The Age of Scorpio (29 page)

Fallen Angel was starting to look angry. He glanced at the Scorpion dug into the flesh on Scab’s left arm and hissed at it, eyes blazing. Scab actually screamed as the S-tech weapon burrowed under his skin, hiding itself completely in his flesh, brass-like living metal wrapping itself around his bones. He had to force himself to ignore the fear radiating from the Scorpion.

Fallen Angel strode towards him. Scab had to put every inch of effort into trying not to get hit. Years of experience, street fighting on Cyst, the planet that most embraced the creed of the cult of Darwin in Consortium space, every dirty trick he’d learned in the penal battalions of the Legion on countless CR worlds and what he could remember of the Elite dances. It wasn’t enough. It was a one-sided and short fight. It was like Fallen Angel was dancing with him in his sleep.

He spoke to Scab as he committed violence on him. The Elite threw a punch to his stomach that lifted Scab off his feet. For an absurd moment Scab felt that his opponent was wearing him like a glove.

‘You did not infiltrate.’

A casual axe kick fractured his skull despite it being seeded with armoured super-hardened ceramic and drove him to the marble floor again. All happening faster than the unaugmented would even be able to see.

‘We may as well have invited you.’

Picked up by the back of his neck and flung against the marble wall. Air forced out of him, replenished immediately by his internal systems, more broken ribs despite the carbon lacing. Fortunately his spine remained intact, though Scab suspected that this was calculation on Fallen Angel’s part to prolong the lesson.

‘You saw nothing of import.’

Lifted up off the ground by his skull. Both of Fallen Angel’s hands, with their long powerful fingers, were wrapped around it.

‘I can see the little god in your eyes. Remember that you did not do this; you are only a vehicle.’ Fallen Angel pushed his fingers into the alien eyes in Scab’s forehead and squeezed. Scab screamed in a way that would shame him when he thought back to it. It was a humiliation in a life largely free of them. The ancient eyes became a sticky mess on the end of Fallen Angel’s fingers.

‘The Consortium has tipped its hand. Now we know they know where we are. They should have sent their Elite instead of this ghost. We’ll move. You’re just here to learn what it’s like to be helpless.’

Now
, Scab thought. It was a coherent energy field weapon, a rod, more commonly known as an energy javelin. It was ancient S-tech and, like the Scorpion, completely illegal. It lived in a hidden sheath in Scab’s right arm. He killed with it only on special occasions. A momentary white and orange glow in the flesh as his neunonics sent the order, his hand swinging towards Fallen Angel. The mortal who killed a god. Maybe.

The time between thinking the order, the movement, the glow of the energy field initiating was so small as to be difficult to measure. It was enough. Fallen Angel grabbed Scab’s arm at the wrist and squeezed, crushing the sheath. Trapping the energy javelin, which started to cut and burn its way through Scab’s flesh. More screaming as flesh smoked and the smell of burning meat filled the air.

‘That might have actually hurt me,’ Fallen Angel said quietly, sounding calmer now. Scab’s right hand fell off, his wrist still glowing as the meat around it cooked. ‘But you’re not really there again, are you.’

Scab felt sick. Different, somehow less with the eyes gone. He was aware of his wounds, the holes in his skull.

‘Will you let him go for me?’ asked a female voice every bit as beautiful, resonant and sad as Fallen Angel’s. Scab managed to look up from the floor. His nano-screen was all but screaming warnings in his neunonics, his defences were being overrun. Elites fought at all levels of conflict.

Scab felt absurdly gratified that after dropping him, Fallen Angel had shown enough respect to take a few steps away, out of easy striking distance.

She was a female version of Fallen Angel: same black hair, a feminised version of the same build with small pale breasts, same eyes. Tall, slender to the point of fragile while still conveying power. Scab recognised her: she was the third monarchist Elite. She was called Horrible Angel and was said to be Fallen Angel’s sister.

Uncaring of Scab, she took her brother’s head and kissed him long and deep.

‘You know who he is?’ she asked when they had finished.

‘Another ghost of someone I killed who has followed me into the underworld. He’ll seek revenge but in the end just follow me with empty eye sockets and a tongueless mouth. Silent and accusing.’

