Neutronium Alchemist: Conflict
Chapter 01
Lady Macbeth slipped slowly into place above the docking
cradle, her equatorial verniers sparkling briefly as Joshua compensated for
drift. Optical-band sensors gave a poor return here; Tunja’s ruby glow was
insipid even in clear space, and down where Ayacucho lurked among the disk
particles it was an abiding roseate gloom. Laser radar guided the starship in
until the cradle latches clamped home.
The bay’s rim lights sprang up to
full intensity, highlighting the hull, their reflected beams twisting about at
irregular angles as the thermo-dump panels folded back into the fuselage. Then
the cradle started to descend.
In the bridge not a word was
spoken. It was the mood which had haunted them all the way from Narok, an
infection passed down from captain to crew.
Sarha looked over the bridge at
Joshua for some sign of . . . humanity, she supposed. He had flown them here,
making excellent time as always. And apart from the kind of instructions
necessary to keep the ship humming smoothly, he hadn’t put ten words together.
He’d even taken his meals alone in his cabin.
Beaulieu and Dahybi had told the
rest of the crew of the Norfolk possession, and how concerned Joshua had been
for Louise. So at least Sarha knew the reason for his blues, even though she
found it slightly hard to believe. This was the Joshua with whom she’d had an affair
for over six months last year. He was so easy about the relationship that when
they did finally stop sleeping together she’d stayed on as part of the crew
without any awkwardness on either side.
Which was why she found it
difficult that Joshua could be so affected by what had happened to Louise, by
all accounts a fairly simple country girl. He never became that
entangled. Commitment wasn’t a concept which nested in his skull. Part of the
fascination was his easygoing nature. There was never any deceit with Joshua,
you knew just where you stood.
Perhaps Louise wasn’t so simple
after all. Perhaps I’m just jealous.
“Going to tell us now, Captain?”
she asked.
“Huh?” Joshua turned his head in
her general direction.
“Why we’re here? We’re not chasing
Meyer anymore. So who is this Dr Mzu?”
“Best you don’t ask.”
A circuit of the bridge showed her
how irritated everyone was getting with his attitude. “Absolutely, Joshua; I
mean, you can’t be sure if we’re trustworthy, can you? Not after all this
time.”
Joshua stared at her. Fortunately,
belaboured intuition finally managed to struggle through his moping thoughts to
reveal the crew’s bottled-up exasperation. “Bugger,” he winced. Sarha was
right, after all they’d been through together these people deserved a better style
of captaincy than this. Jesus, I’m picking up Ione’s paranoia. Thank God I
didn’t have to make any real command decisions. “Sorry, I just got hit by
Norfolk. I wasn’t expecting it.”
“Nobody expected any of this,
Joshua,” Sarha said sympathetically.
“Yeah, right. Okay, Dr Mzu is a
physicist, who once worked for the Garissan navy—”
They didn’t say much while he told
them what the flight was about. Which was probably a good thing, he guessed. It
was one hell of a deal he’d accepted on their behalf. How would I feel if
they’d dragged me along without knowing why?
When he finished he could see a
mild smile on Ashly’s face, but then the old pilot always did claim to chase
after excitement. The others took it all reasonably stoically; though Sarha was
looking at him with a kind of bemused pique.
Joshua hitched his face up into one
of his old come-on grins. “Told you, you were better off not knowing.”
She hissed at him, then relented.
“Bloody hell, wasn’t there anybody else the Lord of Ruin could use?”
“Who would you trust?”
Sarha tried to come up with an
answer, and failed hopelessly.
“If anyone wants to bail out, let
me know,” Joshua said. “This wasn’t exactly covered in my job description when
you signed on.”
“Neither was Lalonde,” Melvyn said
dryly.
“Beaulieu?” Joshua asked.
“I have always served my captain to
the best of my ability,” the shiny cosmonik said. “I see no reason to stop
now.”
“Thanks. All of you. Okay, let’s
get Lady Mac powered down. Then we’ll have a quick scout around for the
doctor.”
The Dorados Customs and Immigration
Service took seventy-five minutes to process the Lady Mac’s crew. Given
the quarantine, Joshua had been expecting some hassle, but these officers
seemed intent on analysing every molecule in the starship. Their documentation
was reviewed four separate times. Joshua wound up paying a
five-thousand-fuseodollar administration fee to the chief inspector before they
were confirmed to be non-possessed, had the appropriate Tranquillity government
authorization to be flying, and declared suitable citizens to enter Ayacucho.
The lawyers were waiting for him at
the end of the docking bay airlock tube. Three of them, two men and a woman,
their unfussy blue suits cloned from some conservative chain-store design
program.
“Captain Calvert?” the woman asked.
She gave him a narrow frown, as if uncertain he could be the person she wanted.
Joshua rotated slightly so his
silver star on his epaulette was prominent. “You got me.”
“You are the captain of the Lady
Macbeth?” Again the uncertainty.
“Yep.”
“I am Mrs Nateghi from Tayari,
Usoro and Wang, we represent the Zaman Service and Equipment Company which
operates here in the spaceport.”
“Sorry, guys, I don’t need a
maintenance contract. We just got refitted.”
She held out a flek with a gold
scale of justice symbol embossed on one side. “Marcus Calvert, this is a
summons for fees owing to our client since August 2586. You are required to
appear before the Ayacucho civil claims court at a date to be set in order to
resolve this debt.”
The flek was pressed into Joshua’s
palm. “Whaa—” he managed to grunt.
Sarha started giggling, which drew
a cool glare from Mrs Nateghi. “We have also filed a court impounding order on
the Lady Macbeth,” she said frostily. “Please do not try and leave as
you did last time.”
Joshua kissed the flek flamboyantly
and beamed at the woman. “I’m Joshua Calvert. I think you should be talking to
my father. He’s Marcus Calvert.”
If the statement threw her, there
was no visible sign. “Are you the Lady Macbeth’s current owner?”
“Sure.”
“Then you remain liable for the
debt. I will have the summons revised to reflect this. The impounding order
remains unaffected.”
Joshua kept his smile in place. He
datavised the flight computer for a review of all 2586 log entries. There
weren’t any. “Jesus, Dad, thanks a bunch,” he muttered under his breath. No
way—absolutely not—would he show the three vultures how fazed he was. “Look,
this is obviously an oversight, a computer glitch, something on those lines. I
have no intention of contesting the debt. And I shall be very happy to pay off
any money owing on Lady Mac’s account. I’m sure nobody wants this
regrettable misunderstanding to come to court.” He jabbed a toe at Sarha whose
giggles had turned to outright laughter.
Mrs Nateghi gave a brisk nod. “It is
within my brief to accept payment in full.”
“Fine.” Joshua took his Jovian Bank
credit disk out of his ship-suit’s top pocket.
“The cost in 2586 to the Zaman
Company for services rendered comes to seventy-two thousand fuseodollars. I
have an invoice.”
“I’m sure you do.” Joshua held out
the credit disk, anxious to be finished.
The lawyer consulted her processor
block, a show of formality. “The interest accrued on your debt over twenty-five
years comes to two hundred and eighty-nine thousand fuseodollars, as approved
by the court.”
Sarha’s laughter ended in a choke.
Joshua had to use a neural nanonics nerve impulse override to stop himself from
snarling at the lawyer. He was sure she was doing the same to stop her equally
blank face from sneering. Bitch! “Of course,” he said faintly.
“And our firm’s fee for dealing
with the case is twenty-three thousand fuseodollars.”
“Yes, I thought you were cheap.”
This time, she scowled.
Joshua shunted the money over. The
lawyers hauled themselves away down the corridor.
“Can we afford that?” Sarha asked.
“Yes,” Joshua said. “I have an
unlimited expense account for this trip. Ione’s paying.” He didn’t want to
dwell on what she’d say when she saw the bill.
I wonder why Dad left in such a
hurry?
Ashly patted Joshua’s shoulder.
“Real chip off the old block, your dad, eh?”
“I hope he hurries up and possesses
someone soon,” Joshua said through gritted teeth. “There’s a few things I’d
like to talk to him about.” Then he thought about what he’d just said. Maybe
not as funny and cuttingly sarcastic as he’d intended. Because Dad was there in
the beyond. Suffering in the beyond. That’s if he wasn’t already . . . “Come
on, let’s make a start.”
The club he wanted, according to
the spaceport personnel, was the Bar KF-T; that’s where the action was. Along
with the dealers, pushers, and pimps, and all the rest of the people in the
know.
The trouble was, Joshua found after
a straight two-hour stint of surfing the tables, they didn’t know the one piece
of information he needed. The name of Alkad Mzu had not left a heavy impression
on the citizens of Ayacucho.
At the end he gave up and went to
sit with Ashly and Melvyn at a raised corner table. It gave him a good view
over the dance floor, where some nice girls were moving in trim movements. He
rolled his beer bottle between his palms, not much interested in the contents.
“It was only a long shot, Captain,”
Melvyn said. “We ought to start sniffing around the astroengineering companies.
Right now they’re so desperate for business that even the legitimate ones would
happily consider selling her a frigate.”
“If she wants to disappear, she has
to do it at the bottom of the heap,” Joshua said. “You’d think the dealers
would have heard something.”
“Maybe not,” Ashly said. “There’s
definitely some kind of underground league here. It can’t be the same as the
usual asteroid independence movements; the Dorados are already sovereign. I got
a few hints when they thought I was offering Lady Mac’s services, plenty
of talk about revenge against Omuta. Mzu could have turned to them, after all
they’re her people. Unfortunately, the likes of you and I can hardly pass
ourselves off as long-lost cousins of the cause.” He held up his hand, studying
it dispassionately.
Joshua looked at his own skin.
“Yeah, you’ve got a point. We’re not exactly obvious Kenyan-ethnic stock are
we?”
“Dahybi might make the grade.”
“I doubt it.” His eyes narrowed.
“Jesus, will you look at how many of those kids are wearing red handkerchiefs
around their ankles.” Six or seven times that evening while he’d been scouting
around teenagers had asked him to take them to Valisk.
“We could do worse than the
Deadnights,” Melvyn said broodingly. “At least there aren’t any possessed
here.”
“Don’t count on it.” Ashly leaned
over the table, lowering his voice. “My neural nanonics suffered a couple of
program load errors this evening. Not full glitches, but the diagnostics
couldn’t pinpoint the cause.”
“Humm.” Joshua looked at Melvyn.
“You?”
“My communications block had a
five-second dropout.”
“Some of my memory cells went
off-line earlier, too. I should have paid more attention. Shit. We’ve been here
barely three hours, and we’ve each been close enough to one to be affected.
What does that come to in percentages of the population?”
“Paranoia can be worse than real
dangers,” Melvyn said.
“Sure. If they are here, they’re
obviously not strong enough to mount an all-out takeover campaign. Yet. That
gives us a little time.”
“So what’s out next move?” Melvyn
asked.
“Other end of the spectrum, I
suppose,” Joshua said. “Contact someone in government who can run discreet
checks for us. Or maybe it wouldn’t be a bad idea to let slip the Lady Mac is
for hire. If Mzu is here to get help, the only place it’ll come from is the
nationalist community. They might even wind up trying to charter us to deploy
the damn thing.”
“Too late now,” Ashly said. “We’re
officially here to buy defence components for Tranquillity. And we’ve been
asking too many questions.”
“Yeah. Jesus, I’m not used to
thinking along these lines. I wonder if any of my fellow captains have been
approached for a combat charter?”
“Only if she’s actually in this
asteroid,” Ashly said. “Nothing to stop the Samaku docking at one of the
others when it arrived. That’s even if she came here in the first place. We
ought to be checking that.”
“I’m not an idiot,” Joshua moaned.
“Sarha’s working on it.”
Sarha’s smile appeared a little
frayed after the third time Mabaki bumped against her. The crowd in the Bar
KF-T weren’t that excitable. She could certainly thread her way through without
jostling anyone.
Mabaki waggled his eyebrows when
she glanced back. “Sorry.” He grinned.
It wasn’t so much that he bumped
her, as where. And how the touch tarried. She told herself a pathetic
middle-aged letch was probably going to be one of the smaller tribulations they
would encounter on this crazy course Joshua had set.
Just before she gave in and tried a
datavise, she located Joshua standing over by the bar (where else, she asked
herself). “That’s him,” she told Mabaki.
Sarha tapped Joshua on the shoulder
as he was accepting a beer bottle from the barmaid. “Joshua, I found someone I
think can . . .” She trailed off in confusion. It wasn’t Joshua. That she of
all people could be mistaken was astonishing. But he did look remarkably similar,
especially in the treacherously shimmering light thrown out by the dance
floor’s holographic spray. Same broad chest to accommodate a metabolism
geneered for free fall, identical prominent jaw folding back into flat cheeks.
But this man’s skin was darker, though nothing like the ebony of most Dorado
Kenyan-ethnics, and his glossy hair was jet-black rather than Joshua’s
nondescript brown.
“I’m sorry,” she stammered.
“I’m not.” He could certainly
manage the Joshua charm-grin, too. Possibly even better than Joshua.
“I was looking for someone else.”
“I hate him already.”
“Goodbye.”
“Oh, please, I’m too young for my
life to end. And it will when you leave. At least have a drink with me first.
He can wait.”
“No he can’t.” She began to move
away. Some erratic impulse made her look back in perplexity. Damn, the likeness
was extraordinary.
His smile widened. “That’s it.
You’re making the right choice.”
“No. No, I’m not.”
“At least let me give you my
eddress.”
“Thank you, but we’re not staying.”
Sarha forced her legs to work. She just knew her face would be red. How
stupidly embarrassing.
“I’m Liol,” he called out after
her. “Just ask for Liol. Everybody knows me.”
I’ll bet they do, she thought,
especially the girls. The crowd closed around her again, Mabaki tagging along
faithfully.
Second time lucky. Joshua was
sitting at a table in a shadowy corner, and he was with Ashly and Melvyn, so
there was no mistake this time.
“Officer Mabaki works for the
Dorados Immigration Service,” Sarha explained as she pulled up a chair.
“Excellent,” Joshua said. “I’d like
to purchase some of your files.”
It cost him fifteen thousand
fuseodollars to learn that the Samaku had definitely docked at Ayacucho.
One passenger had disembarked.
“That’s her,” Mabaki confirmed
after Joshua datavised a visual file to him. “Daphine Kigano. You don’t forget
women like that.”
“Daphine Kigano, really? Bit of a
viper was she?”
“You’re telling me.” Mabaki
savoured another sip of the Tennessee Malt Joshua had bought him. “She was some
friend or other of Ikela’s. You don’t mess with those sort of connections.”
Joshua datavised the club’s net
processor for a civil information core, and accessed a file on Ikela. It was
mostly public relations spin released by T’Opingtu, but it gave him an idea of
what he was dealing with. “So I see,” he muttered. “Can you tell us what
starships have left since Daphine Kigano arrived?”
“That’s simple. None. Well, not
unless you count the Edenist delegation, but they’re from this system’s gas
giant anyway. There are still some inter-orbit ships flying, but no Adamist
starships. The Lady Macbeth is the first starship to arrive since the Samaku
departed.”
After Mabaki left a grin spread
over Joshua’s face. It was the first in a long time which didn’t have to be
printed there by neural nanonics. “She’s still here,” he said to the others.
“We’ve got her.”
“We’ve got a lead on her,” Melvyn
cautioned. “That’s all.”
“Optimist. Now we know who to ask
for, we can start focusing our efforts. I think this Ikela character would be a
good place to start. Hell, we can even get a legitimate appointment. T’Opingtu
is the kind of company we ought to approach for Tranquillity’s SD spares,
anyway.” He drained his beer bottle and put it back on the table. A flash of
movement caught his eye, and he slapped his hand down on the spider which was
scuttling clear of the soggy mat.
“Oh, well,” Samuel said. “At least
we know why he’s here. I suppose Ione Saldana must have commissioned him to
track Mzu.”
“That stupid little cow,” Monica
complained. “Doesn’t she have any idea what kind of issues she’s fooling with?
And sending some bloody mercenary on the chase!”
“Lagrange Calvert,” Samuel mused.
“I suppose she could have done worse. He’s certainly got the balls for a
mission like this.”
“But not the style. God, if he
starts blundering around asking questions everyone in the Dorados is going to
know Mzu is running loose. Here of all places! I ought to terminate him; it’d
save us a nasty headache in the long term.”
“I do wish you wouldn’t keep on
about how much easier life would be if we killed everyone who poses the
slightest inconvenience. Calvert is an amateur, he’s not going to bother us.
Besides, he won’t be the one who stirs up the public.” Samuel indicated the row
of AV pillars set up along one side of the rented office. Edenist agents were
busy monitoring the output of every Ayacucho-based media company.
News of Ikela’s death was already
breaking, tying it in with reports of a “disturbance” at the offices of Laxa
and Ahmad. Police were treating the death as suspicious, refusing to comment to
the rovers gathered outside the doors of the legal firm. Although they’d
already let slip that they would like to question Kaliua Lamu about the death.
Monica winced at that. She
shouldn’t have blown him, but they had been desperate for the information. The
financier had demanded that Monica protect him from his erstwhile comrades: a
request she could hardly refuse. He and his family were already on board one of
the Edenist delegation’s voidhawks, waiting to be spirited away to safety.
“Don’t I know it. That Cabral is going to make our life hell,” she grumbled. “I
don’t know why you let him and the other two go.”
“You know perfectly well why. What
else could we do? For goodness’ sake, Feira Ile is Ayacucho’s SD chief; and Malindi
is president of the Merchant’s Association; and both of them sit on the Dorados
governing council. I could hardly authorize their abduction.”
“I suppose not,” she sighed.
“It’s not as if they can tell
people what they were doing, or even that they were there.”
“Don’t count on it. They’re
certainly above the law here; and if any word of Mzu does leak out it’ll
inflame the nationalist sympathy.”
“I think we had better assume it
will do. Cabral will make sure of it. After all, he voted to help her retrieve
the Alchemist.”
“Yes.” She let out an exasperated
groan. “God, we walked right past her!”
“Ran past,” Samuel corrected.
Monica glared at him. “Any
sightings?”
“None at all. However we are losing
an unusual number of spiders.”
“Oh?”
