventure, further irritated Eldon. It was symptomatic of his overall irritation with the handsome younger man – life hadn’t ground the hopes and dreams out of him yet. Well that and the way that Melia looked at him.

‘Eden, wake up Melia,’ Eldon said.

‘Oh, is kitty going to do some work for a change?’ Eden said, not even trying to hide the acid in her tone.

Eldon turned in the flight chair to look at the engineer. He had always assumed that the glorified mechanic was jealous of Melia, though why she didn’t just sculpt herself to look more pleasing to the eye he had no idea. It wasn’t as if he didn’t pay her enough and she didn’t have the crippling financial responsibilities of trying to run a ship, well, a tug anyway. Eden was neither one thing nor another. He was pretty sure that her base uplift was human, though she’d had some lizard DNA in her somewhere along the line as much of her visible skin was scaled. She’d obviously had both soft-machine biological and hard-machine tech augments, whereas most people tended to go for one or the other. Eldon wasn’t even sure of her gender: he was pretty sure she was base female but from one of the more masculine female genders.

‘Eden, just for once could we pretend that I’m the captain and we’re about to do something really—’

‘Fucking stupid?’ Eden asked. Eldon felt a vein on his forehead start to twitch as Brett laughed, good-naturedly, of course.

‘Eden, Melia’s our bridge drive specialist – we’ll need her,’ Brett said. Oh go and fuck yourself, you supercilious little prick , Eldon thought. But it didn’t matter, Melia was all his, a fully bonded concubine bought and paid for. He’d paid for her training and neunonics so she could help with the ship’s systems. So she wasn’t just an ornament and sex toy.

Eden glared at Eldon. He was just as capable of waking the fucking cat, she thought as she ran through the pod’s shutdown sequence on her neunonics. Strictly speaking, as the ship’s engineer the pod’s systems were her responsibility but Eden was pretty sure that Eldon had just got her to do it because he knew how much she hated the cat.

The pod creaked open. It needed maintenance but Eden was putting it off as long as possible in the hope that Melia died in a horrible cryogenic accident. Eden had sent the cursory, bordering on rude, wake-up call to the cat’s neunonics. Melia hadn’t responded but the pod’s systems reported that the cocktail of drugs required to bring the cat to fully functioning consciousness had been administered.

Melia sat up in the pod and made yawning a performance that allowed her to show off all her sculpted assets. Eldon turned to watch the show. Even Brett, healthy polysexual though he was, looked around briefly.

‘That is so fucking demeaning,’ Eden muttered under her breath.

‘And yet everyone does what I want,’ Melia said, smiling. The lightly furred feline humanoid’s smile was of course predatory.

‘Only because you pander to some xenophile pornographic fantasy hard-wired into the wannabe masculine since before the Loss.’

‘Come on, Eden.’ Brett said. Eden normally liked Brett, but his want for everyone to get on was starting to irritate her as well.

Eldon was looking at Melia with an expression that bordered on worship. His adoration was shattered by the grateful smile that Melia shot Brett.

It was short walk from the pod to Eldon’s flight chair, but the naked feline made a performance of that. Eden tried not to grind her teeth as Melia put her arms around Eldon and jumped into his lap.

‘We’re in space, baby?’ Melia said, rubbing against Eldon and purring gently.

‘Oh put some fucking clothes on!’ Eden said. Melia bared her teeth and hissed at the human – mostly – woman.

‘Go and fuck yourself, you puritan bitch!’ Eldon snapped at the engineer.

‘Eden, you know that they have different social mores to us,’ Brett said in a conciliatory tone.

‘Would those social mores include manipulating the fuck out of every halfwit with a penis?’

‘They like being looked after,’ Brett said.

‘They like other people doing shit for them, you mean.’