Vic was less than pleased that Scab had decided to fly the ship under his own neunonic control. Scab was stood in the centre of the lounge/main room/Command and Control of the Basilisk. He had turned most of the ship’s hull transparent and was looking all around as he put on his brown suit and did up his tie. Scab wove his way through the parasitical suburban habitats attached to Arclight, heavily armed industrial assemblers, from one Consortium subsidiary or another, slowly eating away at tethered asteroids, past ships, the lowliest jury-rigged tramp traders to the massive Consortium bulk ore/carbon haulers, past salvage tugs and sleek scout craft belonging to xeno-archaeology prospectors, down-at-heel feline pleasure barges, scrap-built reptile fighting craft – there were even Consortium navy contractor ships and a Church craft berthed there. Scab took his time taking the Basilisk in, dancing it through the busy space, flying through the aging hologramatic displays, making them distort so it looked like Basilisk was pulling the dissipating light with it.
Vic tried to ignore the ’faced warnings from craft and parts of the habitat they got too close to. It was more difficult when they were flying near enough to see batteries, with sufficient firepower to obliterate them tracking the little craft.
Scab had finished dressing and was pulling weapons more socially acceptable than the Scorpion from the smart-matter storage compartment that the ship had extruded though the floor. He unloaded, checked and then reloaded each of the weapons before holstering them. To Vic’s mind this was still, arguably, Scab dressing.
Vic had already done the same, three handguns with seven barrels between them. Light armour was clipped onto his largely hard-tech chassis to augment the built-in protection. He clipped an autonomous blade disc to his armour. It was designed to seek out the EM fields of biological life, and like most brutal short-range weapons it had been designed by lizards. Vic still wasn’t sure it was enough, not with the people they’d pissed off. On the other hand, nothing would help if an Elite came looking for them.
The Basilisk seemed to give birth to two black globes that floated smoothly on silent AG motors into the air to hover close to Scab and Vic. They had cut right back on the personal satellites’ hardware but augmented their sensor packages. The P-sats would need the augmentation to sort through the clutter inside Arclight and provide them with accurate info. Both of them could extrude handgrips, and their AG motors were more than powerful enough to carry Scab and Vic if they had to.
‘We going to talk about this?’ Vic asked. Scab ignored him. ‘Apparently not. Is there anyone we didn’t piss off back there? I mean Consortium naval contractors, the Church and the fucking Monarchist Elite? Not one mind you – one’s not enough for Scab – no, two Elite.’
‘That’s vanity bordering on monomania,’ Scab finally said. He made it sound like a sigh. ‘None of them have any interest in us. They were after either the ship or the cocoon. The Angel or Ludwig could have destroyed us whenever they wanted.’
‘Comforting. You mean they knew we were there?’
Scab just nodded, remembering when he had been reliant on senses unknown to most biological life. Senses that spread out over hundreds of thousands of miles in space. Senses that meant he could feel the slightest movement in the fabric of space/time itself. Not for the first time Scab thought of how he missed being a god of destruction. He preferred myth to what he thought of as the sordidness of flesh.
‘Has it occurred to you that the Consortium and the Church might want to know who our employers are?’
‘No, I’m a moron,’ Scab said.
Staring. In terms of human reactions this called for staring, Vic was sure of that. He didn’t blink, but staring he could do. He also let off a little fart of pheromones in surprise. Scab wasn’t known for humour, even sarcasm. Vic cursed himself: Scab’s soft-tech-augmented olfactory glands would pick up the pheromones. ‘I was not apprised of how dangerous the situation was otherwise I would have charged more.’ Vic was trying to work out the appropriate amount of time to stare to convey his shocked response. ‘Or said no,’ he finally suggested forcefully.
Scab stopped loading rounds into his tumbler pistol and turned to fix Vic with one of his looks. Vic didn’t like this look. He couldn’t quite read the expression, despite his studies and the help of onboard computer systems, but it did unnerve him.
‘It was an interesting job,’ Scab finally said. Vic did some more staring.
‘And the Church! Really?!’ Vic eventually responded. Scab had done some truly stupid things, more than borderline suicidal, and pissed off some genuinely dangerous and powerful people, but in Vic’s opinion he’d gone too far this time.
Vic followed Scab as he picked up his homburg and placed it on his pale-skinned hairless head. Part of the Basilisk’s hull opened and they stepped into the airlock. The hull sealed shut behind them.
‘I fucking hate zero G,’ Vic muttered.
‘You grew up in it,’ Scab pointed out.
‘I grew up drinking synthetic mother’s milk out of a wall nipple; doesn’t mean I don’t prefer steak.’
‘That’s just something you heard in a colonial immersion.’
The hull opened out in front of them into what looked like a bunker made of patched and corroded armour plate. They were facing five heavily armed scum. Scab had accepted their bid for docking and security. He ’faced them the amount of debt relief he was prepared to pay along with the obligatory ritual threats that went with doing business.
They stepped out of the Basilisk’s AG field and let old instincts and hard-wired zero G routines take over as they drifted towards the ceiling.
‘If the Church does take you and torture you, you can feel good about having no actual information to give them,’ Scab ’faced over their secure link.
‘What is that? A joke?’ Vic demanded. Confusion, Vic thought, he was pretty sure that Scab’s expression was one of mild confusion.
The passageway Vic and Scab took was relatively new and a luxury express route. Scab paid the high price demanded to use it. Vic guessed the fact that the tube was transparent and they could look down on the non-toll routes deeper in the labyrinth of Arclight was supposed to make them feel better. People were packed in so tightly they had to wriggle past each other. Scab could see ’sects, little more than grubs, working the packed passage as his P-sat pulled him along. As he watched, one of them started screaming as some nasty countermeasure took him out as he tried to lift a pistol belonging to a reptile wearing luminescent body-paint gang colours.
‘So why come back?’ Vic ’faced over the secure link.
‘It’s close; we’re unemployed.’
‘We could have looked for bounties from the Basilisk.’ Vic was starting to sound confused as he watched a fight break out in the packed transport tube below. It looked desperate. Someone had probably panicked and the crowd had turned on them. It looked like he was being torn apart. ‘What if Sloper had friends who saw you talking to him?’
‘Then I would imagine we’ll have to do some free killing, but I chose Sloper because he didn’t have any friends and both he and his crew were malleable,’ Scab ’faced back.