The Age of Scorpio

13

A Long Time After the Loss





Vic was no stranger to seeing or causing death. When he had been in the Thunder Squads his job had been property damage on a massive scale. One squad was enough to bring entire city sectors to their knees. He had been involved in the destruction of starscrapers, watching the weight of the buildings tear their top floors out of stabilised geosynchronous orbit. Collateral damage to sentient biomass had been inevitable but that had been on conflict resolution worlds. Though he had to admit that some of the CR worlds had been newly designated and the new designation had come as a shock to the civilian populations.

As the hard-tech-augmented insect watched his partner cut open the front of his own skull with a beam saw, he decided that it wasn’t the number of people that Scab had killed on Arclight with the virus just to get away, it was the context and quality of the killing. The Queen’s Cartel had a lot of money. If they let them get away with what had happened on Arclight then the cartel would look weak and their competitors would assume that they were prey. Vic didn’t even want to think about the ramifications of killing a Church Militiaman.

Travelling through one of the conduits in the exotic gasses of Red Space, Vic had been searching all the comms traffic on the beacons they were in range of, looking for bounties going down on him and Scab. It was okay for Scab – he would make a pile of bodies of any who came after him – but Vic knew it wouldn’t be the same for him. Vic was probably one of the top bounty killers, but the guys who they would send after them were at least his match.

‘At least it will be over soon,’ he actually said out loud. Then he found Scab staring at him. Oh now you’re listening, Vic thought.

So far there had been nothing. This meant that someone with an awful lot of resources to throw at this problem was running interference for them. What worried Vic the most, however, was that whoever their mysterious patron was, they had found a way to sufficiently motivate Scab into this insanity.

And this new madness. Despite the Basilisk’s excellent life-support systems, the ship could not quite scrub the smell of burning bone and flesh out of the air. The argument had gone on for some time, but it hadn’t been much of an argument. It had mostly been Vic screaming at Scab. It was only after he had thought to do a scan of Scab that Vic realised that his partner had been listening to his favourite pre-Loss music on ancient crystal earrings. Scab preferred listening to music rather than downloading it directly into his cerebral cortex via his neunonics. He claimed it sounded better. Vic just thought it showed what a throwback Scab was.

Finally Vic had refused to help. He told Scab that he would have to slave him. Scab had said that he could not risk the drop in performance that came with slaving; Vic had to help him willingly. Scab’s idea of willingness was to slave Vic and put him in an agony immersion of his own design just long enough for Vic to agree. Despite his hard-tech augment, Vic had shaken for hours after Scab had let him out of the immersion – the things he’d seen, experienced, the things in Scab’s mind. Scab had only ever done something like it once before. Vic realised how important this was to Scab.

Scab removed two slits from the bone in the front of his skull and lit a cigarette, dragging deeply. The Basilisk extruded the cold storage drawer with the two biotech organisms in it. Vic had started thinking of them as alien eyes and was more and more sure they were S-tech. He watched, unease trickling through him at some base, instinctual level. Scab lifted the bioware towards his head. Scab’s P-sat was hovering just over the hole in the skull, projecting a sterile field, though Scab’s own bioware and nano-screen were probably more than enough to ward off infection. Scab took another drag on his cigarette and placed the bioware into his skull.

Vic had to admit that things never got boring working with Scab. The universe might be infinite, though the sparsely starred sky of Known Space had always felt claustrophobic to Vic, but after seeing and doing the things he had seen and done with Scab, he was impressed that he could still feel horror and fascination as he watched the things crawl into his partner’s skull. Trickles of sweat made rivulets through Scab’s white make-up. Vic realised that his human partner was shaking. The bioware flattened itself into the two slits Scab had made in his skull. Tendrils burrowed into the grey meat. Vic was even sure he had seen sparks of bioelectric energy. He must be in agony, Vic thought. Good, stupid cunt.

A chair extruded from the white-carpeted floor of the Basilisk’s C and C/lounge and Scab sat down just a little too hard to make it look casual. The P-sat moved to continue projecting the sterile field. Scab reached into his suit and removed his works. Another pointlessly retro vice. Vic didn’t understand why he didn’t just download the drugs he wanted from internal storage. When he had asked Scab about this once, Scab had told him that as a child he had been the leader of a street sect on Cyst, his home planet. When they had captured him and sent him to the Legion, they had done neural surgery on him to remove some of his more dangerous traits. They had cut out the heretically religious aspect of young Scab, but ritual had remained important to him.

Not long after, Scab drifted away on a nod. Vic thought long and hard about extending a blade from one of his power-assisted limbs. Just pressing it into the grey meat. Scab’s P-sat would try and protect him of course, but good as it was, it was no match for Vic. Just a simple movement and all the madness and fear would be over.

He didn’t do it, of course. He didn’t like the way the two eye-like organs on Scab’s head above his human eyes seemed to stare at him. He felt like the coward he knew he was. He felt like he understood the politics of fear.

