The Age of Scorpio (35 page)

‘What do you mean? My sister’s d—’

The bag lady blew smoke all over her. Beth coughed, her eyes watering, and turned away. By the time the smoke had cleared, the woman was nowhere to be seen.

Beth sat down hard on the steps. It was just a weird coincidence, she told herself, the ramblings of someone with mental health problems. Her sister was dead. This had nothing to do with her. She could work hard, get on with her life and be normal. At the back of her mind, the question
What if Talia is alive?
just wouldn’t leave her in peace.

‘Well?’ Baron Albedo asked. Both of them had their hoods up. They liked the look and were only peripherally aware that it would draw attention to them rather than away.

‘Our journey might not be quite the waste of time that the pimp made it out to be,’ King Jeremy mused. The pair watched the response to the destruction of Weightless. It was kind of cool because it was like a disaster movie, but a bit lame because it was British, which made it look low-budget.

The flickering black wound in Red Space at the bridge point to Pythia looked soothing to Vic. Scab had made as much of the hull transparent as he could. Vic wouldn’t have minded so much but Scab had retracted the walls to Vic’s room to make the ship as open plan as possible. Vic’s psychotic partner reclined in one of the smart chairs. The light of Red Space made his naked form look like he was covered in blood.

They said that the really damaged could talk to Red Space. Vic wondered if Scab was communing. Vic, on the other hand, had red fatigue. The constant light was making him angry. He had tried to immerse as much as possible. Experiencing his favourite colonial immersions starring his namesake Vic Matto, letting experimental soundscapes wash over him. None of it was really helping.

The bridge point to Pythia was one of the busiest points in Red Space. Ships were queueing at the bridge-point beacon, sending their bids through to transponders in Real Space for their place in the line. Coming to Pythia was always expensive.

Engines glowing, the
Basilisk
flew down canyons of parked ships. There were vessels from all the main corporate interests in the Consortium, each jockeying for more market position despite ultimately serving the same organisation – competition for the sake of it. Odd-looking craft from the various Monarchist systems, part works of art, part throwbacks to eras that were probably mythical anyway, and part external manifestations of decadent and broken minds. Massive military ships, brooding tonnes of armoured potential violence, moving slowly and majestically through the red, the well-armed beacons tracking their movements. It would not be the first time there had been violence at a bridge point. Then the smaller ships, private yachts of the super-rich, broken-down vessels belonging to info prospectors and gamblers looking for their big break, craft so anonymous that they screamed some intelligence agency or company, a heretical sect looking for enlightenment or whatever the opposite of enlightenment was. The poorer ships containing plenty of supplies for the months or years of waiting their turn.

And bounty ships.
People like us
, Vic thought. Small, fast, well armed, mostly ex-military ships. If they could afford what Pythia charged then they were good, the sort of people that the Queen’s Cartel might send after them. Even before getting in-system, the Pythia bridge point was a reasonably good place to mine data, and neither Vic nor Scab could find details of any bounty on them. Vic gave this some thought. It either meant that there wasn’t one, or it had been done carefully and contracted to professionals.

On the first day they saw some junk ship come apart under the barrage of a garish Monarchist pleasure barge. There hadn’t been any reason that Vic could see. It was probably just to relieve the boredom. The Pythia bridge-point beacons responded immediately. An AG-driven autonomous suicide drone was launched. Its AI system had it dancing around the beams of the pleasure barge’s defence systems. At the same time the beacons were broadcasting their automated admonishment of the pleasure barge publicly, along with how much property damage the suicide drone was about to do and how much it was going to cost them.

The suicide drone was destroyed as it closed but not before it fired its sub-munitions, clustered high-yield lasers, which lit up the barge’s energy displacement grid, and low-yield fusion warheads, which blossomed blue against the red. Massive reactive armour plates blew out. New matter poured like sentient tar from the chagrined pleasure barge’s carbon reservoir.

‘Thank goodness they didn’t kill anyone important,’ Vic muttered as he watched the engraved murals self-etch across the pleasure barge’s new armoured skin.

It was the only interesting thing that happened while they waited, though Vic kept checking for bounty ships.

