Remove ads

A Spector, An Asher, And A Martin Walk Into A Telepod: Let's Read Gavin G. Smith's Age of Scorpio

Reader mode
meloa789 said:
@MJ12 Commando I am remembering you making a vs thread about this book on SB a few years ago. The crazy shit you described in that thread, will they come in later chapters?
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Yup. Coming soon(tm).

MJ12 Commando said:
I will give you actual testimonials from people who have read it:
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

I'm rather fond of this one.

[19:43] MJ12: Oh god @stormbringer951 I should read Age of Scorpio that sounds amazing

(Some time later)

[23:16] MJ12: Gavin Smith's Age of Scorpio is kinda nuts in a good way and you should read it
[23:16] MJ12: @stormbringer951 recommended it to me

(MJ12 is consistently the most indefatigable recommender of things we both like.)
 
One thing I've noticed is that this book feels like it's moving incredibly fast. We got several plot hooks in our second (short) chapter and so much of the synopsis was already busted through in our first.

Given that the book is 500 pages long, I really wouldn't need forewarning to know there's probably a lot of surprises in store. :V
 
Okay, cool. That was a funny little joke, sure. Now can we get the real Let's Read book in here?

Wait what the fuck do you mean this was actually publish-
 
Remove ads
Chapter 3: You've Got Ten Seconds to Beat It Before I Add You to The List of NSF Casualties
  • Threadmarks
    • NonSequtur said:
    It's unfair to make people guess before you get to the second perspective switch. :V
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...

    You are, of course, 100% right here, so...

    Chapter 3: You've Got Ten Seconds to Beat It Before I Add You to The List of NSF Casualties

    The first word you see in Chapter 3 is the time. "Now." As in the present day. Not Ancient Britain. Not the far future, but the present day.

    The chapter starts with the perspective being an unnamed person in the middle of an orgy, busying himself having sex with an unnamed woman under the effects of drugs and alcohol. The woman is into edgeplay, and has "scars on her neck from bloodletting," so he takes a razor, seeks her consent (which she grants), and tastes her blood.

    The result is, quite-literally, the most mind-blowing sex he has had, or will ever have, in his life.

    He considered himself creative. Perhaps that made him more sensitive, perhaps it didn't. He would never know the latent talent he had and the tiny tear that talent made when her blood sought it out. A single tear of blood ran down his smooth pale cheek, as he became a beacon first. Then a gate as his mind was torn apart. He saw it, briefly, the red burning ghost world.

    Then as they came through he felt like he was being torn apart at some base level. His scream echoed in another place. Nothing that heard it cared, or even understood it. It was drowned out by a much louder and all-encompassing scream.

    Then there was destruction.
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...

    I'm pretty sure whatever this is, this isn't safe, sane, or consensual. Consensual in the Mage: the Ascension sense, anyways. Maybe people are into getting devoured by crimson hell-dimensions.

    So after this demonstration of why fetishes are bad for you and why Age of Scorpio only endorses consensual reproductive sex in the missionary position, we get introduced to one of the main characters of the book, Malcolm du Bois.

    The first impression the book gives you of him is incredible:

    Du Bois hated driving through London almost as much as Londoners hated people driving Range Rovers through the tightly packed streets of the city. He fantasised about killing the taxi driver who had seen him coming, seen him obviously in a hurry and had still pulled out in front of him. Pedestrians scattered as he slewed the big four-by-four onto the pavement. He had not hit any of them, not that it mattered – they would all be dead soon. He did nudge the taxi, the impact barely registered on the armoured Range Rover that du Bois had won from a drug dealer playing baccarat in Monte Carlo.
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...

    From this single paragraph you can get that he has some serious anger management issues, is in a hurry, is pretty good at driving, and seems to have lived a very exciting life. Also, he believes that everyone here is about to die.

    Really, not a particularly important detail.

    Du Bois is on the phone call from hell right now. The sort of phone call from your boss that you never want to be on, times a million.

    "They got all the crèches?" du Bois asked again. He was talking into the air, but the secure mobile connection easily picked up his words. It was not often he asked for information to be repeated – there was no requirement – but it was not every day you heard the death of hope itself.

    "Each was hit simultaneously worldwide and in orbit." It did not matter that Control was discussing near-certain extinction, the female voice was the same, somehow managing to be cold, artificial, distant and sexy at the same time. Normally it had du Bois musing on how things had changed but not today.

    "The souls?"

    "They are all gone, the backups as well. They used a virus, a possible derivation of L-tech."

    "Then it's over," du Bois said quietly.

    "They may have stolen the souls," Control said. That explained the security incident he was on his way to deal with.

    "Which is just so much information without the children. Who was it – the Brass City? The Eggshell?"

    "All information points to it being agents of the Brass City, but we cannot be sure. We would like the souls back, Malcolm." Du Bois said nothing. He had to ignore the hopelessness he felt. More than two thousand years of planning, all for nothing. They had failed.
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...



    absolutely no reason this image might be even remotely relevant to what's happening in this part of the plot, absolutely no reason at all

    (s951: There being Control on a voice link to the protagonist in a cold open as they hurry to deal with [incident] is just really very technothriller. Getting a briefing about viruses destroying souls and something something mysterious long-range plans though, is uh, very Technocracy. This is roughly the point at which I knew MJ12 would probably be into this book, entirely coincidentally.)

    Du Bois then drives right up to a paramilitary cordon manned by SCO 19, the specialist firearms unit of the Metropolitan Police Service. They're in the middle of a SWAT raid on a run-down four-story tall building, which he can only see as a blur.

    However, like any good agent of an international conspiracy, his vision is augmented, and after his vision changes, he can make out a unit of firearms officers breaking down a door to enter the building. His immediate reaction to seeing these officers start clearing the building is that it's a fuck-up, and whoever is responsible for the fuck-up needs to suffer.

    Just in case we haven't figured out that this is more than just your normal James Bond-style spy thriller, Du Bois runs into weird blood magic and does some blood magic of his own in response.

    As soon as he climbed out of the Range Rover he felt the blood-screen. It was like walking through preternatural spiderwebs. He hid behind the door of the Range Rover as he did not want the local police to see him self-harm. Du Bois drew the tanto from the sheath in the small of his back. The blade opened his flesh. He barely felt it, the folded steel was so sharp.
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...

