The Age of Scorpio

The Affinity Bridge - By George Mann


1

A Long Time After the Loss





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—’

‘F*cking 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 f*ck 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 f*cking 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 f*cking 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 f*cking clothes on!’ Eden said. Melia bared her teeth and hissed at the human – mostly – woman.

‘Go and f*ck 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 f*ck out of every halfwit with a penis?’

‘They like being looked after,’ Brett said.

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

Eldon’s mood had improved with Melia waking up but was now beginning to sour again. He needed to replace Eden but needed to find someone of her calibre that came at her price. He tried his best to ignore her. Instead he focused on the wriggling naked feline in his lap.

‘Will we be docking soon so we can go and do something fun?’ Melia asked.

‘Baby Doll.’ Eldon ignored the gagging sound that Eden was making. ‘We need you to do some work.’ Melia pouted. ‘Did you look at the data packet I ’faced you?’ Eldon had to suppress his irritation as Melia shook her head.

‘I figured that if it was important you’d tell me when I woke up.’ Melia concentrated for a bit. ‘We’re in the middle of nowhere, baby. Why’d you want to go into the Red here?’

‘We’ve been given a tip on a some salvage, Baby Doll.’

‘In Red Space?’ Melia’s purring baby talk had gone; now she sounded more businesslike. ‘Isn’t that like, really dangerous?’

‘Yes. There’s a reason the Church has us stay on the routes marked with the beacons,’ Eden snapped.

‘They’re paying a lot, Baby Doll – they even installed a new bridge drive,’ Eldon continued. Greed and the need to be safe warred within the feline.

‘Enough money to have fun?’ she asked. Eldon nodded. ‘A lot of fun?’ Eldon looked pained but nodded. Eden groaned as she saw her bonus getting smaller. Melia smiled.

‘I’ll go and put some clothes on before what’s-her-face expires in a puddle of jealousy.’

‘While you’re at it, why don’t you f*ck yourself?’ Eden suggested.

‘Only with Eldon watching, darling.’

Nulty didn’t want to miss this. It had been so long since the Black Swan had gone into Red Space. His hangar door slid down as he disconnected himself from his immersion link. In aperture configuration, Nulty scuttled out of the hangar on deceptively spindly looking insectile legs. Even living as a machine he felt the vertigo of being alone out in the stars and embraced it. He hoped he never grew tired of it. Though he had to cut off the comms chatter from the rest of the crew. He wondered how they could just bicker at times like this.

In front of the Black Swan space was ripped open, though Nulty did not appreciate it as violence. To him it looked like a tear lined with a silk ribbon of blue pulsing radiation. Through the tear it looked like space was bleeding, the bright crimson of Red Space. As incredible as this sight was, there was something about the fabric of Red Space that made him feel uncomfortable. He knew Red Space was dangerous. He knew much of it was uncharted territory, and in his several hundred years of spacefaring he’d heard all the stories, though like most people he’d never seen anything. Deep in his metal shell he just couldn’t shake the feeling that it was wrong at a fundamental level. If he were forced to put a word to it, the word would have been vampiric, though every time he thought it the rational part of his brain scoffed at him.

As they moved through into the eddying, seemingly living crimson smoke of Red Space, Nulty retreated back into his hangar. Reconnecting, Nulty went looking for solace in immersion fantasies.

‘Sorry, boss. Nothing but glitches,’ Brett told Eldon.

‘Baby, I’m bored,’ Melia said. Her tone suggested that she wasn’t just bored, she was more than a little worried.

‘Wow, so this is what Red Space looks like,’ Eden muttered to herself sarcastically.

‘Everyone f*cking shut up!’ Eldon shouted. He was trying to concentrate. He even ignored Melia’s pout, which this time wasn’t just for effect. They’d been in Red Space for the better part of twenty hours, running every conceivable sensor sweep they could. Different rules applied in Red Space, though none of them had ever thought to investigate those rules and find out how they worked. Normally it was just enough to know that some things worked, others didn’t, and stick close to the Church beacons so you didn’t get lost. Those different rules, however, were playing havoc with their sensor sweeps. They had been chasing glitches and sensor ghosts, some of them terrifying in scale, for the last twenty hours.

Despite the uppers, most of them were tired. Because of the uppers, most of them were jittery and even more irritable than normal.

