The Age of Scorpio (77 page)

Vic fired the six grenades from the ACR’s under-barrel launcher. The first one was a controlled-replication, flesh-eating nano-swarm. The second was a viral grenade. Both were high end for the black market, but Vic had suspected when loading them that the
St Brendan’s Fire
’s countermeasures would be able to cope with them. The remaining four were flechette grenades which filled the air with high-velocity needles.

Vic’s two lower limbs drew his double-barrelled laser pistols. His upper and lower torsos counter-rotated as the ACR and the lasers fired, mopping up whatever the heavier ordnance had missed.

Through the ’face feed from his P-sat Vic was aware that it was now in C and C. The command crew died quickly, taken out by the P-sat’s swivel-mounted auto-shotgun firing frangible fragmentation rounds designed not to harm any of the instruments. A measured laser killed those the shotgun didn’t. The P-sat left one crew member alive in C and C.

The ACR’s magazine was solid-state, each bullet assembled in the barrel. Its bullpup magazine looked like it was being eaten as the weapon was fired. The last of the magazine disappeared up into the weapon. Vic slid another magazine home almost immediately but didn’t fire.

A Militiaman died as the strobe gun cut the bunk he was using as cover in half and then near enough did likewise to him. Another almost got his ACR to bear on Vic, but the disc cut his throat.

More than fifty were dead now. Everything was red. They hadn’t fired a single shot. Then Vic’s sensors warned him that the ship’s alarms had started to broadcast to the crew’s neunonics. Any remaining passive security systems were now active.

With a command from Vic, the spipod leaped up onto one of the few remaining bunks and fired into all the bodies to ensure they were dead. It was little more than red-light butchery.

Vic caught his returning disc and clipped it back onto its shoulder mount. He left the bunk room and made for C and C, his ACR at the ready, his lower torso swivelled so his bottom limbs could cover his rear. A few crew members showed their faces in the corridors, but bursts of bullets and beams discouraged them from getting involved. Only one fired back. Small-calibre spit pistol bullets flattened against Vic’s armour. Vic killed him to make a point. If the guy got cloned then maybe next time he would be able to work out the difference between bravery and stupidity.

As he approached C and C, Vic started getting armour integrity warnings ’faced from the suit to his tactical neunonics. It appeared that the armour was slowly being eaten away by a weaponised nano-screen turned nano-swarm. Vic sped up. He stepped over the still-glowing hole in the door to C and C, and turned to look at the tank.

The navigator looked through the green water and transparent tank wall at Vic. The dolphin had been extensively augmented with hard and soft tech. Most people also assumed that Church navigators had a degree of S-tech in them as well.

Vic’s armour was seriously malfunctioning now. He could see part of it dissolving. Soon the nanites would find a weak point in the armour, break through and start eating him.

‘I don’t have much time. Surrender control of all systems to me now,’ he ’faced on an open channel.

‘Just a moment and I think it’ll be over,’ the navigator told him.

Vic was already moving. He liked to think that he’d given the dolphin the chance to be reasonable. He opened the airlocked delivery tray, unclipped the case that Scab had given him and, steeling himself, opened it. The Scorpion was already up, its sting arched, its body language that of impending violence. The Scorpion scared Vic and always had. It was unpredictable and hateful S-tech. It could just as well decide to murder him.

‘Don’t do that. Let’s talk about this!’ Even modulated and ’faced, Vic could hear the fear in the dolphin’s voice. The nanites were through his armour. Vic screamed as they started to eat him alive. Vic dropped the Scorpion into the tray and slid it shut.

The navigator thrashed around so much that he injured himself and red clouds appeared in the water. Vic fell to the ground, his armour now all but dissolving, his exoskeleton starting to do the same.

The thrashing from the tank stopped. The
St Brendan’s Fire
’s systems opened themselves to him. He only just had the presence of mind to deactivate the nano-swarm while he still had flesh and components. The pain stopped almost immediately as his own systems flooded his few remaining biological organs and his mind with numbing narcotics. His systems were starting to rebuild. He would find some more raw materials in the frigate’s med bay to help him rebuild himself before the rendezvous.