    We then cut viewpoints to the man in the building the firearms officers are raiding, Hamad. Hamad is in the building because his first exfiltration route was blown by an organization called "The Circle," which is apparently a world-spanning conspiracy with command over technology and security services.



    Fnord.

    Hamad is holed up in a filthy room in the building, now revealed to be a flophouse, facing down a fuckton of armed and trained men with guns with only two knives. But they're not just any knives.

    He sat cross-legged in the filthy room in the flophouse. In front of him were the two curved daggers. They were older than any existing civilisation and made from materials that most modern scientists would fail to understand, unless of course they were part of the Circle.

    The simple white blade, Gentle Sleep, was not the problem: it killed easily, almost sorrowfully. The other blade, the blade of skeletal black metal, Nightmare, was another matter. It lusted for the killing, whispered to Hamad, drew out the dying and made it hurt for every victim.

    Hamad had thrown a blood-screen up, and through it Nightmare was aware of everyone within the flophouse and the surrounding buildings, the street, the station. Nightmare wanted all their deaths.
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...

    This is the first time the Circle is mentioned, but it won't be the last. The Circle is honestly the odd man out of the three probably-conspiracies mentioned in the chapter - the Eggshell and Brass City are more fantastical and explicitly mystical, while the Circle sounds like a pretty normal sort of secret society - the sort of generic not-Illuminati name you'd see show up.

    We then shift back from Hamad to the commander of the officers, Chief Inspector Benedict Appleby, and we get our first description of Malcom du Bois from Appleby's perspective:

    Chief Inspector Benedict Appleby did not have time to deal with the special-forces cowboy walking towards him. The man wore loose-fitting, dark casual clothes, his sandy-blond hair down to his shoulders, surprisingly clean-shaven, blue eyes and designer leather jacket, but it was his cock-of-the-walk attitude that gave it away.
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...

    Du Bois, who is a people person and extremely diplomatic and soft-spoken, convinces Appleby that it's in the chief inspector's best interests to cooperate:

    "Tell me, Chief Inspector, was one of the group of men you've just murdered fucking your wife?" du Bois asked.

    "What? No!" Appleby had been so taken aback by the question he had actually answered it.

    "Then why have you sent them all to their certain death?"

    "I think we can handle—"

    "No, you have shown no aptitude for thinking at all. I need to get in there now."

    "We're in the middle of an op—"

    "A very public sodomising – yes, I'm aware of that. Do you know what one of these is?" The man showed Appleby a warrant card. Appleby's eyes widened.

    "Yes. I mean, that is, I've never seen one before but—"

    "This means I can do as I please. Order your men not to interfere with me in any way, understand?"

    "Look, you can't speak to me like that! I will need to check this."

    Du Bois sighed: the whole point of the warrant card was to avoid situations like this. He pulled out his phone and hit speed dial.
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...

    Just kidding.



    Honestly, when Agent Smith does a better job being cordial and polite than you, you have problems.

    While du Bois is trying to figure out why this dude is not recognizing his Illuminati membership card, the firearms officers try to take Hamad into custody. Hamad has feelings about this, not because he might be threatened by men with guns, but because they might have families and people might love them and he is sad that this will soon not be the case because they're about to all die. But not sad enough to not do his part in reducing police brutality in London. Hamad then shows off another trick he has:

    The godsware implants were two slits on his forehead. He opened his eyes. All of them. The Marduk implant showed him the ways through. They made a lie of matter. He fell back through the floor.

    Hamad emerged through the ceiling above the stairway halfway through a graceful somersault and landed among the armed police officers on the cramped stairway. He pushed gun barrels away from him, the slightest touch of hand and foot sending the officers tumbling down the stairs. He seemed to flow among them, moving to where they thought him least likely to be. Toying with probability.

    Hamad crouched low, his leg kicking out behind him. Gentle Sleep cut through a heavy boot like it did not exist. A nearly sentient poison coursed into the firearms-officer's body. He died happy as if in the middle of a pleasant dream. Nightmare just had to open the cheek of one of the officers and the screaming began.

    There was panic as the terror-stricken officer tried to flee and shoot his way out of his worst nightmare. The black blade drew blood again and again.
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...

    Interesting phrases pop up here - "Godsware," "Marduk implant," how the implants don't merely let Hamad phase through walls but instead "made a lie of matter." The book doesn't dump much information onto you about what they are and why this might be, but these hints are tantalizing in and of themselves.

    While Hamad assists the Tories in cutting police budgets, it turns out that Du Bois was calling the Home Secretary, and the Home Secretary also thinks that Appleby is a moron. As in real life, the Home Secretary around 2013 would have been Theresa May, this means that Age of Scorpio is set in an alternate universe where Brexit might mean something other than Brexit.

    After handing Appleby the phone to get harangued, du Bois sprints into the building with a .45 drawn, loading it with a magazine of expensive specialist ammunition that cost more than any of the properties lining the street - so not your regular specialized technothriller bullets - and walks right into the aftermath of Hamad's murder spree. There are a lot of dead cops, but du Bois is completely unsurprised. Hamad is already gone, his blood-screen collapsing without him to maintain it, and du Bois tries to track Hamad by spoofing his blood-screen with disguised tracking elements.

    He's not scrying with blood magic. The book is very clear about this. This is not a scrying spell. This is du Bois hacking someone else's blood magic.

    After a moment of silence to honor the 23rd guy to charge Hamad with a MP5 and his bravery, du Bois decides to take his frustrations at failing to get into a gudfite and the doom of all humanity out on Appleby. Despite the fact that Du Bois is surrounded by armed and trained paramilitary police, he smacks a cop trying to stop him from picking this fight in the face hard, and gives exactly zero fucks about all the other cops who are (entirely reasonably) agitated about this.

    An armed police officer demands du Bois get away from Appleby, and Du Bois, who suffers from terminal fucks deficiency, threatens to kill her solely to make the scene a little quieter. Among his many, many talents, du Bois is an expert at conflict resolution and negotiation.

    Du Bois looked around for someone to blame. He found Appleby quickly and strode towards him. Appleby was sitting on some steps leading to one of the other terraced houses. He was gazing down at the Euston Road unseeing. He looked broken.

    "Was 'Don't enter the building under any circumstances' somehow not emphatic enough for you?"