‘What’s that?’ Eldon asked, sharing information with Brett.

‘Another glitch,’ Brett answered wearily. Eldon sighed and then highlighted more of the sensor information. ‘Okay, so it’s a repetitive glitch.’

‘If it’s that regular then there’s a reason. Nulty?’

Nulty had been quiet but he’d been monitoring the sensor sweeps through neunonic interface with his own liquid-software brain.

‘That’s called cause and effect,’ Nulty said over the interface.

‘The signal’s so weak,’ Brett pointed out.

‘Baby, are we moving?’ Melia practically mewed. She sounded frightened.

‘It’s okay, Baby Doll. The Red plays tricks with your perception, just like with the sensors. We’ve got the engines compensating for a stationary position.’

‘Does it play tricks on the bridge drive as well?’ the feline asked.

Normally Melia liked it when she was the centre of attention. She did not like it so much this time as they all turned to look at her.

‘What do you mean?’ Eldon asked. He wasn’t sure if it was his mind playing tricks on him, but now Melia had said that, it did feel like the Swan was moving.

Melia shared the pertinent bridge drive info over the neunonic interface.

‘Shit,’ Eldon said simply.

‘That’s weird. It looks like something’s pulling at it,’ Nulty said over the interface.

‘Ever seen anything like that?’ Brett asked.

‘No, never even heard of anything like that, and I thought I’d heard every bridge drive tale going.’

‘We could be about to start one,’ Brett said, his curiosity overriding his concern.

‘Maybe our mysterious benefactor gave us a dodgy drive,’ Eden said.

‘If something’s pulling at it, then there has to be some kind of measurable force or transmission,’ Nulty said. The rest of them just looked at each other blankly. Nulty had left human mannerisms behind a long time ago. He found himself missing sighing. ‘We’ve been looking for something solid, a wreck. Reconfigure the sensors to check every conceivable spectrum capable of carrying a transmission, then check the rest.’

Much to Eldon’s irritation the others didn’t even check with him; they just followed Nulty’s suggestion.

Eden didn’t say anything, but her expression changed to one of shock.

‘What?’ Eldon demanded. Eden shared the link. Over the ’face the transmission took life in the centre of their minds. At first it just sounded like a deeply unpleasant discordant noise that put them all further on edge. Then with the help of their internal systems they started to discern a pattern.

‘Is that a language?’ Brett asked. Even his normally positive attitude was being overridden by wariness bordering on fear. It felt like an ancient fear, like something he knew at some base instinctual level as an uplifted ape. One thing was clear: if it was a language then it was from a species very alien to any of the known uplifted races.

‘It’s singing,’ Eden said. There was something about it, drawing her to it.

‘Turn it off! Turn it off!’ Melia all but screamed. Melia could break the link any time she wanted and had in fact already done so. Eden just shook her head at the performance, but the others had broken their link to the horrific sounding ‘music’. Eldon was hugging Melia.

‘Boss, this is getting a little f*cking weird,’ Nulty said.

‘I don’t like this. Let’s go back,’ Melia said.

‘We can’t, Baby Doll. We need the payoff, we really do.’ Eldon’s tone was pleading for understanding.

‘Shine any light on this, Cap’n?’ Brett asked.

‘Just these co-ordinates. Find the hulk and take it to a rendezvous point.’

‘Not back to Arclight?’ Nulty asked. Eldon shook his head. Nulty saw the gesture through C and C’s optics.

Nulty ran some diagnostics on the signal, which was coming in from some exotic part of the EM spectrum. Eden had to scrub out the background noise of the Red to isolate it. Nulty shared the information and then did some further checking. That part of the EM spectrum matched some of the emissions produced by the bridge drive.

‘It’s talking to it?’ Brett asked when Nulty shared the information.

‘Don’t see how, it’s a drive,’ Eldon said. At this Nulty would have laughed but as an electronic uploaded consciousness it would have been an affectation.

‘No offence, boss, but the Church keeps their manufacture so secret we can’t really say anything about this for sure,’ Nulty said. ‘It might well be talking to something.’

Even Brett looked horrified. Melia bolted away from Eldon and hissed at him, all submissive coquettishness forgotten now.

‘No way! F*ck that! I am not getting involved in any Church shit! You can take my contract and use it to sodomise yourself for all I care.’