Instead of killing Scab, Vic went with his partner into Monarchist space, looking for the Citadel.

‘You didn’t kill me then?’ Scab asked when he awoke. Vic said nothing. ‘Good.’

The Citadel was out of phase. That much Scab was sure of. Entrance had required a different physical state. Technology, alien or not, was just something that made things happen when he wanted them to. The fragment of the god that lived with him in his skull had shown him the way. A different-coloured space. Reality was broken down to the level of subatomic particles, nothing more than a series of interlinked fields. The ancient technology meshed with human consciousness; science became instinct, matter merely vibration, and then his modified brain translated that information into something he could understand – physics as a waking hallucination. It felt like the defences of the Citadel were shredding him piece by piece, as he flitted between existences in different spaces.

He arrived naked, screaming, flayed and bloody on the cold black marble floor. It was like being born except he had been diminished. The powerful biotech implants notwithstanding, it had required every single intrusion trick he had known, and what knowledge of the Elite that hadn’t been cut out of him surgically and virally. He felt like he had been peeled back layer by layer to something raw, feral and inhuman.

He lay on the cold marble, regrowing layers of skin. Tiny nanites crawled through the pores in his skin to replace his repeatedly murdered nano-screen. He kept them close this time. This high chamber of marble was like a tomb from some xeno-archaeological immersion. There were only a few distant rays of light from some unseen source, but the light illuminated the motes of dust. Scab knew that much of that dust was nanites far in advance of any in Known Space.

He knew that the empty monolithic chamber masked the vast amounts of tech, Seeder and otherwise, that existed to support the Elite. There would be reservoirs of matter that could feed assemblers and provide solid ammunition to feed their weapons instantaneously via complex matter entanglement. Generators and controls, probably merged into the very matter of the place, to provide the defensive fields and stealth systems. Connections to the network of primordial black holes that powered Elite tech, again through complex entanglement, and presumably provided the power to keep the Citadel out of phase and in a different physical state to Real Space, assuming it was in Real Space. There would also be storehouses of forbidden S-tech, Scab imagined and half remembered.

The Scorpion was agony. It had burrowed deep into the flesh of his left arm, wrapping itself around the bones. Only the top of its back was visible, the sting twitching in and out of his skin. He could have deadened the nerve endings easily but didn’t. All sensation was a reminder of existence. The pain would end when he was finished. It was how he would know.

‘Are you a shade? Someone I’ve killed?’ The voice was beautiful, deep, resonant and so very sad-sounding. Scab rolled into a defensive crouch. The crouch in the presence of the figure that stood over him made him feel like a feral animal. Scab was fine with that. Sometimes beauty was there just to be destroyed.

The figure had a shock of the blackest hair that Scab had ever seen. Tall and so slender, he somehow looked delicate. There being no fat on him, despite his delicacy his musculature was perfectly toned. He might as well have been carved out of marble. His eyes were dark pools with stars in them. He was naked. Well, that wasn’t entirely true, Scab thought, he would have drawn his armour back under his skin.

Scab angrily drew upon his internal drug resources to subdue the feeling of awe rising in him. He knew that this was a tailored psychological response designed by the AIs and scientists who over the generations of the existence of the Elite had helped mould them into the legendary gods they were. Every movement, every mannerism designed to tell you one thing: there is no hope.

A moment of concentration and then recognition.

‘I’ve seen you before. We slew monsters and you were there.’

Fallen Angel.

‘I want the cocoon.’

‘I don’t really know what that means.’

‘The white thing you took off the Seeder ship.’

‘It wasn’t a ship, but I apologise. I have misled you. When I said that I did not know what that means, I should have said I don’t care.’

It was the tone of honest sympathy that angered Scab the most.

‘Is it here?’

‘Why would it be here?’

‘Because you brought it here.’

‘If we did, it would be because we are slaves. It will be somewhere else now.’

Scab stared at him. Still trying to shake the feeling that he was a disgusting beast in the presence of something transcendent.

‘Then you won’t mind if I have a look.’

Scab stood up and made as if to move past Fallen Angel. The Elite took Scab by the shoulder. Fallen Angel held him lightly but Scab could feel the power in the fingers. It was magnitudes above what Vic could have managed with his high-end, hard-tech augments, impressive for what was primarily soft tech. On the other hand, there had to be a price for laying a hand on Scab.

A flat palm to Fallen Angel’s wrist to knock the arm away. That almost contacted. The Elite made the moving of his arm out of the way look languid. Fallen Angel allowed the roundhouse kick to land, taking the meaningless impact on the shoulder. With Scab’s ability and soft-machine augments, he knew that the kick had more than enough power to powder bone in someone as highly augmented as he himself was. He was reasonably sure that Fallen Angel hadn’t even felt it.

