His top limbs grabbed his advanced combat rifle from his back as he dropped the strobe gun. The gun’s four-legged spipod unfolded and the weapon went looking for more victims.
Meanwhile, the P-sat had taken out two crewmen it had met in the corridor with neurotoxin-coated flechettes fired from a suppressed spit gun. It had just attached a thermal seed frame to the reinforced door that led to Command and Control in the centre of the frigate.
The strobe gun was advancing, its barrels swinging back and forth, firing nearly constantly, its targeting systems finding victims sometimes with the help of info ’faced from Vic’s own neunonics.
Vic fired the six grenades from the ACR’s under-barrel launcher. The first one was a controlled-replication, flesh-eating nano-swarm. The second was a viral grenade. Both were high end for the black market, but Vic had suspected when loading them that the St Brendan’s Fire’s countermeasures would be able to cope with them. The remaining four were flechette grenades which filled the air with high-velocity needles.
Vic’s two lower limbs drew his double-barrelled laser pistols. His upper and lower torsos counter-rotated as the ACR and the lasers fired, mopping up whatever the heavier ordnance had missed.
Through the ’face feed from his P-sat Vic was aware that it was now in C and C. The command crew died quickly, taken out by the P-sat’s swivel-mounted auto-shotgun firing frangible fragmentation rounds designed not to harm any of the instruments. A measured laser killed those the shotgun didn’t. The P-sat left one crew member alive in C and C.
The ACR’s magazine was solid-state, each bullet assembled in the barrel. Its bullpup magazine looked like it was being eaten as the weapon was fired. The last of the magazine disappeared up into the weapon. Vic slid another magazine home almost immediately but didn’t fire.
A Militiaman died as the strobe gun cut the bunk he was using as cover in half and then near enough did likewise to him. Another almost got his ACR to bear on Vic, but the disc cut his throat.
More than fifty were dead now. Everything was red. They hadn’t fired a single shot. Then Vic’s sensors warned him that the ship’s alarms had started to broadcast to the crew’s neunonics. Any remaining passive security systems were now active.
With a command from Vic, the spipod leaped up onto one of the few remaining bunks and fired into all the bodies to ensure they were dead. It was little more than red-light butchery.
Vic caught his returning disc and clipped it back onto its shoulder mount. He left the bunk room and made for C and C, his ACR at the ready, his lower torso swivelled so his bottom limbs could cover his rear. A few crew members showed their faces in the corridors, but bursts of bullets and beams discouraged them from getting involved. Only one fired back. Small-calibre spit pistol bullets flattened against Vic’s armour. Vic killed him to make a point. If the guy got cloned then maybe next time he would be able to work out the difference between bravery and stupidity.
As he approached C and C, Vic started getting armour integrity warnings ’faced from the suit to his tactical neunonics. It appeared that the armour was slowly being eaten away by a weaponised nano-screen turned nano-swarm. Vic sped up. He stepped over the still-glowing hole in the door to C and C, and turned to look at the tank.
The navigator looked through the green water and transparent tank wall at Vic. The dolphin had been extensively augmented with hard and soft tech. Most people also assumed that Church navigators had a degree of S-tech in them as well.
Vic’s armour was seriously malfunctioning now. He could see part of it dissolving. Soon the nanites would find a weak point in the armour, break through and start eating him.
‘I don’t have much time. Surrender control of all systems to me now,’ he ’faced on an open channel.
‘Just a moment and I think it’ll be over,’ the navigator told him.
Vic was already moving. He liked to think that he’d given the dolphin the chance to be reasonable. He opened the airlocked delivery tray, unclipped the case that Scab had given him and, steeling himself, opened it. The Scorpion was already up, its sting arched, its body language that of impending violence. The Scorpion scared Vic and always had. It was unpredictable and hateful S-tech. It could just as well decide to murder him.
‘Don’t do that. Let’s talk about this!’ Even modulated and ’faced, Vic could hear the fear in the dolphin’s voice. The nanites were through his armour. Vic screamed as they started to eat him alive. Vic dropped the Scorpion into the tray and slid it shut.
The navigator thrashed around so much that he injured himself and red clouds appeared in the water. Vic fell to the ground, his armour now all but dissolving, his exoskeleton starting to do the same.
The thrashing from the tank stopped. The St Brendan’s Fire’s systems opened themselves to him. He only just had the presence of mind to deactivate the nano-swarm while he still had flesh and components. The pain stopped almost immediately as his own systems flooded his few remaining biological organs and his mind with numbing narcotics. His systems were starting to rebuild. He would find some more raw materials in the frigate’s med bay to help him rebuild himself before the rendezvous.
It was a blissed Vic who managed to sit on one of the couches and let it grow to envelope his awkward and now partially eaten ’sect frame. Blissed or not, the sight of the Scorpion dug into flesh just behind the dolphin’s artificial gill, sting buried deep in the navigator’s skin, was horrific. Its legs had grown to form what looked like a skin-tight cage clamped into the cetacean’s flesh. The navigator was still alive, his eyes full of pain.
Vic shut down the ship. There were still people in there. Those he couldn’t trap, he turned the ship’s remaining security systems on. The rest Scab could kill. Vic didn’t mind killing, but Scab actually liked to be a monster. Scab liked hide-and-seek. Vic stationed the P-sat outside the hole in the door to C and C to watch his back.
Open access showed him the St Brendan’s Fire’s rendezvous point in planetary Red Space with the Monk.
‘You’re not supposed to be able to do that,’ Vic mused. But then you weren’t supposed to be able to take a Church frigate on your own, no matter how good you were. You also weren’t supposed to be able to break a Church navigator’s conditioning so easily. You certainly weren’t supposed to get away with it, and he didn’t imagine he would.
Scab stared at the frigate. He got a very good look at the ship’s batteries, most of which were pointed at him.
‘And of course you know how to navigate in planetary Red Space,’ he said grimly.
‘It’s over. I’m sorry. It’s up to you: we can put you back into Real Space if you want, but you should know we had to destroy your ship and kill Vic. Your employer will be after you. It might be better if we kill you now.’
Scab looked down with a half-smile on his lips. ‘You have to earn the right to kill me,’ he said, and then looked at her, grinning savagely.
‘I think we’ve just done that. I’m talking about what’s best for you. We harbour no ill will towards you, but you’re a very dangerous person to leave in play as an enemy.’
‘Even for the Church?’
‘Even for the Church.’
‘I’m not your enemy.’
Vic was holding the ship in a blizzard of black ash in a red sky. He wasn’t sure what was happening, but he was reasonably sure that he was in some kind of Red Space simulacrum or echo of the planet Game. He had watched the massive blackened skeletal trees collapse like they were made of burned paper.