‘Are we working for the Church?’ Brett asked more reasonably.

‘I don’t know, not as far as I know,’ Eldon said, as confused and frightened as the rest.

‘If this is to do with bridge drives then more likely it’s a Consortium bid to break the Church’s monopoly on their manufacture,’ Nulty said.

‘You f*cking moron!’ Melia screamed at Eldon.

‘I didn’t know,’ he said defensively. ‘We’re jumping to conclusions.’

‘But that doesn’t make any sense,’ Brett said. ‘I mean, why us? After all we’re a bit . . .’

‘Crap?’ Melia suggested.

‘Rough and ready, I was going to say.’

‘Deniability and expendability,’ Nulty answered.

Melia turned on Eldon. ‘That’s it. Contract’s null and void. Get us out of here.’

‘But, Baby Doll—’

‘Don’t Baby Doll me, you repellent, cockless f*cktard. Get us out of here before a Church cruiser turns up, kills us, destroys our backup and murders everyone we ever met. I may be the cheapest clone possible of the original, but I have no wish to wake up in one of their immersion interrogations!’

Eldon seemed to deflate. He’d lost his big score, through that probably the Swan and his only real pleasure in life in one brief moment. Brett’s look of sympathy wasn’t helping either. Then he realised that Eden had been uncharacteristically quiet throughout Melia’s outburst.

‘Are you still listening to that noise?’ he asked. Brett turned to look at Eden. Melia did as well, an expression bordering on horror across her feline features.

Eden just shrugged.

‘Shut it off, now,’ Eldon said. Eden did so.

‘There’s another signal,’ Eden said. She tried to share the second signal. She found that the others weren’t so swift to interface with her.

‘You’ll want to hear this.’

‘She’s right,’ Nulty said over the interface. The others relented. This message was much weaker, broken. ‘What the f*ck is this? A radio wave?’ he mused to himself.

‘What’s a radio wave?’ Brett asked. Nulty ignored him.

The language was unknown but sounded like one of the uplifted races, probably human. Eldon started to ask if it was live but stopped as it repeated itself. It was some kind of recording. His neunonics searched for a translation program but came up with nothing despite the thousands of variant uplift languages and dialects in his systems.

‘I’ve got it,’ Nulty said over the interface. His voice didn’t sound right. ‘It’s a mayday signal in human common.’

‘Bullshit,’ Eldon started.

‘From before the Loss.’ The four of them on the bridge just stared at each other. Eldon was the first to smile. He looked over to Melia to see the cash signs mirrored in her eyes.

Nulty lived for extravehicular activity but he still wasn’t loving Red Space. Space should be really big. Somehow the strange gaseous-like nature of his surrounding environment seemed to be bearing down on him, making him feel claustrophobic. The living smoke effect of Red Space that he was used to was so much thicker here than on the normal Church-approved routes.

‘You got it?’ Eldon asked as Nulty scuttled over one of the detachable boosters, sending a diagnostic check as he did so. He’d sent some of the vacuum drones out but didn’t want to let them get too far from the drifting tug as he wasn’t happy with the ’face connection.

He reached the final spotlight and snaking tool limbs rapidly began repairing the ‘non-essential system’, as Eldon had called it when Nulty had suggested repairing it the last time they were docked at Arclight. He jury-rigged it and then stressed the repair by increasing the power output. The billowing red clouds were so thick here that the sensors were now next to useless, too much interference. It had rapidly come down to just what they could see with the optics.

They were letting the bridge drive pull them to wherever it was apparently going. Melia was running complex intelligent navigation programs that they hoped would be able to take them back to their initial position, or close to it, because they had no idea where they would end up with even a small amount of movement in Red Space.

The spotlight’s beam stabbed out into the living smoke with enough power to put some laser weapons to shame, illuminating swirling eddies in the red gases.

It appeared through the smoke like some primal leviathan.

They weren’t used to Nulty screaming. He just didn’t emote that much.

‘Turn on the engines! We’re going to hit it!’

Eldon and Brett reacted with a thought. It was a simple matter to swing the engine arms around to point subjectively forward and trigger the engines, halting and then quickly reversing the gentle forward momentum of whatever had been attracting the bridge drive.