    Appleby looked up, appalled that someone would say something like that at a time like this, further angering du Bois, who saw it as self-pity.

    One of Appleby's subordinates moved towards du Bois, arm outstretched to intercept him. Du Bois grabbed the man's hand, locked it and then elbowed him in the face, easily knocking him to the ground.

    "Stay down there," du Bois spat as he reached Appleby and leaned down. There were more officers running towards him. "Tell me—"

    "Sir!" an armed police officer shouted at him. "Get away from the chief inspector."

    Du Bois turned on her. "Don't make me kill you just for some peace and quiet." He turned back to Appleby. It was the waste that bothered him the most. "Tell me. How does a mental subnormal, incapable of understanding the most elementary of missives, rise to such a high position in the Met?" Appleby flinched. "Are you a Mason or something?" Appleby turned to look at him, appalled. Shock was rapidly being replaced by anger.

    "I lost men to—"

    Du Bois grabbed him, pulling his face closer. "Listen to me, you seeping cock-sore. You didn't fucking lose them; you killed them. You killed them because you are a moron, because you are too fucking stupid and greedy to sit back and think, Hmm, perhaps this position of power and responsibility is too much for my tiny mind to handle. Perhaps I won't risk murdering people because I'm a simpering lightweight vastly out of my depth and lacking the common sense that God gave shrubbery!"

    Du Bois felt a degree of pride as he saw tears form in Appleby's eyes. He worried that people like Appleby would find ways to rationalise what they had done. Du Bois wanted to drive home the man's culpability, hopefully help break him so he would not manoeuvre himself into a position of responsibility and influence again. In du Bois's mind, Appleby's stupidity made him dangerous. Surrounded by nervous police officers, du Bois stared at the man with cold blue eyes. He wanted to see the breaking point.
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...

    If du Bois ever played Alpha Protocol, he would just mash the "Aggressive" response button the moment it popped up, except when he could hit "Execute" instead. If you think that perhaps the guy who just casually threatens to shoot people because they're in his way might not be the best vehicle for pointing out why wasting lives is bad, you're right.

    To distract you from this, the story immediately moves on to the second main character of the modern-era, Beth.

    Beth knew she was ugly. She knew because the cell-block mums had not tried to rape her. She stared at the hated reflection in the small mirror. She knew she was too squat, too brutish, had too little femininity for the rest of the world. No matter how much you try and get away from other people's expectations, reject them utterly, you still ended up feeling their looks, judging yourself through their eyes. Still, she had broken enough mirrors and going down for manslaughter had been her seven years of bad luck, let out early for good behaviour. The only thing she did like was the Celtic tattoo creeping up from her neck. That and, mannish or not, she had kept in good shape. Though she wondered if they would let her work on the doors again with her record. She had been working that night after all.
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...

    Beth does not have issues. She has subscriptions.

    Beth is a former bouncer who has just finished serving time for manslaughter, having been sentenced to seven years in prison but getting let out early for good behavior. She is the second main character introduced in this chapter, and her life is one which involves a distinct lack of world-spanning conspiracies and soul-destroying viruses.

    After leaving prison, she returns home to meet her father, an unhealthy man on supplemental oxygen who smokes heavily and is extremely disappointed that Beth, not her sister Talia, has returned home:

    'You! You did this. You drove her away when you killed her man. What were you thinking?'

    Beth stood up slowly. I was thinking that maybe if I left it this time he would beat her so hard he'd finally kill her, Beth thought. Talia, the pretty one, Talia the popular one, Talia the feminine one, Talia the fucking trouble-magnet. Beth took after her dad and Talia took after some lost dark beauty from their family's genetic past. They had never got on, but Talia was her younger sister so she had looked out for her. Not the easiest of jobs for someone that self-destructive. Beth had lost count of the number of times that someone had come to find her to peel Talia, messed up on drugs or alcohol, off the floor and take her home, or pull her out of some other scrape. Not that she had ever been thanked.

    Talia had found Davey with her unerring ability to get involved with the worst guy possible. He was a minor-league dealer with a history of violence against his partners. None of this had mattered to Talia. It had been true love through the bruises. Beth had been pretty sure that Davey was going to kill her that final time. That said, she knew she had lost control. She had not needed to go as far as she did. Even then it had still hurt to see Talia in court testifying against her. Had it not been for that, the sentence might have been suspended.
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...

    Beth's family is fucked up, basically. Talia has self-destructive tendencies, Beth does her best to protect her sister but also resents her for it, Beth's dad openly favors Talia, and this ended up culminating in Beth beating Talia's boyfriend to death for his abuse of Talia, and getting thanked by her own sister sending her to prison.

    You can see why she has issues.

    Talia, the book takes pains to point out here, looks nothing like Beth. Beth looks like her father. Talia is a dark-haired beauty who might have gotten her genes from some long-forgotten ancestor in the family tree. Not her mother, notably.

    Talia left the house six months ago, and Beth's dad is worried, so he successfully guilt-trips Beth into looking for her. After asking around, she finds out the following:

    1. Talia went to Portsmouth with a goth pretty boy, and was in contact with her friends until a few weeks ago;
    2. Apparently Talia's been doing some hardcore fetish porn, which some of Beth's friends have seen. I'm not sure how this conversation would have gone, but it's probably in the top ten of 'awkward conversations you can have.'

    One of Talia and Beth's mutual friends gives Beth an address in Portsmouth. Beth's dad then attempts another guilt-trip check and succeeds, so Beth packs for a trip to Portsmouth, taking some brass knuckles, an axe handle wrapped in a bike chain, a Balisong knife, and her grandfather's First World War bayonet.

    The last time she armed herself and went to help her sister, she ended up in prison. But maybe that was just an outlier - you need to get a large sample before you can make any sort of positive determination on these things. Beth walks out without saying goodbye.

    McGurk leaned heavily on his cane and looked at the bloody and naked girl lying on top of the rubble, dust still settling on her. He was sure she was still alive: her tits were moving.

    'Well fuck,' he said, his strong Portsmouth accent unmistakable. He could hear sirens in the distance. 'Put her in the motor.'

    'Boss?' Markus asked. A house blowing up was bound to draw the attraction of the police.
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...