“Children are going around killing
them. It’s some kind of organized game. Several day clubs are running
competitions to see who can find the most. There are cash prizes. Clever,” he
acknowledged.
“Somebody’s well organized.”
“Yes and no. Children are a most
peculiar method of attack, the numbers they can eliminate will inconvenience us
rather than block us. If it was another agency that discovered we were
infiltrating the asteroid, they would release a tailored virus to kill the
spiders.” He cast an inquiring glance. “No?”
She puckered her lips in an ironic
smile. “I would imagine that could well be standard operating procedure for
some people.”
“So . . . it isn’t an agency, but
it is someone who has connections that reach down into local day clubs. And
quickly.”
“Not the partizans. They were never
that well organized, and their membership is mostly aging reticents. The group
that has Mzu?”
“By process of elimination, it must
be.”
“Yes, but so far we only know one
member, this Voi girl. If there is an inner core of partizans I find it hard to
believe the ESA didn’t know about them.”
“And us.” He looked over to the
agents monitoring the news, his face flickering through a range of expressions
as he exchanged a barrage of questions and answers across the general affinity
band. “Interesting.”
“What?” she asked patiently.
“Given Ikela’s mysterious death and
his wealth, there’s been no mention of his daughter by any media company.
That’s normally the first thing reporters focus on: who’s going to inherit.”
“Cabral’s shielding her.”
“Looks like it.”
“Do you think he could be involved
with this new group?”
“Very unlikely. From what we know
about him, his partizan involvement was minimal, he was part of it for form’s
sake.”
“So what the hell group is Voi
mixed up with?”
Much later, when he had the time to
sit down and think about it, Liol gave Lalonde as the reason for being so slow
off the mark. He would never have been so sluggish under normal circumstances.
But after accessing Kelly Tirrel’s report he hit Ayacucho’s clubs and bars, drinking
and stimming out with methodical determination. A lot of people were doing
exactly the same thing, but for a different reason. They merely feared the
possessed, while Liol had watched his life’s dream crumple in less than a
second.
It had always been a dangerous
dream. A single hope which has lasted from the earliest days of childhood is
not a sound foundation on which to build a life. But Liol had done it. His
mother had always told him his father would come back one day; an assurance she
kept on repeating through another three husbands and countless boyfriends. He
will return, and he’ll take us away with him; somewhere where the sun shines
dazzling white and the land is flat and endless. A universe away from the
Dorados, worldlets haunted by the momentous horror and tragedy of the past.
The dream—the sure knowledge—of his
destiny gave Liol attitude, setting him apart from his peers. His was among the
first generation of Garissans born after the genocide. While others suffered
from their parents’ nightmares, a young Liol flourished in the expanding
caverns and corridors of Mapire. He was the champion of his day club; idolized
as reckless by his teeny friends, the first of all of them to get drunk, the
first to have sex, the first to try soft drugs, and then not so soft, the first
to run a black stimulant program through newly implanted neural nanonics. A
genuine been-there-done-that kid, as much as you could go and do within the
limited scope for experience permitted in orbit around Tunja.
His zest even carried over into his
early twenties, when the years of his father’s non-return were beginning to
pile up in an alarming quantity. He still clung to his mother’s promise.
A goodly number of his
contemporaries emigrated from the Dorados when they reached their majority, a
migration worrying to the council. Everyone assumed Liol would be among them,
surely the first who would want to seek new opportunities. But he stayed,
joining in the effort to build the Dorados into a prime industrial state.
Garissa’s refugees had been awarded
the settlement rights to the Dorados by the Confederation Assembly as part of
their restitutions against Omuta for the genocide. Every multistellar company
mining the ore had to pay a licence fee to the council, part of which was used to
invest in the asteroids’ infrastructure, while the remainder was paid directly
to the survivors, and their descendants, by now scattered across the
Confederation.
By 2606 this dividend had grown to
a respectable twenty-eight thousand fuseodollars per annum. With such a
guaranteed income as collateral, Liol had little trouble collecting loans and
grants from the bank and the Dorados Development Agency to start his own
business. In keeping with his now somewhat unhealthy obsession with
spaceflight, he formed a company, Quantum Serendipity, specializing in
servicing starship electronics. It was a good choice; the number of starship
movements in the Tunja system was growing each year. He was awarded
subcontracts by the larger service and maintenance companies, working his way
up the list of approved suppliers. After two years of steady growth, he leased
a docking bay in the spaceport, and made his first bid for a complete starship
maintenance service. Year three saw Quantum Serendipity buy a majority share in
a small electronics station; by producing the processors in-house he could
undercut his competitors and still make a profit.
He now had the majority shares in
two electronics stations, owned seven docking bays, and employed seventy
people. And six months ago, Quantum Serendipity had landed a service contract
for the communications network linking Ayacucho’s SD platforms; a rock-solid
income which was on the verge of pushing him into a whole new level of
operations.
Then news of the possession arrived
from the Confederation Assembly, swiftly followed by Kelly Tirrel’s report. The
first didn’t bother Liol half as much as his competitors, with his SD contract
he could keep his company afloat throughout the crisis. But the second item,
with its hero-of-the-day, super-pilot Lagrange Calvert rescuing little kiddies
in his starship. That came close to breaking Liol. It was the end of his world.
None of his friends understood the
reason behind his sudden ferocious depression, the worrying benders he launched
himself into. But then they had never been told of his dream, and how much it
meant to him, that was private. So after a couple of abortive attempts to
“cheer him up” had failed dismally amid his tirades of calculatingly vicious
abuse, they had left him alone.
Which was why he’d been surprised
when the girl in the Bar KF-T had spoken to him. Surprised, and not a little
bit blasted. The come-on routine he gave her was automatic, he didn’t have to
think. It was only when she’d gone that a frown crossed his flattish, handsome
face. “Joshua,” he said in a drink-fuddled voice. “She called me Joshua. Why
did she do that?”
The barmaid, who by now had given
up on the idea of lugging him home for the night, shrugged gamely and moved on.
Liol drained his whisky chaser in
one swift toss, then datavised a search request into the spaceport registration
computer. The answer seemed to trojan a wickedly effective sober-up program
into his neural nanonics.
Alkad had seen worse rooms when she
was on the move thirty years ago. The hotel charged by the hour, catering for
starship crews on fast stopovers, and citizens who wanted somewhere quiet and
private to indulge any of a variety of vices which modern technology could
provide. There was no window, the hotel was cut into rock some distance behind
the cliff at the end of the biosphere cavern. It was cheaper that way. The
customers never even noticed.
Big holograms covered two of the
walls, showing pictures of some planetary city at dusk, its jewelscape of
twinkling lights retreating into a horizon of salmon-pink sky. The bed filled
half of the floor space, leaving just enough room for people to shuffle around
it. There was no other furniture. The bathroom was a utilitarian cubicle fitted
with a shower and a toilet. Soaps and gels were available from a pay dispenser.
“This is Lodi Shalasha,” Voi said
when they arrived. “Our electronics supremo, he’s made sure the room’s clean. I
hope. For his sake.”
The young man rolled off the bed
and smiled nervously at Alkad. He was dressed in a flamboyant orange suit with
eye-twisting green spirals. Not quite as tall as Voi, and several kilos
overweight.
Student type, Alkad categorized
instantly, burning with the outrage that came from a head stuffed full of fresh
knowledge. She’d seen it a thousand times before when she was a lecturer; kids
from an easy background expanding their minds in all the wrong directions at
the first taste of intellectual freedom.
His smile was strained when he
looked at Voi. “Have you heard?”
“Heard what?” the tall girl was immediately
suspicious.
“I’m sorry, Voi. Really.”
“What?”
“Your father. There was some kind
of trouble at the Laxa and Ahmad offices. He’s dead. It’s all over the news.”
Every muscle in the girl’s body
hardened, she stared right through Lodi. “How?”
“The police say he was shot. They
want to question Kaliua Lamu.”
“That’s stupid, why would Kaliua
shoot my father?”
Lodi shrugged hopelessly.
“It must have been those people
running to the offices. Foreign agents, they did it,” Voi said. “We must not
let this distract us.” She paused for a moment, then burst into tears.
Alkad had guessed it was coming,
the girl was far too rigid. She sat Voi down on the bed and put her arm around
the girl’s shoulders. “It’s all right,” she soothed. “Just let it happen.”
“No.” Voi was rocking back and
forth. “I must not. Nothing must interfere with the cause. I’ve got a
suppressor program I can use. Give me a moment.”
“Don’t,” Alkad warned. “That’s the
worst thing you can do. Believe me, I’ve had enough experience of grief to know
what works.”
“I didn’t like my father,” Voi
wailed. “I told him I hated him. I hated what he did. He was weak.”
“No, Ikela was never weak. Don’t
think that of your father. He was one of the best navy captains we had.”
Voi wiped a hand across her face,
simply broadening the tear trails. “A navy captain?”
“That’s right. He commanded a
frigate during the war. That’s how I knew him.”
“Daddy fought in the war?”
“Yes. And after.”
“I don’t understand. He never
said.”
“He wasn’t supposed to. He was
under orders, and he obeyed them right up to his death. An officer to the last.
I’m proud of him. All Garissans can be proud of him.” Alkad hoped the hypocrisy
wouldn’t taint her voice. She was alarmingly aware how much she needed Voi’s
people now, whoever they were. And Ikela had almost kept the faith, it was only
a white lie.
“What did he do in the navy?” Voi
was suddenly desperate for details.
“Later, I promise,” Mzu said.
“Right now I want you to activate a somnolence program. Believe me, it’s the
best thing. We were having a hard enough day before this.”
“I don’t want to sleep.”
“I know. But you need it. And I’m
not going anywhere. I’ll be here when you wake up.”
Voi glanced uncertainly at Lodi,
who nodded encouragingly. “All right.” She lay back on the bed, shuffled herself
comfortable, and closed her eyes. The program took hold.
Alkad stood up and deactivated the
chameleon suit. It was painful peeling the hood off her face, the thin fabric
stuck possessively to her skin. But the room’s cool air was a tonic; she’d
sweated heavily underneath it.
She split the seal on her blouse
and began to wriggle her arms out of the suit.
Lodi coughed frantically.
“Never seen a naked woman before?”
“Er, yes. But . . . I. That is—”
“Are you just playing at this,
Lodi?”
“Playing at what?”
“Being a good-guy radical, a
revolutionary on the run?”
“No!”
“Good. Because you’re going to see
a lot worse than a bare-arsed woman my age before we’re done.”
His skittish attitude calmed. “I
understand. I really do. Er—”
Alkad started on the trousers, they
were tighter than the hood. “Yes?”
“Who are you, exactly?”
“Voi didn’t explain?”
“No. She just told me to alert the
group for possible action. She said we must be careful because the asteroid was
probably under covert surveillance.”
“She was right.”
“Yeah, I know,” he said proudly. “I
was the one who worked out the Edenists were spreading those spiders.”
“Clever of you.”
“Thanks. Our junior cadres are
cleaning them from critical areas, corridor junctions and places. But I made
sure they skimp around this hotel; I didn’t want to draw attention to it.”
“A smart precaution. So do these
cadres of yours know we’re here?”
“No, absolutely not; nobody else
knows. I swear. Voi said she wanted a safe room; I even paid cash.”
Maybe I can still salvage this
after all, Alkad thought. “Tell you what, Lodi; I’m going to have a shower
first, then afterwards you can tell me all about this little group of yours.”
As with most crews when they were
docked, Joshua liked to book in at a hotel even if it was only for a single night.
It wasn’t necessarily more convenient than staying in the Lady Mac, it
just made a change. This time, though, the crew returned to the starship; and
Joshua depressurized the airlock tube once they were all back on board. It
would hardly stop anyone in an SII suit, but Lady Mac had her fair share
of internal defence systems. And besides . . . at the back of his mind was the
notion that a possessed would be hard-pressed to wear and operate a spacesuit;
if Kelly was right, their rampant energistic ability would completely screw up
the suit’s processors. He sealed himself up in his sleep cocoon with his
paranoia reduced to its lowest level in days.
It was a sombre breakfast as they
began to drift into the galley cabin and collect their food five hours later.
Everyone had accessed the local news companies. Ikela’s murder was the premier
item.
Ashly glanced at the galley’s AV
pillar as he plugged his cereal packet into the milk nozzle.
“Got to be a cover-up,” the pilot
grunted. “Too much smoke, too little fire. The police should have made an
arrest by now. Where’s someone as prominent as this Lamu character going to
hide in an asteroid?”
Joshua glanced up from his carton
of grapefruit. “You think Mzu did it?”
“No.” Ashly retrieved the
now-chilly packet and gulped down a mouthful of the mushy wheat paste. “I think
someone trying to get Mzu did it; Ikela just got in their way. The police must
know that. They simply can’t blurt it out in public.”
“So did they get her?” Melvyn
asked.
“Am I psychic?”
“Such questions are irrelevant,”
Beaulieu said. “We don’t have enough information to speculate in this fashion.”
“We can certainly speculate on who
else is trying to nab her,” Melvyn said. “For my money, it’s got to be the
bloody intelligence agencies. If we can confirm she made it here, so can they.
And that’s serious trouble, Captain. If they can kill someone like Ikela with
impunity, they’re not going to worry much about riding over us.”
Joshua switched his empty carton of
grapefruit for a can of tea and a croissant. He stared around at his crew as he
chewed on the bland pastry (another reason he liked hotels, free-fall food was
always soft and tacky to avoid crumbs). Melvyn’s words were unsettling, none of
them were really used to personal, one-on-one danger; starship combat was so
very different. Then there was the possibility of encountering the possessed as
well. “Beaulieu’s right, we don’t have enough data yet. We’ll spend the morning
rectifying that. Melvyn and Ashly, you team up; I want you to concentrate on
industrial defence contracts, see if you can find traces of the kind of things
Mzu would require for retrieving and deploying the Alchemist. Principally,
that’ll be a starship, but it’ll still need fitting out; if we’re really lucky
she could have ordered some kind of customized equipment. Dahybi, Beaulieu; try
and find out what happened to the Daphine Kigano alias, where she was last
seen, her credit disk number, that kind of thing. I’m going to find out what I
can about Ikela and his associates.”
“What about me?” Sarha asked
indignantly.
“You’re on duty in here, and you
don’t let anyone apart from us on board. From now on, there will always be one
of us on the bridge. I don’t know that there are any possessed in Ayacucho, but
I’m not risking it. There’s also the intelligence agencies to consider, along
with local security forces, and whoever Mzu is lined up with. I think now might
also be an appropriate time to take the serjeants out of zero-tau just in case
events turn sour. We can pass them off as cosmoniks easily enough.”
Ione was finding the whole
sensation of independence most peculiar, both individually and in unison with
the mirror fragment minds in the other serjeants. Her thoughts were fluttering
across the affinity band like birds fleeing a hurricane.
We must try and separate more, she said.
To which her own thoughts replied: Absolutely.
She felt like giggling; the kind of
giggle that came from being tickled by a merciless lover: unwelcome yet
inevitable.
The affinity contact with the other
three serjeants reduced, paring down to essential information: location, threat
status, environment interpretation. She couldn’t help the little frisson of
eagerness at the experience; this was the first time she had ever been anywhere
outside Tranquillity. Ayacucho might not be much, but she was determined to
soak in as much of it as she could.
She was following Joshua out of the
transit capsule which had delivered them from the spaceport. The axial chamber
was just a low-gee bubble of rock, but at the same time it was a bubble of rock
which she hadn’t seen before. Her first foreign world.
Joshua got into a waiting tube lift
and sat down. She chose the seat opposite him, the composite creaking as it
adjusted to her weight.
“This is all so strange,” she said
as the lift moved off. “Part of me wants to be next to you.”
His face became immobile. “Jesus,
Ione, why the fuck did you shove your personality into the serjeants?
Tranquillity’s would’ve been just fine.”
“Why, Joshua Calvert, I do believe
you’re embarrassed.”
“Who me? Oh, no, I’m quite used to
sexless two metre monstrosities making a pass at me.”
“Don’t be so grumpy. It’s
unbecoming. Besides, you should be grateful. My instinct is very protective
towards you. That might give me an edge.”
Joshua’s retort was lost somewhere
in his throat.
The lift’s doors opened on a public
hall in the asteroid’s commercial district where several late office workers
scurried to work while a pair of mechanoids cleaned the walls and floor. It was
less spartan than the axial chamber, with a high, arched roof and troughs of
plants spaced at regular intervals. But it was still only a tunnel through
rock, nothing exuberant. Unfortunately the serjeant didn’t have lips that could
easily be compressed into a pout, otherwise she would have done it. She really
wanted to see the biosphere cavern.
Joshua started off down the hall.
“What do you hope to accomplish
here?” she asked.
“T’Opingtu is a big company;
someone will have been appointed to run it straightaway. And Ikela would make
sure his replacement is someone he can trust, someone from his immediate
circle. It’s not much, but it’s the best lead we’ve got.”
“I really don’t think you’ll be
able to get an appointment today.”
“Don’t be such a downer, Ione. Your
trouble is Tranquillity is incorruptible and logical, that’s all you’re used
to. Asteroids like Ayacucho are neither. The size of the contract I’m going to
dangle in their faces will get me straight into the top office. There’s an
etiquette to this kind of business.”
“Very well, you get in. Then what?”
“I won’t know until I get there.
Remember this is strictly a data acquisition mission, everything is helpful
even if it is only negative. So keep your senses open and your memory on full
record.”
“Aye, Captain.”
“Okay, now we’re primarily interested
in anything we can learn about Ikela’s life. We know he was an Garissan
refugee, so who did he move with from the past, was he a strong nationalist?
Names, contacts, that kind of stuff.”
“My personality didn’t suffer any
damage during the replication process, I can think for myself.”
“Wonderful. A bodyguard with an
attitude.”
“Joshua, darling, this isn’t
attitude.”
He stopped and jabbed a finger at
the husky construct. “Now look—”
“That’s Pauline Webb,” Ione said.
“What? Who?”
Three people were marching down the
public hall towards Joshua. Two African-ethnic men flanking a white woman. He
didn’t like the look of the men at all; they were wearing civilian suits, but
combat armour would have been more appropriate. Boosted, and no doubt
containing a wide variety of extremely lethal implants.
