Free The Age of Scorpio by Gavin Smith Page B

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.
    The panic that came from submersion was just an ancient race memory. Brett had more than enough oxygen in his system to survive for a reasonable amount of time underwater. The grip of the dolphin’s tentacles was strong but not crushing. Still, as he struggled to get free, the tentacles might as well have been steel cables.
    The dolphin moved with incredible rapidity through the water towards the tunnel that Brett had seen him disappear into earlier. Except now it looked less like a tunnel and more like a sphincter.
    His neunonics sounded an alarm as the sensors on his skin, which he used to understand pheromones when dealing with insects, picked up an unknown secretion. The sphincter closed behind them.
    Brett found himself being dragged through massive and very alien internal organs that seemed to pulse with their own life. There was the sensation of going deeper and deeper, though whether that was real or just fear, Brett couldn’t be sure.
    He tried the interface and was more than a little disturbed that he could not contact the others. Whatever prevented them from contacting the Swan obviously had the same effect between different sections of the ship/thing, whatever it was. Brett did not like the totality of the signal block either.
    The dolphin breached onto a small bone-like alcove that looked different to the other areas – dark, lacking in life. The organs around the alcove looking diseased to Brett. The tentacles dragged him out of the water and laid him next to the prone dolphin.
    ‘You carrying violence?’ Brett ignored the question. His disc gun was still bonded to the back of his suit and he had a laser at his hip. Shooting was imminent when he got free. His neunonics would replay the way back to the others. ‘I’m your only friend here young ’un. Don’t worry. They don’t know where you are. Mind blind in here. I killed it, whipped up a little disease right here, just small enough for them not to notice.’
    Brett wondered how good the dolphin was at reading human expressions as he stared at the grotesque human mouth under the dolphin’s main mouth. It just would not stop talking, the ancient common accompanied by a clicking noise.
    ‘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