It was two days before their turn came up. Two days was pretty quick. Again Vic marvelled at the resources behind this job. It was still, however, two days of being bathed in red. Two days of Scab lying naked and unmoving on the sofa. Some of the time Vic was pretty sure that he was data-mining, but not all the time. Fortunately Scab was using the smart chair’s catheter and cleaning facilities. He was also smoking enough to make the ship smell despite otherwise excellent atmosphere scrubbers. Although furious with Scab, Vic eventually got bored and started talking to him, but Scab did not answer.

Bridging back into Real Space was cool relief.

With unaugmented vision Vic could make out the burn of the engines of other ships making for Pythia. Pythia itself was a disc of shadow deep in a cloud of particulate matter thought to come from one or more long-destroyed planets. The cloud glowed gold, illuminated by light refracting from the system’s giant yellow sun. The star had a number, probably of interest to navigation systems and ship AIs, but nobody had ever named it. Pythia was the only thing that mattered in this system.

Closer to Pythia, the planet’s long-range orbital defences let the
Basilisk
know that it was extensively covered. Scab ’faced his privacy bid over. Privacy was like everything else: you either fought or paid for it. When a mote of dust could spy on you, then those with the best tech and the most money got the best privacy. Vic had been told of a time where privacy was a right, before the Loss. He suspected that it was as mythical as the Naga. If there were people around to make money from it, he couldn’t understand why they wouldn’t exploit it. One of Pythia’s hospitality contractors got back to them. The contractors were one of the lesser-known branches of the mystery cult, but they seemed competent and had accepted their bid. Scab changed course and made for their habitat after clearing it with the defence systems.

‘So are you going to put some clothes on?’ Vic asked. Scab still ignored him.
For fuck’s sake
, the ’sect thought,
I’m supposed to be angry with him and he’s the one doing the ignoring
. At the back of his head he knew this was because Scab didn’t care. They weren’t friends or even partners really; he was a resource, like the ship.

Space was more and more crowded the closer they got to Pythia. Vic could see the various habitats in orbit run by the subcontracted cult of Pythia employees. They went from garish, over-the-top, neon-lit luxury hotels to zero-G coffin stacks. Shuttlecraft and heavy maintenance automatons flew between the habitats and the heavily armed orbital fortresses with their rings of weapons satellites and static AG smart munitions. Vast fields of orbital solar panels absorbed light from the star, and along with various massive power-generating stations, dipped tethers into Pythia’s cloudy upper atmosphere. Occasionally ghost fire could be seen flitting around the far end of the tethers. The tethers were the only thing other than sacrifices allowed through the atmosphere.

Scab banked the
Basilisk
over one of the super-hotel habitats. Vic looked down through the commercial holography displays, through the ornate transparent hull designed to look like crystal with iron supports, at the sculpted island landscape of the pool area. As they passed, the hotel’s weapons batteries tracked them across its territory. The habitat they were making for was supposed to be mid-level and anonymous. Scab hadn’t paid for luxury; he had paid for secrecy and security.

An incoming comms warning was ’faced from the
Basilisk
to Vic and then promptly disappeared as if it had never existed. Vic checked the
Basilisk
’s systems. The message had disappeared from there as well. Vic turned to look at Scab in his chair.

‘What was that?’ he demanded. At first Vic didn’t think Scab was going to say anything. He was lying perfectly still, a long head of ash on the cigarette held in his fingers. Finally Scab turned to look at him. The ash didn’t fall.

‘If I tell you, do you promise not to go on at length?’ The vibrations of his voice sent the ash tumbling to the floor, which quickly absorbed the waste.

‘It’s the
St Brendan’s Fire
, isn’t it?’ Vic asked, referring to the Church frigate that had tried to accost them as they were leaving Arclight. Vic crossed all four of his arms. Scab just sighed. ‘Did they say what they want?’

‘They want us to stop searching for a way to break their bridge monopoly.’

‘Which I’m comfortable with.’

‘See, I just didn’t want to have the same conversation again.’

‘Well, I’ll just do as I’m told then.’ Despite the angry clattering of his mandibles, Vic was sure he nailed the intonation of human sarcasm.