Pauline Webb stopped a couple of
metres short of Joshua and gave the serjeant a curious glance. “Your
appointment is cancelled, Calvert. Collect your crew, get back in your
starship, and go home. Today.”
Joshua produced his most nonchalant
grin. “Pauline Webb. Fancy seeing you here.”
Her narrowed eyes gave the serjeant
another suspicious glance. “This situation is not your concern anymore.”
“It is everybody’s concern,” Ione
said. “Especially mine.”
“I didn’t know you things could
operate independently.”
“Now you do,” Joshua said politely.
“So if you’ll just step aside . . .”
The man directly in front of Joshua
folded his arms and planted his feet slightly apart, a true immovable object.
He smiled carnivorously down at Joshua.
“Er, perhaps we could come to an
arrangement?”
“The arrangement is simple,” Webb
said. “If you leave, you get to live.”
“Come on, Joshua,” Ione said. The
serjeant’s all-too-human hand closed on his shoulder, forcing him to turn.
“But—”
“Come on.”
“That’s smart advice,” Webb said.
“Listen to it.”
Ione let go of his shoulder after a
few paces. A fuming Joshua allowed her to escort him back down the hall towards
the lift. When he glanced over his shoulder Webb and her two troopers were
standing watching him.
“This isn’t her turf,” he hissed at
the serjeant. “We could have caused a scene, made trouble for her. The police
would have sorted her out as well as us.”
“Any incident with the authorities
here would have been resolved in her favour. She’s a CNIS officer assigned to
Mzu; the local Navy Bureau would have backed her, and you and I would be in
deep shit, not to mention jail.”
“How the hell did Webb know where I
was going?”
“I imagine Lady Mac’s crew
is under clandestine surveillance right now.”
“Jesus!”
“Quite. We will have to withdraw
and come up with a new strategy.”
They reached the lift doors, and
Joshua datavised for a ride back to the axial chamber. He cast another glance
over his shoulder to check on Webb, a sly smile germinating on his face. “You know
what this means, don’t you?”
“What?”
“The agencies don’t have her yet.
We’re still in with a chance.”
“That’s logical.”
“Of course it’s logical. We may
even be able to turn this to our advantage.”
“How?”
“I’ll tell you when we’re back in Lady
Mac. Everyone’s going to have to undergo decontamination first. Christ
knows what sort of covert nanonics they’ve stung us with. We’ll be broadcasting
our own thoughts back to them if we’re not careful.”
The lift doors opened and he
stepped inside. Someone had slapped half a dozen twenty-centimetre circular
holomorph stickers at random over the walls, with a couple more on the ceiling.
One was at head height; it started its cycle, a tight bud of lavender photons
swelling out from the centre into the form of a scantily clad teenage
cheerleader. She shook her silver baton enthusiastically. “Run, Alkad, run!”
she yelled. “You’re our last hope; don’t let them catch you. Run, Alkad, run!”
Joshua stared at it in
stupefaction. “Jesus wept.”
The cheerleader winked saucily, and
syphoned back down below the sticker’s surface. Three more began their cycle.
Chapter 02
Arnstadt fell to the Organization
fleet after a ninety-minute battle above the planet. The Strategic Defence
network was hammered into oblivion by Capone’s antimatter-powered combat wasps.
There had been some advance warning from the Edenists, giving the local navy
time to redeploy their ships. Three squadrons of voidhawks had arrived from the
habitats orbiting one of the system’s gas giants, reinforcing the Adamist vessels.
None of the preparations altered
the final outcome. Forty-seven Arnstadt navy ships were destroyed, along with
fifteen voidhawks. The remaining voidhawks swallowed away, withdrawing back to
the gas giant.
The Organization fleet’s transport
starships moved unopposed into low orbit, and spaceplanes began to ferry a
small army of possessed down to the surface. Like all modern Confederation
planets, Arnstadt had few soldiers. There were several marine brigades, which
were mainly trained in space warfare techniques and covert mission procedures.
Wars in this era were fought between starships. The days of foreign invasion
forces marching across enemy territory had vanished before the end of the
twenty-first century.
With its SD network reduced to
radioactive meteorites flaring through bruised skies, Arnstadt was incapable of
offering the slightest resistance to the possessed marching down out of their
spaceplanes. Small towns were infiltrated first, increasing the numbers of
possessed available to move on to larger towns. The area of captured ground
began to increase exponentially.
Luigi Balsmao set up his
headquarters in one of the orbiting asteroid settlements. Information on the
people captured by the advancing possessed was datavised up to the asteroid
where the structure coordination programs written by Emmet Mordden decided if
they should be possessed or not. Organization lieutenants were appointed, their
authority backed up by the firepower of fleet starships in low orbit.
With the subjugation of the planet confidently
under way, Luigi split half of the fleet into squadrons and deployed them
against the system’s asteroid settlements. Only the Edenist habitats were left
alone; after Yosemite, Capone wasn’t about to risk a second defeat on such a
scale.
Starships were dispatched back to
New California, and fresh cargo ships began to arrive soon, bringing with them
the basic components for a new SD network along with other equipment to help
consolidate the Organization’s advance. Rover reporters were allowed to see
carefully selected sections of the planet under its new masters: children left
non-possessed to run around freely, possessed and non-possessed working side by
side to restart the economy, Luigi stamping down hard on any possessed who
didn’t acknowledge the Organization’s leadership.
News of the successful invasion
swept across the Confederation, backed up by sensevise recordings from the
reporters. Surprise was total. One star system’s government—no matter what its
nature—taking over another was a concept always considered totally impossible.
Capone had proved it wasn’t. In doing so he set off a chain reaction of panic.
Commentators began to talk about planetary level exponential curves, the most
extreme showing the entire Confederation falling to the Organization within six
months as the industrial resources of more and more systems were absorbed by
Capone’s empire.
On the Assembly floor, demands that
the Confederation Navy should intervene and destroy the Organization fleet
became almost continuous. First Admiral Aleksandrovich had to make several
appearances to explain how impractical the notion was. The best the navy could
do, he said, was to seek out the source of Capone’s antimatter and prevent a
third system from being taken over. Arnstadt was already lost. Capone had
secured a victory which couldn’t be reversed without a great loss of life. At
this stage, such casualties were wholly unacceptable. He also pointed out that,
sadly, a great many non-possessed crews were cooperating with the Organization to
operate their starships. Without them, the invasion of Arnstadt could never
have happened. Perhaps, he suggested, the Assembly should consider introducing
an emergency act to deal with any such traitors. Such legislation might, in
future, discourage captains seeking to sign up with Capone for short term gain.
“Escort duties?” André Duchamp
asked wearily. “I thought we were here to help defend New California itself.
What exactly does this escort duty entail?”
“Monterey hasn’t given me a
detailed briefing,” Iain Girardi said. “But you will simply be protecting cargo
ships from attack by the Confederation Navy. Which is exactly what your
contract stipulated.”
“Hardly,” Madeleine growled. “Nor
does it say anywhere that we help a deranged dictator who wiped out an entire
fucking planet. I say jump out, Captain. Power up the patterning nodes right
now and get the fuck out of here while we still can.”
“I would have thought this was a
more appealing task for you,” Iain Girardi said. His acceleration couch webbing
peeled back, and he drifted off the cushioning. “The majority of the crews in
the cargo ships are non-possessed, and you won’t be permanently in range of the
Organization’s SD platforms. If anything, we’re giving you an easier job with
less risk for the same money.”
“Where would we be going?” André
asked.
“Arnstadt. The Organization is
shipping industrial equipment there to help restart the planetary economy.”
“If they hadn’t blown it all to
shit in the first place they wouldn’t need to restart it,” Madeleine
said.
André shushed her impatiently. “It
seems fine to me,” he told Iain Girardi. “However, the ship will require some
maintenance work before we can undertake such an assignment. An escort flight
is very different from supplementing planetary defences.”
Iain Girardi’s humour appeared
strained for the first time. “Yes. I’ll have to discuss the nature of the
repairs with Monterey.” He datavised the flight computer for a communications
channel.
André waited with a neutral smile.
“The Organization will bring the Villeneuve’s
Revenge up to full combat-capable status,” Iain Girardi announced. “Your
hull and sensor suite will be repaired by us, but you must meet the cost of
secondary systems.”
André shrugged. “Take it out of our
fee.”
“Very well. Please dock at
Monterey’s spaceport, bay VB757. I shall disembark there; you’ll be assigned a
liaison officer for the mission.”
“Non-possessed,” Desmond Lafoe said
sharply.
“Of course. I believe they want you
to take some reporters with you, as well. They’ll require access to your
sensors during the flight.”
“Merde. Those filth. What
for?”
“Mr Capone is highly focused on the
need for accurate publicity. He wants the Confederation to see that he is not a
real threat.”
“Unlike Arnstadt,” Madeleine said
swiftly.
André piloted the starship down
from its emergence zone to the large asteroid. Spaceflight traffic above New
California was heavy: starships raced between the orbital asteroids and the
emergence zones, spaceplanes and ion field flyers flew a constant shuttle service
from the planet. Although the starship only had sixty-five per cent of its
sensor clusters remaining, André kept them fully extended to gather what
information he could.
When the flight computer told her
Girardi was talking to Monterey again, Madeleine opened an encrypted channel to
André: “I don’t think we should dock,” she datavised.
The captain extended the datavise
to include Erick and Desmond. “Why not?”
“Look at those ships out there, if
anything there’s more activity than before the planet was possessed. I didn’t
realize how damn professional this Capone Organization is. We’re not going to
get out of this, André, we’re in too deep. The second we dock they’ll swarm on
board and possess us.”
“Then who will crew the ship for
them? Non, they need us.”
“She has a point about the
Organization’s size and motivation, though,” Erick datavised. “The possessed
are dependent on us flying the warships, but what happens when there are no
more worlds left to invade? Capone took Arnstadt in less than a day, and almost
doubled his military resources doing so. He’s not going to stop now. If he and
the rest of the possessed keep on winning at that rate, there will be no place
left for non-possessed anywhere in the Confederation. That’s what we’ll be
helping bring about.”
“I know this.” André cast a guilty
glance at Girardi to make sure he wasn’t aware of the conversation. “That is
why I agreed to the escort duty.”
“I don’t get it,” Madeleine said.
“Simple, ma chérie. The
Organization repairs the Villeneuve’s Revenge for me, fills up our
cryogenic fuel tanks, equips us with combat wasps, and sends us off on a
flight. Then while we’re en route, we vanish. What is to stop us?”
“Their liaison officer, for a
start,” Desmond said.
“Ha, one man. We can overcome him.
Capone has made his greatest mistake in trying to dishonour André Duchamp. It
is I who is using them now, for the benefit of my fellow man, comme il faut.
I am no quisling. And I think we should make sure the reporters know of
this savage blow we will strike against Capone.”
“You really intend to leave?”
Madeleine asked.
“Naturally.”
Erick grinned, as best as his new
skin would allow him. For once Duchamp’s devious nature could actually work for
the best. He opened a new file in his neural nanonics memory cell and started
recording the sensor images. CNIS would want to know about the Organization’s
disposition; though he suspected the New California system would already be
under full covert surveillance.
“What about Shane Brandes?” Desmond
asked.
André’s face darkened. “What about
him?”
“How long were you planning to
leave him in zero-tau?”
“I could hardly drop him off at
Chaumort, it was too small. We want a backwards planet where we can dump him in
the middle of a desert or a jungle.”
“Lalonde would do,” Madeleine said under
her breath.
“Well, if you’re looking for
somewhere he won’t come back from,” Desmond offered maliciously.
“No,” Erick datavised.
“Why not?” André asked. “Give him
to the Organization when we dock. It is an excellent idea. Shows them how loyal
we are.”
“We kill him, or dump him. But not
that. You didn’t see what they did to Bev.”
André flinched. “Very well. But I’m
not hanging on to that bastard forever, his zero-tau is costing me power.”
Villeneuve’s Revenge docked in its designated bay, its crew alert
for any treachery from the Organization. There was none to see. As Iain Girardi
promised, maintenance teams immediately started to work on the starship’s
battered hull and defunct sensors. It took eleven hours to withdraw the damaged
sections and install new replacements. Integration and diagnostic checks took
another two hours to complete.
Once André agreed that they were
ready for escort duties, the Organization started loading combat wasps into the
launch tubes. An airlock tube slid out from the docking bay wall to connect
with the Villeneuve’s Revenge.
It was Desmond, armed with a
machine pistol bought on Chaumort, who went down to the lower deck with
Girardi. He made sure the tube was completely empty before opening the hatch
and letting the Organization man out. Only when Girardi had swum down the
length of the tube, and closed the far hatch behind him, did he give André the
all-clear.
“Send your liaison officer
through,” André datavised to the spaceport.
As arranged, the man wore nothing,
towing his clothes in a small bag behind him as he came along the tube. Desmond
made every test they could think of, requesting complex datavises from the
liaison officer’s neural nanonics, exposing him to different processor blocks.
“I think he’s clean,” Desmond datavised.
Madeleine unlocked the manual
latches on the hatch to the lower deck.
The liaison officer introduced
himself as Kingsley Pryor. To Erick, his subdued behaviour and quiet, stumbling
voice indicated someone emerging from shock.
“There will be a convoy of twelve
cargo ships departing for Arnstadt in three hours,” Kingsley Pryor told them.
“The Villeneuve’s Revenge will be one of five combat-capable ships
escorting them. Your job is to defend them from any sneak attacks from
Confederation Navy ships. If it does happen, they’ll probably use voidhawks
against us.” He gave the bridge a thoughtful look. “I wasn’t told there would
only be four of you. Is that enough to operate at full combat efficiency?”
“Of course it is,” André responded
hotly. “We have survived much worse than a voidhawk attack.”
“Very well. There is one other
thing you should know. The Organization is held together by fear and respect,
obedience must be total. You have accepted our money and signed on with the
fleet, we will not tolerate any disloyalty.”
“You come on my ship, and tell me—”
André blustered loudly.
Kingsley Pryor held up a hand. Weak
though the gesture was, it silenced Duchamp immediately. Something in the
liaison officer’s manner put a great deal of weight behind his authority. “You
signed a pact with the devil, Captain. Now I’m explaining the small print. You
don’t trust us, fair enough; we don’t really trust you either. I’m sure that
now you’ve seen New California firsthand you’ve realized just how powerful and
dedicated the Organization is, and you’re having second thoughts about
supporting us. Perfectly natural. After all, it would be very easy for a
starship to disappear in the direction of the Confederation. Let me try and
dissuade you. While your ship was being repaired, a nuclear explosive was
included inside one of the new components. It has a seven-hour timer which must
be reset by a code. I do not have that code, so you cannot use debrief nanonics
to extract it from me. A liaison officer in one of the other escort ships will
transmit that code at us every three hours, resetting the timer. In turn I will
transmit the code I have been given at the other ships, which have been
similarly modified. If all of us stay together, there will be no problem. If
one ship leaves, they will be killing themselves and the crew of another ship.”
“Remove it now!” André shouted
furiously. “I will not fly under such a blackmail threat.”
“It is not blackmail, Captain, it
is enforcement, making sure you abide by the terms of your contract. I believe
the argument goes along the lines of: If you intended to keep the agreement you
made with us you have nothing to worry about.”
“I will not fly with a bomb on
board. That is final!”
“Then they will come on board, and
possess you. And another crew will be found. It is the ship and its capability
they want, Captain, not you as an individual.”
“This is intolerable!”
For a moment a real anger shone in
Kingsley Pryor’s eyes. He sneered at André. “So is a free man agreeing to help
Capone, Captain.” Then the emotion was gone, leaving only the meek expression
in its wake. “Shall we get the reporters on board now? We haven’t got too much
time before we have to be at the jump coordinate.”
Jed Hinton was still a hundred
metres from the pub when he knelt down and took the red handkerchief off his
ankle. Koblat’s adults were starting to get nettled by Deadnight; kids that
followed the cause were being hassled. Nothing serious, some jostling in public
places, arguments at home. The usual crap.
Digger, of course, despised the
recording; descending into a rage whenever it was mentioned. For once Jed
enjoyed a guilty delight at the way he intimidated Miri and Navar, forbidding
them to have anything to do with it. Without realizing, he’d altered the
political structure of the family. Now it was Jed and Gari who were the
favoured ones, the ones who could access Kiera Salter, and talk about her ideas
with their friends, and know the taste of freedom.
Jed walked into the Blue Fountain,
making out like it was cool for him to be there. Normally he’d be anywhere
else, it was Digger’s pub. But Digger was busy these days; not working the
tunnelling units, but out at the spaceport doing maintenance on the machinery
in the docking bays. There were three shifts a day now, supporting the
increasing number of flights. Yet although everyone knew perfectly well
starships were arriving and departing several times a day, there was no
official log. Three times he’d accessed the net and asked the spaceport
register for a list of ships docked only to be told there were none.
Fascinated, the Deadnight kids had
asked around, and together they’d pieced together the basics of the
quarantine-busting operation. They had all been excited that day, starships
arriving illegally was perfect for them. Beth had smiled at him and
said: “Bloody hell, we might just make it to Valisk, after all.” Then she’d
hugged him. She’d never done that before, not in that way.
He asked the barman for a beer,
slowly scanning the pub. A room where the images within the ten-year-old
landscape holograms covering the walls were diminishing to blurred smears,
their colours fading. The naked rock they covered would be less depressing.
Most of the scuffed composite and aluminum tables were occupied. Groups of men
sat hunched over their drinks and talked in low tones. Nearly a quarter of the
customers were wearing ship-suits, bright and exotic compared to the clothes
favoured by Koblat’s residents.
Jed located the crew from the Rameses
X, the starship’s name stencilled neatly on their breast pockets. Their
captain was with them, a middle-aged woman with the silver star on her
epaulette. He went over.
“I wonder if I could talk to you,
ma’am?”
She glanced up at him, faintly
suspicious at the respectful tone.
“What is it?”
“I have a friend who would like to
go to Valisk.”
The captain burst out laughing. Jed
flushed as the rest of the crew groaned, trading infuriatingly superior
expressions.
“Well, son, I can certainly
understand how come your friend is so interested in young Kiera.” She winked
broadly.