    We shift perspectives again to a man called McGurk, who has a strong Portsmouth accent and is looking at a naked, bloody young woman on top of a pile of rubble. He mentions that she might be the person someone named Arbogast wants him to bring to him, and orders his goons to pick her up and put her in his BMW.

    Just like chapter 2, chapter 3 and the "Now" portions are a major change in tone. What we're getting here is two story threads - you have du Bois's thread, which is a technothriller or spy fiction, except with occult conspiracies and hints of blood magic and science fiction technology. Then you have Beth, who is existing in what seems to be a pretty mundane, gritty crime fiction story, with absolutely nothing supernatural at all mentioned about her.

    This chapter also illustrates some of the flaws of Age of Scorpio - it's really, really overstuffed at times - and the modern day storyline skips from a lot of viewpoints at the start because the big players are so separated from each other.

    But it also is why Age of Scorpio is an excellent topic for a Let's Read - it's just so overstuffed with wild ideas that it's fun to talk about. You have high-octane space opera, cosmic horror urban fantasy, and gritty low fantasy in the same book - and given that these are all parts of the same book, you can guess that there's some shared plot thread between all of them.

    And you can already see that there are definitely ties between the present-day portions and the future portions. I'll even give you a freebie: scroll back up to the quoted introduction of Chapter 3, then look at how Red Space was described in Chapter 1.

    In front of the Black Swan space was ripped open, though Nulty did not appreciate it as violence. To him it looked like a tear lined with a silk ribbon of blue pulsing radiation. Through the tear it looked like space was bleeding, the bright crimson of Red Space. As incredible as this sight was, there was something about the fabric of Red Space that made him feel uncomfortable.
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...
    ...
    ...
    …
    ...
    ...
    Yeah, they're pretty much identical. The difference between whatever happened here and a jump to Red Space is, of course, that Nulty and the Black Swan didn't encounter "them" - whatever "they" were. They passed through without issue.

    I would say that this is the true introduction to Age of Scorpio - one of the few low fantasy high fantasy cyberpunk space opera urban fantasy technothriller cosmic horror novels in existence. Several very disparate genres being thrown into a single book and setting, with a plot that tries to weave these into a coherent whole. I'm not entirely sure it succeeds, either, but whatever it does, the ride is incredible.
     
  • Threadmarks
    • MJ12 Commando said:
    shift perspectives again
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...

    yeah you thought i was kidding huh
    MJ12 Commando said:
    This is the first time the Circle is mentioned, but it won't be the last. The Circle is honestly the odd man out of the three probably-conspiracies mentioned in the chapter - the Eggshell and Brass City are more fantastical and explicitly mystical, while the Circle sounds like a pretty normal sort of secret society - the sort of generic not-Illuminati name you'd see show up.
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...

    no, these won't be explained
    yes, they will be on the quiz
     
    Last edited:
    Is the goal of AOS to make us enter red space by disorientating us? Because I think it's working.
     
    I'm fascinated by this, truly. I don't know whether it's good or not, but I'm watching on in anticipation.

    Like, you have some Asshole Antiheroes, some stock gritty fantasy characters, and a bunch of gratuitous sex, violence, and drug abuse, mixed in with gonzo science fiction and high fantasy concepts. I can't figure out whether stuff like "cloned catgirl sex slaves" are cringe or like, some sort of clever commentary (or "clever" commentary?).

    Maybe it's hard to get a bead on any of these concepts because we've only had once scene per character.

    ...

    So Talia has some sort of dark beauty buried somewhere in her family tree? Maybe like, I don't know, a Pitchish druidess?
     
    MJ12 Commando said:
    No, actually, the final scene in the books is a person deciding to go to a perfectly normal, not-out-of-the-ordinary college for the first time and make some new friends.
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...
    prometheus110 said:
    If this is fake, fuck off. If this is real, fuck off.

    :V
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...

    The reason why I asked that question was because I still remember the VS Debate from a couple of years ago, even if there were few replies. So even if scantly, I know that things might escalate.
     
    MJ12 Commando said:
    I'm pretty sure whatever this is, this isn't safe, sane, or consensual. Consensual in the Mage: the Ascension sense, anyways. Maybe people are into getting devoured by crimson hell-dimensions.
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...
    To be fair to the weird orgy guy, going into hell dimensions doesn't make his respect for consent any less commendable 👍

    (look at the sentences this story makes me write)
     
    NonSequtur said:
    no, these won't be explained
    yes, they will be on the quiz
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...

    Professor can I change courses.

    I also can't help but notice that we have these three amorphous mysterious conspiracies that seem to want to be in charge of everything and seem to on some level be competing against each other, two of whom have mystical connotations and a third more secular one, and in the future segment we have this amorphous mysterious group called the Church that seems to largely be in control of everything with competition from a second amorphous mysterious group with a far more secular name.
     
    Chapter 4. So Long and Thanks For All The Drugs
  • Threadmarks
    • Chapter 4. So Long and Thanks For All The Drugs

    Side note: this chapter was a lot, and I kinda wanted to just quote all of it. It's paced like that.

    Article:
    It took a long time to convince the Black Swan's systems that the mating with the other ship/thing was safe enough to open the airlock. The docking system was too strange, too organic. Eventually Nulty had to override the system himself.


    Last time we left the down-on-their-luck, ragtag band of misfits from the Black Swan, they were about to try and board a big ol' derelict-looking weird ship in the middle of Red Space to score a really big payday.

    Article:
    One of them was waiting in the docking tube for them. He looked like an eccentric soft machine sculpt. Except the alienness seemed less forced. He – they were pretty sure it was a he despite a degree of androgyny – had pale skin with lines traced over it. Eden magnified her vision. They weren't lines but the outline of delicate scales. His eyes were black pools, no visible iris or pupil. His neck seemed to palpate slightly and his head, utterly hairless, looked swollen. Webbed fingers with black sharp-looking nails were wrapped around a staff which looked like it was made of a material somewhere between bone and pearl. He wore a scaled robe of silver-coloured material that seemed to move of its own accord.

    When he opened his mouth, they recognised the noises as words; the syntax was familiar but even so it strained their neunonics' translation routines. Behind the strange, nominally human, man they could see a soft pearl-like luminescence. It smelled, not unpleasantly, of the sea, and they could hear the sound of water gently lapping against something. Their suit sensors showed that the atmosphere was apparently breathable. If there were any toxins the sensors couldn't pick them up. The sensors also told them that the atmosphere was warm and damp.

