The Age of Scorpio (44 page)

The artery rose in a helix towards the living dome-like roof of this particular city, where massive cells photosynthesised the weak light of Pangea’s main-sequence G-type star. Some effect of the planet’s wrecked atmosphere made the star look white.

Much of the trip from Pythia to Pangea had been taken up with Scab trying to work out what the Church frigate had done to the
Basilisk
and upgrading the ship’s security. Elements of Pangea’s not inconsiderable navy were on the
Basilisk
the moment they opened the bridge from Red Space into Real Space. Security for Pangea was run by one of the largest private military contractors.
Basilisk
had been told to power down all weapon systems or be destroyed. Scab had done it without too much attitude – to Vic’s surprise. They had then been escorted through orbital defences comparable to Pythia’s. All of this was paid for through the export of biotech developed in the cities. Many of Scab’s soft-machine augments were derived from Living City technology. There were rumours that the Living Cities’ wealth came, in part, from illegal technology derived from their use of banned Seeder tech.

They had been extensively disarmed, much to Scab’s disapproval. There had been no chance to bid for weapons, just a blanket refusal, and it was made clear that any attempt to bring virals into the city would result in immediate death. Scab had undergone a complete blood transfusion with less than good grace. He had even cleaned under his fingernails, removing all the neurotoxins. During the docking and decontamination procedures, Scab had his cigarettes and old-school syringes of opiates removed.

They had also had to shut down their external ’face links. Any communication was going to have to be done the old-fashioned way. Their nano-screens had to be extensively reprogrammed and internalised. In short, they both felt naked, though Vic was just enjoying being in the city. The warm wind blowing through the artery somehow reminded him of a human womb immersion he had once done. It had left him wondering why the little hairless monkeys ever left.

P-sats had obviously not been allowed. Instead they were being guided to a meeting place by one of the inhabitants of the city. They all looked the same. Neutral-gendered, Vic believed they were actually grown from the city. It was nominally human, as most of the inhabitants of the Monarchist systems were, and naked, which made sense. Vic was starting to find something artistic and aesthetically pleasing about the translucent skin, the internal organs on display and the glowing violet-coloured blood that provided them with their own bioluminescence. Looking around through the arteries and the flesh of the massive city, he could see them moving around doing various tasks. It made Vic think of the nanites that suffused his own body. Scab, presumably still grumpy at being disarmed, had wondered out loud why people would want to turn themselves into glowing bowel parasites.

The helical artery brought them to the highest level of the city. Vic looked down on it. From the top the city looked like a roughly circular plain. It was constantly moving, constantly rippling. The chamber they had arrived at was the first bit of opaque flesh they had come across. The sphincter-like door opened with a distinctly organic sucking noise. Vic and Scab followed their guide through.

The boardroom table looked as if it was made from sculpted tooth enamel. The chairs had been grown from the floor and were covered in a moss-like substance.

There were two other people in the room. One of them seemed to be clothed in black glass, and was leaning against the transparent flesh of what passed for a window in the outer wall. The other was the hairless tattooed Monk from the
St Brendan’s Fire
. She was lounging on one of the chairs, feet up on the bone-white table.

The guide moved to one side, pushing himself against the flesh wall of the room. Scab was already moving towards the Monk. It looked like she was trying to say something.

Scab was in the air over the table. The Monk just leaned back and used one hand to flip off the chair and onto her feet. Vic sighed internally. He couldn’t be bothered.

A series of short fast strikes with clawed hands opened up a cut on her porcelain skin. Normally, neurotoxins on his filed and hardened nails would be enough to slow the Monk down and give Scab the edge, but they had been removed.

Scab stepped to the side to avoid a powerful front kick. He turned the sidestep into a sweep, which the Monk leaped over. In mid-air she straightened her leg and caught Scab a solid blow in the face, sending him staggering back across the living boardroom.

She’s good
, Vic thought. Then he decided to look at the figure in black glass again.

‘Oh shit,’ Vic muttered as Scab and the Monk danced their violent dance. The figure in black glass was an Elite. Vic didn’t think it was Fallen Angel but he couldn’t be sure; with the exception of Ludwig they all kind of looked the same to him.