Jed’s embarrassment deepened, which
must have been obvious to all of them. True, he had spent hours on his
processor block with a graphics program, altering the image from the recording.
Now the block’s small AV pillar could project her lying beside him on the bed
at night, or looming over him smiling. At first he’d worried he was being
disrespectful, but she would understand the need he had for her. The love. She
knew all about love, in its many forms. It was all she spoke of.
“It’s what she offers,” he
stammered helplessly. “That’s what we’re interested in.”
That just brought another round of
hearty laughter from the group.
“Please,” he said. “Can you take us
there?”
The humour sank from her face.
“Listen, son, take the advice of an older woman. That recording: it’s just a
big bullshit con. They want you there so they can possess you, that’s all.
There’s no paradise waiting at the end of the rainbow.”
“Have you been there?” he asked
stiffly.
“No. No, I haven’t. So you’re
right, I can’t say for certain. Let’s just put it down to a healthy dose of
cynicism; everybody catches it when they get older.” She turned back to her
drink.
“Will you take me?”
“No. Look, son, even if I was crazy
enough to fly to Valisk, do you have any idea how much it would cost you to
charter a starship to take you?”
He shook his head mutely.
“From here, about a quarter of a
million fuseodollars. Do you have that kind of money?”
“No.”
“Well, there you are then. Now stop
wasting my time.”
“Do you know anyone who would take
us, someone who believes in Kiera?”
“Goddamnit!” She screwed around in
her chair to glare at him. “Can’t you inbred morons pick up a simple hint when
it’s smacked you in the face?”
“Kiera said you’d hate us for
listening to her.”
The captain let out an astonished
snort of breath. “I don’t believe this. Don’t you see how gullible you are? I’m
doing you a favour.”
“I didn’t ask you to. And why are
you so blind to what she says?”
“Blind? Fuck you, you teeny
shit.”
“Because you are. You’re scared
it’s true, that she’s right.”
She stared at him for a long
moment, the rest of the crew fixing him with hostile stares. They’d probably
beat him up in a minute. Jed didn’t care anymore. He hated her as much as he
did Digger and all the others with closed minds and dead hearts.
“All right,” the captain whispered.
“In your case I’ll make an exception.”
“No,” one of the crew said, his
hand going out to hold her arm. “You can’t, he’s only a kid with a hard-on for
the girl.”
She shook off the restraining hand
and brought out a processor block. “I was going to hand this over to the
Confederation Navy, even though it would be difficult to explain away given our
current flight schedule. But I think you can have it instead, now.” She took a
flek from its slot in the block and slapped it into an astonished Jed’s hand.
“Say hello to Kiera for me. If you aren’t too busy screaming while they possess
you.”
Chairs were pushed back noisily.
The crew of the Rameses X left their unfinished drinks on the table and
marched out.
Jed stood at the centre of a
now-silent pub, every eye locked on him. He didn’t even notice, he was staring
raptly at the little black flek resting in his palm as if it were the key to
the fountain of youth. Which in a way, he supposed, it was.
The Levêque was orbiting
fifteen thousand kilometres above Norfolk, its complete sensor suite extended
to sweep the planet. Despite the Confederation Navy’s hunger for information,
little data was returning. Slow cyclonic swirls of red cloud had mushroomed
from the islands, mating then smoothing out into a placid sheet, sealing the
world behind a uniform twilight nimbus. Small ivory tufts of cirrocumulus swam
above the polar zones for a few hours, the last defiant speckling of alien
colour; but in time even they fell to melt into the veil.
The consolidation was five hours
old when the change began. Levêque’s officers noticed the cloud’s light
emission level was increasing. The frigate’s captain decided to play safe and
ordered them to raise their orbit by another twenty thousand kilometres. By the
time their main fusion drive ignited, the crimson canopy was blazing brighter
than any firestorm. They ascended at five gees, badly worried by the glare
expanding rapidly across the stars behind them. Gravitonic sensors reported
discordant ripples within the planetary mass below. If the readings were
truthful, then the world should be breaking apart. Heavily filtered
optical-band sensors revealed the planet’s geometry remained unchanged.
Seven gees, and the cloud’s surface
was kindling to the intensity of a nuclear furnace.
Luca Comar looked upwards in a
dreamy daze. The red cloud guarding the sky above Cricklade manor’s steep roof
was writhing violently, its gold and crimson underbelly caught by potent
microburst vortices. Huge churning strips were being torn open, allowing a
fierce white light to slam down. He flung his arms wide, howling a rapturous
welcome.
Energy stormed through him at an
almost painful rate, bursting from some non-point within to vanish into the
raging sky. The woman beside him was performing the same act, her features
straining with effort and incredulity. In his mind he could feel the possessed
all across Norfolk uniting in this final supreme sacrament.
Boiling fragments of cloud plunged
through the air at giddy velocities; corkscrew lightning bolts snapping between
them. Their red tint was fading, sinking behind the flamboyant dawn irradiating
the universe beyond the atmosphere.
A thick, heavy light poured over
Luca. It penetrated straight through his body. Through the mossy grass. Through
the soil. The whole world surrendered to it. Luca’s thoughts were trapped by
the invasion, unable to think of anything but sustaining the moment. He hung
suspended from reality as the last surge of energy unwound through his cells.
Silence.
Luca slowly let out his breath. He
opened his eyes cautiously. The clouds had calmed, reverting to rumpled white
smears. Warm mellow light was shining over the wolds. There was no sun, no
single source point, it came from the boundary of the enclosed universe itself.
Shining equally, everywhere.
And they’d gone. He could no longer
hear the souls in the beyond. Those piercing pleas and promises had vanished.
There was no way back, no treacherous chink in the folds of this fresh
continuum. He was free inside his new body.
He looked at the woman, who was
glancing around in stupefaction.
“We’ve done it,” he whispered. “We
escaped.”
She smiled tentatively.
He held out his arms, and
concentrated. Not the smoke-snorting knight again; the moment required something
more dignified. Soft golden cloth settled around his skin, an imperial toga,
befitting his mood.
“Oh, yes. Yes!”
The energistic ability was still
there, the imposition of will upon matter. But now the cloth had a stronger,
firmer texture to the artefacts he’d created before.
Before . . . Luca Comar laughed. In
another universe. Another life.
This time it would be different.
They could establish their nirvana here. And it would last forever.
The cluster of five survey
satellites from the Levêque gradually spread apart as they glided
through the section of space where Norfolk should be. Communications links
beamed a huge flow of information back to the frigate. Every sensor they had
was switched to maximum sensitivity. Two distinct spectrums of sunlight fell on
them. Tremulous waves of solar ions dusted their receptors. Cosmic radiation
bombardment was standard.
There was nothing else. No gravity
field. No magnetosphere. No atmospheric gas. Space-time’s quantum signature was
perfectly normal.
All that remained of Norfolk was
the memory.
When it was discovered in 2125,
Nyvan was immediately incorporated into the celebration of hope which was
sweeping Earth in the wake of Felicity’s discovery. The second terracompatible
planet to be found, a beautiful verdant virgin land, proof the first hadn’t
been a fluke. Everybody on Earth wanted to escape out to the stars. And they
wanted to go there now. That, ultimately, proved its downfall.
By then, people had finally
realized the arcologies weren’t going to be a temporary shelter from the ruined
climate, somewhere to stay while Govcentral cooled the atmosphere, cleaned up
the pollution, and put the weather patterns back to rights. The tainted clouds
and armada storms were here to stay. Anyone who wanted to live under an open
sky would have to leave and find a new one.
In the interests of fairness and
maintaining its own shaky command over individual state administrations,
Govcentral agreed that everyone had the right to leave, without favouritism. It
was that last worthy clause, included to pacify several vocal minorities, which
in practice meant that colonists would have to be a multi-cultural,
multi-racial mix fully representative of the planet’s population. No limits
were placed on the numbers buying starship tickets, they just had to be
balanced. For those states too poor to fill up their quota, Govcentral provided
assisted placement schemes so the richer states couldn’t complain they were
being unfairly limited. A typical political compromise.
By and large, it worked for Nyvan
and the other terracompatible planets being sought out by the new ZTT drive
ships. The first decades of interstellar colonization were heady times, when
common achievement easily outweighed the old ethnic enmities. Nyvan and its
early siblings played host to a unity of purpose rarely seen before.
It didn’t last. After the frontier
had been tamed and the pioneering spirit flickered into extinction the ancient
rivalries lumbered to the fore once again. Earth’s colonial governance gave way
to local administrations on a dozen planets, and politicians began to adopt the
worst jingoistic aspects of late twentieth-century nationalism, leading the mob
behind them with absurd ease. This time there were no safeguards of seas and
geographical borders between the diverse populations. Religions, cultures,
skins, ideologies, and languages were all squeezed up tight in the pinch
chamber of urban conglomeration. Civil unrest was the inevitable result,
ruining lives and crippling economies.
Overall, the problem was solved in
2156 by the Govcentral state of California, who sponsored New California, the
first ethnic-streaming colony, open only to native Californians. Although
initially controversial, the trend was swiftly taken up by the other states.
This second wave of colonies suffered none of the strife so prevalent among the
first, clearing the way for the mass immigration of the Great Dispersal.
While the new ethnic-streaming
worlds successfully absorbed Earth’s surplus population and flourished
accordingly, the earlier colonies slowly lost ground both culturally and
economically: a false dawn shading to a perpetual twilight.
“What happened to the asteroids?”
Lawrence Dillon asked.
Quinn was gazing thoughtfully at
the images which the Tantu’s sensors were throwing onto the hemisphere
of holoscreens at the foot of his acceleration couch. In total, eleven
asteroids had been manoeuvred into orbit around Nyvan, their ores mined to
provide raw material for the planet’s industries. Ordinarily, they would
develop into healthy mercantile settlements with a flotilla of industrial
stations.
The frigate’s sensors showed that
eight of them were more-or-less standard knots of electromagnetic activity,
giving off a strong infrared emission. The remaining three were cold and dark. Tantu’s
high-resolution optical sensors focused on the closest of the defunct rocks,
revealing wrecked machinery clinging to the crumpled grey surface. One of them
even had a counter-rotating spaceport disk, though it no longer revolved; the
spindle was bent, and the gloomy structure punctured with holes.
“They had a lot of national wars
here,” Quinn said.
Lawrence frowned at him, thoughts
cloudy with incomprehension.
“There’s a lot of different people
live here,” Quinn explained. “They don’t get on too good, so they fight a lot.”
“If they hate each other, why don’t
they all leave?”
“I don’t know. Ask them.”
“Who?”
“Shut the fuck up, Lawrence, I’m
trying to think. Dwyer, has anyone seen us yet?”
“Yes, the detector satellites
picked us up straightaway. We’ve had three separate transponder interrogations
so far; they were from different defence network command centres. Everyone
seemed satisfied with our identification code this time.”
“Good. Graper, I want you to be our
communications officer.”
“Yes, Quinn.” Graper let the
eagerness show in his voice, anxious to prove his worth.
“Stick with the cover we decided.
Call each of those military centres and tell the bastards we’ve been assigned a
monitor mission in this system by the Confederation Navy. We’ll be staying in
high orbit until further notice, and if any of them want fire support against
possessed targets we’ll be happy to provide it.”
“I’m on it, Quinn.” He began
issuing orders to the flight computer.
“Dwyer,” Quinn said. “Get me a
channel into Nyvan’s communications net.” He floated away from his velvet
acceleration couch and used a stikpad to steady himself in front of his big
command console.
“Er, Quinn, this is weird, the
sensors are showing me like fifty communications platforms in geosync,” Dwyer
said nervously. He was using grab hoops to hold himself in front of his flight
station, his face centimetres from a glowing holoscreen, as though the closer
he could get the more understanding of its data he would have. “The computer
says they’ve got nineteen separate nets on this world, some of them don’t even
hook together.”
“Yeah, so? I told you, dickbrain,
they got a shitload of different nations here.”
“Which one do you want?”
Quinn thought back, picturing the
man, his mannerisms, voice, accent. “Is there a North American-ethnic nation?”
Dwyer consulted the information on
the holoscreen. “I got five. There’s Tonala, New Dominica, New Georgia, Quebec,
and the Islamic Texas Republic.”
“Gimmie the New Georgia one.”
Information began to scroll up on his own holoscreen. He studied it for a
minute, then requested a directory function and loaded in a search program.
“Who is this guy, Quinn?” Lawrence
asked.
“Name’s Twelve-T. He’s one mean
fucker, a gang lord, runs a big operation down there. Any badass shit you want,
you go to him for it.”
The search program finished its
run. Quinn loaded the eddress it had found for him.
“Yeah?” a voice asked.
“I want to talk to Twelve-T.”
“Crazy ass mother, ain’t no fucker
got that handle living here.”
“Listen, shitbrain, this is his
public eddress. He’s there.”
“Yeah, so you know him, datavise
him.”
“Not possible.”
“Yeah? Then he don’t know you. Any
mother he need to rap with knows his private code.”
“Okay, the magic word is Banneth.
And if you don’t think that’s magic, trace where this call is coming from. Now
tell the man, because if I come calling, you’re going out hurting.”
Dwyer gave another myopic squint at
his displays. “He’s tracing the call. Back to the satellite already. Hot
program.”
“I expect they use it a lot,” Quinn
muttered.
“You got a problem up there,
motherfucker?” a new voice asked. It was almost as Quinn remembered it, a low
purr, too damaged to be smooth. Quinn had seen the throat scar which made it
that way.
“No problem at all. What I got up
here is a proposition.”
“Where you at, man? What is this
monk shit? You ain’t Banneth.”
“No.” Quinn swayed forwards slowly
towards the camera lens in the centre of the console and pulled his hood right
back. “Run your visual file search program.”
“Oh, yeah. You used to be Banneth’s
little rat runner; her whore, too. I remember. So what you want here, ratty?”
“A deal.”
“What you got to trade?”
“You know what I’m riding in?”
“Sure. Lucky Vin ran a trace, he’s
pissin’ liquid nitrogen right now.”
“It could be yours.”
“No shit?”
“That’s right.”
“What’ve I gotta do for it, hump
you?”
“No, I just want to trade it in.
That’s all.”
The whisper lost its cool. “You
want to trade in a fucking Confederation Navy frigate? What the fuck for?”
“I need to talk to you about that.
But there’s some good quality hardware on board. You’ll come out ahead.”
“Talk, motherfucker? If your
hardware’s so shit-hot, how come you wanna dump it?”
“God’s Brother doesn’t always ride
to war. There are other ways to bring His word to the faithless.”
“Cut that voodoo shit, man. Damn, I
hate that sect shit you arcology freaks use. Ain’t no God, so he sure as shit
can’t have no Brother.”
“Try telling that to the
possessed.”
“Motherfuck! Smartass motherfucker!
That’s what you are, that’s all you are.”
“Do you want to deal or not?” Quinn
knew he would; what gang lord could resist a frigate?
“I ain’t promising shit up front.”
“That’s cool. Now I need to know
which asteroid to dock with. And it’s going to have to be one which doesn’t ask
too many questions. Have you got any weight in orbit?”
“You know it, man, that’s why you
come to me. You might talk like you the King of Kulu’s brother, but here it’s
me who’s got the juice. And stink this, I don’t trust you, rat runner.”
“With this much firepower behind
me, think how much I care. Start fixing things.”
“Fuck you. A strike like this is
gonna take a few days to set up, man.”
“You have forty-eight hours; then I
want a docking bay number flashing in front of me. If not, I will smite you
from the face of the world.”
“Will you cut that freaky crap—”
Quinn cancelled the circuit and
threw his head back laughing.
It had only taken a few hours for
the screen of red cloud to engulf the sky above Exnall. The tenuous beginnings
of the early morning had been supplanted by billowing masses of solid vapour
sweeping up from the south. Thunder arrived in accompaniment, bass grumbles
which seemed to circle and swoop around the town like jittery birds. There was
no telling where the sun was now, but its light still seemed to slip through the
covering to illuminate the streets in natural tones.
Moyo marched down Maingreen on his
mission to find some kind of transport for Stephanie’s children. The more he
thought about the prospect, the happier it made him. She was right, as always,
it did give him something positive to do. And no, he didn’t want to spend
eternity in Exnall.
He passed the doughnut café and the
baseball game in the park, oblivious to either. If he searched with his mind,
he could perceive the buildings around him like foggy shadows; all space was
dark, while matter was amended to a translucent white gauze. Individual objects
were hard to distinguish, and small ones almost impossible; but he thought he
stood a good chance of recognizing something like a bus.
The street sweeper was busy again.
A man in a grey jacket and cloth cap, pushing his broom in front of him as he
made his way slowly along the pavement. Every day he had appeared. He never did
anything else but sweep the pavements, never talked to anybody, never responded
to any attempts at conversation.
Moyo was slowly coming to learn
that not all of Exnall’s possessed were adapting readily to their new
circumstances. Some, like the sports nuts and café owners were obsessively
filling every moment of their day with activity no matter how spurious, while
others would amble around in a listless mockery of their earlier existence.
That assessment put his own labours perilously close to the apathetic ones.
A dense collection of shadows at
the rear of one of the larger stores caught his attention. When he walked
around the building there was a long van parked in the loading bay. It had
suffered some damage in the riot; struck by white fire the front two tyres had
melted into puddles of sticky plastic, the navy-blue bodywork was blackened,
and in some places cracked open, the windshield was smashed. But it was
certainly big enough.
He stared at the first tyre,
visualizing it whole and functional. Not an illusion, but how the solid matter
should actually be structured. The hardened plastic puddle started to flow,
amoebic buds swelling up to engulf the naked hub.
“Yo there, man. Having some fun?”
Moyo had been so involved with the
tyre he hadn’t noticed the man approaching. At first sight the man looked as if
he’d grown a dark brown mane; his beard came down to his waist as did the
corkscrew locks of his luxuriant hair. A pair of tiny amber hexagonal glasses
which were almost curtained by tresses seemed perversely prominent. The flares
of his purple velvet trousers were embellished with tiny silver bells which
chimed with each step, not in tune, but certainly in keeping.
“Not exactly. Is this your van?”
“Hey, property is theft, man.”
“Property is what?”
“Theft. You’re like stealing from
what rightfully belongs to all people. That van is an inanimate object. Unless
you’re into a metallic version of Gaia—which personally I’m not. However, just
because it’s inert that doesn’t mean we can abuse its intrinsic value which is
the ability to carry cats where they want to go.”