    'I am Ezard,' their translation subroutines finally came back. 'I am the speaker. You are welcome here.'

    'First contact?' Brett asked the others over the interface.

    'He's human, or was once,' Eden replied.


    The ship is, in fact, not actually derelict. There's a welcoming party, and the welcoming party is human. Ish. And leaning very heavily into the whole marine biome theme.

    Them being actual humans disappoints Brett, who seems really into the idea of RPing a real first contact. It also really disappoints Eldon, but for more prosaic reasons. If everyone on this ship was dead, he'd get to salvage the ship.

    Remember that hardened biohazard container he brought along for this exact contingency?

    Article:
    He waited until the Swan's airlock closed behind them and then sent a neunonic command to set off the viral canister that Brett had attached to his suit. He had expected some sort of warning siren and to then be torn apart but nothing happened.


    Yeah.

    We're on chapter four, the first contactees have barely said their hello's and it's already attempted murder o'clock.

    Eldon Sloper, what a guy.

    Despite him mentioning the bioweapons he was going to use to kill any crew in the last chapter so they could :turian: salvage :turian: the ship, I really didn't expect his first gambit to be "actually let's just murder everyone" before they could even find out what's what. It's kinda sudden.

    Especially when he half expects the crew of the other ship (the number of whom he doesn't know, and who are currently attached to his ship by a thoroughly non-standard docking mechanism) to detect it and try and murder him in response.

    I expect this to go swimmingly.


    Ezard, meanwhile, is doing his best to be accommodating. He assures his new guests that the environment is clean and the air is breathable and tries his best to make them welcome. Brett, as a conscientious reader of first contact fiction, explains that they're keeping the helmets on for Ezard's own protection; the place the Black Swan crew comes from has really high levels of nanotech pollution.

    All the chatter ceases when they reach their destination though, because the view is breathtaking:

    Article:
    The chamber – Eldon struggled not to think of it as a wet cave with ribs – reminded him of the texture of the inside of his own mouth. The suit sensors told of a warm wind blowing through. The wind seemed to blow one way and then be sucked back. There was no visible floor; it was mostly clear water. The same omnipresent pearl-like luminescence that illuminated the rest of the cavern lit the shallows. There were much darker areas that were obviously a lot deeper.

    The water was broken by islands which looked like a mixture of bone and some unknown type of flesh. On the islands there were more people like Ezard. They appeared to have binary male and female sexes and only a very few of them were clothed as Ezard was.

    'I assure you it did not look like this when we started. It was far more utilitarian. We sculpted this over the many generations that we've lived within the Mother,' Ezard told them.


    Neat.

    It's a pretty large living area, taking up most of the internal space of the ship, but Eldon is still uncomfortably reminded of how much like the inside of a giant monster this is. But while he's having biomechanical vore flashbacks, the rest of the crew are treating it with reverential awe:

    Article:
    'Where are you from?' Eden asked, awe in her voice.

    'Earth,' Ezard answered.

    'You don't happen to know where it is, do you?' Eldon asked.

    'If it exists still it will not be as it was.'

    Eden glanced at the others questioningly.

    'They could know so much,' Brett said over the interface.

    'Yes, alive they would be of incalculable worth to the uplifted races but nothing to us,' Eldon told him angrily.


    They're pretty sure this ship is Seeder tech, and a brief conversation with Ezard confirms to them that these people are so deeply connected to humanity's heritage that Brett and Eden are having second thoughts about the whole murder thing Eldon has going now, now that it looks like it's expanded to encompass cultural and literal genocide.

    Oops.

    They've started arguing with him on the radio, but it's probably a bit too late to put the viruses back in the bottle.

    Eldon tells his crew to shut the fuck up and think of the money, and anyway, there's something wrong about Ezard's people so they deserve it, but Brett and Eden, who are both more open-minded, tell him that they're just evolved to fit their environment.

    So uh, we can add racist to Eldon Sloper's extensive negative karma ledger.

    Article:
    Ezard turned to look at them. 'I cannot express how glad we are to see you. We have been trapped in this realm too long. We want to meet the rest of humanity. Can you take us out of the red sky?'

    Eldon sent the command from his neunonics and his suit visor opened. He breathed in the air. He, like the rest of the crew, had immunised themselves against the particular flavour of viral they were using. If you used virals you hadn't protected yourself against, then you were a fool who deserved to die, in his opinion.

    'We'll be glad to help.' He ignored the demands to know what the fuck he was doing over the interface. He knew with his long life he must have picked up all sorts of nano-infections that his cheap nano-screens could barely control. Time to spread them around, he thought. A plea of ignorance might help if they got caught.


    Also he has Strong Opinions about the correct way to use bioweapons to murder people.

    What.

    A.

    Guy.

    As an aside, I'm not entirely sure why he goes mask-off, considering he's already tried to infect them with the strongest actual bioweapons he can get his hands on, but I guess he thinks this might speed the process along?

    The rest of his crew are less than impressed with his continuing behaviour, anyway.



    In a short interlude, Nulty is still out on the hull of the ship, running the anomalous signals they noticed last chapter through every filter he can think of. Red Space is fucking with the signal, but it seems to be a field reading similar to the one given off by the S-tech ship. He's lost contact with the rest of the crew inside the hull of the other ship, and he idly wonders whether they've been torn apart by feral Seeder servitors yet. He consoles himself with the idea that if the worst came to worst, he can pilot the Swan himself if he can figure out how to detach from the other ship.


    Back inside, everyone else has reluctantly been peer-pressured into opening their visors. Melia thinks it smells fishy. It's making the catgirl hungry.

    Speaking of fishy, the description of the inhabitants of the other ship seems … kinda unnerving?

    Article:
    The bio-sculpted inhabitants of the ship/thing Ezard referred to as Mother were all staring at them, their expressions unreadable. Eden could not shake the feeling that they were communicating in some way. She had watched one of them crawl to a swollen nipple-like growth on the wall of the chamber and suck on it. Moments later she had sunk to the ground in what looked like a narcotic stupor.


    @MJ12 Commando : They clearly come from a future where The Last Jedi is recognized as the cultural classic it is, and drinking space-milk straight out of the tiddy is haute cuisine.