It was a blissed Vic who managed to sit on one of the couches and let it grow to envelope his awkward and now partially eaten ’sect frame. Blissed or not, the sight of the Scorpion dug into flesh just behind the dolphin’s artificial gill, sting buried deep in the navigator’s skin, was horrific. Its legs had grown to form what looked like a skin-tight cage clamped into the cetacean’s flesh. The navigator was still alive, his eyes full of pain.

Vic shut down the ship. There were still people in there. Those he couldn’t trap, he turned the ship’s remaining security systems on. The rest Scab could kill. Vic didn’t mind killing, but Scab actually liked to be a monster. Scab liked hide-and-seek. Vic stationed the P-sat outside the hole in the door to C and C to watch his back.

Open access showed him the
St Brendan’s Fire
’s rendezvous point in planetary Red Space with the Monk.

‘You’re not supposed to be able to do that,’ Vic mused. But then you weren’t supposed to be able to take a Church frigate on your own, no matter how good you were. You also weren’t supposed to be able to break a Church navigator’s conditioning so easily. You certainly weren’t supposed to get away with it, and he didn’t imagine he would.

Scab stared at the frigate. He got a very good look at the ship’s batteries, most of which were pointed at him.

‘And of course you know how to navigate in planetary Red Space,’ he said grimly.

‘It’s over. I’m sorry. It’s up to you: we can put you back into Real Space if you want, but you should know we had to destroy your ship and kill Vic. Your employer will be after you. It might be better if we kill you now.’

Scab looked down with a half-smile on his lips. ‘You have to earn the right to kill me,’ he said, and then looked at her, grinning savagely.

‘I think we’ve just done that. I’m talking about what’s best for you. We harbour no ill will towards you, but you’re a very dangerous person to leave in play as an enemy.’

‘Even for the Church?’

‘Even for the Church.’

‘I’m not your enemy.’

Vic was holding the ship in a blizzard of black ash in a red sky. He wasn’t sure what was happening, but he was reasonably sure that he was in some kind of Red Space simulacrum or echo of the planet Game. He had watched the massive blackened skeletal trees collapse like they were made of burned paper.

In his neunonics he could see Scab in his disguised form and the Monk in hers sitting on the strange coffin-shaped cocoon thing. Somehow Scab’s face behind his visor dominated the image from the ship’s external visual sensors. Vic locked weapon system after weapon system onto Scab as he counted the ways in which he hated that man. There would never be a better time than now. There was no way Scab would survive and he did not have clone insurance. Scab wanted to die – he was daring everyone in Known Space to do it – but nobody had the balls. Now with a thought Vic could kill him. No comebacks. Except. Vic glanced over at the Scorpion in the tank. The navigator that the Scorpion appeared to have fused with was staring at him.

‘Leave me something of her,’ Scab ’faced over their secure link.

He wanted to scream, weep, tear at what little remained of his flesh, thrash around, engage in all the human melodrama he’d experienced in immersions. Instead he just sagged in the couch and cursed himself for a coward. He heard the Monk ’face the
St Brendan’s Fire
, wondering what was taking so long.

‘I’m sorry,’ Vic ’faced her back.

The Monk’s head whipped around to look at Scab. She was moving for her bone blade. Scab grabbed her wrist. A laser cannon on one of the beam batteries fired. The Monk’s torso turned to red steam which then promptly froze. Scab was still holding her upper arm.

He stared at the
St Brendan’s Fire
until the forward airlock ramp lowered from the head of the craft like a mouth. With a thought Scab commanded the three AG motors to take him into the airlock.

Scab cut the fused flesh off the Monk’s severed hand and attached the warmer to it, returning it to simulated life. He stared at Vic all the while. Vic would not look at him, could not meet his murky lifeless eyes. He didn’t need to look at him to feel the disdain.

‘Why were the weapons on me?’ Scab finally asked.

‘Dramatic irony?’ Vic suggested.

Scab was not disdainful of Vic for wanting to kill him. He was disdainful of Vic for not going through with it.

Scab stripped the spacesuit gauntlet off the reanimated hand, then he put the hand on the cocoon. It was warm, and he cut the flesh to let some blood leak out onto the cocoon’s strange shell. Slowly the cocoon started to dissolve. Vic stared at it in horror.

Falling through smoke. Falling through a clear blue sky, the churning red water of a feeding frenzy below her. Britha told herself that she couldn’t hear all the screaming. That she couldn’t hear how much she had failed these people. The thing crawling through her head recoiled from the violation of the sky hanging above them like an angry living black sun.

