The Age of Scorpio (21 page)

Scab stopped loading rounds into his tumbler pistol and turned to fix Vic with one of his looks. Vic didn’t like this look. He couldn’t quite read the expression, despite his studies and the help of onboard computer systems, but it did unnerve him.

‘It was an interesting job,’ Scab finally said. Vic did some more staring.

‘And the Church! Really?!’ Vic eventually responded. Scab had done some truly stupid things, more than borderline suicidal, and pissed off some genuinely dangerous and powerful people, but in Vic’s opinion he’d gone too far this time.

Vic followed Scab as he picked up his homburg and placed it on his pale-skinned hairless head. Part of the
Basilisk
’s hull opened and they stepped into the airlock. The hull sealed shut behind them.

‘I fucking hate zero G,’ Vic muttered.

‘You grew up in it,’ Scab pointed out.

‘I grew up drinking synthetic mother’s milk out of a wall nipple; doesn’t mean I don’t prefer steak.’

‘That’s just something you heard in a colonial immersion.’

The hull opened out in front of them into what looked like a bunker made of patched and corroded armour plate. They were facing five heavily armed scum. Scab had accepted their bid for docking and security. He ’faced them the amount of debt relief he was prepared to pay along with the obligatory ritual threats that went with doing business.

They stepped out of the
Basilisk
’s AG field and let old instincts and hard-wired zero G routines take over as they drifted towards the ceiling.

‘If the Church does take you and torture you, you can feel good about having no actual information to give them,’ Scab ’faced over their secure link.

‘What is that? A joke?’ Vic demanded.
Confusion
, Vic thought, he was pretty sure that Scab’s expression was one of mild confusion.

The passageway Vic and Scab took was relatively new and a luxury express route. Scab paid the high price demanded to use it. Vic guessed the fact that the tube was transparent and they could look down on the non-toll routes deeper in the labyrinth of Arclight was supposed to make them feel better. People were packed in so tightly they had to wriggle past each other. Scab could see ’sects, little more than grubs, working the packed passage as his P-sat pulled him along. As he watched, one of them started screaming as some nasty countermeasure took him out as he tried to lift a pistol belonging to a reptile wearing luminescent body-paint gang colours.

‘So why come back?’ Vic ’faced over the secure link.

‘It’s close; we’re unemployed.’

‘We could have looked for bounties from the
Basilisk
.’ Vic was starting to sound confused as he watched a fight break out in the packed transport tube below. It looked desperate. Someone had probably panicked and the crowd had turned on them. It looked like he was being torn apart. ‘What if Sloper had friends who saw you talking to him?’

‘Then I would imagine we’ll have to do some free killing, but I chose Sloper because he didn’t have any friends and both he and his crew were malleable,’ Scab ’faced back.

You mean programmable
, Vic thought but said nothing. Then it dawned on him.

‘Seeder’s sake, Woodbine,’ Vic said. Scab looked over his shoulder in irritation at the sound of his first name, but it was one of those moments when Vic just didn’t care. ‘Are you looking into this?’

‘It’s interesting,’ Scab said.

‘Are you fucking mad?!’ Vic asked before realising that it was a stupid question. Though it had occurred to Vic in the past that Scab was a new iteration of sanity, a psychological evolution designed to help the naked monkeys cope. Maybe one day all humans would be like Scab. The thought had frightened Vic.

‘I was offered a good deal,’ Scab said. He almost sounded wistful.

‘Debt relief’s a bit fucking difficult to spend when some Elite’s rewritten your DNA to see what you’d look like as protoplasm!’ It had taken Vic a while to learn to shout over the interface; it was mainly a human talent though lizards were good at it as well. He had been proud when he’d finally managed it. It was very useful for conversations like this with Scab.

‘It wasn’t money,’ Scab said. He didn’t say it over the interface. He didn’t even say it aloud. Vic’s hearing through his antenna had been excellent before it had been augmented by the ’sect’s hard-tech retrofit. Scab had just moved his stained lips as he sub-vocalised it.

‘Are you using us as bait?’ Vic demanded.

He always becomes difficult to manage when he’s frightened
, Scab thought.