    Brett, however, is loving it. Or would be, if he wasn't depressed about Eldon's antics:

    Article:
    Brett was looking despondent. Their attempted genocide was weighing heavily on him. He was wandering towards the subjective front of the craft, approaching the biomechanical machinery/organs. In front of the wall of machinery/organs there was what looked to be some kind of web made of a fine, delicate version of the same material as Ezard's staff. In the centre of the web was a cocoon of the same material. It glowed with an inner light and something about it suggested a feminine quality.

    Brett stood looking at it for a while. The others were some way back sitting on one of the islands, not sure what to do while they waited for genocide to take place.


    Ah yes, that awkward moment when you're twiddling your thumbs waiting for your bioweapons to kick in. A highly relatable feel.

    Melia is kinda freaked out and wants to just go back but Eldon thinks it would be too socially awkward, which is … some kind of concern. Eden isn't even sure if bioweapons are going to work on people who might have augmented themselves with Seeder tech anyway, and she figures they can't actually fight the whole ship with just four disc guns.

    Meanwhile, Brett is wandering around, gawking, sightseeing and doing tourist things:

    Article:
    Brett looked down. He was surprised to see a dolphin looking at him, similar to those that worked with the Church. Except it was not quite a dolphin. Where the Church dolphins had waldos, this one had tentacles. Where the Church dolphins used interface to communicate, this one appeared to have a human mouth growing out of its neck. The creature looked old, its skin cracked and covered in growths.

    It was staring straight at Brett from about eight feet down in the clear water. A shadow passed over it and with a flick of its tail it dived down into a tunnel that led into the machinery/organs.


    There are two chapters where dolphins are mentioned in this book. This is one of them.

    The Church is known for using dolphins with manipulator arms and (brain?) interfaces. These guys have a dolphin with tentacles and a second, human, mouth growing out of its neck. This book just puts that out there!

    I actually like unexplained details in worldbuilding, but this book really has a lot of things.

    The dolphin fucks off as Ezard shows up to do tour guide-y things, so Brett asks about the cocoon thing. The translator's working much faster now, so they can have a real conversation without the lengthy awkward pauses, although between themselves most of the inhabitants of the ship are speaking in a different language with lots of clocks and other sea life noises.

    Article:
    'She,' Ezard corrected. He seemed to be struggling to explain concepts with the linguistic tools he had. 'She is a conduit, a translator. The Mother speaks through her because she is of the Mother's line. When we are in the real, maybe she will hatch, become like a god. She is the link between them in the past and us now.'

    Brett did not understand but found something beautiful in what Ezard was saying. More and more he was sure that he did not want to kill these people.

    'Look, Ezard, there's something I have to tell you,' he said. His handsome face was in turmoil as he struggled with his betrayal. He liked and trusted his companions but his loyalty to them was outweighed by the magnitude of the crime they were about to commit. Ezard regarded him with an expression that managed to be both expectant and inscrutable.

    Tentacles shot out of the water and wrapped around Brett. He was ripped off his feet and dragged into the water before the others had a chance to respond. Ezard dived into the water after him.


    We interrupt this exposition dump with some breaking news:

    Brett has just been kidnapped by a dolphin.

    Brett instantly panics and starts struggling, but he's being held pretty tightly. He has enough oxygen that his augmented body can survive for a while underwater, but he's being carried along tunnels and through a whole bunch of massive pulsing alien internal organs. More importantly, whatever cut off comms contact between the team and Nulty outside the Black Swan has now cut him off from the rest of the team too.

    He's alone in Gigertown.

    The dolphin finally beaches with him onto a small dark alcove somewhere far, far away on the ship. It's. The dolphin assures him that this is a little diseased blind-spot it created so the Mind can't see in here, and they need to talk. Brett has no intention of talking once he can figure out how to get free, but for now he's really distracted by the grotesque human mouth underneath the dolphin's normal mouth.

    Article:
    'They call me Zadok. They say I wasn't grown right, that the template was fucked, but they need the likes of me. All sorts of disease alchemy. I can heal as well as hurt. Put a disease in my tool though, so there'd be no more of me.'

    Brilliant, Brett thought. He appeared to have been kidnapped by a disease-spreading mutant dolphin bearing a grudge against their hosts.

    'They don't have anything good for you here. They just want to get out of the dark and spread, like a disease. Everyone has to be the same, like. They are no friends to you and yours.'

    'Can you let me go?' Brett asked.

    'If I let you go, you going to behave? Because I think you're carrying some violence with you and I can't get hurt before I tell you what you're into here.'

    Brett just nodded. The dolphin shifted him around in the coils of his tentacles so he could examine him with one crusty eye.

    'You got any bottled fun on you, boy? You are a boy, aren't you?'

    'Yes,' Brett answered, trying to shift, the coils of tentacle tightening around him as he tried.

    'Yes to bottled fun or orifice fun?'

    'I'm a boy, man. I'm male. I don't know what bottle fun is.'

    'See, they cut me off from the drug nipples, no more mother's milk for me and I'm not an endorphin drinker, otherwise I could just suck it out of you. You wouldn't like that though. It's not fair, is it?'

    'Yes, I have drugs,' Brett managed between gritted teeth. He kept to himself that they were part of his internal systems. He did not like the idea of being torn apart by some junkie dolphin looking for a fix. A thought occurred to Brett: 'If they don't wish us well then how come they let you live?'

    'Told you. They need me for maintenance. You, you're just spare parts, some new information, maybe a top-up on the old gene pool, but most importantly you're a key to this smoking red prison. I'll be honest. I'd like to see the ocean that my ancestors saw. I 'members it up here.' He tapped his skull with a tentacle. 'But it's far more important to fuck them. Ruin it for them. Just like they fucked me. They took my tool; they can all die.' The little chamber of dead meat resonated with obvious anger and bitterness. Brett grunted as the tentacles started to tighten around him.


    This is an absurdly long passage for me to quote in one piece, but I really couldn't bring myself to shorten the excerpt. I mean, seriously. I just want everyone to admire these words.

    This is a book where a mutant drug-addicted disease-riddled tentacle dolphin with a human mouth is shaking down a victim it kidnapped for drugs or sex* in the guts of a … space whale, while trying to convince the guy that his hosts have nefarious and shady bad intentions. How can you not love this?

