The Age of Scorpio (2 page)

‘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 fucking 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 fucking 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! Fuck 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 fucking 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 fucktard. 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 fuck 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 – fuck 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.