‘Du Bois, there has been an incursion in Portsmouth,’ Control said. Du Bois started the Range Rover’s engine as Control downloaded coordinates into the vehicle’s satnav. He glanced at them before pulling out into traffic.
‘Is this the beginning?’ he asked.
‘No, the evidence points to this being something else.’
As he drove, du Bois edited his memory. Just a tiny bit. He made himself think that he had erased the souls as per his instructions from Control. He was ravenously hungry.
7. A Long Time After the Loss
Scab hugged the cocoon like a lover as he watched Eldon Sloper get torn apart. The crew of the Black Swan had played their part. The Basilisk, Scab’s ship, had tapped into the Swan’s sensor data. The suggestion he had implanted when he had meat-hacked them had sent them on board despite the stupidity of such a move, and they had provided a distraction. Now there was a race on to see if they were going to be vented into Red Space or torn apart by the Seeder-augmented human throwbacks.
When they had given him the viral they had described it as some kind of song. The Scorpion, an ancient and very illegal piece of S-tech, had drunk it like it was milk. Scab had felt the weapon’s excitement as it dug its legs deep into his arms, making them bleed again. He’d had to reseal the wound before anything too toxic had leaked out of him. As the scorpion had fed the poison into the Seeder ship he had shared the weapon’s near-sexual pleasure at the murder. After all, it wasn’t every day you got to kill a genuine alien as opposed to just another fucking uplifted animal, Scab thought, unable to prevent his lips curving into a smile. Scab wished he were naked. Pleased that the only people who could possibly see this were his soon-to-be-dead dupes.
Scab had absently wondered how old the song the Scorpion was singing to the Seeder craft was. Had humanity’s lost sun even been born then? The first stage of the viral song the Scorpion had sung had got him in. It had felt like being pushed back in after being born. Or so he imagined. The second stage had started killing the ancient creature/craft. The third stage had delivered the message to sever the craft’s hold on the cocoon as high above him preset explosives fed on the matter of flesh, turning it into fire and force.
There was pain as the Scorpion sank into the flesh of his arm. He was more aware of than actually felt it scraping against bone as it wrapped itself around his radius and ulna.
More pain when he heard the Seeder spawn’s death scream in his head as he was pulled into vacuum. Scab felt blood trickle from his ears. It all but exploded from his nose, covering the visor of his suit as he rode the cocoon out into a Red Space strobing in violent light.
‘Well shit,’ was all that Vic could muster. The eight-foot-tall insect was extensively hard-tech-augmented, initially for work in gravity and then after a stint in the military for combat as well. He looked through the transparent smart-matter hull as he searched through his neunonics for accounts of combat in Red Space. Very few people did it. It always ended badly. ‘Well shit,’ Vic tried again, speaking out loud to nobody. He then followed that up with ‘Fuck.’
He was receiving more information on the full-scale space action from the ship’s sensor suite. Both cruisers were ponderous but graceful as they simultaneously tried to use the Seeder craft for cover while manoeuvring for a clear shot on the other.
Laser batteries fired so rapidly that they looked like arcing curves against the black, their beams lighting up energy dissipation matrices like neon. Battery after battery connected the two ships with lines of bright light. Various kinetic harpoons hit armour so hard they heated it white-hot as the reactive plate exploded out, trying to lessen the force of the impacts. Carbon reservoirs fed the assemblers with the raw material to regrow and replace the reactive armour. Broad-pattern DNA hacker beams lit up disruptive countermeasure screens. AG-driven autonomous suicide munitions hunted for each other and openings to the enemy ship. Meanwhile, both craft tried to bring their big guns to bear: the Church cruiser’s D-guns, the Consortium cruiser’s fusion and particle-beam cannons.
While in the Thunder Squads, Vic had personally carried enough ordnance to severely damage cities and with his team had done so on various conflict resolution worlds; this, however, was on a different scale. Outside everything was fire and force. Night turned to day.
The ship’s upgraded stealth systems would keep the Basilisk hidden while this mess was going on. However, when one side won they wouldn’t be hiding from a beaten-up old salvage tug like the Black Swan. Red Space or no Red Space, Vic doubted that Basilisk’s systems could hide them from military-grade scanners.
Vic nodded to himself. ‘Well shit,’ he said again. Yes, Scab had properly fucked them this time. Then he saw part of the Seeder craft’s hull burst. Basilisk was kind enough to zoom in on the area and pick up the bodies tumbling into Red Space. Vic was peripherally aware of a tiny white light coming from the Black Swan moments before the Seeder craft exploded. Actually, Vic thought with a sort of hysterical calmness, it was less like an explosion, more like it had just burst. Vic completely reset his initial estimation of just how much Scab had fucked them both this time. There wasn’t enough meat left in his brain to hear the Seeder ship’s death scream. Still, Vic thought, the intensity of the fight between the Church and the Consortium cruisers had slackened off considerably.
Vic let off the pheromone equivalent of a human shitting himself when Fallen Angel tore through space. He wasn’t sure if the enormous wingspan of the hermaphroditic figure armoured in liquid obsidian was some sort of hologram or shadowy exotic material. Fallen Angel was shorter than Vic, though not by much, but its wings seemed to cast a shadow over both the cruisers.
The Elite were the ultimate expression of armed force. Extensively augmented, each was armed with fully integrated S-tech weapons of near-unimaginable sophistication that allowed them to go toe to toe with entire fleets. There were only six of them in existence at any one time. In part this was because of the tremendous expense of keeping them operational. And in part it was due to the worry of what would happen if one of them ever broke its extensive conditioning and turned against its master. Three Elite served the Consortium and three served the Monarchist systems, and an uneasy balance was maintained. Fallen Angel served the Monarchists. Mostly the Elite acted domestically. For the Monarchists to break the uneasy cold war and utilise one of their Elite against Consortium interests like this was all but a declaration of war.
They couldn’t hide from the Elite, Vic knew. If bounty killers were celebrities then the Elite were celebrity killer gods. It wasn’t a case of sophisticated sensors. They understood their surroundings on an instinctive level as if they were somehow connected to the very fabric of time/space itself. Vic suddenly found himself envying the human ability to weep. He wanted to weep like the little hairless monkey infants wept. Underneath the panic, the combat veteran of more than a dozen CR worlds and hardened bounty killer had just enough presence of mind through the fog of rapidly administered calming drugs to feel awe, as once again Scab reset the bar on just what a total fucking shit-magnet he was.
Tumbling into a storm of fire and light, at first Scab thought he was seriously ill as a foreign sensation flooded through him. He had forgotten what joy was. Then he saw Fallen Angel. They had actually sent an Elite. He wondered if this would be a good enough death.