    If this was on anyone's bingo card for this chapter, please let me know. I'm going to act very impressed but please know that I'll be pre-judging you for lying and already having read the book.

    * I think it's safe to presume that's what orifice fun is, but I don't feel entirely confident because this chapter is definitely biotech weird shit o' clock.


    Anyway, before I gush too much, let's continue on. Brett finally manages to entice the dolphin with drugs enough to get him to loosen his grip. Big mistake:

    Article:
    Brett stood up among the serpentine uncoiling tentacles and wondered if they were looking for him. The bonded disc gun came off the back of his suit as soon as he touched the weapon. His neunonics sent the safety code to the gun instantaneously. Brett also sent the command to switch the weapon to pump action because he thought it was cooler.

    The butt of the weapon was snug against his shoulder. Zadok saw what was happening but obviously did not have the soft machine enhanced reaction augmentations that Brett did. The dolphin was only just starting to move when both barrels of the disc gun went off. To Brett it was like everything was happening in slow motion. The butt of the weapon contracted, cushioning the recoil as solid-state shot turned into razor-sharp, electromagnetically propelled spinning discs. Zadok's flesh spread itself across the diseased chamber. Brett worked the pump mechanism on the weapon, chambering another two rounds from the tubular magazines under the side-by-side barrels. He fired again, just to be on the safe side. There was another display of dead flesh.

    'Fuck yeah!' Brett said, trying not to dance a little. 'That's what you get!' Then he remembered where he was. He looked around the chamber for further threats, expecting more junkie, mutant dolphins but finding none.



    He doesn't actually scream "get some", but he's totally screaming "get some".

    Please say goodbye to Nice Boy Almost Wholesome Tourist Brett, and join me in welcoming Legendary Gamer Brett.

    MJ12: But does he really count as a gamer if he's the least racist member of the party? The world wonders.

    That's not a joke by the way. Traumatized by the whole "kidnapped into a space whale thing", Brett is flashing back to the FPS games he's played:

    Article:
    Brett rose out of the pool with the disc gun ready, scanning from side to side. This was the way the tac program in his neunonics told him to do it; more to the point it was the way he had done it in immersions. Playing legionnaire for fun.

    Brett was now sure he was lost. He was not sure how as the recorder facility on the route finder application in his neunonics should have taken him back to the main chamber.


    Unfortunately, as befits a gamer protagonist, he's in one of those confusing old school FPS games and he's lost as hell and wandering around randomly in dead ends.

    He eventually ends up in a large chamber, with a warm wind blowing through it and water gently lapping. It's the whole marine aesthetic again, which soothes him, until he gets a good look at one of the growths on the walls:

    Article:
    At first Brett thought it was some kind of organic waste sack or tube. Then he realised it was a massive distended pregnant belly, not unlike the ones on the few fetishist weirdos he had seen go in for natural births. Only this one ended in a biomechanical vaginal orifice. Brett followed the tube up. It was part of something that had once been very clearly human – more human than Ezard and his friends in the main chamber.

    He/she, gender did not matter, was merged with the flesh of the chamber. No eyes, no ears, these were extraneous – why would it need them? Instead of a mouth there was a translucent tube. Matter could be seen moving sluggishly down it. This was not pregnancy. This was flesh as a material, storage, an incubator. Somehow Brett knew that the Mother and the Father were the ship. He knew that the passengers and crew were raw material. Their minds were only of use as inspiration. All over Known Space, human flesh was used as a raw material in more base ways – labour, sex, sustenance – but this had nothing to do with humanity. To Brett this was abomination. He looked around, his eyes brightening the darkness and magnifying what he saw. The abomination was repeated on either side of the chamber many times. Through the gloom he could see more chambers.

    The plop it made sliding out of the closest stomach's orifice was almost comical. Brett's features contorted as he looked down at the utterly inhuman thing uncurling in the water in front of him. Even the flesh sculptors on Cyst could not have invented such a departure from humanity using the same basic material. Humanoid disgust overwhelmed Brett as for the first time he was confronted by something that, although hybridised, was genuinely alien and not just another uplifted animal like himself.

    He raised the disc gun to his shoulder and aimed it at the newborn crime against human flesh. The safety was already off.

    Brett's neunonics recorded the flight of his head through the air, its impact on the surface of the water. As Brett's head sank before his systems registered brain death and became inert, the neunonics recorded the hazy image of a full-grown version of the newborn Brett had just seen, vomiting something onto his headless corpse. The final thing Brett's systems registered was the enzyme breaking down his flesh for the thing to start sucking up his corpse.


    Brett really lost his head when the aesthetic got a bit too H.R. Giger for him, huh?

    MJ12: He should have remembered from his videogames that melee attacks are an instant kill, too bad.

    Between this and the mutant dolphin soliloquy, we can maybe draw some disturbing inferences about what happened back on Earth.


    Meanwhile, back in the main chamber, Ezard is being politely insistent that they will find the malfunctioning maintenance dolphin and get Brett back safe and well. Eden wants to go rescue Brett right now but both Eldon and Melia want nothing the fuck to do with that. They're about to blow up into a major argument, when …

    Article:
    They swung round to see a woman walking towards them and pointing.

    'You did this!' She shouted the words as if they were new to her. As if she had not used even this ancient form of common in a long time, if ever.

    Her skin was covered in jumbled words and patterns, some of them animated. Others glowed with their own luminescence. Eldon could not keep his eyes off her chest – the flashing and animated images looked like a collision between adverts for a soft drink and an insect brothel. They had apparently carried in a number of nanite advertising plagues. Plagues that their own screens would have stopped but against which those here would have no countermeasures.


    So, how about them first contact protocols?

    Lacking nano-screens to adblock for them, their hosts are pretty irate. At this point, it would take a diplomatic genius to calm the situation down. Eden, bless her, is doing her best:

    Article:
    'Shit,' Eldon said. Eden was trying to explain the concept of nano-pollution to the angry women as more closed on them. Ezard was staring at them like he wanted an explanation.

    'You brought something else . . .' Ezard started.

    Eldon drew the disc gun from his back and let Ezard have both barrels. Ezard's abdomen almost ceased to exist as he flew back into the pool.

