The Age of Scorpio Read Free

asked when Nulty shared the information.
    ‘Don’t see how, it’s a drive,’ Eldon said. At this Nulty would have laughed but as an electronic uploaded consciousness it would have been an affectation.
    ‘No offence, boss, but the Church keeps their manufacture so secret we can’t really say anything about this for sure,’ Nulty said. ‘It might well be talking to something.’
    Even Brett looked horrified. Melia bolted away from Eldon and hissed at him, all submissive coquettishness forgotten now.
    ‘No way! Fuck that! I am not getting involved in any Church shit! You can take my contract and use it to sodomise yourself for all I care.’
    ‘Are we working for the Church?’ Brett asked more reasonably.
    ‘I don’t know, not as far as I know,’ Eldon said, as confused and frightened as the rest.
    ‘If this is to do with bridge drives then more likely it’s a Consortium bid to break the Church’s monopoly on their manufacture,’ Nulty said.
    ‘You fucking moron!’ Melia screamed at Eldon.
    ‘I didn’t know,’ he said defensively. ‘We’re jumping to conclusions.’
    ‘But that doesn’t make any sense,’ Brett said. ‘I mean, why us? After all we’re a bit . . .’
    ‘Crap?’ Melia suggested.
    ‘Rough and ready, I was going to say.’
    ‘Deniability and expendability,’ Nulty answered.
    Melia turned on Eldon. ‘That’s it. Contract’s null and void. Get us out of here.’
    ‘But, Baby Doll—’
    ‘Don’t Baby Doll me, you repellent, cockless fucktard. Get us out of here before a Church cruiser turns up, kills us, destroys our backup and murders everyone we ever met. I may be the cheapest clone possible of the original, but I have no wish to wake up in one of their immersion interrogations!’
    Eldon seemed to deflate. He’d lost his big score, through that probably the Swan and his only real pleasure in life in one brief moment. Brett’s look of sympathy wasn’t helping either. Then he realised that Eden had been uncharacteristically quiet throughout Melia’s outburst.
    ‘Are you still listening to that noise?’ he asked. Brett turned to look at Eden. Melia did as well, an expression bordering on horror across her feline features.
    Eden just shrugged.
    ‘Shut it off, now,’ Eldon said. Eden did so.
    ‘There’s another signal,’ Eden said. She tried to share the second signal. She found that the others weren’t so swift to interface with her.
    ‘You’ll want to hear this.’
    ‘She’s right,’ Nulty said over the interface. The others relented. This message was much weaker, broken. ‘What the fuck is this? A radio wave?’ he mused to himself.
    ‘What’s a radio wave?’ Brett asked. Nulty ignored him.
    The language was unknown but sounded like one of the uplifted races, probably human. Eldon started to ask if it was live but stopped as it repeated itself. It was some kind of recording. His neunonics searched for a translation program but came up with nothing despite the thousands of variant uplift languages and dialects in his systems.
    ‘I’ve got it,’ Nulty said over the interface. His voice didn’t sound right. ‘It’s a mayday signal in human common.’
    ‘Bullshit,’ Eldon started.
    ‘From before the Loss.’ The four of them on the bridge just stared at each other. Eldon was the first to smile. He looked over to Melia to see the cash signs mirrored in her eyes.
    Nulty lived for extravehicular activity but he still wasn’t loving Red Space. Space should be really big. Somehow the strange gaseous-like nature of his surrounding environment seemed to be bearing down on him, making him feel claustrophobic. The living smoke effect of Red Space that he was used to was so much thicker here than on the normal Church-approved routes.
    ‘You got it?’ Eldon asked as Nulty scuttled over one of the detachable boosters, sending a diagnostic check as he did so. He’d sent some of the vacuum drones out but didn’t want to let them get too far from the drifting tug