Fallen Angel raised his knee level with his chin and then straightened his leg. The impact broke ribs. Scab spat blood in mid-air as the kick tore him off his feet and sent him flying backwards. He landed hard on the black marble. The noise of their violence seemed obscene in the otherwise quiet chamber.

Scab rolled back into his animalistic crouch and bared his teeth. Fallen Angel watched him, his expression a mix of curiosity and confusion. Scab ran at him, launching himself into the air, knees forward. It was an easy thing for Fallen Angel to roll under the blow.

Scab had known this. He channelled every bit of hatred, every bit of anger at being in a situation where he was so horribly outmatched, where cunning and ultraviolence would not see him through, where he wasn’t in control. The Scorpion, ancient and vile, responded.

The sting drew a long thin line of black just under Fallen Angel’s eye. This was extraordinary in itself. More extraordinary was the ancient venom in the sting actually giving the Elite’s internal antivirals a moment of trouble.

Scab landed, scampered across the floor like an animal, using one hand for support, and turned to face Fallen Angel again. The Elite touched his face and then held his black-covered fingertips in front of his eyes. The exotic matter looked like liquid as it was sucked back through his skin.

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 f*cking 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.

‘I had you cloned,’ Scab ’faced, the words soft and quiet in Vic’s mind.

‘Yes, thanks for that,’ Vic spat back. ‘You couldn’t leave me in peace then? Actually finally let me go?’ Vic had often thought that human tears looked very cathartic but were beyond him, and his pheromone-producing glands were not quite rebuilt yet. Scab seemed to be giving Vic’s words some thought.

‘You like life,’ he finally ’faced.

Vic gave this some thought. Scab was right. He like immersions, drink and drugs, partying, sex with experimental female-identifying humans, violence when he was in control; he sort of liked travel but was becoming more and more convinced that everywhere the uplifted races went was a shithole. Maybe it was all shallow stuff but Vic was happy with that. What he couldn’t cope with was the abusive, albeit well-paid, borderline slavery that was being Scab’s partner.

‘I’m seeking an end,’ Scab said.

Vic wasn’t sure what he meant. ‘And you have to take me along with you?’ Scab said nothing. ‘I take it we didn’t get the cocoon thing back?’ Vic just about made out Scab shaking his head through the thick opaque gel. ‘So we’re finished with this now? This is just so beyond us, even for you it’s just banging your head on a hull. There’s nothing we can do here.’

‘I got into the Citadel,’ Scab ’faced.

Oh shit, Vic thought. The insect knew this wasn’t over. He thought back to human tears. There was enough of Vic to push his way through the gel and press his chitinous features up against the tank’s transparent material.

‘So all that effort, the expense, the S-tech, the blanks, the viral attack on Arclight, the dead Church Militiaman . . . NOT TO MENTION MY F*ckING MURDER AT THE HANDS OF A SICK MACHINE MADE EONS BEFORE MY PEOPLE EVEN F*ckING EXISTED was for nothing?!’ He was absurdly pleased that he had managed to convey angry/shouty human across the interface.

Scab considered the outburst as a reasonably asked question.

‘I don’t know.’ He shrugged. He was still both worried and trying to make sense of the Elite’s words.

‘Look, this is about bridge technology. The Monarchists want it; the Consortium wants it so they can break the Church’s monopoly. It’s the key to Red Space. This is way out of our league.’

‘Fun though,’ Scab said. He almost meant it. He was healed, his hand regrown, but he still missed the graft. The eyes. What he had seen with them. ‘And you’ve said that before.’

‘We’re working for Consortium interests?’ Vic asked.

Scab said nothing, which to Vic meant he knew but was not going to say. Scab tried to avoid lying where possible.

‘What I don’t understand is why they haven’t sent their own Elite.’

‘Maybe they have. They are capable of acting with subtlety. Or maybe it’s a case of mutually assured destruction. The Monarchists are mad, the Consortium greedy. The Consortium know that sending their Elite will lead to a confrontation. A very expensive one.’

‘They must have better options than us.’

‘And they are probably using them in ways we don’t see. The nobody who gave us the S-tech graft for ex—’

‘He seemed more like a street heretic,’ Vic said. Scab just stared at the ’sect. He hated interruptions. ‘Sorry.’

‘Despite your whining, self-pity and lack of self-belief, we are two very capable operators.’

‘But it’s over now, right?’ Scab shook his hand. ‘You once told me that you were a killer, not a detective. They have the resources of the entire Monarchist systems at—’

‘They are fragmented.’

Though apparently it was okay for Scab to interrupt, Vic mused. ‘Even if it’s just one of the kingdoms. We’re two people and a ship you’ve bullied so badly the AI committed suicide.’

‘I killed it, well, lobotomised it.’

‘Whatever.’

‘We’re going to Pythia.’

Vic gave this some thought, feeling himself getting angrier as he did.

‘Why the f*ck didn’t we just go there in the first place?’ he demanded.

‘Intelligence pointed to the Citadel. It would have made sense to hide it there.’