The Polyhedron Club was specialised: it catered mainly to men of the heterosexual kink and women of the homosexual kink. Most of the six-armed, no-legged, zero-G dancers were either of the girly girl or ladyboy gender. Most of them were human though there were a few felines and one reptile. Whether it had been custom fabricated or originally something else, the Polyhedron was, as its name suggested, an area with numerous sides. The club made good use of all twenty sides of the cavernous red-mock-velvet-lined chamber: each triangle had tables and chairs with micro-hooks that could be neunonically controlled to fasten the clientele to their seats.

The supports for the superstructure provided poles for the dancers’ complex, gymnastic and erotic dances.

‘So, just to be clear,’ Vic asked over the secure interface, ‘the plan is to wait here until something bad happens?’

Scab took another suck from his drink bulb and ignored him. Vic went back to watching one of the human dancers. He was pretty sure she was attractive by human standards as he had run her through some comparison routines in his neunonics. On the other hand, it kind of spoilt the thrill of being a humanophile if they had the same amount of limbs as you.

Both of them felt the atmosphere in the room change. Their P-sats rose from where they had been hovering in one of the many faceted corners, and the club’s defence systems ’faced automated anti-violence warnings with graphic examples of the consequences to both of them if they disobeyed.

The dancers scrambled and swung out of the way. Vic could understand why as he tried to suppress feelings of hatred, anger and not a little fear. Fully armoured and armed in Thunder Squad gear, he could have taken them, of that he was sure; like this he wasn’t so sure. He couldn’t make up his mind whether or not he wanted Scab to start on them or not. It would be an interesting death for him and a fight that Vic would want to see. Scab, however, just sat at the table taking the occasional sip from the nipple of his drink bulb and annoying everyone who could smell near him by engaging in his smoking retro-vice, as he watched the two warrior-caste ’sects fly towards them.

Compared to the custom-evolved biomechanical killing machines, Scab looked positively spindly. Overlapping plates of chitin formed armour the match of high-grade military protection. It was rumoured that the armour’s energy dissipation matrix was an application of S-tech that had been bred into their line. Their lower limbs ended in bladed legs, the four upper limbs all ended in grafted weapons. Their oversized mandibles were knife-like blades attached to sinuous corded muscles designed for close-quarters combat.

The two warriors propelled themselves across the club on small armoured wings that moved so quickly they were a blur. Ideal for zero-G manoeuvring, they could be retracted into armoured chitinous sheaths. The two warriors held a human between them. He wore a white suit of some rendered linen analogue and a panama hat. Despite an androgynous quality, Vic was pretty sure the human was male. Skin grew across his eyes, adding to the expressionless look on his face.

Vic clattered his mandibles together, wishing he could whistle like he had seen surprised humans do in immersions. Even Scab raised an eyebrow. The warriors were towing a blank towards them. A very rare, very expensive and very illegal application of S-tech, it involved some kind of neural entanglement of identical clones. The neurology of blanks was altered by the ancient alien tech, allowing them to be used as transmitters and receivers. Some even whispered that it was an S-tech application developed by the Naga, the semi-mythical race of serpents, the so-called missing fifth and oldest uplifted race.

‘Do you think they could have drawn more attention to us?’ Vic wondered. Scab frowned slightly.

The warriors brought the semi-comatose drooling blank to their table as another chair grew out of the floor. Mandibles clattering together produced a series of synchronised clicks accompanied by scents as they released pheromones.

‘They feel, quite strongly, that we should talk to the blank,’ Vic translated, though he was sure that Scab would have understood. Scab was staring at the warriors. Vic wondered whether or not he should tell him that staring at them or any form of intimidation was a complete waste of time. He also considered provoking a fight just to see who would win.

Finally Scab just nodded. The warrior ’sects put the blank in the chair and retreated slightly to hover in the air. Everything else in the Polyhedron had stopped: the dancers, the bar staff and the other clientele where all staring at Vic, Scab and the blank.

Single-minded, privacy-enforcing nanites went looking for the inevitable surveillance nanites to eat. As the privacy cage grew up out of the floor to encompass them, the last thing Scab noticed was a shaven-headed human woman watching them. There was something about her, something that screamed Church to him. Then the privacy field started up.

