The Age of Scorpio (8 page)

They were not shy. One of them was waiting in the docking tube for them. He looked like an eccentric soft machine sculpt. Except the alienness seemed less forced. He – they were pretty sure it was a he despite a degree of androgyny – had pale skin with lines traced over it. Eden magnified her vision. They weren’t lines but the outline of delicate scales. His eyes were black pools, no visible iris or pupil. His neck seemed to palpate slightly and his head, utterly hairless, looked swollen. Webbed fingers with black sharp-looking nails were wrapped around a staff which looked like it was made of a material somewhere between bone and pearl. He wore a scaled robe of silver-coloured material that seemed to move of its own accord.

When he opened his mouth, they recognised the noises as words; the syntax was familiar but even so it strained their neunonics’ translation routines. Behind the strange, nominally human, man they could see a soft pearl-like luminescence. It smelled, not unpleasantly, of the sea, and they could hear the sound of water gently lapping against something. Their suit sensors showed that the atmosphere was apparently breathable. If there were any toxins the sensors couldn’t pick them up. The sensors also told them that the atmosphere was warm and damp.

‘I am Ezard,’ their translation subroutines finally came back. ‘I am the speaker. You are welcome here.’

‘First contact?’ Brett asked the others over the interface.

‘He’s human, or was once,’ Eden replied.

‘Follow me,’ Ezard said. The translation was coming faster now. He turned and walked down the tube of flesh. With a degree of trepidation, the four followed. Eldon was last. He waited until the
Swan
’s airlock closed behind them and then sent a neunonic command to set off the viral canister that Brett had attached to his suit. He had expected some sort of warning siren and to then be torn apart but nothing happened.

‘The environment is clean here. You can take your helmet suits off if you wish, although we will not be offended if you don’t,’ Ezard was saying when Eldon caught up.

‘It’s as much for your protection as ours,’ Brett was explaining through the translator interface with the suit. ‘We come from a culture with a great deal of nano-technology pollution.’ They walked out into an open area. ‘Seeders.’ There was awe in his voice.

Eldon looked around, struggling to cope with what he saw. He did not even notice that they had lost contact with the
Swan
.

It was clear that, allowing for the thickness of the hull/skin, the chamber was as wide as the craft and almost as long, though either end seemed to be packed with interconnected biomechanics that were neither quite machines nor internal organs.

The chamber – Eldon struggled not to think of it as a wet cave with ribs – reminded him of the texture of the inside of his own mouth. The suit sensors told of a warm wind blowing through. The wind seemed to blow one way and then be sucked back. There was no visible floor; it was mostly clear water. The same omnipresent pearl-like luminescence that illuminated the rest of the cavern lit the shallows. There were much darker areas that were obviously a lot deeper.

The water was broken by islands which looked like a mixture of bone and some unknown type of flesh. On the islands there were more people like Ezard. They appeared to have binary male and female sexes and only a very few of them were clothed as Ezard was.

‘I assure you it did not look like this when we started. It was far more utilitarian. We sculpted this over the many generations that we’ve lived within the Mother,’ Ezard told them.

‘Where are you from?’ Eden asked, awe in her voice.

‘Earth,’ Ezard answered.

‘You don’t happen to know where it is, do you?’ Eldon asked.

‘If it exists still it will not be as it was.’

Eden glanced at the others questioningly.

‘They could know so much,’ Brett said over the interface.

‘Yes, alive they would be of incalculable worth to the uplifted races but nothing to us,’ Eldon told him angrily.

‘Boss, Brett may be right. We can’t get away with this.’ Eden said.

‘Just shut the fuck up and think about the money. Look at them – they’re not right.’

‘They’ve just evolved to fit the environment,’ Eden said.

Ezard turned to look at them. ‘I cannot express how glad we are to see you. We have been trapped in this realm too long. We want to meet the rest of humanity. Can you take us out of the red sky?’

Eldon sent the command from his neunonics and his suit visor opened. He breathed in the air. He, like the rest of the crew, had immunised themselves against the particular flavour of viral they were using. If you used virals you hadn’t protected yourself against, then you were a fool who deserved to die, in his opinion.