Eldon was about to reproach Nulty for his overreaction, but Nulty chose that moment to trigger the rest of the spots and bring them to bear. Eldon saw just how close they had got to the other ship – thing – whatever it was.

‘How did we miss that?’ Eldon asked in awe. It was at least the size of a capital ship. He was pretty sure he’d seen smaller habitats.

‘Even now it’s barely there,’ Eden told him. She was just staring at it through the transparent smart-matter hull. All of them were using the ship’s sensors and feeds from the drone, Nulty and the external optics to get a more complete picture in their minds via their neunonic interfaces.

It was massive, dwarfing the Black Swan. The smoky Red Space seemed to stick to it somehow, helping to conceal it.

‘That’s not right,’ Melia said.

Eldon and Brett worked in conjunction to manoeuvre the Swan, tilting it subjectively downwards so they could get a better look at their find as they travelled down the length of it.

‘Can you clean up the resolution on the lenses?’ Eldon asked Nulty. ‘I think the gas is messing it up.’

‘No, you’re seeing what I’m seeing,’ Nulty said.

The hull of the ship, if that’s what it was, seemed to be made out of some kind of thick heavy-duty material which looked like the rubbery flesh of some sort of abyssal sea creature. It was so large that it was difficult to get an idea of its shape but it seemed aerodynamic enough for atmospheric operations. What he could see of the shape reminded Eldon of marine life, or maybe a seed pod. Then he saw the hull of the ship move. Like it was breathing. Melia, noticing this through one of the drones’ optics feeds, let out a little gasp.

‘I don’t like this,’ the feline said.

‘Can’t you say anything else?’ Eden demanded. ‘Very little heat bleed. If its internal systems are working then they are very efficient – f*ck all is penetrating its hull. Also getting some very strange energy readings from it, in weird spectrums. Like it’s generating a field of some kind.’

‘Be more specific,’ Eldon snapped.

‘Can’t,’ Eden said, sharing her readings with the rest of the crew.

‘It’s a Naga spore ship,’ Melia said.

‘There’s no such thing as Naga,’ Eden scoffed. Melia looked like she was about to argue.

‘You know what it looks like, don’t you?’ Brett asked. ‘A colonial carrier.’ Eldon started laughing; he liked it when Brett said something stupid.

‘Except they were made of metal. We’ve all been in one: they’re museums and churches now.’

‘Actually I grew up on habitats,’ Brett said. Eldon rolled his eyes as if that explained everything. ‘But I’ve seen pictures, and if they had been made of some kind of flesh then that’s what they’d look like.’

‘He’s got a point, boss,’ Nulty said over the interface. ‘Knew this guy once who claimed that all the museums and the churches that we supposed were in the hull of old colony carriers were actually fakes. ‘Course he also said he used to be one of the Lords of the Monarchist systems.’

‘Nulty, what do you make of the composition of the hull?’ Eden asked. She knew but she didn’t want to be the one who said it.

‘That hull’s alive,’ Nulty said, the first to give words to what they’d all been thinking. ‘That’s Seeder biotech, that is.’

On the bridge the four of them glanced at each other. They knew that managed correctly this could be worth a fortune, if they could hold on to their claim. The Seeders were the semi-mythical progenitor species of the uplifted races as well as the inspiration of worship for the Church. Most of the uplifted races having long abandoned the idea of actual supernatural gods.

‘Why’s it speaking monkey if it’s Seeder tech?’ Melia asked before remembering everyone else on the Swan was either human or started off that way. Brett looked at her reproachfully. Eden just glared.

‘I don’t know. I’m not getting anything through the hull. Eden?’ Nulty said.

Eden went through the sensor suite, but a combination of the Red Space environment and the craft/thing’s hull/skin was blocking even the harshest of active scans.

Something occurred to Brett. ‘Was this the area where the glitch was coming from?’ he asked Eldon.

Eldon considered this. ‘I don’t think so.’

‘So what? We tow this to the rendezvous and get paid?’ Melia asked, undisguised greed in her voice. She was not very interested in sensor glitches. Eldon seemed reluctant to answer the question.

‘What?’ Melia demanded.

‘We need to go on board,’ Eldon said. Melia looked at him like he was insane. Brett was nodding eagerly.

‘F*ck that!’ Melia said.