Clearly to Fallen Angel it was all about him
, Scab thought. The idea almost made him smile. He was going to die fighting Elite. He had cut one, and given him pause with the energy javelin. Impossible feats for many. Scab wasn’t sure if it was enough.
If he could die now . . . No
. He remembered the deal he had made. This way it would not end.

‘No,’ Horrible Angel said. ‘This is Woodbine Scab, bounty killer extraordinaire and ex-Elite. One of us . . .’ Fallen Angel turned to look at him. Something had changed. It was as if he was regarding him in a new light as he wrapped his arms around Horrible Angel.

‘. . . now little more than a frightened animal,’ Fallen Angel said, finishing his sister’s sentence. ‘Why did they take your wings away?’

Horrible Angel turned to look at Scab as well. He had managed to back himself against the wall so he could sit up a bit. Trying to ignore his smoking wrist, he was tempted to tell them the truth. That he couldn’t remember. That the information was gone after they had mentally spayed him. It was, after all, very difficult to lie to Elite. They were trained and augmented to read people. They had to be able to predict the movements that any opponent made against them. Be it a single opponent in hand-to-hand or an entire Consortium navy battle group. Scab still had vestiges of the talent himself. He wished he had a cigarette.

‘I didn’t want to be a slave,’ he told them both. They both looked impassive. Maybe they believed him, maybe they didn’t, maybe he had inadvertently guessed the truth. It was the ultimate irony of the Elite. They were undoubtedly the most dangerous and physically powerful people in Known Space but their masters were not stupid. Their loyalty was conditioned and programmed to the nth degree, it was absolute. The killer gods were the ultimate servants.

‘What did you think you could do here?’ Horrible Angel asked.

‘He fought me,’ Fallen Angel said redundantly.

‘Did you think to use our arrogance against us?’ she asked. Scab couldn’t see the point in answering. ‘What if it’s not arrogance?’

‘I just want the cocoon?’ He felt the burning itch in his flesh, under his skin, coming from patches all over his body.

‘It is gone from here,’ Horrible Angel said. Her voice was little more than a sigh. ‘We know where and we know why but we will not tell you. As you pointed out, we are all the servants of contemptible gods.’

Scab’s chuckle sounded like dry paper being crumpled up.

‘Not me, not any more.’

‘You more than all,’ Horrible Angel said.

‘You are the most puppet of puppets,’ Fallen Angel said, almost brightly. ‘I can see your strings from all the way over here.’

He watched as the first lesion appeared. It looked like patches of skin were caving in. A fast-acting, flesh-eating nano-virus.

‘You’ve made his flesh necrotic,’ Horrible Angel said.

‘For you.’

‘It’s beautiful.’

All Scab could do was watch. A guest at his own consumption. Both of them turned back to him.

‘It was the connection,’ Horrible Angel said. Some feeling prickled Scab. He did not like this, did not want to hear her words.

‘At some base level we are attached to creation,’ Fallen Angel continued. It was true: the uplifted races understood very little about S-tech except how to use it, but the Seeders must have understood the universe at a fundamental level. The technology the Elite wore connected them to this somehow. Scab remembered Vic describing it as a gun being taught physics. He almost smiled at the memory.

‘It’s not slavery you fear. We are all slaves, even our shadowed undying masters, the Lords and Ladies of Monarchist and Consortium space,’ Horrible Angel said.

‘Even the Church. You are still a slave, you have always been a slave; everything else is just so much thrashing around signifying nothing. Little more than desperate cries for attention,’ Fallen Angel said.

‘You feared the truth,’ Horrible Angel said.

Scab wanted to tell her to be quiet. He opened his mouth to issue a pointless threat.

‘Don’t threaten her,’ Fallen Angel said. ‘If you threaten her I have to act.’

‘And you are more plaything than victim still.’ Filed teeth clamped together in Scab’s mouth. ‘Fear made you lose your wings, not the wish for false freedom,’ Horrible Angel continued. Then she stared at the necrotic patterns the virus was drawing in his flesh as if transfixed.

‘You cannot remember that destruction is your only birthright. You search endlessly not realising that the only freedom you have left is to come to terms with your slavery to grotesqueries. The freedom to realise that everything is meaningless. You don’t fear slavery, you’re a more sophisticated version of everyone else; you crave slavery. You were shown the truth and panicked. It is freedom you fear.’