‘We’ll be glad to help.’ He ignored the demands to know what the fuck he was doing over the interface. He knew with his long life he must have picked up all sorts of nano-infections that his cheap nano-screens could barely control.
Time to spread them around
, he thought. A plea of ignorance might help if they got caught.

Nulty was still picking up the sensor glitch. Eldon had been right: there had to be something there. Nulty did not like that and was running the signal through every filter he could think of, but the interference of Red Space was preventing him from gathering any more information. It seemed like another strange field reading, not dissimilar but not the same as the weird readings he was getting off the thing they were docked to. A thing he was more and more sure was some kind of S-tech ship.

He had expected to lose contact with the boarding crew but that did not mean that Nulty liked it. He wondered if they were being torn apart by feral Seeder servitors. He could pilot the
Swan
if he had to, though he was not sure about the bridge drive. The issue was the docking tube. It wasn’t a known tech interface. It seemed attached to the
Swan
like a leech.

Eventually they all followed Eldon’s lead and opened their visors, making the suits recede from their faces. Melia was the last.

‘It smells of fish,’ she observed. ‘I’m hungry.’

The bio-sculpted inhabitants of the ship/thing Ezard referred to as Mother were all staring at them, their expressions unreadable. Eden could not shake the feeling that they were communicating in some way. She had watched one of them crawl to a swollen nipple-like growth on the wall of the chamber and suck on it. Moments later she had sunk to the ground in what looked like a narcotic stupor.

Ezard had said little. He had just let them wander, as they wanted.

‘When you feel safe, when you are happy, we should discuss if you would be prepared to help us leave this place.’

Eldon had just nodded.

‘Call me when you need me.’ Ezard had then dived off the smooth bone/flesh island into one of the deeper pools. He glided though the water, propelled by a rippling movement in his cloak. Eden was not sure if it was technology, biology or some symbiosis of both.

Brett was looking despondent. Their attempted genocide was weighing heavily on him. He was wandering towards the subjective front of the craft, approaching the biomechanical machinery/organs. In front of the wall of machinery/organs there was what looked to be some kind of web made of a fine, delicate version of the same material as Ezard’s staff. In the centre of the web was a cocoon of the same material. It glowed with an inner light and something about it suggested a feminine quality.

Brett stood looking at it for a while. The others were some way back sitting on one of the islands, not sure what to do while they waited for genocide to take place.

‘We should be heading back,’ Melia said over the interface.

‘If it happens it’ll happen quick,’ Eldon replied, still angry at what he saw as betrayal by the licensed concubine.

‘We’ve no idea what effect it will have on their altered physiology,’ Eden pointed out. ‘If Nulty’s right and this is S-tech, then who knows how they could have augmented themselves.’

‘So what? We just make our excuses and leave?’ Eldon asked.

‘They don’t seem armed,’ Eden said. ‘But I don’t fancying holding off a small civilisation with four disc guns, yeah?’

Brett looked down. He was surprised to see a dolphin looking at him, similar to those that worked with the Church. Except it was not quite a dolphin. Where the Church dolphins had waldos, this one had tentacles. Where the Church dolphins used interface to communicate, this one appeared to have a human mouth growing out of its neck. The creature looked old, its skin cracked and covered in growths.

It was staring straight at Brett from about eight feet down in the clear water. A shadow passed over it and with a flick of its tail it dived down into a tunnel that led into the machinery/organs.

Ezard all but leaped out of the water to land on the island next to Brett. The black pools of his eyes made him difficult to read, but Brett was pretty sure that he was staring at the cocoon with an expression of reverence.

‘What is it?’ Brett asked. He now spoke the same anachronistic version of Known Space common that Ezard did, the translation subroutine having learned it fully and meshed it with his neunonics. Effectively the language had been downloaded into his brain. Though Brett was pretty sure he had heard the others here speak a different language, one that sounded a little like sea life communicating. He had heard sounds like that in immersion programmes. Brett reckoned it would require modifications to their voice boxes to allow them to make the sounds he had heard.