Eden was irritated to find herself forced to agree with Melia. ‘Go inside what? We don’t even know if it’s a ship! It could be a f*cking animal for all we know, and I don’t want to get swallowed. If it is a ship, the environment might be completely inimical to human life.’

Melia was nodding in agreement.

‘Then why’s it broadcasting in human common?’ Eldon asked.

‘I don’t know, a caught transmission? A lure?’

‘How dangerous can they be if they’re transmitting a mayday?’ Brett asked. Eden just looked at him as if he was a moron.

‘He’s right,’ Nulty said. ‘We want to salvage this, we have to check to see if it has crew.’

‘The crew of that thing can’t be subject to Consortium salvage laws,’ Eden said, getting more heated. ‘If that’s Seeder tech, what if the whole thing is filled with servitors? Have you thought about that?’ They gave a shiver. All of them had seen the wedge-headed, multi-limbed, armoured carapace effigies of the last living remnants of Seeder biotech, crucified on the X-shaped crosses in churches.

‘Then we can’t take it back into Known Space,’ Nulty said.

‘Look, this is a big f*cking score—’ Eldon started.

‘Yeah, for you. Even with a bonus it’s not worth the risk for the rest of us,’ Eden said. Eldon was less than pleased to see Melia nodding in agreement.

‘But, Baby Doll, you’ll get to share in my fortune,’ Eldon pleaded.

‘Uh uh, not this time. I want an equal share. When I agreed to our little arrangement you misled me into thinking that you were a ship’s captain . . .’

‘I am.’

‘No, you’re owner of a piece of shit. I want an equal share.’

‘Equal share? Are you actually going to do something or just hide in your cryo-pod until it’s over?’ Eden asked.

Melia turned to glare at the more masculine, scaled woman. ‘I’ll do my bit,’ she answered haughtily. Eden just raised an eyebrow.

‘Look. I am the captain, and you will f*cking do as you’re told or you’ll be out that airlock for mutiny!’ Eldon screamed at them, visions of his fortune slipping away. Melia, Eden and Brett just looked at him sceptically.

‘And how do you intend to enforce that?’ Eden asked. Eldon turned to look pleadingly at Melia. He couldn’t believe she’d turned on him after he’d treated her so well.

‘Oh, grow up,’ the feline snapped.

‘I think it’s time to negotiate, boss,’ Nulty said.

‘This is mutiny,’ Eldon said weakly. The rest of them ignored him. ‘We don’t even know how to get in.’

Eldon had finally admitted how much his mysterious contact was paying him after Eden held him upside down and Melia threatened to torture him. To make matters worse, Brett had had to intervene on Eldon’s behalf, further adding to the humiliation.

Brett was piloting the Swan steadily nearer to the craft/thing, trying to get close enough for their active scans to work, when it happened. During a very slow pass, something seemed to grow out of the craft. It looked like a tunnel made of the hull’s rubbery flesh.

‘What is it?’ Melia asked. There was something obscene about it, Melia decided, and it wasn’t as if she had terribly delicate sensibilities. ‘Some kind of defence system?’

‘I don’t think so,’ Nulty communicated over the interface. ‘I think it’s a docking arm?’

Brett swung the engine arms around to bring the Swan to a halt. The tunnel seemed to be swaying in the cloudy Red Space in front of them.

‘You’re going to let that touch the Swan?’ Eden asked doubtfully, looking over at Eldon. Eldon was crouched in the corner, sulking. He had been trying to work out how get the money for the ship/thing and then burn the rest of the crew. He looked up at the sound of Eden’s voice.

‘Oh what? Am I captain again? Is there actual work to be done?’

‘Take it easy, Cap’n,’ Brett said good-naturedly.

‘Go and f*ck yourself, muscle-head,’ Eldon muttered. Brett just laughed as if it was friendly banter.

Eldon had seen the thing in his mind but he walked over to look through the transparent hull.

‘Nulty, if it goes badly do you reckon you can cut that thing?’ Eldon asked.

‘Er . . . yes,’ Nulty said. He did not sound very sure of himself.

Eldon turned to Eden. ‘Sure, why not? A fifth of something is better than nothing and you gotta take risks if you want the pay-off. Besides,’ he stabbed a finger at Melia, ‘maybe then I can get rid of this bitch and get a decent concubine.’ Eldon glared at her. ‘You’re coming. None of your bullshit. I’ve got the contract. You don’t come, you don’t get paid, understand me?’ Melia looked like she was about to argue. ‘Besides, if it all goes horribly wrong I want to make sure that you die as well as me.’

