Scab nodded.
The warriors were waiting for them when the cage receded back into the Polyhedron’s subjective floor. Vic had holstered his weapons, but the ’sect was still seething with anger at Scab. However, he was no longer in control of his body. Scab had slaved him and hacked his neunonics, taking control of his body. Again. Vic was entertaining murder fantasies that he knew he would never have the courage to act out.
Scab ’faced his clean-up bid to the Polyhedron’s AI. It was accepted and the club’s security systems did not attack him.
‘Check with your queen,’ Scab told the two warriors. They were radiating impending high-order violence. The dancers and other clientele were looking for cover.
Nothing happened. Locked in his prison body, Vic was shocked. The killing would already be on Arclight’s newsfeed, which meant transmission to docked ships, who would send it to the transmitters on Red Space beacons the next time they bridged. The footage of the blank’s killing, visual, audio and possibly immersion from some of the witnesses would be available for sale throughout the Consortium as quickly as Red Space travel and light could carry it. Everyone would know that Scab, already a celebrity killer, had, for whatever reason, destroyed a very valuable Queen’s Cartel resource. If the cartel did not respond then they would look weak.
Vic experienced a sinking sensation when he realised that they would not respond. He badly wanted Scab dead right now. Instead this was just going to be another story in his partner’s legend.
Scab stood up. The micro-hooks in his brogues anchored him to the floor. His P-sat rose to hover over his left shoulder. Vic found himself following Scab as he slowly walked towards the exit.
Vic looked around the club. There seemed to be more people there now. A lot of them sat at the bar, ignoring the dancers, wearing long black coats that could cover a multitude of sins. They had the look of Church Militia. Brilliant, Vic thought.
Vic barely had a moment to think that the human male in the button-up black suit who landed in front of Scab looked familiar, before Scab stuck a metalforma blade in the guy’s face. It wasn’t so much the speed of the attack that appalled him, Vic reflected; he’d seen Scab fight before. It was how quickly he got his bid into the Polyhedron’s security systems so they didn’t blow him away. The metalforma blade grew inside the man’s head, branching out into a razor-sharp, root-like structure. The man swayed back on his anchored shoes, bobbing back and forth in the zero G.
Vic had a second to realise that the dead guy looked a little like his partner before the shaven-headed women landed in front of Scab. She was a monk. She wore brown armoured robes. She was powerfully built but all high-end soft-machine augmentation, S-tech as well if the rumours were true, moving tattoos based on Seeder symbols. She was not carrying any weapons; her hands were open. Scab levelled the tumbler pistol at her face.
‘It’s stupid to martyr yourself for a faith that doesn’t even have an afterlife,’ he told her.
‘We’re just here to talk,’ she said.
A Church monk was probably more than equal to dealing with Scab, particularly with all the backup she had. The militants he had noticed were now all turning to focus on them. Nobody had drawn weapons yet except for Scab. Vic was surprised that he hadn’t drawn any either. The problem for the Monk and her militants wasn’t so much Vic and Scab as the bidding war that would be required to act in the Polyhedron. In that, Scab already had the drop on them, and they would have to fight him and the club’s automated systems.
‘Stop cloning him,’ Scab told her, and with his gun levelled at her continued heading for the door, Vic following him. The Monk just watched them leave.
He had had been waiting for them as they left the Polyhedron. He had the look of home- and ship-less excess humanity. He was someone who had failed in the life of economic Darwinism but hadn’t yet got round to dying. The one resource that nobody ever seemed to run out of, the one resource that the Consortium didn’t seem to care enough about to control with artificial scarcity, was so-called sentient biological life. This was presumably why you couldn’t use human matter in assemblers, Vic mused. Then there’d be no shortage of raw material for the Consortium to control. However, most of what Vic termed human refuse tended to come with only two eyes. The ’sect was more than a little surprised when two wrinkles on the man’s head opened. Vic wasn’t sure if they were eyes or not. Each looked like a biotech collection of nerve endings forming sensory organs. Still Vic couldn’t shake the feeling that they were staring at him.
‘What the fuck?’ Vic said, wondering when his capacity for surprise would wear out. The man reached up with a small-bladed, but obviously very sharp, anachronistically-steel-bladed scalpel and cut the two eye-like organs out of his head. Blood poured down out of the wounds into the man’s real eyes. All the while he stared at Scab and Scab watched the self-mutilation. ‘Street art?’ Vic wondered out loud.
Scab looked at the man expectantly as he drew an archaic-looking syringe from his jacket and stabbed it into Vic’s armour. The vibrating power-driven needle drove itself through to original flesh.
‘What are you doing?!’ Vic cried, mandibles clattering together, the panic in his voice belied by his calm, combat-ready stance.
‘It’s a vaccine. Relax,’ Scab said. Vic felt like an animal wanting to bolt but trapped in a cage.
‘I’ve been waiting,’ the man said. ‘They told me you would come and I was to do nothing but wait.’ The ragged, gaunt, dirty nobody finished cutting out the two eye-like organs and handed them to Scab. Scab continued to watch him as he slipped the organs into the pocket of his raincoat.
‘I am nothing now,’ the man said.
Scab nodded. ‘Few people fulfil their dharma,’ he said after a moment’s reflection.
Vic watched the man collapse to the ground, his flesh slowly being eaten away. Then his virus warning went off, and he turned to look at Scab as Arclight started broadcasting a viral contamination warning. Vic knew if the virus was powerful and new enough to defeat Arclight’s countermeasures and most people’s personal defences then it would have to have been very expensive.
Scab grabbed the extruded handle of his P-sat and allowed it to pull him quickly towards the ship. Vic found himself doing the same while covering their retreat.
The expressway sealed as Arclight tried to keep some of its wealthier denizens safe. The P-sat dragged them through the lower passageways. They were still quite crowded, but it was easy to push through corpses in zero G, particularly as a lot of their flesh was missing thanks to the nano-enhanced necrotic nature of the virus radiating from Scab like a bad smell.
‘They won’t let you get away with this,’ Vic said. He knew the cartel could not leave this unanswered. ‘We’re dead the moment we set foot on the Basilisk.’ The ’sect was quite looking forward to his death. More than anything else, ’sects were about efficiency. They wouldn’t make him suffer, just snuff him out. It would be a release, swimming through corpses as a virus ate their flesh was not his idea of fun.
However, Scab had already allowed for this. The Basilisk’s recently upgraded sensors had thoroughly mapped their path into Arclight, and Scab had uploaded it into his neunonics. Since they had landed he had been planting the seeds of escape just in case things turned out bad. He had sent out stealth AI programs of his own devising to burrow quietly into the various weapons and security systems that could give him problems on the way out, be they on the station or on other ships.