‘She,’ Ezard corrected. He seemed to be struggling to explain concepts with the linguistic tools he had. ‘She is a conduit, a translator. The Mother speaks through her because she is of the Mother’s line. When we are in the real, maybe she will hatch, become like a god. She is the link between them in the past and us now.’

Brett did not understand but found something beautiful in what Ezard was saying. More and more he was sure that he did not want to kill these people.

‘Look, Ezard, there’s something I have to tell you,’ he said. His handsome face was in turmoil as he struggled with his betrayal. He liked and trusted his companions but his loyalty to them was outweighed by the magnitude of the crime they were about to commit. Ezard regarded him with an expression that managed to be both expectant and inscrutable.

Tentacles shot out of the water and wrapped around Brett. He was ripped off his feet and dragged into the water before the others had a chance to respond. Ezard dived into the water after him.

The panic that came from submersion was just an ancient race memory. Brett had more than enough oxygen in his system to survive for a reasonable amount of time underwater. The grip of the dolphin’s tentacles was strong but not crushing. Still, as he struggled to get free, the tentacles might as well have been steel cables.

The dolphin moved with incredible rapidity through the water towards the tunnel that Brett had seen him disappear into earlier. Except now it looked less like a tunnel and more like a sphincter.

His neunonics sounded an alarm as the sensors on his skin, which he used to understand pheromones when dealing with insects, picked up an unknown secretion. The sphincter closed behind them.

Brett found himself being dragged through massive and very alien internal organs that seemed to pulse with their own life. There was the sensation of going deeper and deeper, though whether that was real or just fear, Brett couldn’t be sure.

He tried the interface and was more than a little disturbed that he could not contact the others. Whatever prevented them from contacting the
Swan
obviously had the same effect between different sections of the ship/thing, whatever it was. Brett did not like the totality of the signal block either.

The dolphin breached onto a small bone-like alcove that looked different to the other areas – dark, lacking in life. The organs around the alcove looking diseased to Brett. The tentacles dragged him out of the water and laid him next to the prone dolphin.

‘You carrying violence?’ Brett ignored the question. His disc gun was still bonded to the back of his suit and he had a laser at his hip. Shooting was imminent when he got free. His neunonics would replay the way back to the others. ‘I’m your only friend here young ’un. Don’t worry. They don’t know where you are. Mind blind in here. I killed it, whipped up a little disease right here, just small enough for them not to notice.’

Brett wondered how good the dolphin was at reading human expressions as he stared at the grotesque human mouth under the dolphin’s main mouth. It just would not stop talking, the ancient common accompanied by a clicking noise.

‘They call me Zadok. They say I wasn’t grown right, that the template was fucked, but they need the likes of me. All sorts of disease alchemy. I can heal as well as hurt. Put a disease in my tool though, so there’d be no more of me.’

Brilliant
, Brett thought. He appeared to have been kidnapped by a disease-spreading mutant dolphin bearing a grudge against their hosts.

‘They don’t have anything good for you here. They just want to get out of the dark and spread, like a disease. Everyone has to be the same, like. They are no friends to you and yours.’

‘Can you let me go?’ Brett asked.

‘If I let you go, you going to behave? Because I think you’re carrying some violence with you and I can’t get hurt before I tell you what you’re into here.’

Brett just nodded. The dolphin shifted him around in the coils of his tentacles so he could examine him with one crusty eye.

‘You got any bottled fun on you, boy? You are a boy, aren’t you?’

‘Yes,’ Brett answered, trying to shift, the coils of tentacle tightening around him as he tried.

‘Yes to bottled fun or orifice fun?’

‘I’m a boy, man. I’m male. I don’t know what bottle fun is.’

‘See, they cut me off from the drug nipples, no more mother’s milk for me and I’m not an endorphin drinker, otherwise I could just suck it out of you. You wouldn’t like that though. It’s not fair, is it?’

‘Yes, I have drugs,’ Brett managed between gritted teeth. He kept to himself that they were part of his internal systems. He did not like the idea of being torn apart by some junkie dolphin looking for a fix. A thought occurred to Brett: ‘If they don’t wish us well then how come they let you live?’