22. A Long Time After the Loss
Vic knew that there was no reason for the beacon to be all the way out here. It wasn’t on any navigational chart. The information as to its whereabouts had recently been added to the nav systems by Scab. Vic liked nothing about this, but then he hadn’t liked anything for some time now.
The bridge drive made a cut in Red Space. The Basilisk emerged into blackness.
‘Where are we and where are the all the stars?’ Vic asked. Scab ignored him.
There was something wrong with the blackness. Vic couldn’t shake the feeling that the infinity of space was somehow closing in on him. He didn’t like the way space seemed to move in the periphery of his multifaceted vision. He didn’t like the feeling that somehow space was squirming.
‘Is that a monastery?’ Vic might as well have been talking to himself. He was receiving the image from the Basilisk’s sensors straight into his neunonics. It showed an ancient-looking habitat built into an asteroid. It had the look of a Church habitat but a very old one. A search of his neunonics found nothing that matched it.
The sensors showed indications of life but no weapon locks from defensive systems. That wasn’t right. Vic couldn’t think of another habitat that had no defensive systems.
‘I don’t want to go there,’ Vic said firmly and crossed all four of his arms. ‘I mean—’ he started.
‘Can you not want to go there silently?’ Scab demanded, turning on Vic. This made Vic even more nervous as Scab seemed a little on edge.
The familiar clang of docking was followed by a grinding noise as the ancient docking arm tried to make a seal.
‘Maybe we’ll just be sucked out into space when we open the airlock,’ Vic said hopefully, but the docking arm finally made its seal. Scab ’faced opening instructions to the Basilisk and after decontamination procedures the wall opened. Vic didn’t like what he saw. It was difficult to tell their race or sex, but they were probably human or feline, as they were wearing voluminous red-hooded robes that covered their features.
Between the two red-clad monks was an ornate cylinder floating on an AG drive. The cylinder was a nano-fabricated tank designed to look like wood, brass and glass. A thick black fluid swirled around inside another clear liquid, seemingly with a life of its own.
It was with dawning horror that Vic realised what these people were.
‘This is a heretical cult!’ he cried, only to be ignored yet again. Were these his real employers? Surely they were too poor for the sort of resources that Scab had been throwing at this thing.
‘Night draws in,’ one of the monks said. Human, male, working hard to impart as little emotion as possible.
‘We have little time,’ the other said. Vic couldn’t be sure of its race, let alone gender.
‘I need a message delivering,’ Scab told them. ‘Tell him that we’re going to need a diversion.’
The monks nodded. Vic was coming to the conclusion that if he could work out a way to commit suicide without being cloned by Scab, it might be easier than this insanity.
The chimera reared on its cloven-hoofed rear legs, striking out with its claws as it surged forward, opening rents of red in the sculpted flesh of the tank-bred biomechanoid it was fighting. There was cheering from the various boxes grown out of the root-like wood that formed the arena.
Zabilla Haq turned away from the arena, distaste written all over her face. The bloodshed did not bother her. The biomechanoid was unimpressive in its modernity; she liked the classical elegance of the three-headed chimera, but then it had taken her a great deal of time and effort to grow it. Adapting and splicing pre-Loss genetic material from a goat, lion and snake had been the easy part. The dragon head had been difficult. It had meant the creation of an entirely new template, as she had not been prepared simply to modify an existing lizard template. Instead, using reptile DNA as a guide, she had written her own code. She was pleased with the result. The difficult part had been making the three heads co-operate while retaining a degree of individual function.
The chimera butted the biomechanoid and horns tore more flesh. The lion head ripped another chunk of meat away as the staggering biomechanoid tried to bring its weapon gauntlet to bear. The hooded serpent tail darted over the chimera’s body; fangs pierced mottled armour, and venom emptied into the biomechanoid’s flesh. The chimera all but climbed up its opponent, using its claws, rearing high. Despite being the creature’s creator, Zabilla couldn’t help but admire the haughty and proud set to the creature’s draconic middle head.
‘I like it,’ Gilbert Scoular said, sounding like he meant the opposite. ‘But it’s not terribly original, is it?’ the fat, ostentatiously dressed, self-proclaimed genetic artist said from his chaise longue. He was heavily made up, sweating and being fanned by a licensed and chipped morlock servant that, it was whispered, he had grown himself and used as a sex toy. ‘Good thing you didn’t give it wings after all. I shouldn’t like to see one of those nesting in the upper branches.’
Her inability to get it to fly had proved extremely frustrating. Scoular’s attempts at biological espionage must have revealed this. Nearly every utterance was a passive-aggressive attack. Zabilla was too good at the Game to show a response, though her grip on the wine glass tightened. She felt her consort Dracup tense next to her. He was working his way towards a second name in the eyes of the Absolute and not as used to the constant barbed attacks of life in society as she was. He was reaching across his emerald-green, handsomely cut, knee-length padded silk tunic for the bone blade sheathed at his hip. He would scar Scoular’s fat face and then call him out.
She stopped him with a glance, hoping that Scoular hadn’t noticed her paramour’s rashness. More to the point, she hoped that the Absolute wasn’t tuned into her own experiential headware at the moment. Though that was likely, as they were now in the semi-final round of the hastily called audition for a chance to run the Absolute’s secret ‘grand project’. Calling the artist out in a duel would be tantamount to admitting that Scoular was not only a better genetic designer but witty enough to elicit a physical response with mere words. He wasn’t. Dracup, on the other hand, had held her as she had cried tears of frustration when she was unable to make the creature fly.
‘As ever, I bow to your greater knowledge of such things,’ Zabilla said. She left the fact that her unoriginal creature was tearing apart his own creation unsaid. ‘After all, you are the artist; I am a mere biophysicist. My studies mean that my interest can never be anything more than amateur.’
‘Whereas your armoured spider with weapon-tipped limbs is an inspired idea,’ Dracup told Scoular dryly. Better, Zabilla thought. A little too obvious but better than drawing a blade.
Their faces were bathed in a warm but less than comforting red glow.
‘Oh, a hard-tech cheat. How… special,’ Scoular said.
Getting the dragon’s head to breathe fire naturally had been very difficult. The crowd went wild. The bloodshed didn’t bother her, but she found the cheering of the crowd a trifle gauche. Under her distaste she was trying not to smile. Scoular could not have failed to know that the flame was an application of biotech. His comment was so petty that Dracup even ignored the easy opportunity to challenge him to a duel.
The chimera paced around the sand of the arena, parts of which were on fire now. Firefighting drones remained hovering above on their AG motors. Zabilla uncharitably hoped that the dragon’s fire had caught some of the bystanders. The arachnid biomechanoid was burning and badly damaged, trying to stand on limbs that were being consumed.