The water hit her hard, tasting of salt, copper and meat. Shapes writhed over each other like a basket full of eels. The sea seemed full. The force of her impact carried her down. To part of her the ocean seemed home, to another part the bloodlust seemed right and proper. The thing in her head howled and sent unimaginable pain lancing through her.

Something grabbed her arm. She did not fight. It pulled her deeper. What was left of her real mind told her that she was not of the sea as the pressure mounted, but somehow she did not die.

It was there, through silted water, down under the mud, something huge, ancient, alive and suffering. Something trying to wake but waking into a world of fear, pain, burning and slaughter. It was so large as to be difficult to comprehend, like a mountain, a living mountain.

The energy in the water was palpable. Patches of its flesh glowed through the murky water, making patterns, lightning playing across those patterns. Britha knew somehow that this was the energy that violated the sky, letting the Hungry Nothingness in.

Someone, something, took her deeper. She should be drowning now. Britha felt the touch of the living mountain’s hard flesh. It felt like rock or a shell but then it opened to softer flesh. She was not being consumed, she told herself. It was more like the births she had helped with over the years. It was like going home. It was not just the blood, the blood which had granted Britha power and magics, that called to this creature. Something at a much more primal level recognised the creator of life.

Now falling again. Britha landed on something warm, wet and alive. She felt a hot wind, like breath, on her skin. She tried to cope with the pain, tried to ignore the horror of what she had just done. She felt feverish. Her body was fighting itself, it wanted her to give in to fury and destroy life, but she was home and would be safe.

Britha opened her eyes and tried to make sense of things. It looked like a tunnel but she knew that she was in a living thing. Living stalactites of translucent white flesh dangled from the ceiling, giving off a faint glow and moving with the warm wind and of their own accord. The long corridor had regular arches of bone. The walls and floor remind her of the dimpled flesh on the inside of a mouth. The flesh rippled with movement.

And Cliodna stood over her. She too seemed to sway with the warm wind. Crouched over like a predatory animal, she did not look like her lover any more. She was all armour and hard edges. She looked like a warrior. No, Britha corrected herself, she looked like a weapon. The other woman seemed to seethe somehow.

Cliodna reached down and ran a sharp black claw across Britha’s skin. Britha did not cry out. Her head wanted to burst and the claw wound seemed like nothing. Even through the war in her body and the agony in her head, even though she was slowly beginning to realise that some of the thoughts in her head were not her own, the thought that Cliodna would hurt her made all the strength that had carried her this far evaporate. She wanted to curl up and end it. If Cliodna wanted to then let her kill her.

Instead Britha got up unsteadily.

Cliodna threw Britha’s spear at her feet. ‘Kill me,’ she said quietly.

Quicksilver tears sprang from Britha’s eyes but she didn’t move. Cliodna darted forward and more slashes appeared in Britha’s flesh. The blood ran down her, dripped onto the flesh of the floor and was instantly absorbed.

‘Kill me,’ Cliodna said more loudly and licked her bloodied nails. Britha knew that the Otherworldly woman couldn’t help herself and shook her head.

Cliodna embraced Britha. Her skin was course and rough now, she felt jagged and sharp. She grabbed Britha’s hair and yanked her head back. ‘Kill me!’ Cliodna screamed in her face, breath smelling of meat, before sinking rows of teeth into the other woman’s shoulder and pushing sharp nails through her skin.

This time Britha screamed and pulled away, Cliodna’s fingers and teeth tearing her flesh.

Britha staggered back, sobbing. ‘I can’t!’ she screamed.

‘I can smell that monster’s scent on you,’ Cliodna growled. ‘Either kill me or I will kill you.’

‘You pushed me away!’ Britha screamed at her. She knew it wasn’t fair. Now more than ever it was evident that Cliodna had done it for Britha’s safety. Not only that, it would seem that Bress was more than a little responsible for Cliodna’s transformation.

‘I don’t want to live like this,’ Cliodna told her. ‘I only destroy. I am hanging on to what little is left of me. My nails are bloodied by the meat of my younger brothers and sisters!’ Britha knew she meant her and the other peoples of Ynys Prydein and beyond. ‘Soon I will be gone. I would rather I be killed by someone I loved, when I was capable of that. Better that than I become a terror to your people.’