“Cats? I just want it to ferry some
children out of here.”
“Yeah well okay that’s cool, too.
But what I like mean is that it’s like community property. It was built by
people, so all people should share it equally.”
“It was built by cybersystems.”
“Oh, no, that’s real heavy-duty
corporate shit. Man, they’ve got into your skull big-time. Here, take a toot,
Mr Suit, take yourself out of yourself.” He held out a fat reefer which was
already alight and sending out a pungent sweetness.
“No thanks.”
“Takes your mind to other realms.”
“I’ve just got back from one, thank
you. I have no intention of returning.”
“Yeah, right, dig your point. The
baddest trip of them all.”
Moyo couldn’t quite make out what
he was confronting. The man didn’t seem like one of the apathetic ones. On the
other hand, he obviously hadn’t managed to adapt very well. Perhaps he came
from a pre-technology age, where education was minimal and superstition ruled
everyone’s life.
“What era do you come from?”
“Ho! The greatest one there ever
was. I dug the era of peace, when we were busy fighting the establishment for
all the freedom you cats just take for granted. Heck, I was at Woodstock, man.
Can you dig that?”
“Um, I’m very happy for you. So you
don’t mind if I rebuild the van, then?”
“Rebuild? What are you, some kind of
anti-anarchist?”
“I’m someone who’s got children to
look after. Unless you’d rather they were tortured by Ekelund’s people.”
The man’s body bucked as if he’d
been struck a physical blow; his arms wove in strange jerky motions in front of
him. Moyo didn’t think it was a dance.
“I hate your hostility groove, but
I dig your motivation. That’s cool. A square cat like you is probably having a
lot of trouble adjusting to this situation.”
Moyo’s jaw dropped open. “I’m having
trouble?”
“Thought so. So like what kind of
magical mystery tour are you planning here?”
“We’re taking the children out of
Exnall. Stephanie wants to drive up to the border.”
“Oh, man!” A wide smile prised
apart layers of hair. “That is so beautiful. The border again. We’re gonna roll
this old bus out and set the draft dodgers free in the land of Mounties and
maple leaves. What a trip! Thank you, man, thank you.” He walked over to the
battered van and stroked its front wing lovingly. A small wavy rainbow appeared
on the bodywork where his hand had touched it.
“What do you mean, we?”
“Come on, man, lighten up. You
don’t think you can handle that kind of scene alone, do you? The military mind
is full of low cunning; you wouldn’t get a mile out of town without them
throwing up roadblocks across the freeway. Maybe a few of us would fall down
some stairs while we’re being arrested, too. It happens, man, all of the
frigging time. The federal pigs don’t give a shit about our rights. But I’ve
been here before, I know how to go sneaky on them.”
“You think she’d try and stop us?”
“Who, man?”
“Ekelund.”
“Hell, who knows. Chicks like that
have got it real hard up their asses. Between you and me, I think they’re maybe
like aliens. You know, UFO people from Venus. But I can see you’re sceptical
right now, I won’t press it. So how many kids are you planning on squirrelling
away in here?”
“About seven or eight, so far.”
Without quite understanding how it
happened, Moyo found a friendly arm around his shoulder, guiding him to the
van’s cab.
“That’s worthy. I can dig that. Now
you just ease yourself up in the driver’s seat, or whatever the hell they call
it these days, and dream up some controls we can all handle. Once you’ve done
that and I’ve given us a cool disguise we can hit the road.”
Twinkles of light were shooting all
over the van’s bodywork, sketching glowing lines of colour in the damaged
composite. It was as if a flock of acidhead fairies had been let loose with
spray cans. Moyo wanted to complain at this ideological hijack, but couldn’t
manage to think up the correct words. He took the easy option, and sat in the
driver’s seat like he’d been told.
There was a gap between the
deuterium tank’s cryostat ducts and the power feed sub-module which routed
superconductor cables to nearby patterning nodes, a narrow crevice amid the
boxy, nultherm foam-coated machinery. In the schematics which the flight
computer provided, it was listed as a crawlway.
For pigmy acrobats, maybe, Erick
thought irascibly. He certainly couldn’t wear any protective gear over the SII
suit. Sharp corners and bloated tubes jabbed and squeezed against him every
time he moved. It couldn’t be doing the medical nanonic packages around his arm
and torso any good. Thankfully the black silicon covering his skin was an
effective insulator, otherwise he would have been either roasted, frozen, or
electrocuted long ago.
Along with Madeleine he’d been
burrowing through the innards of the Villeneuve’s Revenge for nine hours
now. It was nasty, tiring, stressful work. With his body in the state it was he
had to keep a constant check on his physiological status. He was also running a
mild relaxant program in primary mode; claustrophobia was a problem prowling
wolfishly around the fringes of conscious thought.
The crawlway ended a metre short of
the hull, opening out into a hexagonal metallic cave bordered with stress
structure girders, themselves spiralled by cables. Erick squirmed out into this
cramped space and drew a sharp breath of relief, more psychological than
practical given he was breathing through a respirator tube. He switched his
collar sensors to scan around, seeing the fuselage plate behind his head. It
appeared perfectly normal, a smooth, slightly curving silicon surface, dark
grey with red code strips printed around the edges.
With his legs still jammed in the
crawlway, Erick pulled the sensor block from the straps securing it to his
side. It contained six separate scanner pads which he slipped out and started
fixing to the hull plate and girders.
“Plate 3-25-D is clean,” he
datavised to André eight minutes later. “No electromagnetic activity; and it’s
solid, too, no density anomalies.”
“Very good, Erick. 5-12-D is next.”
“How is Madeleine doing?”
“She is methodical. Between you,
eighteen per cent of the possible locations have now been eliminated.”
Erick cursed. The four of them had
carefully gone over the starship’s schematics, working out every possible
section of the hull were the device could have been hidden by Monterey’s
maintenance crews. With Pryor on board observing the bridge, they were limited
to two crew searching at any one time, the two supposed to be asleep. It was
going to take a long time to cover all the possible areas.
“I still say it’s probably a combat
wasp. That would be the easiest method.”
“Oui, but we won’t know for
sure until you have eliminated all the other options. Who can tell with such
treacherous bastards?”
“Great. How long to Arnstadt?”
“We have another five jumps to go.
Two of the other escort ships are manoeuvring sluggishly, which gives us
additional time. They are probably searching as we are. You have perhaps
another fifteen hours, twenty at the outside.”
Not enough, Erick knew, not nearly
enough. They were going to have to go to Arnstadt. After that he didn’t like to
think what the Organization would require from them. Nothing as simple as
escort duties, that was for certain.
“All right, Captain, I’m on my way
to 5-12-D.”
The chamber which the Saldanas used
for their Privy Council meetings was called the Fountain Room, a white marble
octagon with a gold and opal mosaic ceiling. Imposing three-metre statues stood
around the walls, sculpted from a dark rock which had been cut out of Nova
Kong, depicting a toga-clad orator in various inspirational poses. The Fountain
Room wasn’t as grandiose as some of the state function rooms added to the
Apollo Palace in later centuries, but it had been built by Gerald Saldana soon
after his coronation for use as his cabinet room. The continuity of power was
unbroken since then; the Saldanas were nothing if not respectful for the traditions
of their own history.
There were forty-five members of
the current Privy Council, including the Princes and Princesses who ruled the
Principalities; which meant a full meeting was held only every eighteen months.
Normally the King summoned twenty to twenty-five people to advise him, over
half of which were nearly always family. Today there were just six sitting
around the Fountain Room’s triangular mahogany table with its inlaid crowned
phoenix. It was the war cabinet, chaired by Alastair II himself, with the Duke
of Salion on his left, followed by Lord Kelman Mountjoy, the Foreign Office
Minister; on the King’s right-hand side was the Prime Minister, Lady Phillipa
Oshin; Admiral Lavaquar, the defence chief; and Prince Howard, president of
Kulu Corporation. No aides or equerries were present.
Alastair II picked up a small gavel
and tapped the much-battered silver bell on the table in front of him. “The
fifth meeting of this cabinet committee is now in order. I trust everyone has
accessed the latest reports concerning Arnstadt?”
There was a subdued round of
acknowledgement from the cabinet.
“Very well. Admiral, your
assessment?”
“Bloody worrying, Your Majesty. As
you know interstellar conquest has always been regarded as completely
impractical. Today’s navies exist to protect civil starships from piracy and
deter potential aggressors from committing random or sneak assaults. If anyone
strikes at us for political or economic reasons they damn well know we will
strike back harder. But actually subduing an entire system’s population was not
a concept any of our strategy groups even considered until today. Ethnically
streamed populations are too diverse, you simply cannot impose a different
culture on a defeated indigenous people, it will never be accepted, and you
lose the peace trying to enforce it. QED, conquests are impractical. Possession
has changed that. All Confederation worlds are vulnerable to it, even Kulu.
Though had the Capone Organization fleet jumped into orbit here, they would
have lost.”
“Even armed with antimatter?”
Prince Howard inquired.
“Oh, yes. We would have taken a
pounding, no doubt about it. But we would have won; in terms of firepower our
SD network is second only to Earth’s. The thing which concerns our strategists
most is the Organization’s theoretical expansion rate. They have effectively
doubled their fleet size by taking Arnstadt. If another five or six star
systems were to fall into Capone’s hands, we would be facing parity at the very
least.”
“We have distance on our side,” Lady
Phillipa said. “Kulu is nearly three hundred light-years from New California.
Deploying any kind of fleet over such a distance would be inordinately
difficult. And Capone is having trouble resupplying his conquests with He3,
he simply isn’t getting any from the Edenists.”
“Your pardon, Prime Minister,” the
admiral said. “But you are taking a too literal interpretation of these events.
Yes it would be physically difficult for Capone to subdue Kulu, but the trend
he is starting would be a different matter indeed. Others returning from
the beyond are equally capable, and some have considerably more experience in
empire building than he does. Unless planetary governments remain exceptionally
vigilant in searching for outbreaks of possession, what happened to New
California could easily be repeated. If Capone was all we had to worry about, I
would frankly be very relieved. As to the Organization’s He3
shortage: deuterium can and will be used as a monofuel for starship drives.
It’s less efficient and its radiation output has a progressively detrimental
effect on the drive tube equipment, but do not imagine for a moment that will
prevent them from using it. The Royal Navy has contingency plans to continue
high-level operations in the event that Kulu loses every single He3
cloudscoop in the Kingdom. We can fly for years, conceivably decades, using
deuterium alone should the need arise.”
“So lack of He3 isn’t
going to stop him?” the King asked.
“No, sir. Our analysts believe that
given the internal nature of Capone’s Organization he will have to continue his
expansion efforts in order to survive. The Organization has no other purpose,
growth through conquest is all it is geared up for. As a strategy for
maintaining control over his own people it is excellent, but sooner or later he
will run into size management problems. Even if he realizes this and tries to
stop, his lieutenants will stage a coup. If they didn’t they’d lose their
status along with him.”
“He seems to be running New
California efficiently enough,” Lord Mountjoy said.
“That’s a propaganda illusion,” the
Duke of Salion said. “The agencies have come up with a similar interpretation
as the navy. Capone boasts he has established a working government, but
essentially it’s a dictatorship backed by the threat of ultimate force. It
survives principally because the planetary economy is on a war footing which
always distorts financial reality for a while. This idea of a currency based on
magic tokens is badly flawed. The energistic ability of the possessed is essentially
unlimited, you cannot package it up and redistribute it to the have-nots as if
it were some kind of tangible commodity.
“And so far no one has challenged
Capone, he’s moved too swiftly for that. But the Organization’s internal
political situation won’t last. As soon as any kind of routine is established,
people can start to look at how they are being made to live and consider it
objectively. We estimate that serious underground opposition groups are going
to start forming within another fortnight among both communities. From what
we’ve actually seen and what we can filter through the propaganda, it would be
very tough for possessed and non-possessed to live peacefully side by side. The
society Capone has built is extremely artificial. That makes it easy to
destroy, especially from within.”
Lord Mountjoy smiled faintly. “You
mean, we don’t have to do anything but wait? The possessed will wipe themselves
out for us?”
“No. I’m not saying that. Our
psychologists believe that they cannot form societies as large or as complex as
ours. We have system-wide industrial civilizations because that is what it
takes to maintain our socioeconomic index. But when you can live in a palace
grander than this one simply by wishing it to be, what is the point of having
states whose populations run into hundreds of millions? That’s what will
eventually neuter Capone; but it doesn’t get rid of the general problem which
the possessed present. Not for us.”
“I never thought a military
solution was the right one, anyway,” Alastair said with a contrite nod at the
admiral. “Not in the long term. So what kind of threat are we facing from the
possessed infiltrating us? Have we really caught all of them who were at
liberty in the Kingdom? Simon?”
“Ninety-nine point nine per cent,
Your Majesty, certainly here on Kulu itself. Unfortunately, I can’t give you
absolutes. Sheer probability dictates that several have eluded us. But the AIs
are becoming increasingly proficient in tracking them down through the net. And
of course, if they begin to build up in any numbers they become easy for us to
spot and eradicate.”
“Hardly good for morale, though,”
Lady Phillipa said. “Government can’t guarantee you won’t get possessed, but if
it does happen don’t worry, we’ll see it.”
“Admittedly inconvenient for
individual subjects,” Prince Howard observed. “But it doesn’t affect our
overall ability to respond to the threat. And the Kulu Corporation has already
built a prototype personal monitor to safeguard against possession.”
“You have?”
“Yes. It’s a simple bracelet
stuffed with various sensors which is linked permanently into the
communications net. It’ll stretch our bandwidth capacity, but two AIs can keep
real-time tabs on every person on the planet. If you take it off, or if you are
possessed, we’ll know about it straightaway and where it happened.”
“The civil rights groups will love
that,” she muttered.
“The possessed will not,” Prince
Howard said levelly. “And it is their opinion which matters the most.”
“Quite,” Alastair II said. “I shall
publicly put on the first bracelet. It ought to help ease public attitude to
the notion. This is for their own good, after all.”
“Yes, Your Majesty,” Lady Phillipa
conceded with reasonable grace.
“Very well, we cannot guarantee
absolute safety for the population, but as my brother says, we can still
conduct broad policy. For the moment, I have to be satisfied with that. As to
the principal thrust of that broad policy, we must make a decision about
Mortonridge. Admiral?”
“My staff tactical officers have
been running battle simulations along the lines young Hiltch suggested. His
experience has been a lot of help, but for my mind there are an awful lot of
variables and unknowns.”
“Do we win any of these
simulations?” the Duke of Salion asked.
“Yes. Almost all of them, providing
we devote sufficient resources. That seems to be the clinching factor every
time.” He gave the King a worried look. “It’s going to be risky, Your Majesty.
And it is also going to be extremely costly. We must maintain our current
defence status throughout the Kingdom simultaneously with running this
campaign. It will take every military reserve we have, not to mention
stretching our industrial capacity.”
“That should keep the baronies
happy,” Lady Phillipa said.
Alastair II pretended he hadn’t
heard. “But it can be done?” he pressed the admiral.
“We believe so, Your Majesty. But
it will require the full support of the Edenists. Ideally, I’d also like some
material cooperation from the Confederation Navy and our allies. The more we
have, the greater chance of victory.”
“Very well. Kelman, this is your
field. How did your audience with the Edenist ambassador go?”
The foreign minister attempted not
to smile at the memory; he still wasn’t sure which of them had been the more
surprised. “Actually, Ambassador Astor was extremely receptive to the notion.
As we know, the old boy doesn’t exactly have the easiest of jobs here. However,
once I asked, he immediately put the whole embassy over to working on the
practical aspects. Their military and technology attachés agree that the Jovian
habitats have the capacity to produce Tranquillity serjeants in the kind of
quantities we envisage.”
“What about commitment?” Prince
Howard asked.
“Such a request would have to be
put before their Consensus, but he was sure that given the circumstances
Jupiter would consider it favourably. He actually offered to accompany whatever
delegation we send and help present the argument for us. It might not sound
like much, but I consider such an offer to be significant.”
“Why exactly?” the King asked.
“Because of the nature of their
culture. Edenists very rarely enact a Consensus, normally there is no need.
They share so much in terms of ethics and motivation that their decisions on
most subjects are identical. Consensus is only required when they confront
something new and radical, or they are threatened and need to select a level of
response. The fact that the ambassador himself is in agreement with our request
and that he is willing to argue our case for us is a very positive factor. More
than anyone, he understands what it has cost us to ask for their help in the
first place, the pride we have swallowed. He can convey that for us.”
“In other words, he can swing it,”
Prince Howard said.
“I consider it a high probability.”
The King paused for a moment,
weighing up the troubled faces confronting him. “Very well, I think we should
proceed to the next stage. Admiral, start to prepare what forces you need to
support the liberation of Mortonridge.”
“Yes, Your Majesty.”
“Kelman, the immediate burden rests
upon your ministry. The admiral says he requires support from the Confederation
Navy and our allies, it will be up to the diplomatic service to secure it.
Whatever interests we have, I want them realized. I suggest you confer with the
ESA to see what pressure can be applied to anyone displaying less than
wholehearted enthusiasm.”
“What level of assets do you want
activated?” the Duke of Salion asked cautiously.
“All of them, Simon. We either do
this properly or not at all. I am not prepared to commit our full military
potential against such a powerful enemy unless we have total superiority. It
would be morally unacceptable, as well as politically unsound.”
“Yes, sir, I understand.”
“Excellent, that’s settled then.”
“Um, what about Ione?” Lady
Phillipa asked.
Alastair almost laughed openly at
the Prime Minister’s meekness. Not like her at all. Everyone did so tiptoe
around the subject of Tranquillity in his presence. “Good point. I think it
might be best if we employ family here to complement Kelman’s people. We’ll
send Prince Noton.”
“Yes, Your Majesty,” Lord Mountjoy
said guardedly.
“Any other topics?” the King asked.
“I think we’ve achieved all our
aims, sir,” Lady Phillipa said. “I’d like to announce that plans to liberate
Mortonridge are under way. A positive step to regain the initiative will be
just what people need to hear.”
