Free The Age of Scorpio by Gavin Smith

saying when Eldon caught up.
    ‘It’s as much for your protection as ours,’ Brett was explaining through the translator interface with the suit. ‘We come from a culture with a great deal of nano-technology pollution.’ They walked out into an open area. ‘Seeders.’ There was awe in his voice.
    Eldon looked around, struggling to cope with what he saw. He did not even notice that they had lost contact with the Swan .
    It was clear that, allowing for the thickness of the hull/skin, the chamber was as wide as the craft and almost as long, though either end seemed to be packed with interconnected biomechanics that were neither quite machines nor internal organs.
    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.
    ‘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.
    ‘Boss, Brett may be right. We can’t get away with this.’ Eden said.
    ‘Just shut the fuck up and think about the money. Look at them – they’re not right.’
    ‘They’ve just evolved to fit the environment,’ Eden said.
    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.
    Nulty was still picking up the sensor glitch. Eldon had been right: there had to be something there. Nulty did not like that and was running the signal through every filter he could think of, but the interference of Red Space was preventing him from gathering any more information. It seemed like another strange field reading, not dissimilar but not the same as the weird readings he was getting off the thing they were docked to. A thing he was more and more sure was some kind of S-tech ship.
    He had expected to lose contact with the boarding crew but that did not mean that Nulty liked it. He wondered if they were being torn apart by feral Seeder servitors. He could pilot the Swan if he had to, though he was not sure about the bridge drive. The issue was the docking tube. It wasn’t a known tech interface. It seemed attached to the Swan like a leech.
    Eventually they