The automaton wasn’t the Absolute. The Absolute was changed. Human was no longer a word that could really be applied to it. It was a series of complex sense organs with redesigned neural pathways that could process sensations which would destroy a normal human mind and physiology. Its mind was spread holistically throughout its physical whole. It was an organism designed primarily to experience pleasure. Its physical body was buried deep in its home planet’s crust, protected by vast amounts of automated security, and provided for by automated life-support systems far from the eyes and touch of other people.

The automaton was designed to look like something from myth, to inspire awe: an idealised body of brass complete with a suitably intimidating phallus, the face of a pre-Loss ancient god made from beaten platinum and gold. It was an avatar, a messenger; it shared a fragment of its creator’s intellect and did the Absolute’s bidding. It helped keep the signal constant.

The hall in the Citadel was an appropriate place for the automaton. It was a huge, empty, echoing chamber of black marble. It was meant to look like a place where gods walked.

The cocoon lay on the cool marble floor. There was still a blue-white glow from within but it was fading. The automaton stared down at it for a long time. Finally it climbed onto the cocoon and lay down, caressing it.

One of the Absolute’s favourite toys materialised from the wall, like the cold dead marble had given birth. The Elite’s armour disappeared into his body, its absorption feeling like breathing in. The tall male-favouring hermaphrodite was no less alien and god-like despite his nominally human appearance. Expressionless, he watched the automaton’s sensual display as he walked over to the cocoon. Animated shadow followed him, making abstract but somehow terrible patterns on the floor.

‘Where is Ludwig?’ the automaton asked quietly. Its voice was the result of thousands of years of research by the uplifted races and AIs into trying to synthesise charisma and awe.

Fallen Angel closed his eyes. Sight had long since become an overrated sense. ‘He is drinking a star,’ the Elite answered, his voice deep and melodious.

‘They know it was us?’ the automaton asked. Fallen Angel just nodded. ‘Any trouble?’

‘Scab’s pale reflection was there.’

‘It is no matter; he is no longer an Elite. If he comes looking for it then he can play the Game.’

‘If the Consortium send their Elite?’

‘You’ll fight them, and stars will weep, but I don’t think they’ll risk full-scale war. They don’t have our sense of adventure. They like to control and measure their wars. Fight among themselves. That way they can be sure of the outcome.’

‘The Church?’

‘They would but don’t have Elite,’ said the automaton.

‘They have access to lot of S-tech.’

‘Embargoes are more likely, but the Consortium are as sick of their bridge monopoly as we are. We may find they are unexpected allies. No, this was one dice roll and we won.’

Fallen Angel knew that the wants and desires of the Absolute were not necessarily the wants and desires of other sentient life forms. ‘What are you going to do with it?’

‘It’s a toy. I’m going to play with it.’

The privacy field’s internal holographic projector was old but serviceable. It made them look like they were sitting at their table in deep space looking at a spiral galaxy. Vic liked it. It was retro but evocative.

Despite the Polyhedron’s security guarantees, Scab was still running his own checks. Privacy wasn’t as dead as people liked to claim. It was, however, very expensive.

‘I am disappointed.’ The words seemed to crawl across the blank’s features as a series of violent tics before they came rasping out of its mouth. Scab was mildly surprised that anyone would think he would care if they were disappointed.

‘So this is our mysterious employer then?’ Vic said largely for the sake of something to say.

‘What happened?’ the blank managed after a violent-looking facial spasm that made Vic sit back.

‘Doesn’t matter. It wasn’t viable,’ Scab told the blank.

The blank’s mouth opened wide. ‘I want it,’ it finally managed.

‘Whoever’s running the Monarchist systems these days wanted it more,’ Scab told the blank.

‘Two fucking Elites!’ Vic snapped, his mandibles clattering audibly.

‘Not one, because that would have been easy, but two fucking Elites.’

‘I want it,’ the blank repeated.

‘Elites are beyond my capabilities,’ Scab said. It sounded matter of fact, and only someone who knew him as well as Vic did could understand how much that admission cost him. ‘I would like to be able to kill them but I can’t.’