“But no mention of the Edenists,”
Lord Mountjoy interjected quickly. “Not yet, that still needs to be handled
with care.”
“Of course,” she said.
“Whatever you think appropriate,”
Alastair told them. “I wish all of you good luck on your respective tasks. Let
us hope Our Lord smiles on us, the sunlight seems to be decidedly lacking of
late.”
It was only the third time Parker
Higgens had been invited into Ione’s apartment, and the first time he’d been in
alone. He found himself disturbed by the big window in the split-level entrance
lounge which looked out into the circumfluous sea; the antics of the shoals of
small fish flashing their harlequin colours as they sped about did not amuse
him. Strange, he thought, that the threat of pressure which all that water
represented should be so much more intimidating than the vacuum outside the
starscraper windows.
Ione welcomed him with a smile and
a delicate handshake. She was wearing a yellow robe over a glittering purple
bikini, her hair still damp from her swim. Once again, as he had been right
from the first moment he saw her, Parker Higgens was captivated by those
enchanting blue eyes. His only comfort was that he wasn’t alone in the Confederation,
millions suffered as he did.
“Are you all right, Parker?” she
inquired lightly.
“Yes, thank you, ma’am.”
Ione gave the window a suspicious
look, and it turned opaque. “Let’s sit down.”
She selected a small circular table
made from a wood so darkened with age it was impossible to identify. A pair of
silent housechimps began to serve tea from a bone china set.
“You seem to have made a lot of new
friends in Trafalgar, Parker. An escort of four voidhawks, no less.”
Parker winced. Did she have any idea
how penetrating that irony of hers could be? “Yes, ma’am. The navy science
analysts are here to assist with our interpretation of the Laymil recordings.
The First Admiral’s staff suggested the procedure, and I had to agree with
their reasoning. Possession is a terrible occurrence, if the Laymil had a
solution we should not stint in our efforts to locate it.”
“Please relax, Parker, I wasn’t
criticising. You did the right thing. I find it most gratifying that the Laymil
project has suddenly acquired so much importance. Grandfather Michael was right
after all; a fact he must be enjoying. Wherever he is.”
“You have no objection to the navy
people scrutinizing the recordings, then?”
“None at all. It would be a rather
spectacular feather in our cap if we did produce the answer. Although I have my
doubts on that score.”
“So do I, ma’am. I don’t believe
there is a single answer to this problem. We are up against the intrinsic
nature of the universe itself, only God can alter that.”
“Humm.” She sipped her tea, lost in
contemplation. “Yet the Kiint seem to have found a way. Death and possession
doesn’t bother them.” For the first time ever she saw real anger on the old
director’s gentle face.
“They’re not still working here are
they, ma’am?”
“Yes, Parker, they’re still here.
Why?”
“I fail to see the reason. They
knew all along what had happened to the Laymil. Their whole presence here is
some absurd charade. They never had any intention of helping us.”
“The Kiint are not hostile to the
human race, Parker. Whatever their reasons are, I’m sure they are good ones.
Perhaps they were gently trying to nudge us in the right direction. Who knows?
Their intellects are superior to ours, their bodies too, in most respects. You
know, I’ve just realized we don’t even know how long they live. Maybe they
don’t die, maybe that’s how they’ve beaten the problem.”
“In which case they can hardly help
us.”
She stared at him coolly over the
rim of her cup. “Is this a problem for you, Parker?”
“No.” His jaw muscles rippled as he
fought his indignation. “No, ma’am, if you value their input to the project I
will be happy to set aside my personal objection.”
“Glad to hear it. Now, there are
still four thousand hours of sensorium records in the Laymil electronics stack
which we haven’t accessed yet. Even with the new teams you brought it’s going
to take a while to review them all. We’ll have to accelerate the process.”
“Oski Katsura can construct
additional reformatting equipment, that ought to speed things along. The only
area of conflict I can see is weapons technology. You did say you wished to
retain the right of embargo, ma’am.”
“So I did.” He has a point. Do I
really want to hand Laymil weapons over to the Confederation, no matter how
noble the cause?
It is no longer a relevant
question, Tranquillity said. We
know why the spaceholms committed suicide. Our earlier assumption that it was
inflicted by an external force is demonstrably incorrect. Therefore your worry
that the data for some type of superweapon exists is no longer applicable. No
superweapon was designed or built.
You hope! What if the spaceholms
built one to try and stop the approach of the possessed Laymil ships?
Given the level of their
knowledge base at the time of their destruction, any weapons built in defence
of the spaceholms would not be noticeably different to our own. They did not
think in terms of weapons; whereas there is a case to be made for plotting
human history in terms of weapons development. It may well be that anything the
Laymil came up with would be inferior.
You can’t guarantee that. Their
biotechnology was considerably more advanced than Edenist bitek.
It was impressive because of its
scale. However, their actual development was not much different to the
Edenists. There is little risk of you worsening the situation by allowing
unlimited access to the recordings.
But not zero?
Of course not. You know this,
Ione.
I know it. “I think we’d better rescind that proscription
for the time being,” she told Parker Higgens.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Is there anything else we can do
to assist the Confederation Navy? Our unique position here ought to count for
something.”
“Their senior investigator came up
with two suggestions. Apparently Joshua Calvert said he found the original
electronics stack in some kind of fortress. If he were to supply us with the
coordinate of this structure we could explore it to see what other electronics
remain. If one stack can survive undamaged, then there must be others, or even
parts of others. The data in those crystals is priceless to us.”
Oh, dear, Tranquillity said.
Don’t you dare go all sarcastic
on me, not after Joshua agreed to find the Alchemist. We both agreed he’s grown
up a lot since that time.
Unfortunately his earlier legacy
remains.
Just in time she guarded herself
against a scowl. “Captain Calvert isn’t here at the moment. But, Parker, I’d
advise against too much optimism. Scavengers are notorious braggarts, I’d be
very surprised if this fortress he spoke of exists in quite the same condition
he claimed.”
Neeves and Sipika may have the
coordinate, Tranquillity said.
They might cooperate. If not, we are in an official state of emergency;
debrief nanonics could be used.
Well done. Send a serjeant in
there now to interview them. Make it clear that if they don’t tell us
voluntarily it’ll be extracted anyway. “I’ll see what can be done,” she said in the hope of countering his
disappointed expression. “What was the other suggestion?”
“A thorough scan of Unimeron’s
orbital track. If the planet was taken into another dimension by Laymil
possessed there may be some kind of trace.”
“Surely not a physical one? I
thought we had this argument before.”
“No, not a physical one, ma’am. We
thought, instead, there may be some residual energy overspill in the same way
the possessed betray their presence. It may be there is a detectable distortion
zone.”
“I see. Very well, look into it.
I’ll authorize any reasonable expenditure for sensor probes. The
astroengineering companies should welcome the work now I’ve stopped ordering
weapons for the SD network. We might even get some competitive prices.”
Parker finished his tea, not quite
certain he should ask what he wanted to. The responsibilities of the project
directorship were sharply defined, but then he was only human. “Are we well
defended, ma’am? I heard about Arnstadt.”
Ione smiled, and bent down to scoop
Augustine from the floor. He’d been trying to climb the table leg. “Yes,
Parker, our defences are more than adequate.” She ignored the old director’s
astonishment at the sight of the little xenoc, and stroked Augustine’s head.
“Take it from me, the Capone Organization will never get into Tranquillity.”
Chapter 03
Hull plate 8-92-K: lustreless grey,
a few scratches where tools and careless gauntlets had caught it, red stripe
codes designating its manufacturing batch and CAB permitted usage, reactive
indicator tabs to measure radiation and vacuum ablation still a healthy green;
exactly the same as all the other hexagonal plates protecting the delicate
systems of the Villeneuve’s Revenge from direct exposure to space.
Except it was leaking a minute level of electromagnetic activity. That was what
the first scanner pad indicated. Erick hurriedly applied the second over the
centre of the source. The sensor block confirmed a radiation emission point.
Density analysis detailed the size of the entombed unit, and a rough outline of
its larger components.
“I got it, Captain,” Erick
datavised. “They incorporated it in a hull plate. It’s small, electron
compressed deuterium tritium core, I think; maybe point two of a kiloton
blast.”
“You’re sure?”
Erick was too tired to be angry.
This was his ninth search, and they were all imposing far too much stress on
his convalescent body. When he finished each ten-hour session spent snaking
through the starship’s innards he had to go straight on bridge duty to maintain
the illusion of normal shipboard routine for Kingsley Pryor and the eight rover
reporters they were carrying. On top of that the Organization had played dirty.
Just as he knew they would.
“I’m sure.”
“Thank the blessed saints. Finally!
Now we can escape these devils. You can deactivate it, can’t you, mon enfant?”
“I think the best idea would be to
detach the plate and use the X-ray lasers to vaporise it as soon as it’s
clear.”
“Bravo. How long will it take?”
“As long as it does. I’m not about
to rush.”
“Of course.”
“Are there any reasonable jump
coordinates in this orbit?”
“Some. I will begin plotting them.”
Erick slowly swept the rest of the
little cavity for any further incongruous processors. Opposite the hull plate
was a spiral of ribbed piping, resembling a tightly coiled dragon’s tail, which
led to a heat exchange pump. He had emerged at its rim, wedged between the
curving titanium and a cluster of football-sized cryogenic nitrogen tanks which
pressurized the vernier rockets. A small, cramped space, but one providing a
hundred crannies and half-hidden curves. It took him half an hour to sweep it
properly, forcing himself to be methodical. Not easy with an armed mini-nuke
eighty centimetres from his skull, its timer counting down.
When he was satisfied there were no
booby triggers or alarms secreted in the cavity, he squirmed around to face the
hull and eased himself further out of the crawlway like paste from a tube.
Normally, a starship’s hull plates
were detached from the outside, with the seam rivets and load pins easily
accessible. This was a lot more difficult. The arcane procedure for an internal
jettison ran through Erick’s neural nanonics, an operation which must surely
have been dreamed up by committees of civil servant lawyers on permanent lunch
breaks and with no knowledge of astroengineering. It was highly tempting just
to shove a fission blade into the silicon and saw around the mini-nuke in a
wide circle. Instead he datavised the flight computer to switch off the
sector’s molecular binding force generator, then applied the anti-torque
screwdriver to the first feed coupling. It might have been imagination, but he
thought his new AT arm was slower than the other. The nutrient reserves were
almost depleted. His thoughts were too cluttered to really bother about it.
Eighty minutes later, the plate was
ready. The little cavity swarmed with discarded rivets, load pins, flakes of
silicon, and several tool heads he’d lost. His suit sensors were having trouble
supplying him with a decent image through all the junk. He slotted the last
tools back in his harness and wriggled even further out of the crawlway,
feeling around with his toes for a solid foothold to brace himself against.
When he was in position he was bent almost double with his back pressing
against the plate. He started to shove, his leg muscles straining hard.
Physiological monitor programs began signalling caution warnings almost
immediately. Erick ignored them, using a tranquillizer program to damp down the
swelling worry about the further damage he was causing himself.
The plate moved—neural nanonics
recording a minute shift in his posture. Then he was rising in millimetre
increments. He waited until the neural nanonics reported the plate had shifted
five centimetres, then stopped pressing. Inertia would complete the work now.
Cramp persecuted his abdomen.
A wide sliver of silver-blue light
shone into the cavity as he retreated back down into the crawlway. One edge of
the plate was loose, rising up out of alignment. His suit collar sensors
hurriedly reduced their receptivity as the beam animated the rivet fragments
into a glittering storm.
The plate lumbered upwards. Erick
checked the edges one last time to see if they were all clear, then datavised:
“Okay, Captain, it’s free. Fire the verniers. Let’s separate.”
He could actually see the silent
eruptions of the tiny chemical rocket nozzles ringing the starship’s equator,
quick luminous yellow fountains. The hull plate appeared to be moving faster
now, receding from the cavity.
Kursk was visible outside. The Villeneuve’s
Revenge was in low orbit, soaking in the wellspring of lambent light
shimmering off the planet’s cloud-daubed oceans.
It was the Capone Organization’s
second conquest: a stage three world, six light-years from Arnstadt. With a
population of just over fifty million, it was evolving from its purely
planetary-based economic phase to develop a small space industry. Consequently,
it was an easy target. There was no SD network, yet it had valuable modern
astroengineering stations and a reasonable population. The squadron of
twenty-five starships which Luigi Balsmao dispatched to subdue the planet had
encountered almost no opposition. Five independent trader starships docked at
Kursk’s single orbiting asteroid settlement had been armed with combat wasps;
but the weapons were third-rate, and the captains less than enthusiastic about
flying out to die bravely against the Organization’s superior firepower.
Along with the other escort ships,
the Villeneuve’s Revenge had been assigned to the new Organization
squadron within eight hours of arriving at Arnstadt. A subdued but furious
André was unable to refuse. They had even seen action, firing half a dozen
combat wasps against the two defenders who had responded to their arrival.
With their depleted crew numbers,
everyone had to be on the bridge during the last stage of the mission, which
meant they couldn’t continue their search for the bomb. Which in turn meant
they couldn’t duck out of the final engagement.
With the small battle won, and the
planet open to Capone’s landing forces, the Villeneuve’s Revenge had
been given orbital clearance duties by the squadron commander. Tens of
thousands of tiny fragments thrown out by detonating combat wasps now
contaminated space around the planet, each one presenting a serious potential
impact hazard to approaching starships. Combat sensor clusters on the Villeneuve’s
Revenge were powerful enough to track anything larger than a snowflake that
came within a hundred kilometres of the fuselage. And André was using the X-ray
laser cannons to vaporise any such fragment they located.
Erick watched hull plate 8-92-K
shrink, a small perfect black hexagon against the glittery deep turquoise
ocean. It turned brilliant orange in an eyeblink, then burst apart.
“I think it is time we had a small
discussion with Monsieur Pryor,” André Duchamp datavised to his crew.
It was almost as if the
Organization’s liaison man was expecting them when André datavised his command
code to open the cabin door. It was Kingsley Pryor’s designated sleep period,
but he was fully dressed, floating in lotus position above the decking. His
eyes were open, showing no surprise at the two laser pistols levelled at him.
Nor fear, Erick thought.
“We have eliminated the bomb,”
André said triumphantly. “Which means you have just become surplus to
requirements.”
“So you’re going to slaughter the
other crews, are you?” Kingsley said quietly.
“Pardon?”
“I have to transmit a code every
three hours—seven at the most, remember? If that doesn’t happen one of the
other starships will explode. Then they won’t be in any position to transmit
their code, and another will go. You’ll start a chain reaction.”
André maintained his poise.
“Obviously, we will warn them we are leaving before we jump outsystem. Do you
take me for a barbarian? They will have time to evacuate. And Capone will have
five ships less.” There was a glint in his eye. “I will make sure the rover
reporters understand that. My ship and crew are striking right at the heart of
the Organization.”
“I expect Capone will be devastated
at the news. Deprived of a warrior like you.”
André glared furiously; he could
never manage sarcasm, however crude, and he hated being on the receiving end.
“You may inform him yourself. We will return you to him via the beyond.” His
grip on the laser pistol tightened.
Kingsley Pryor switched his glacial
eyes to Erick, and datavised: “You have to stop them murdering me.”
The message was encrypted with a
Confederation Navy code.
“Knowing the nature of the possessed,
I expect that code was compromised a long time ago,” Erick datavised back.
“Very likely. But do your shipmates
know you are a CNIS officer? You’d join me in the beyond if they did. And I’ll
tell them. I have absolutely nothing to lose, now. I haven’t for some time.”
“Who the fuck are you?”
“I served a duty tour in the CNIS
weapons division as a technical evaluation officer. That’s why I know who you
are, Captain Thakrar.”
“As far as I’m concerned that makes
you a double traitor, to humanity and the navy. And Duchamp won’t believe a
word you say.”
“You need to keep me alive,
Thakrar, very badly. I know which star system the Organization is planning to
invade next. Right now, there is no more important piece of information in this
whole galaxy. If Aleksandrovich and Lalwani know the target, they can intercept
and destroy the Organization fleet. You now have no other duty but to get that
information to them. Correct?”
“Filth like you would say
anything.”
“You can’t risk the possibility
that I’m lying. I obviously have access to the Organization’s command echelons,
I wouldn’t be in this position if I didn’t. Therefore I could quite easily know
their overall strategic planning. At the very least, procedure says I should be
debriefed.”
The decision seemed more enervating
than all that time spent in the cavity working on the hull plate. Erick was
repelled by the notion that a piece of shit like Pryor could manipulate him.
“Captain?” he said wearily.
“Oui?”
“How much do you think he’s worth
if we turn him over to the Confederation authorities?”
André gave his crewman a surprised
look. “You have changed since you came on board, mon enfant.”
Since Tina . . . who wouldn’t?
“We’re going to be in the shit with the Confederation when we return. We did
sign up with Capone, remember, and we helped with this invasion. But if we
bring them a prize like this, especially if we do it in full view of the
rovers, we’ll be heroes; it’ll wipe the slate clean.”
As always, avarice won with
Duchamp. His gentle face’s natural smile expanded with admiration. “Good
thinking, Erick. Madeleine, help Erick stuff this pig into zero-tau.”
“Yes, Captain.” She pushed off the
hatch rim and grabbed hold of Pryor’s shoulder. On the way she couldn’t resist
giving Erick a troubled look.
He couldn’t even raise a regretful
grin in response. I thought it was over, that getting rid of the bomb would
finish it. We would dock at some civilized spaceport, and I could turn them all
over to the local Navy Bureau. Now all I’ve done is swapped one problem for another.
Great God Almighty, when is this all going to end?
The beyond was different, not
changed, but the rents which tore open into the real universe fired in flashes
of sensation. They enraged and exhilarated the souls which dwelt there; a
pathetic taster, a reminder of what used to be. Proof that corporeal life could
be theirs again.
There was no pattern to the rents.
The beyond did not have a structured topology. They occurred. They ended. And
each time a soul would wriggle through to possess. Luck, chance, dictated their
appearance.
The souls screamed for more,
scrabbling at the residual traces of their more fortunate comrades who had made
it though. Pleading, praying, promising, cursing. The tirade was one-way.
Almost.
The possessed had the power to look
back, to listen harder.
One of them said: We want somebody.
