The Age of Scorpio

34

A Long Time After the Loss





‘What are you doing?’ Vic demanded as he watched the cocoon slowly dissolve. Vic was reasonably sure that he had nailed a very human-sounding borderline hysteria in his voice. If not, he knew that Scab would pick up on his panicky pheromone secretions. ‘We’ve got no idea what’s in there. It could be viral; it could be dangerous Seeder tech – anything, something worse than the Scorpion. You can’t open it.’

‘And yet . . .’ Scab said. He hadn’t taken his eyes off the cocoon. He was getting dressed. He had injected himself with a chemical, given to them on the Living Cities, which was slowly returning Scab to his normal self, reversing the DNA process that had allowed him to disguise himself on Game. Vic had brought some of Scab’s stuff with him: his suit, hat, hand weapons, the energy javelin, his P-sat – though not the heavy combat chassis – a case of cigarettes, ear crystals with his music and the case for his works. The important stuff, Vic had guessed. Scab’s internal repair systems were still trying to regrow part of his face.

‘Look. Let’s just deliver it to your employer and retire, separately, rich, or at least almost out of debt, to a life of luxury, and wait for the Church, or some of these Monarchist crazies to, at best, assassinate us. If you’re bored you can hunt down the surviving crew members. You’ll enjoy that.’ He glanced up at Scab.

‘I’m tired of being a nightmare. You don’t have much imagination, do you?’

‘That’s really not true. I have lots of it, and all it’s being used for is to imagine the bad shit that’s going to happen to us as a result of this. Much of it involves very powerful people using a remarkable amount of resources to make me suffer.’

‘We’re not turning it over,’ Scab said. He was still staring at the cocoon as he pushed the javelin back into its hidden sheath in his right arm. The coherent energy blade glowed under his flesh for a moment. Once the shock of Scab’s statement had worn off, Vic realised that Scab actually had an expression on his face. Curiosity.

‘W-w-why not?’ Vic managed. He wasn’t sure he’d ever been so frightened, not even after he’d had his brain modified to be more human and he’d experienced his first dream. Apparently foreign images in his head while he slept – it had been terrifying.

‘What do you mean why not?’ An insect gaping is basically an insect with all its mandibles open. Scab looked up at Vic as if noticing him for the first time. ‘Everyone wants this.’

‘Yes, I’ve noticed that,’ Vic said, sounding a lot calmer than he felt. ‘I think the being killed by an Elite drove it home. So what – and I want to know the answer to this question less than any question I’ve ever asked before – do you intend to do with it?’

‘Well, to get the best price, we should auction it,’ Scab said as he ensured that all his weapons were sitting properly in holsters and sheaths.

Vic nodded, shutting down certain of his mental faculties and transferring their running to his neunonics, while he drowned himself in tranquillisers so he wasn’t utterly overwhelmed by hysteria.

‘And who do you envision coming to this auction?’

‘I’d imagine the main bidders will be the Church, the Consortium and representatives from the Monarchist systems, but anyone who can meet my price is welcome.’ Everything in place, Scab lit up a cigarette. His neunonics were cycling through his collection of pre-Loss music trying to find something appropriate for the cocoon’s big reveal.

‘Please, Scab, don’t misunderstand me. I have delusions of ruling Known Space as well, but we don’t have the power to back it up. We’re just a couple of guys with guns is all.’

‘It’ll be difficult, but I’ll find a way to make it easier for them to just give me what I want.’

‘They’ll track us down and kill us afterwards.’

‘I’d welcome that.’

‘What about me? I don’t have a f*cking death wish.’

‘What about you?’

‘They’ll kill me.’

‘At best.’

‘That’s what I said!’

‘So?’

Vic stared at him for a moment. He saw this was going to be problematic.

‘You can understand why I don’t want to be killed, right?’

‘I guess. I just don’t see what it’s got to do with the plan.’ Scab was getting angry.

‘F*ck you, Scab.’ It might have been one of the bravest things he’d ever done. Scab looked at him like he was studying some kind of new phenomenon.

‘What do you think our arrangement is?’

‘Slave.’

‘Don’t give me that. You are very well paid.’

‘Can I leave now?’

‘Obviously not. You are a resource, a very well-paid resource. Don’t ever forget that. You have had a good run and been well paid for it, but nothing is for ever.’

‘Motivating.’

‘Would you prefer to be slaved?’

‘What are you asking for from the three most powerful groups in Known Space?’

‘Would you prefer to be slaved?’

‘I deserve an answer.’

‘You deserve what I choose.’

‘The problem with you, Scab, is you don’t leave people with anything. It’s all very well being the most hard-arsed cunt in Known Space, but you’ve left me with nothing to lose, so either kill me, slave me, go f*ck yourself or answer the f*cking question.’ Vic was pretty sure he had killed himself.

Scab was staring at him. His face seemed impassive again but Vic knew the human well enough to recognise the anger.

