Scab glanced down as what had looked like a tumbling piece of inert wreckage lit up. The Black Swan’s main engines took it quickly away from the hulk of the dead Seeder craft. The tug’s bridge drive, that Scab had paid for out of this job’s expenses, tore a blue pulsing hole in space as the oversized engines propelled it through the rip into Known S pace.
‘Vic, come and pick me up,’ Scab said as he re-established the interface connection.
‘What the fuck!’ Vic screamed at him. ‘What the fuck!’
Scab was still wondering if something had startled the Elites when it happened. The holes that appeared subjectively above him didn’t so much look like gate rips, more like larvae eating through rotting fruit. More holes opened in space; white lightning seemed to spark and then flicker out as if consumed. The energy involved must have been colossal, Scab thought. More and more holes appeared until Red Space began to resemble a rotten honeycomb.
The things crawling through the gates, dissipating the clouds they touched, were not black. They were the absence of colour – wriggling, hungry, maggot-like voids. Where they touched the debris of the two cruisers, the wreckage simply ceased to exist as if it had been consumed. It was beautiful, Scab thought, utter oblivion. Not just the antithesis of life but the antithesis of everything. Scab could hear their idiot song. An acidic tear traced its way down through the pale makeup, mucus and blood on his face. Then the sleek wedge of the Basilisk was in front of him.
‘What the fuck!’ Vic screamed at him hysterically when Scab was back on board. The tall hard-tech-augmented ’sect was pointing at the external display that took up one wall of the hull. Red Space was still being consumed.
With a thought Scab sent co-ordinates to the ship. The ship’s engines lit up as the view changed and the ship headed towards the co-ordinates. Outside, red was becoming black, or rather the absence of colour. If you focused hard enough you could see it wriggling like all-consuming bacteria.
Scab sent the ship into a series of rapid evasive manoeuvres to avoid being consumed, though the ship’s anti-gravity field compensated for this and both he and Vic remained comfortably standing.
Scab sat down on one of the two smart chairs, the only real furniture in the otherwise bare room. With a thought he peeled the arm of his spacesuit back. His arm hung limp. The Scorpion had reacted badly to something and squeezed, powdering his radius and ulna.
Vic was watching the screen on the edge of collapse as the Basilisk spun and banked, narrowly avoiding consumption or ceasing to exist or whatever was happening out there.
Scab coaxed the Scorpion out of his flesh, grimacing at the pain he allowed himself to feel. The lockbox rose through the carpeted floor at his neunonic summons. The room was suddenly bathed in blue light from the gate rip. In the lockbox was some fluffy, core-world pet creature designed to appeal to spoilt, mid-echelon corporate children. The Basilisk had already injected the previously hibernating creature with the wake-up. It looked up at Scab with big soulful eyes. Scab was more interested in the neunonic feed of the very fabric of Red Space being consumed by whatever it/these were. Scab absently dropped the brass-skinned Scorpion in with the pet. The Scorpion immediately reared up, sting coming over its head, as Scab gave the signal to close the box.
Scab had time to light a cigarette with his left arm and they were through the rip.
In Real Space Nulty was dancing on the hull of the Black Swan. He’d made it! Somehow, among all that, he had cut the Swan free and remained unnoticed until he could get out of there. Sure, he had a long ride home, but the Swan was his now!
The modified Corsair-class ship swept out of the rip, its engines on high burn. To Nulty it looked predatory and violent. He couldn’t even be bothered bringing the Swan’s paltry weapon systems online.
‘Bollocks,’ the engineer said.
Lasers lit up the darkness; the Swan briefly became light before its energy dissipation matrix was overloaded, but it was the kinetic javelins that did the damage. Penetrating the Swan’s hull, shredding it, scattering the remains, the vacuum cooling the heat from the friction of hypersonic impacts.
Nulty was still alive. He was damaged, missing limbs, but largely intact and spinning away from the wreckage.
‘Bastard!’ he screamed at the receding light of the Basilisk’s engines.
Scab took a long drag of his cigarette, savouring his retro vice.
‘What the fuck!’ Vic screamed at him again, spoiling his contemplative mood. ‘The Consortium navy! The Church! And… and the fucking Elite! And what was happening there – it was like space was being eaten or something?!’ Vic paused for breath, for psychosomatic reasons Scab assumed. ‘What have you got us into?!’
Scab gave the question some thought. ‘It’s exciting,’ he finally said.
Vic stared at him with multifaceted eyes, his mandibles agape. Vic was a humanophile, a worker ’sect who had rejected the tightly regulated, genetically programmed, caste-based social structure of ’sect society and escaped into gravity, augmentation and, somewhat ironically to Scab’s mind, military service. Scab’s military service had been different. He hadn’t volunteered. Before he had been chosen to be an Elite he had been Legion. Offered the choice between serving the Consortium in the CR worlds as one of its most expendable troops or execution for his crimes as a street sect leader on Cyst.
The mandibles-agape expression wasn’t quite working for Vic, Scab decided. ‘Besides,’ he said as he started looking for the portable assembler, using the interface to send it his medical requirements and some more of his debt credits, ‘how often do you get to see two Elite in action?’
Vic’s mandibles clattered together tightly. ‘Oh yes, that was a real treat for me,’ he told his ‘partner’.
He cast his mind back to one terrifying night in the Abyssal Reaches. The destruction of an entire habitat. Their officers had told them that the subsidiary they had been fighting had gone rogue. However, a rumour had spread that they had found Seeder ruins in the Reaches, the Consortium board had done the maths and it had simply proved cheaper to use an Elite to bring the conflict to a rapid conclusion. Vic had never quite worked up the nerve to ask if Scab had been the Elite that had killed all those people. Women, children, larvae, it hadn’t mattered. Then he realised what Scab had just said.
‘Two! What do you mean two?’
‘Ludwig was there as well. What do you think took out the Church cruiser?’
Vic allowed more calming agent to mix with his neurochemistry.
‘But we’re out now, done, yes?’ Vic asked when the chemicals had calmed him enough. The ’sect was more than a little worried about how Scab would answer. He knew that Scab was psychotic and more than a little self-destructive but you didn’t go up against the Elite.
Scab finally nodded. ‘We’ve lost the package and we don’t have anything like the resources to retrieve it.’ Once, he thought, once I could have done it.
8. Northern Britain, a Long Time Ago
Surely the body cannot lose this much blood and live? she thought. It had felt painful at first. Now it felt like getting close to sleep. She was weak and tired.