The Monk had closed with Scab, swinging at him with a series of vicious hooks. Scab threw himself back towards the floor. Landing with his weight on one hand, he kicked from the ground, catching the Monk on the side of the head with the toe of his spats. She staggered back but recovered quickly. Scab tried to hook his leg around her neck, but she moved with it and did a one-handed cartwheel out of the lock, landing crouched to face him.

Vic was caught between watching the Elite, who Scab would have also noticed but was ignoring in favour of violence that had a better chance of success, and the ongoing fight. The Monk was genuinely skilled rather than having augmented fighting abilities. She was experienced as well. Vic assumed she had the best soft-machine augments that debt, or in the Church’s case actual credit, could possibly buy. He was able to read where and what she was going to do because she was a very efficient and skilled fighter. Scab, on the other hand, fought chaotically. The Monk had to deal with Scab moving to where he shouldn’t, doing moves he shouldn’t and fighting with a ferocity she couldn’t match. He had a genuine desire to hurt his opponent.

Scab closed in and locked the Monk’s arm. Grinning with savage joy, Scab kneed the Monk in the head and then repeatedly struck her in the face with his fingers. He was trying to push his filed-down fingernails through her armoured skull.

It was all over now. Scab’s fingers had found her eyes. Any moment now membranes would pop and he would force the fingers into her brain, and his reputation would increase as he added a dead monk to his list of kills.

Then the Monk lost her temper. It was like a berserk rage without the augments, Vic thought. She lost an eye tearing his finger out. She headbutted Scab hard enough to break the reinforced cartilage of his nose. Then she somersaulted out of the lock. The sound of her arm spiral fracturing and dislocating simultaneously was loud enough to make Vic flinch. She screamed in pain, landed and kicked Scab in the chest.

Scab flew back across the room. The Monk leaped after him. Scab hit the wall. The Monk kicked him in the head. His skull cracked under the force of the blow. A look of fury on her face, the Monk repeatedly kicked him in the head, pulping his face and skull as he slid down the wall.

Vic was hoping this was freedom at last, but somehow Scab managed to leg-sweep her from the ground while she was too intent on turning his head to pulped meat. The Monk hit the floor and Scab axe-kicked her in the head.

‘Stop this or I will destroy them both,’ the guide said quietly to Vic. He only picked it up because his aural augments were able to filter out the sound of the fight.

‘What? If you’ve got some skills as well, then jump in, have some fun,’ Vic told the guide.

‘I will simply ask the city to flex. Everyone in the room will be crushed.’

Vic sighed. A power-assisted leap carried him easily over the table. The tall ’sect landed softly behind his partner. Scab currently had the upper hand and was standing on one of the Monk’s legs, fending off kicks from the other while trying to break her knee by punching it. He was aware of Vic behind him but had assumed that his partner had come to help.

There were a number of ways Vic could have handled trying to break up the fight, but he was feeling reckless. He grabbed Scab by the shoulders of his raincoat with his upper two arms and then flung Scab backwards.

Scab flew across the boardroom again and hit the wall. Behind Vic the Monk skipped to her feet. One of her arms hung limp at her side but she assumed a defensive stance. Scab was straight back onto his feet. Even through the pulped meat of his face, Scab’s rage was plain to see. Vic actually staggered back a few steps.
This is it
, he thought, but he made himself big, stretching to his full height, all four arms outstretched.

‘Are you out of your fucking mind!’ Scab screamed. Vic had never seen him lose control like this.

‘They’ll kill us all if you don’t stop,’ Vic said. He couldn’t quite keep the tremor out of his voice. His pheromone excretions told the rest of the story about how frightened he was.

Scab’s face was contorting and he was gasping for air as he tried to control himself. The humourless and very familiar laughter wasn’t helping matters, Vic decided. Both he and Scab turned to look at the Elite. What they saw were warped reflections of themselves in the glass armour.

‘Something funny?’ Scab asked in a tone that suggested to Vic more impending violence.
Good. You just kill yourself attacking an Elite, then Known Space will be fucking rid of you and I can enjoy the sights of the Living Cities while waiting for a bounty crew to catch up with me.