The gibbering souls shrieked their
lies in return. I know where they are. I know how to help. Take me. Me! I will
tell you.
The chant of a billion tormented
entities is not one to be ignored.
Another rent appeared, loud
sunlight piercing an ebony cloud. There was a barrier at the top, preventing
any soul from surging through into the glory. Its extended existence igniting
an agonized desire within those who flocked around it.
See? A body awaits you, a reward
for the information we need.
What? What information?
Mzu. Dr Alkad Mzu, where is she?
The question rippled through the
beyond, a virus rumour, passed—ripped—from one soul to another. Until, finally,
the woman came forth, rising from the degradations of perpetual mind-rape to
embrace and adore the pain which saturated her new body. Feelings rushed in to
inflate consciousness: warmth, wetness, cool air. Eyes blinked open, half
laughing, half-weeping at the agony of her scalded, skinless limbs. “Ayacucho,”
Cherri Barnes coughed to the gangsters standing over her. “Mzu went to
Ayacucho.”
The top secret file contained a
report which the First Admiral found even more worrying than any naval defeat.
It had been written by an economist on President Haaker’s staff, detailing the
strain which possession was placing on the Confederation economy. The major
problem was that modern conflicts tended to be resolved by fifteen-minute
engagements between opposing squadrons of starships; fast, and usually pretty decisive.
It was an exceptional dispute which led to more than three navy engagements.
Possession, though, was shutting
down the interstellar economy. Tax revenue was falling, and with it the
government’s ability to support its forces on month-long deployment missions.
And the Confederation Navy placed the primary drain on everyone’s finances.
Enforcing the quarantine was good strategic policy, but it wasn’t going to
solve the problem. A new strategy, one which had to include a final solution,
had to be found within six months. After that, the Confederation would start to
fragment.
Samual Aleksandrovich exited the
file as Maynard Khanna ushered the two visitors into his office. Admiral
Lalwani and Mullein, the captain of the voidhawk Tsuga, both saluted.
“Good news?” Samual Aleksandrovich
asked Lalwani. It had become a standing joke at the start of their daily
situation meetings.
“Not entirely negative,” she said.
“You amaze me. Sit down.”
“Mullein has just arrived from
Arnstadt; Tsuga has been on intelligence gathering duties in that
sector.”
“Oh?” Samual cocked a thick eyebrow
at the youngish Edenist.
“Capone has invaded another star
system,” Mullein said.
Samual Aleksandrovich swore
bitterly. “That’s not negative?”
“It’s Kursk,” Lalwani said. “Which
is interesting.”
“Interesting!” he grunted. His
neural nanonics supplied him with the planet’s file. Not knowing the
world he was supposed to protect kindled obscure feelings of guilt. Its image
appeared on one of the office’s long holoscreens, just a perfectly ordinary
terracompatible world, dominated by large oceans.
“Population fifty million plus,”
Samual Aleksandrovich recited from the file. “Hell. The Assembly will combust,
Lalwani.”
“They’ve no right,” she said. “Your
original confinement strategy is working very effectively.”
“Apart from Kursk.”
She ducked her head in
acknowledgement. “Apart from Kursk. But then that isn’t due to the quarantine
order failing. The quarantine was intended to prevent stealthy infiltration,
not armed invasions.”
Samual’s mind went back to the
classified report. “Let’s hope the noble ambassadors see it that way. Why did
you say it was interesting?”
“Because Kursk is a stage three
world: no naval forces, no SD network. A pushover for the Organization.
However, all they earned themselves was a few orbital industrial stations and a
big struggle to quash the planetary population, the majority of whom live in
the countryside, they’re still very agrarian. In other words, the possessed are
up against small, solid communities of well-armed farmers who have had plenty
of advance warning.”
“But possessed forces backed up by
starships, nonetheless,” Samual observed.
“Yes, but why bother possessing
fifty million people who can make no positive contribution to the
Organization?”
“Possession makes no sense
generally.”
“No, but Capone’s Organization
needs sound economic support, certainly his fleet does. It won’t operate
without a functioning industrial capacity behind it.”
“All right, you’ve convinced me. So
what analysis has your staff come up with?”
“We believe it was principally a
propaganda move. A stunt, if you like. Kursk wasn’t a challenge to him, and it
isn’t an asset. Its sole benefit comes from the psychology. Capone has
conquered another world. He’s a force to be reckoned with, the king of the
possessed. That kind of garbage. People aren’t going to look at how
strategically insignificant Kursk is, all they’ll think about is that damn
exponential expansion curve. It’s going to place a lot of political pressure on
us.”
“The President’s office has
requested a briefing on the new development in two hours, sir,” Maynard Khanna
said. “It will be reasonable to assume the Assembly will follow that up with a
request for some kind of large-scale high-visibility military deployment. And a
victory. It will be expedient for the politicians to demonstrate the
Confederation can strike at the enemy, that they’re not sitting back doing
nothing.”
“Wonderfully precise thinking,”
Samual Aleksandrovich grumbled. “National navies have only released seventy per
cent of the forces pledged to us; we are barely managing to enforce the
quarantine; we can’t track down where the hell Capone’s antimatter is coming
from. Now they expect me to ransack what forces I have to build some kind of
interdiction flotilla. I wonder if they’ll give me a target, too, because I
certainly can’t see one. When will people learn that if we kill the possessed
bodies all we’re doing is simply adding to the numbers of souls in the beyond;
and I doubt the families of those we kill will thank us.”
“If I can offer a suggestion, sir,”
Mullein said.
“By all means.”
“As Lalwani said, Tsuga has
been collecting intelligence from Arnstadt. It’s our contention that Capone
isn’t having it all his own way, not down on the planet itself. The SD
platforms are having to fire on almost an hourly basis to support the
Organization lieutenants on the surface. There is a lot of resistance down
there. The Yosemite Consensus believes that if we were to start harassing the
ships and industrial stations Capone has in orbit, it would make life very
difficult for him. Constant reinforcement over interstellar distances is going
to place a considerable strain on his resources.”
“Maynard?” the First Admiral asked.
“Possible, sir. The general staff
already has appropriate contingency plans.”
“When don’t they?”
“Primarily, it would mean the
observation voidhawks seeding Arnstadt’s orbital space with stealthed fusion
mines; a decent percentage should manage to trickle past the SD sensors. Equip
them with mass-proximity fuses and any ships down there would be in deep
trouble. No one would know when an attack was coming; it would rattle the crews
once they realized we were blitzing them. Fast-strike missions could also be
mounted against the asteroid settlements; jump a ship in, fire off a random
salvo of combat wasps, and jump out again. Something similar to the Edenist
attack against Valisk. It would have the advantage that we were mainly
destroying hardware rather than people.”
“I want the feasibility studies run
today,” the First Admiral said. “Include Kursk as well as Arnstadt. That’ll
give me something concrete when I’m called to explain this latest fiasco to the
Assembly.” He gave the young voidhawk captain a speculative gaze. “What exactly
is Capone’s fleet doing right now?”
“Most of it is spread through the
Arnstadt system, keeping the asteroid settlements in line until their
populations are fully possessed. A lot of captured ships are being flown back
to New California, we assume to be armed ready for his next invasion. But it’s
a slow job; he’s probably short of crews.”
“For once,” Lalwani said sorely. “I
can’t get over how many of those independent trader bastards went to work for
him.”
“Recruitment is slowing
considerably now the quarantine is in place,” Maynard Khanna said. “Even the
independent traders are reluctant to take Capone’s money now they’ve heard
about Arnstadt, and the Assembly’s proclamation must have had some effect.”
“That or they’re too busy raking it
in by breaking the quarantine, I expect.” She shrugged. “We’ve been getting
reports; some of the smaller asteroids are still open to flights.”
“There are times when I wonder why
we bother,” Samual Aleksandrovich marvelled. “Thank you for the briefing,
Mullein, and my gratitude to Tsuga for a swift flight.”
“Has Gilmore made any progress?”
Lalwani asked when the captain had left.
“He won’t admit it, but the science
teams are stumped,” Samual Aleksandrovich said. “All they can come up with is a
string of negatives. We’re learning a lot about the capabilities of this
energistic ability, but nothing about how it is generated. Nor have Gilmore’s
people acquired any hard data on the beyond. I think that worries me the most.
It obviously exists, therefore it must have some physical parameters, a set of
governing laws; but they simply cannot detect or define them. We know so much
about the physical universe and how to manipulate its fabric, yet this has
defeated our most capable theorists.”
“They’ll keep at it. The research
teams at Jupiter have done no better. I know that Govcentral have established a
similar project; and no doubt the Kulu Kingdom will be equally industrious.”
“I think in this instance they
might all even be persuaded to cooperate,” Samual Aleksandrovich mused. “I’ll
mention it during my presidential briefing, it’ll give Olton something to
concentrate on.”
Lalwani shifted around in her
chair, leaning forwards slightly as if she was discomforted. “The one piece of
genuinely good news is that we believe Alkad Mzu has been sighted.”
“Praise the Lord. Where?”
“The Dorados. Which lends a
considerable degree of weight to the report. That’s where seventy per cent of
the Garissan refugees finished up. There is a small underground movement there.
She’ll probably try to contact them. We infiltrated them decades ago, so there
shouldn’t be any problem.”
Samual Aleksandrovich gave his
intelligence chief a pensive stare. He had always been able to rely on her
utterly. The height of the stakes these days, though, were breaking apart all
the old allegiances. Damn Mzu’s device, he thought, the alleged potency of the
thing even gnaws at trust. “Which ‘we’ is that, Lalwani?” he asked quietly.
“Both. Most intelligence agencies
have assets in the underground.”
“That’s not quite what I meant.”
“I know. It’s going to be down to
the agents on the ground, and who reaches her first. For me personally, Edenist
acquisition would not be an unwelcome outcome. I know we won’t abuse the
position. If CNIS obtains her, then as admiral of the service I will follow
whatever orders the Assembly’s Security Commission delivers concerning her
disposal. Kulu and the others could give us a problem, though.”
“Yes. What do the Edenists propose
to do if you get her?”
“Our Consensus recommends zero-tau
storage. That way she will be available should the Confederation ever face an
external threat which needs something as powerful as the Alchemist to defend
it.”
“That seems a logical course. I
wonder if the Alchemist could help us against the possessed?”
“Supposedly, it’s a weapon of
enormous destructive power. If that’s true, then like every weapon we have in
our arsenal today, it will be utterly ineffective against the possessed.”
“You’re right of course.
Unfortunately. So I suppose we are going to have to depend on Dr Gilmore and
his ilk for a solution.” And I wish I had the confidence I should have in him.
Saviour-to-be is a terrible burden for anyone to carry around.
It was the one sight Lord Kelman
Mountjoy had never expected to see. His job had taken him to countless star
systems; he had stood on a beach to watch a binary dawn over the sea, admired
Earth’s astonishing O’Neill Halo from a million kilometres above the north
pole, enjoyed lavish hospitality in the most exotic locations. But as Kulu’s
foreign minister, Jupiter was always destined to be verboten.
Now, though, he accessed the battle
cruiser’s sensor suite throughout the entire approach phase. The starship was
accelerating at one and a half gees, carrying them down towards the
five-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-kilometre orbital band occupied by the Jovian
habitats. Two armed voidhawks from the Jovian defence fleet were escorting the
warship in. Just a precaution, Astor had assured them. Kelman had accepted
gracefully, though most of the Royal Navy officers were less charitable.
The habitat Azara was looming large
ahead of them, a circular spaceport disk extending out of its northern endcap.
Although Edenism didn’t have a capital, Azara played host to all of the foreign
diplomatic missions. Even the Kingdom maintained an embassy at Jupiter.
“I still can’t get used to the
scale here,” Kelman confessed as the acceleration began to fluctuate. Their
approach was in its final stages, the battle cruiser flowing through the thick
traffic lanes of inter-orbit ships towards the spaceport. “Whenever we build
anything large it always seems so ugly. Of course, technically the Kingdom does
own one bitek habitat.”
“I thought Tranquillity was
independent,” Ralph Hiltch said.
“Great-grandfather Lukas granted
its title to Michael as an independent duchy,” Prince Collis said affably. “So,
strictly speaking, in Kulu law, my father is still its sovereign. But I’d hate
to try and argue the case in court.”
“I didn’t know,” Ralph said.
“Oh, yes. I’m quite the amateur
expert on the situation,” Prince Collis said. “I’m afraid we do all harbour a
rather baroque interest in Cousin Ione and her fiefdom. All of my siblings
access the official file on Tranquillity at some time while we’re growing up.
It’s fascinating.” Alastair II’s youngest child smiled whimsically. “I almost
wish I’d been sent with that delegation instead of Prince Noton. No offence,”
he added for Astor’s benefit.
“Your Highness,” the Edenist
ambassador murmured. “This would seem to be the time for breaking taboos.”
“Indeed. And I shall do my best to
throw off my childhood prejudices. But it will be hard. I’m not accustomed to
the notion of the Kingdom being dependent on anyone.”
Ralph looked across the small
lounge. All of the acceleration couches had tilted down from the horizontal,
transforming into oversized armchairs. Ambassador Astor lay back bonelessly in
his, a politely courteous expression on his face, as always. Ralph had no idea
how he maintained it without the benefit of neural nanonics.
“Attempting to remedy a situation
not of your making is hardly dishonourable, Your Highness.”
“Oh, Ralph, do stop blaming
yourself for Ombey,” Kelman Mountjoy protested. “Everyone thinks you’ve done a
superb job so far. Even the King, which makes it official. Right, Collis?”
“Father thinks very highly of you,
Mr Hiltch,” the Prince confirmed. “I dare say you’ll be lumbered with a title
once this is over.”
“In any case, I don’t believe this
proposed alliance could be said to make the Kingdom dependent on us,” Astor
said. “Liberating the possessed of Mortonridge is both necessary and
advantageous to everyone. And if, afterwards, we understand each other a little
better, then surely that’s for the best, too.”
Kelman exchanged an amused glance
with Astor as Ralph Hiltch shuffled around in discomfort. For all that they
came from totally different cultures, he and the Edenist shared remarkably
similar rationalities. Communication and understanding came swiftly between
them. It was a cause of growing dismay to Kelman that the freedom he’d enjoyed
all his life, allowing him to develop his intellect, was maintained by
guardians such as Ralph and the navy, who could never share his more liberal
outlook. Small wonder, he thought, that history showed empires always rotted
from the core outwards.
There were checks as soon as they
docked. Brief almost-formalities; the inevitable test for static, confirmation
that processors worked in their presence; verifications which everybody had to
comply with. Including the Prince. Ambassador Astor made sure his own
examination was a very public one. And Collis was charm personified to the two
Edenists running sensors over him.
Azara’s administrator was waiting
with a small official reception committee at the spaceport’s tube station. In
most Edenist habitats, the post of administrator was largely ceremonial; though
in Azara’s case it had evolved into something approaching Edenism’s foreign
minister.
Quite a considerable crowd had
assembled to see the delegation; mostly young, curious Edenists, and staff from
the foreign embassies.
A smiling Collis listened to the
administrator’s short speech, replied with a few appropriate words, and said he
was eager to see the inside of a habitat. The whole group ignored the waiting
tube carriage and walked out of the station.
Ralph had never been inside a
habitat either. He stood on the lawn outside the tube station and stared along
the cylindrical landscape, mesmerized by the beauty of the sight. This was a
lush, dynamic nature at its most majestic.
“Makes you wonder why we ever
rejected bitek, doesn’t it?” Kelman said quietly.
“Yes, sir.”
The Prince was mingling among the
crowd, smiling and shaking hands. Walkabouts were hardly a novelty for him, but
this was unplanned, and he didn’t have his usual retinue of ISA bodyguards,
just a couple of dour-faced Royal Marines that everyone ignored. He was clearly
enjoying himself.
Kelman watched a couple of the
girls kiss him, and grinned. “Well, he is a real live prince, after all. I
don’t suppose they get to meet very many of them around here.” He glanced up at
the radiant axial light tube and the verdant arch of land overhead. There was
something distinctly unnerving about knowing the vast structure was alive, and
looking right back at him, its huge thoughts contemplating him. “I think I’m
glad to be here, Ralph. And I think you had the right idea to ask for an
alliance. This society really has a frightening potential, I never actually
appreciated that before. I always thought it would be they who were the losers
as a result of our foreign policy. I was wrong: no matter all the barriers and
distance we throw up, they won’t make the slightest difference to these
people.”
“It’s too late to alter that now,
sir. We’re free of their energy monopoly. And I’m not sorry about that.”
“No, Ralph, I don’t suppose you
are. But there are more aspects to life than the purely materialistic. I think
both our cultures would benefit from stronger ties.”
“You could say the same about every
star system in the Confederation, sir.”
“So you could, Ralph, so you
could.”
The second general Consensus within
a month, and probably not the last within this year, it acknowledged wryly amid
itself as it formed.
The most unfortunate aspect of Lord
Kelman Mountjoy’s request, Consensus decided, is its innate logic. Examination
of the war simulations presented to us by Ralph Hiltch show a very real
possibility that the liberation of Mortonridge will succeed. We acknowledge
those among us who point out that this success is dependent on no further
external factors being applied in the favour of the possessed. So already we
see the risk rising.
Our major problem derives from the
projected victory being almost totally illusory. We have already concluded that
physical confrontation is not the answer to possession. Mortonridge simply
confirms this. If it takes the combined strength of the two most powerful
cultures in the Confederation to liberate a mere two million people on a single
small peninsula, then freeing an entire planet by such a method clearly verges
on the impossible.
Hopes across the Confederation
would be raised to unreasonable heights by success at Mortonridge. Such hopes
would be dangerous, for they would unleash demands local politicians will be
unable to refuse and equally unable to satisfy. However, for us to refuse the
Kingdom’s request would cast us in the role of villain. Lord Kelman Mountjoy
has been ingenious in placing us in this position.
“I would disagree,” Astor told the
Consensus. “The Saldanas know as well as us that military intervention is not
the final answer. They too are presented with an enormously difficult dilemma
by Mortonridge. As they are more susceptible to political pressures, they are
responding in the only way possible.