‘Good,’ Scab said. Vic was a little annoyed that Scab appeared to have missed it.

Scab put a hat and sunglasses on. In the centre of the lounge a holographic picture of an augmented, heavyset feline male appeared. Vic looked over the feline. He wore utilitarian clothes that looked heavy enough to have significant built-in armour and an energy dissipation weave. The weapons he wore on display were similarly functional – no show, just utility.

‘That Jide?’ Vic asked, and then increased the magnification of the image, paying attention to the striping on the feline’s fur. ‘I didn’t realise he was a Rakshasa.’

Scab nodded. The Rakshasa were an aristocratic warrior elite found on some of the more hidebound feline planets. As individual combatants they were very dangerous because of their warrior philosophy. As soldiers they were difficult to lead.

More detailed holographic images were appearing in the air. Rotating images showed. A human half-and-half whose slender androgynous beauty even Vic was able to admire. S/he was their kick-murder specialist, their silent killer.

Two humans, over-muscled man-plusses. They were either genuine twins, genetically altered to become twins or just cut to look the same. Obvious conflict-resolution world veterans, both of them sported significant levels of hard-tech augment. The twins were all scar tissue, metal and hardened composite.
Either one of them could give me a run for my money if they know what they are doing
, Vic thought.

The fifth and final member of the team was also significantly hard-tech augmented, though with some interesting soft-tech enhancements as well. The lizard was obviously a berserker. Their close-in specialist. Once berserk, he would be little more than an unpredictable scaled weapon.

‘Seeder’s sake, that’s a heavy crew,’ Vic said, wishing he could whistle through his mandibles. The ’sect ’faced to local comms and found that Jide’s crew weren’t much below Vic and Scab in the bounty-killer ratings. They specialised in taking down heavy high-profile targets. ‘Wonder who they’re here for?’ But Vic already had a sinking feeling. Scab turned to look at his partner. Scab’s milky eyes were hidden behind the lenses of his sunglasses. Vic looked at the holography and then back at Scab. He thought he detected the ghost of a smile on the human’s face. ‘They could actually do it!’

‘Then I’ll be dead and you’ll be free,’ Scab said and turned back to stare at the transparent ceiling. All around was the light and metal of busy high orbit. With a thought Scab rolled the
Basilisk
until their subjective up was looking down at the cloudy planet.

Vic didn’t need to download any information on Pythia; everyone knew the story. It hadn’t been called Pythia originally. It had been one of the first planets to be colonised by lost humanity. Overcrowded, its environment and resources were exhausted after centuries of habitation. Unrestricted nanite use led to overwhelming nano-pollution which first became a health risk and then a global pandemic. The solution was more nanites, a tailored viral nano-swarm designed to eat all the others and then destroy itself. However, the design team of the consumption swarm had been infiltrated by a nanite rights terrorist organisation. Instead of consuming the planet-wide nano-epidemic, it became its operating system and united it as one god-like swarm. The first thing the Pythia virus did was become a wind that blew across the planet, eating layer after layer of the planet’s inhabitants’ flesh. Flaying them down to picked-clean polished bone and then eating the bone as well. Pythia simultaneously became the planet’s only sentient inhabitant and a civilisation in its own right made up of uncountable millions of tiny individuals.

This caused panic in the Consortium systems. Pythia had made it quickly into orbit, its unparalleled processing power allowing it to hack even the most secure military systems if they were ’faced. If they weren’t ’faced then they could still be hacked, assuming a self-replicating mote of dust could get close enough to them.

The Consortium navy blockaded the bridge points. The navy sent entire battle groups after ships containing Pythia, and hired veritable fleets of bounty ships to do the same. Pythia was tracked down and destroyed, all except for the original planet. There was a battle between Pythian-held orbital weapon systems, the Consortium navy and at least one member of the Consortium Elite at the time. Pythia was eventually eradicated from orbit.

Nobody was quite sure what to do about the planet. Destroying it was a risky proposition because nobody could guarantee that wouldn’t just spread the nanites across system space. Blockading was another possibility, but people would always try and find a way back for whatever crazy reason they thought they had. Tailored seek-and-destroy nano-swarm bombing was the only real option, but that had not worked well the first time.