Melia hissed and made an obscene gesture.

Brett pushed both hands into the ball of semi-solid liquid. The spacesuit started crawling up his arms, covering them and then growing down his torso. He held the visor in front of his face and the liquid suit crawled over his head to connect with it. The armoured environment bladders on the suit inflated as they took gas from the surrounding atmosphere. The suit had already connected to his neunonics and Brett adjusted the gas mix with a thought.

He had already adjusted his nano-screen, brought it in close to his body, only leaving a little outside the suit. Whenever he did this it always made his skin crawl but he knew this was psychosomatic. A screen of nanites surrounded Brett, like everyone else in Known Space, everyone who didn’t want to quickly sicken or die and could afford it. The screen prevented him from being attacked by rogue nano-swarms, provided him with a degree of privacy and stopped him from coming down with all but the most sophisticated advertising nano-viruses. Nanite pollution was so extreme in all but the most expensive enclaves in Known Space that without a screen you would be dead within days, or at very best sporting a colourful rash advertising the latest soft drink.

However, for cultures that did not have such a high level of nanite pollution exposure, the nano-screens themselves could be potentially harmful.

‘First-contact protocols?’ Brett asked. He had just realised that he’d always wanted to say that.

Melia and Eden stopped and looked at him as if he was mad.

‘What do you think happens if there’s a crew on board, arsehole?’ Eldon demanded. Brett was taken aback by the anger in his tone. Eldon was just pissed off that he had to spell this shit out to Brett. ‘We get nothing. Reining in our nano-screens is the least of our issues.’

Brett just stared at Eldon as he lifted one foot and then the other so the spacesuit could assemble the hard-wearing soles.

Eldon was holding the quick-release holster for his double-barrelled laser pistol to the thigh of the suit so it could bond, as Eden handed out the double-barrelled disc guns. The disc guns were basically electromagnetic shotguns. It fired solid-state cartridges of smart matter that split into multiple razor-sharp aerodynamic discs. Designed to be fired semi-automatically, the disc guns had a pump-action mechanism to help clear the inevitable jams. Like most brutal close-quarters weapons, they had been designed by one of the tribes of lizard uplifts. Eden held out one of the weapons to Brett. He eyed it through his visor for a while and then took it from her.

‘Just so you know,’ Eldon said, holding up a hardened biohazard container. ‘Just so you’re in just as much trouble as the rest of us if this screws up. Just so you can’t claim you had no knowledge or rat us out, this is a bucket of the most potent virals I could lay my hands on. If we get in and there’s crew, this is for them.’ Brett stared at it. He looked like he was about to object but he caught a glimpse of three hard faces watching him through darkening visors. ‘In fact, I think you should carry this.’ Eldon held the canister out. Eldon was enjoying this, starting the boy down the long road of moral compromises and disappointments that was life. He also thought he was doing the boy a favour. You want to prosper, then people are going to have to die; it was an important life lesson.

‘I don’t want to—’ Brett began.

‘Just f*cking man up,’ Eden snapped at him. Brett had thought they were friends.

Brett swallowed hard and took the canister from Eldon.

‘F*ck up, you get left. Don’t hold up your end, you get left. Understand?’ Eldon was starting to feel more in control again. Also, he was never going to get tired of making this kid miserable. Brett just nodded.

With a thought Eldon fired the Swan’s engines gently to spin the ship slowly and match up the end of the tunnel of flesh with the Swan’s crew airlock. Compared to the jarring impact of most docking arms, this felt like a kiss.

Eden checked the readings from the sensors on the outer airlock door in her neunonic feed. ‘We’ve got a seal. Atmosphere looks fine, all within uplift tolerances, no discernible exotics, no discernible nano-activity, but I’ll run a more thorough check when we’re through . . .’

‘What?’ Melia asked.

‘Nothing, just it looks a bit moist is all.’

Eldon tried not to think that he’d let his clone insurance lapse. He transferred command protocols to Nulty.

‘You’ve got the Swan, Nulty,’ he said across the interface.

‘Okay, boss. Go careful.’

Eldon sent the command to open the airlock.