    The angry women with the virulent advertising disease grabbed Eden by the neck and lifted her off her feet. Nanites quickly laced through the skin and flesh of Eden's neck, hardening it, protecting her windpipe, but her augmentations were strictly civilian and designed for industrial accidents. The woman's fingers were still crushing her flesh. There was blood running down Eden's attacker's fingers.

    Eldon turned his disc gun on the woman holding Eden off the ground. His neunonics warned him that Eden's position was within his field of fire but offered him the best target solution. He pulled the trigger. Both barrels fired. The discs tore chunks out of Eden and the woman. The woman staggered but did not drop Eden. Moments later Eden's head just seemed to pop off. The headless corpse dropped to the ground and the angry and already injured woman turned towards Eldon. Melia's double-barrelled disc blast tore the woman off her feet.


    Eldon, on the other hand:



    Eldon and Melia, as the last two members of the Swan's crew in the ship, are retreating back to back as the horde of enraged locals charge them.

    Article:
    'What the fuck did you shoot Ezard for?' Melia demanded, piteously aware of how few rounds the disc guns had in their tubular magazines.

    'Panicked,' Eldon answered, thinking that this was not a good time for a domestic.

    'And Eden?'

    'Same thing.'

    'Are you panicking now?'

    'Yes.' Though had Eldon been totally honest he would now have told her that panic was warring with irritation.

    'You going to shoot me?' Melia demanded. Eldon gave it some thought.

    'You hold them off and I'll make a run for help,' he suggested.


    If this was a different protagonist I'd read it as lighthearted banter, but Eldon Sloper is …. well …uh ...

    Hey ladies, he's not technically single, but he is in the market for a new licensed concubine. 💋


    Anyway, while he's trying to extricate them from a firefight that was entirely his fault, Eldon notices something weird and out-of-place in the middle of a firefight:

    Article:
    He looked up at the cocoon. He was surprised to see an ugly wiry-looking man with no hair and green-stained lips climbing around on it.

    The man's spacesuit sleeve was halfway up his right arm. Clinging to this arm, its legs digging into his flesh, was an arachnid with pincers and a sting. The arachnid looked like it was made of living brass. The sting had extended and seemed to be deep in the material of the cocoon.

    Eldon recognised the man, or his neunonics did. He was famous. But there was something else, something familiar, as if he had actually met him but he could not remember when.

    There was a cry of pain from the man as the sting retracted from the cocoon and the brass arachnid sank into his flesh, moving underneath the skin. The man's spacesuit covered him and the visor slid over his face. Then the man hugged the cocoon.


    Pay no attention to the celebrity with the arachnid doing something to the cocoon while everyone is distracted. I'm sure this won't be important or anything.


    Out on the hull, Nulty has his own issues. He's also pretty sure the sensor glitch that has been plaguing the Black Swan for the past two chapters is some sort of stealth craft, with a similar energy signature to the S-tech ship they're docked up to.

    The clouds in Red Space are clearing, which usually happens when ships gate into the red from the real. A lot of clouds are clearing:

    Article:
    The violence done to the very fabric of Red Space was appalling in its scale. Nulty watched from the hull of the Black Swan, feeling exposed in the vacuum that he'd thought of as his home. As space was torn open, the craft coming through looked like a massive cliff of armour and technology from his perspective. It moved slowly, gracefully, through the pulsing blue tear, angry ribbons of white energy sparking off its hull. Nulty had the absurd urge to go and hide on the other side of it. Except that the sensor feed from the Swan was showing another bridge of similar size opening behind him. For a supposedly off-the-beaten-track part of Red Space, things were getting very busy. The second craft was of about equal size and similarly armoured, but unlike the smooth, angular lines of the first craft, its hull was ornate, even bearing statuary protruding.

    Nulty recognised both craft. The first was a Consortium Free Trade Enforcer-class heavy cruiser. The second was also a heavy cruiser but belonged to the Seeder Church. Nulty understood why they were here. Both would have an interest in the Seeder craft, if that was what it was, particularly if it held the secret of bridge tech. To the Consortium it could mean breaking the Church's monopoly, a monopoly that the Church would not want to see broken.


    Happening status: it's.

    Both ships instantly aggro each other and start trading threats as they try to target-lock each other. It's rough going because both their sensor systems keep glitching in Red Space.

    While the Consortium cruiser reads normal on scan, the Church vessel is showing some weird energy signature readings similar to the S-tech ship. More relevantly to Nulty, it's also similar to the readings he's getting from their own bridge drive, which was mysteriously modified by their mysterious client.

    As the two ships open fire on each other, Nulty has had enough. Neither side has any particular reason to keep him alive once they win, so it's all drones for themselves. He starts cutting free the S-tech ship's airlock.


    Just in time, really. Inside the ship, Melia and Eldon are playing the world's most cyberpunk biomechanical shooter:

    Article:
    One of the ship/thing's inhabitants moved too close to Melia and she fired. Eldon also fired as they closed on him. To Eldon it looked like black veins of disease were crawling across the walls/flesh of the ship/creature. Eldon cursed himself roundly. The virals he had brought on board were the most potent he could find in Arclight. He had never imagined that they would be as potent as this. He had killed his prize.

    'You've done this!' one of the women screamed at him with a larynx designed for a different language.

    'I didn't mean to,' he cried, and then shot her with both barrels. The craft bucked under his feet. It felt like an impact, a powerful one. The ripple that surged through the craft and knocked him off his feet reminded him of dry retching. In the ceiling above he watched as the flesh transformed itself into fire. A chemical reaction as explosives fed on flesh until it reached fusion and breached the outer hull.

    Eldon did not see space. It was his torn-up constituent parts that were sucked through the hole in the ancient creature's flesh and into Red Space's clouded starless night.


    Eldon Sloper, everyone.

    Join us in the next spacefuture chapter for MJ's* coverage of the further adventures of the (surviving) crew of the Black Swan :V

    *Side note on programming for the rest of this Let's Read: For the rest of this book, it's going to rotate between cyberpunk spacefuture -> antiquity -> present, which works out pretty well for me and MJ because we alternate each chapter, and alternate chapters in every setting[/u].
     
    Last edited:
  • Threadmarks
    • Reader mode
    You must login or register to reply here.
    Remove ads
    Back
    Top