‘Nobody’s spoken to me like that since the Legion.’

Vic just spread out all his limbs, palms up, fingers open in a kind of multi-limbed ’sect, I-don’t-care shrug.

‘If I tell you, will you stop whining and be useful again?’

‘Oh, I apologise that my impending death is making me whiny.’

The look that Scab then gave Vic let him know that the human was being indulgent. Vic guessed that retrieving the cocoon and double-crossing the Church had put his ‘partner’ in what passed for a good mood in Scab world.

‘Fine. Yes, then. I’ll stop “whining”.’

‘I want the surgery they did when they made me join the Legion undone. I know they have a full copy of my personality in the Psycho Banks. I want to be as I was, full and hole, not this weakened version of me.’

‘A monster?’ You had to work hard for that word to mean anything among the casual cruel brutalities of Known Space.

‘Whole.’

‘King Shit of Cyst?’

‘I’m missing something.’

‘That’s not much to ask.’

‘Then I want to be Elite again.’ Something cold ran through Vic as Scab said this. It was a very human feeling.

‘That will just put you under the control of whichever power agrees.’

‘Not if I don’t undergo the conditioning.’

Vic stared at him. He thought he had known it was coming. He had heard stories about Scab: the street sect on Cyst, his kingdom of agony, the mountain of bones, from gang leader to world ruler under the Consortium’s nose. As an Elite with no control over him, he could do the same to star systems, perhaps even more than that.

It wasn’t bravery. It was instinct. Vic was moving before he had even thought it through. If he had, he would have been too frightened to do anything, or he might have killed himself and hoped for the best.

His top right limb drew the triple-barrelled shotgun pistol. The left was going for the reptile power disc. His lower limbs were drawing both double-barrelled laser pistols.

Scab threw himself over the cocoon, the metalforma knife palmed into his left hand. He threw it as he rolled. His clothes turned into a red neon grid as four beams hit. The tripled-barrelled blast caught him in the back. The explosive rounds penetrated his armoured clothing and hit his hardening skin and then exploded, taking a chunk out of his back.

The knife hit Vic in the throat. It didn’t penetrate his armour but stuck there, the smart-matter blade digging through the armour for flesh. Scab’s P-sat rose behind Vic and lit up his energy dissipation grid with laser fire.

Scab was on one knee, filling the air with flechettes from the spit gun in his right hand. The flechettes would do little but irritate and distract Vic. Scab emptied the reptile mini-disc launcher on his upper left arm. The hundreds of tiny discs were keyed to track Vic’s electromagnetic signature. Scab was a bright neon figure now, his energy dissipation grid glowing, about to succumb to Vic’s laser fire which would cook his flesh.

Dropping the empty shotgun pistol, Vic leaped into the air, extending the blades on his top two limbs, still firing the laser pistols with his lower limbs. The leap took him over the cocoon. Scab drew his tumbler pistol and had time to fire twice. The slow bullets would burrow through Vic’s armoured exoskeleton and then fragment, spinning inside him. Vic sent an incredibly illegal post-mortem kill instruction to his neunonics, which would in turn control his hard-tech systems that made up the majority of his body and keep his weapons firing.

Vic landed in front of Scab already dead. The metalforma blade had pushed through his neck armour and fanned out, killing him.

Vic’s blades scissored in on Scab, the ’sect’s lasers still firing. Scab stepped inside the reach of the blades. His right forearm glowed momentarily, and the spit gun he was holding exploded as the energy javelin shot through it and Scab drove it into Vic’s chest cavity. The S-tech coherent energy-field weapon cut through Vic’s armoured skeleton, Scab moving it around inside his partner’s chest until the post-mortem attack was beyond the corpse’s capability.

Vic’s body stopped moving. Scab, bloody and burned, stepped out of Vic’s bladed embrace and looked at him, shaking his head. Vic was probably the finest resource he’d had. If he had had to choose between Vic and the Scorpion, he was not sure which one he would have picked.

On the other hand, the cocoon was almost gone. What was in it was starting to take form. Still smoking, Scab wandered over to stand beside it. The last remaining bits of the cocoon seemed to dissipate. Scab was quite surprised to find himself looking down at a slender, pale, dark-haired, apparently natural human female. She opened her eyes and then immediately started to die.

‘That f*cking bastard!’ the Monk shouted. Or would have if she hadn’t been in a nutrient tank having her body regrown. Instead she had ’faced it vigorously.

‘Is that any way for a woman of the cloth to talk?’ Churchman asked mildly. The Monk thrashed around in the tank to glare at him through the gel with natural eyes. ‘It’s not the first time you’ve died,’ he said.

‘It’s the first time I’ve had to be cloned, and I can’t say I’m enjoying the experience.’ Through the gel she could make out the general outline of Churchman, or rather the technological form that gave what was left of him a semblance of being alive.

‘I haven’t seen you this angry in a long time.’

‘I’m going to kill him.’

‘He’s been in touch.’