Un-Scab-like retorts and denials filled his mind, but he just lay there and watched them. He could not know if what they were saying was true. That secret had long since been eaten from his mind. Connected though they were, with access to the highest levels of intelligence the Monarchist systems could gather, they could not have known the truth of his expulsion from the Elite. But there was something in their words that Scab did not like at an unconscious and possibly instinctual level. If this was what empathy felt like then he did not like it.

Again it was the sympathy on Horrible Angel’s face that got to him the most.

‘Throw him out,’ she told her brother. ‘Ludwig is killing his friend now.’ She turned and walked silently away, leaving Scab more than a little confused. He was about to die now but it wouldn’t be enough.

‘I don’t have any friends,’ he told Fallen Angel. It seemed very important that Fallen Angel understand this before he died.

Scab liked vacuum – he had been exposed before and felt a kinship with it. He was still alive. The virus had been trying to eat his flesh back to his skeleton when they flung him into space. Somehow the
Basilisk
had found him. The ship’s medical systems were able to counteract the virus but only because the virus allowed it. They had tested him but let him live. Scab could only imagine it was because they thought it crueller this way, but he couldn’t forget the look of sympathy on Horrible Angel’s face.

Vic opened his eyes to the inside of a clone tank in some faceless insurance company laboratory. He had never expected to see this again. Vic had used up the last of his insurance money when Scab had last killed him. More than anything, it annoyed Vic that Scab would not tell him why he had killed him the last time. He said that if Vic knew he would just have to kill him again. So someone else had paid for him to be cloned.

Vic felt the itch of the nano-sculpting of raw flesh as they rebuilt him. This was the cheap part, the flesh. The expensive part would be putting his hard-tech augments back in. The gear fetishist part of his custom-designed humanesque personality hoped that whoever was footing the bill would opt for upgrades. He felt the crawling beneath his vat-grown chitinous skull as neunonic-filled liquid software and hardware was implanted. This comforted him. Soon he would be able to communicate.

He had almost been free, he thought, free of Scab, but someone had brought him back again.

The memory upload of his last minutes hit him. Terror had overwhelmed him. He had been sat in the C and C/lounge of the
Basilisk
, feeling enough tension to make an augmented heart explode. The walls of the ship had been transparent but space was a blank canvas. There had been something behind him. It had ghosted through the hull of the ship. He had done the pheromonic equivalent of shitting himself. He did not want to turn around. He knew the machine was waiting for him.

They had taken everything from his mind, where he had been, what he had been doing. All they had left him with was the memory of the machine’s ability to kill him in a moment and make it feel like eternity. A lifetime of agony. That was their message for him.

What he couldn’t understand was why he still lived. Ludwig would have sensed the memory download application in his neunonics. Neunonic viruses that could be carried through the download process to wipe the victim’s mind utterly were among the most difficult and expensive to create, but an Elite, particularly a machine Elite, would certainly have access to them.

Through the gel he could make out unfocused grey eyes staring at him. Vic ignored his partner and as soon as the neunonics were installed set up a secure interface to the
Basilisk
. Even lobotomised (the ship had lost a disagreement with Scab), trying to talk to the ship’s AI felt like trying to coax a frightened animal out of hiding. Ludwig had hurt the ship as well and removed the relevant part of its memory.

Scab’s polite request to ’face sounded like someone knocking on his skull. Vic took the mental equivalent of a deep breath and then opened the link.

‘You got me fucking killed by an Elite! You don’t think this in-over-our-heads overkill bullshit has gone too far now?!’

‘It didn’t go well,’ Scab agreed. He was sitting on a chair outside the tank, hat in his hands, watching Vic in the tank as if looking for a clue or some sign of irredeemable weakness. Vic assumed he was engaging in the retro-vice of smoking just to annoy any of the insurance technicians who had olfactory glands.

‘I notice they didn’t kill you.’ Vic tried to put as much venom into the comment as he could manage. Scab was well known as one of the few bounty killers who never took out clone insurance. Vic was sure Scab wanted to die but on his own very specific terms. The ’sect was unsure what those terms were.