‘It’s like watching a bad actor try to play you in a low-budget immersion.’

The black armour became liquid and was sucked into the Elite’s skin. He was an Elite version of Scab. He looked healthier, less gaunt. He was wearing a skin-tight, long-sleeved black top and black trousers, and his lips were stained black. The thing that unnerved Vic most about Elite Scab was that his eyes looked alive, but there was a malignancy in their life, a hatred and a madness. Vic wondered if Elite Scab had had the same neurosurgery to remove some of his more unpleasant predilections as his partner. He wasn’t optimistic about the chances of that.

‘Bollocks,’ the Monk said. It seemed to be a pre-Loss word for testicles, according to Vic’s neunonics. He couldn’t imagine why she’d choose to bring that up now. She was, however, looking nervously between Scab and Elite Scab.

‘Could I arrange refreshments for everyone?’ the guide asked, his tone neutral.

‘As soon as we have killed the copy. I have no need to subject myself to the insult of his further existence,’ Elite Scab said. Vic almost thanked him for his help in resolving the situation peacefully.

‘I thought you were the original,’ Vic said carefully. He knew he was taking his life in his hands and half-expected a thorough killing from Scab.

‘I am,’ Scab answered. There was something of the cornered animal about him at the moment, Vic thought. Scab clearly wanted to kill everyone in the room, but unusually for him – as Scab was prepared to pick fights with entire habitats – found himself horribly outgunned.

‘You’re little more than a biological machine. You were programmed to think what we wanted you to think. You’re a pale imitation, nothing more. If this wasn’t the case you’d still be able to make art,’ Elite Scab told Scab.

‘Art?’ the Monk asked incredulously.

‘Kill people in creative ways,’ Vic told her. She looked unimpressed.

‘You know what you are, messenger boy?’ Scab asked once he’d managed to stop shaking with rage. ‘Motivation, nothing more.’ Vic couldn’t read Elite Scab at all. He also didn’t understand what Scab was saying. He was missing part of the conversation. He was also sure that Elite Scab would have to be one of the Consortium Elite, and if he and Scab were about covert Consortium business then he didn’t understand why Elite Scab would be allowed to kill Scab or even what he was doing here in Monarchist space, the Living Cities’ enmity with the Game notwithstanding.

Elite Scab turned to the guide, who was speaking.

‘Since you all arrived here at the same time, we thought you might all benefit from a conversation. We can only assume that you will all have plenty of opportunities to kill each other once you are far away from Pangea, but for now there will be no more killing.’

Elite Scab nodded as if he was taking this in, but Vic recognised the signs that he was preparing to do something awful – he’d seen similar behaviour in his own Scab. There was little they could do. It was pointless attacking an Elite at the best of times, let alone unarmed. He respected the guide for standing up to Elite Scab, but it had seemed foolish to let him into the city in the first place.

‘Look, can everyone called Woodbine Scab, clone or not, please just be reasonable for a moment,’ Vic ventured.

Elite Scab looked a little bit exasperated at this, as he reached out and touched the wall of the Living City. It had taken years of research and untold amounts of debt relief to develop the Seeder-tech-derived programmable virus that coated Elite Scab’s hand, but he still made its application look casual.

The guide screamed. The City shook, convulsed; there was a palpable feeling of pain and distress that even Vic picked up on. Through the transparent flesh they saw a helical artery crushed by a convulsion of muscle, the people in it reduced to squirts of luminescent flesh and blood. The guide sank to his knees in pain. The Monk moved around the table to help him to his feet despite her ruined arm.

‘Apparently not,’ Vic said.

‘Mr Scab,’ the guide, who Vic was beginning to think was a bit more than just a guide, said to Elite Scab as the Monk helped him to a seat, ‘we of course respect your power, and you could cause us great harm, perhaps even destroy this city, but we would live on. What I don’t think you could do is destroy this city before we kill you. I wonder if you have ever been this close to destruction before?’

‘You think I care? I’ve razed planets, I’ve been worshipped as a god. I’m bored and I could kill my copy with a thought.’

‘I’m not the copy,’ Scab said quietly, dangerously.