“I would also say this: By sending
the King’s natural son with their delegation they are signalling the importance
they attach to our decision, and an acknowledgement of what must inevitably
come to be should our answer favour them. If both of us commit ourselves to the
liberation there can be no return to the policies of yesterday. We will have
established a strong bond of trust with one of the most powerful cultures in
the Confederation currently contrary to us. That is a factor we cannot afford
to ignore.”
Thank you Astor, Consensus replied,
as always you speak well. In tribute of this, we acknowledge that the future must
be safeguarded in conjunction with the present. We are presented with an
opportunity to engender a more peaceful and tolerant universe when the present
crisis is terminated.
Such a raison d’être is not a
wholly logical one to place ourselves on a war footing. Nor is the kindling of
false hope which will be the inevitable outcome.
However, there are times when
people do need such a hope.
And to err is human. We embrace our
humanity, complete with all those flaws. We will tell the Saldana Prince that
until such time that we can provide a permanent solution to possession he may
have our support for this foolhardy venture.
After a five-day voyage, Oenone slipped
out of its wormhole terminus seventy thousand kilometres above Jobis, the Kiint
homeworld. As soon as they had identified themselves to the local traffic
control (a franchise run by humans) and received permission to orbit, Syrinx
and the voidhawk immediately started to examine the triad moons.
The three moons orbited the
planet’s Lagrange One point, four million kilometres in towards the F2 star.
Equally sized at just under eighteen hundred kilometres in diameter, they were
also equally spaced seventy thousand kilometres apart, taking a hundred and
fifty hours to rotate about their common centre.
They were the anomaly which had
attracted the attention of the first scoutship in 2356. The triad was an
impossible formation, too regular for nature to produce. Worse, the three moons
massed exactly the same (give or take half a billion tonnes—a discrepancy
probably due to asteroid impacts). In other words, someone had built them.
It was to the scoutship captain’s
credit she didn’t flee. But then fleeing was probably a null term when dealing
with a race powerful enough to construct artefacts on such a scale. Instead,
she beamed a signal at the planet, asking permission to approach. The Kiint
said yes.
It was about the most forthcoming
thing they ever did say. The Kiint had perfected reticence to an art form. They
never discussed their history, their language, or their culture.
As to the triad moons, they were an
“old experiment,” whose nature was unspecified. No human ship had ever been
permitted to land on them, or even launch probes.
Voidhawks, however, with their mass
perception ability, had added to the sparse data over the centuries. Using Oenone’s
senses, Syrinx could feel the moons’ uniformity; globes of a solid aluminum
silicon ore right down to the core, free of any blemishes or incongruities.
Their gravity fields pressed into space-time, causing a uniquely smooth
three-dimensional stretch within the local fabric of reality. Again, all three
fields were precisely the same, and perfectly balanced, ensuring the triad’s
orbital alignment would hold true for billions of years.
A pale silver-grey in colour, they
each had a small scattering of craters. There were no other features; perhaps
the strongest indicator to their artificial origin. Nor could centuries of
discreet probing by the voidhawks find any mechanical structures or instruments
left anywhere. The triad moons were totally inert. Presumably, whatever the
“experiment” was, it had finished long ago.
Syrinx couldn’t help but wonder if
the triad had something to do with the beyond and the Kiint’s understanding of
their own nature. No human astrophysicist had ever come up with any halfway
convincing explanation as to what the experiment could be.
Maybe the Kiint just wanted to
see what the shadows would look like from Jobis’s surface, Ruben said. The penumbra cones do reach back
that far.
It seems a trifle extravagant
for a work of art, she
countered.
Not really. If your society is
advanced enough to build something like the triads in the first place, then
logic dictates that such a project would only represent a fraction of your
total ability. In which case it might well be nothing other than a chunk of
performance art.
Some chunk. She felt his hand tighten around hers, offering
comfort in return for the brief hint of intimidation she had leaked into the
affinity band.
Remember, he said, we really know very little about
the Kiint. Only what they choose to tell us.
Yes. Well I hope they choose to
let slip a little more today.
The question over the true extent
of the Kiint’s abilities nagged at her as Oenone swept into a
six-hundred-kilometre parking orbit. From space Jobis resembled an ordinary
terracompatible world; although at fifteen thousand kilometres in diameter it
was appreciably larger, with a gravity of one point two Earth standard. It had
seven continents, and four principal oceans; axial tilt was less than one per
cent, which when coupled with a suspiciously circular orbit around the star
produced only mild climate variations, no real seasons.
For a world housing a race which
could build the triads there was astonishingly little in the way of a technological
civilization visible. Conventional wisdom had it that as Kiint technology was
so advanced it could never resemble anything like human machinery and
industrial stations, so nobody knew what to look for; either that or it was all
neatly folded away in hyperspace. Even so, they must have gone through a stage
of conventional engineering, an industrial age with hydrocarbon combustion and
factory farming, pollution and exploitation of natural planetary resources. If
so, there was no sign of it ever existing. No old motorways crumbling under the
grasslands, no commercial concrete cities abandoned to be swallowed by
avaricious jungles. Either the Kiint had done a magnificent job of restoration,
or they had achieved their technological maturity a frighteningly long time
ago.
Today, Jobis supported a society
comprised of villages and small towns, municipalities perched in the centre of
land only marginally less wild than the rest of the countryside. Population was
impossible to judge, though the best guesstimate put it at slightly less than a
billion. Their domes, which were the only kinds of buildings, varied in size
too much for anyone to produce a reliable figure.
Syrinx and Ruben took the flyer
down, landing at Jobis’s only spaceport. It was situated beside a coastal town
whose buildings were all human-built. White stone apartment blocks and a web of
small narrow streets branching out from a central marina made it resemble a
holiday destination rather than the sole Confederation outpost on this placid,
yet most eerily alien of worlds.
The residents were employed either
by embassies or companies. The Kiint did not encourage casual visits. Quite why
they participated in the Confederation at all was something of a mystery,
though one of the lesser ones. Their only interest and commercial activity was
in trading information. They bought data on almost any subject from anyone who
wanted to sell, with xenobiology research papers and scoutship logs fetching
the highest prices. In exchange, they sold technological data. Never anything
new or revolutionary, you couldn’t ask for anti-gravity machines or a
supralight radio; but if a company wanted its product improving, the Kiint
would deliver a design showing a better material to use in construction or a
way of reconfiguring the components so they used less power. Again, a huge hint
to their technological heritage. Somewhere on Jobis there must be a colossal
memory bank full of templates for all the old machines they’d developed and
then discarded God-alone-knew how long ago.
Syrinx never got a chance to
explore the town. She had contacted the Edenist embassy (the largest diplomatic
mission on Jobis), explaining her mission, while Oenone flew into
parking orbit. The embassy staff had immediately requested a meeting with a
Kiint called Malva, who had agreed.
She’s our most cooperative
contact, Ambassador Pyrus
explained as they walked down the flyer’s airstairs. Which I concede isn’t
saying much, but if any of them will answer you, she will. Have you had much
experience dealing with the Kiint?
I’ve never even met one before, Syrinx admitted. The landing field reminded her
of Norfolk, just a patch of grass designated to accommodate inconvenient
visitors. Although it was warmer, subtropical, it had the same temporary feel.
Few formalities, and fewer facilities. Barely twenty flyers and spaceplanes
were parked outside the one service hangar. The difference to Norfolk came from
the other craft sharing the field, lined up opposite the ground-to-orbit
machines. Kiint-fabricated, they resembled smaller versions of human ion field
flyers, ovoid but less streamlined.
Then why were you sent? Pyrus asked, diffusing a polite puzzlement into
the thought.
Wing-Tsit Chong thought it was a
good idea.
Did he now? Well I can hardly
contradict him, can I?
Is there anything I should know
before I meet her?
Not really. They’ll either deal
with you or not.
Did you explain the nature of
the questions I have?
Pyrus waved an empty hand around at
the scenery. You told me when you contacted the embassy. We don’t know if
they can intercept singular-engagement mode, but I expect they can if they
want. Next question of course is would they bother. You might like to ask Malva
exactly how important we are to them. We’ve never worked that out either.
Thank you. Syrinx patted the top pocket of her ship-tunic,
feeling the outline of her credit disk. Eden had loaded it with five billion
fuseodollars before she left, just in case. Will I have to pay for the
information, do you think?
Pyrus gestured at the Kiint transport
craft, and a hatch opened, the fuselage material flowing apart. It was close
enough to the ground not to need airstairs. Syrinx couldn’t quite judge if its
belly was resting on the ground, or if it was actually floating.
Malva will tell you, Pyrus said. I advise total openness.
Syrinx stepped into the craft. The
interior was a lounge, with four fat chairs as the only fittings. She and Ruben
sat down gingerly, and the hatch flowed shut.
Are you all right? an anxious Oenone asked straightaway.
Of course I am. Why?
You started accelerating at
roughly seventy gees and are currently travelling at Mach thirty-five.
You’re kidding! Even as she thought it, she was sharing Oenone’s
mind, perceiving herself streaking across a tall mountain range eight hundred
kilometres inland from the town at an awesome velocity for atmospheric travel. They
must be very tolerant of sonic booms on this planet.
I suspect your vehicle isn’t
producing one. My current orbital position doesn’t allow optimum observation,
but I can’t locate any turbulence in your wake.
According to Oenone, the
craft decelerated at seventy gees as well, landing some six thousand kilometres
from the spaceport field. When she and Ruben stepped out a balmy breeze plucked
at her silky ship-tunic. The craft had come to rest in a broad valley, just
short of a long lake with a shingle beach. Cooler air was breathing down from
the snowcapped peaks guarding the skyline, ruffling the surface of the water.
Avocado-green grass-analogue threw thin coiling blades up to her knees. Trees
with startlingly blue bark grew in the shape of melting lollipops, colonizing
the valley all the way up to the top of the foothills. Birds were circling in
the distance; they looked too fat to be flying in the heavy gravity.
A Kiint dome was situated at the
head of the lake, just above the beach. Despite the fresh mountain air, Syrinx
was perspiring inside her ship-tunic by the time they had walked over to it.
It must have been very old; it was
made from huge blocks of a yellow-white stone that had almost blurred together.
The weathering had given it a grainy surface texture, which local ivy-analogues
put to good use. Broad clusters of tiny flowers dripped out of the dark leaves,
raising their pink and violet petals to the sun.
The entrance was a wide arch, its
border blocks carved with worn crestlike symbols. A pair of the blue-bark trees
stood outside, gnarled from extreme age, half of their branches dead, but
nonetheless casting a respectable shadow over the dome. Malva stood just inside,
a tractamorphic arm extended, its tip formshifting to the shape of a human
hand. Breathing vents issued a mildly spicy breath as Syrinx touched her palm
to impossibly white fingers.
I extend my greetings to you and
your mind sibling, Syrinx, the
Kiint broadcast warmly. Please enter my home.
Thank you. Syrinx and Ruben followed the Kiint along the
passage inside, down to what must have been the dome’s central chamber. The
floor was a sheet of wood with a grain close to red and white marble, dipping
down to a pool in the middle which steamed and bubbled gently. She was sure the
floor was alive, in fact the whole chamber’s decor was organic-based. Benches
big enough to hold an adult Kiint were like topiary bushes without leaves.
Smaller ones had been grown to accommodate the human form. Interlocked patches
of amber and jade moss with crystalline stems matted the curving walls,
threaded with naked veins of what looked to be mercury. Syrinx was sure she
could see them pulsing, the silver liquid oozing slowly upwards. An aura of
soft iridescent light bounced and ricocheted off the glittery surface in
playfully soothing patterns.
Above her, the dome’s blocks capped
the chamber. Except from inside they were transparent; she could see the
geometric reticulation quite plainly.
All in all, Malva’s home was
interesting rather than revelational. Nothing here human technology and bitek
couldn’t reproduce with a bit of effort and plenty of money. Presumably it had
been selected to put Confederation visitors at ease, or damp down their greed
for high-technology gadgets.
Malva eased herself down on one of
the benches. Please be seated. I anticipate you will require physical
comfort for this session.
Syrinx selected a seat opposite her
host. It allowed her to see some small grey patches on Malva’s snowy hide, so
pale they could have been a trick of the light. Did grey indicate aging in all
creatures? You are very gracious. Did Ambassador Pyrus indicate the
information I would ask for?
No. But given the trouble which
now afflicts your race, I expect it is of some portent.
Yes. I was sent by the founder
of our culture, Wing-Tsit Chong. We both appreciate you cannot tell me how we
can rid ourselves of the possessed. However, he is curious about many aspects
of the phenomenon.
This ancestor of yours is an
entity of some vision. It is my regret I never encountered him.
You would be most welcome to
visit Jupiter and talk to him.
There would be little point; to
us a memory construct is not the entity, no matter how sophisticated the simulacrum.
Ah. That was my first question:
Have the souls of Edenists transferred into the neural strata of our habitats
along with their memories?
Is this not obvious to you yet?
There is a difference between life and memory. Memory is only one component
which comprises a corporeal life. Life begets souls, they are the pattern which
sentience and self-awareness exerts on the energy within the biological body.
Very literally: you think, therefore you are.
Life and memory, then, are
separate but still one?
While the entity remains
corporeal, yes.
So a habitat would have its own
soul?
Of course.
So voidhawks have as well.
They are closer to you than your
habitats.
How wonderful, Oenone said. Death will not part us, Syrinx. It has never parted captains
and ships.
A smile rose to her face, buoyed by
the euphoria of the voidhawk’s thoughts. I never expected it to, my love.
You were always a part of me.
And you I, it replied adoringly.
Thank you, Syrinx told Malva. Do you require payment
for this information?
Information is payment. Your
questions are informative.
You are studying us, aren’t you?
All of life is an opportunity to
study.
I thought so. But why? You gave
up star travel. That must be the ultimate way to experience, to satisfy a
curious mind. Why show an interest in an alien race now?
Because you are here, Syrinx.
I don’t understand.
Explain the human urge to
gamble, to place your earned wealth on the random tumble of a dice. Explain the
human urge to constantly drink a chemical which degrades your thought processes.
I’m sorry, she said, contrite at the gentle chide.
Much we share. Much we do not.
That’s what puzzles myself and
Wing-Tsit Chong. You are not that different from us; ownership of knowledge
doesn’t alter the way the universe ultimately works. Why then should this
prevent you from telling us how to combat the possessed?
The same facts do not bring
about the same understanding. This is so even between humans. Who can speak of
the gulf between races?
You faced this knowledge, and
you survived.
Logic becomes you.
Is that why you gave up
starflight? Do you just wait to die knowing it isn’t the end?
Laton spoke only the truth when
he told you that death remains difficult. No sentient entity welcomes this
event. Instinct repels you, and for good reason.
What reason?
Do you embrace the prospect of
waiting in the beyond for the universe to end?
No. Is that what happens to
Kiint souls, too?
The beyond awaits all of us.
And you’ve always known that.
How can you stand such knowledge? It is driving humans to despair.
Fear is often the companion of
truth. This too is something you must face in your own way.
Laton also called death the
start of the great journey. Was he being truthful then as well?
It is a description which could
well apply.
Syrinx glanced over to Ruben for
help, not daring to use the singular engagement mode. She felt she was making
progress, of sorts, even if she wasn’t sure where it was leading—though some
small traitor part of her mind resented learning that Laton hadn’t lied.
Do you know of other races which
have discovered the beyond? Ruben
asked.
Most do. There was a tinge of sadness in Malva’s
thoughts.
How? Why does this breakthrough
occur?
There can be many reasons.
Do you know what caused this
one?
No. Though we do not believe it
to be entirely spontaneous. It may have been an accident. If so, it would not
be the first time.
You mean it wasn’t supposed to
happen?
The universe is not that
ordered. What happens, happens.
Did these other races who found
the beyond all triumph like the Kiint?
Triumph is not the object of
such an encounter.
What is?
Have you learned nothing? I
cannot speak for you, Ruben.
You deal with many humans,
Malva, Syrinx said. You
know us well. Do you believe we can resolve this crisis?
How much faith do you have in
yourself, Syrinx?
I’m not sure, not anymore.
Then I am not sure of the
resolution.
But it is possible for us.
Of course. Every race resolves
this moment in its history.
Successfully?
Please, Syrinx. There are only
differing degrees of resolution. Surely you have realized this of all subjects
cannot be a realm of absolutes.
Why won’t you tell us how to
begin resolving the crisis? I know we are not so different. Couldn’t we adapt
your solution? Surely your philosophy must allow you some leeway, or would
helping us negate the solution entirely?
It is not that we cannot tell
you how we dealt with the knowledge, Syrinx. If it would help, then of course
we would; to do otherwise would be the infliction of cruelty. No rational
sentient would condone that. We cannot advise you because the answer to the
nature of the universe is different for each sentient race. This answer lies
within yourselves, therefore you alone can search for it.
Surely a small hint—
You persist in referring to the
answer as a solution. This is incorrect. Your thoughts are confined within the
arena of your psychosocial development. Your racial youth and technological
dependence blinds you. As a result, you look for a quick-fix in everything,
even this.
Very well. What should we be
looking for?
Your destiny.
The hold-down latches locked the Tantu
into the docking cradle, producing a mechanical grinding. Quinn didn’t like
the sound, it was too final, metal fingers grasping at the base of the
starship, preventing it from leaving unless the spaceport crew granted
permission.
Which, he told himself, they would.
Eventually.
It had taken Twelve-T almost a week
to organize his side of the deal. After several broken deadlines and threats
and high-velocity abuse, the necessary details had finally been datavised to the
Tantu, and they’d flown down to Jesup, an asteroid owned by the
government of New Georgia. The flight plan they’d filed with Nyvan’s traffic
control was for a cryogenic resupply, endorsed and confirmed by the Iowell
Service & Engineering Company who had won the contract. As the fuel
transfer didn’t require the Tantu’s crew to disembark, there was no
requirement for local security forces to check for signs of possession. The
whole routine operation could be handled by Iowell’s personnel.
When the docking cradle had lowered
the frigate into the bay, an airlock tube wormed its way out of the dull metal
wall to engage the starship’s hatch. Quinn and Graper waited in the lower deck
for the environmental circuit to be established.
The next five minutes, Quinn knew,
were going to be crucial. He was going to have to use the encounter to
establish his control over Twelve-T, while the gang lord would undoubtedly be
seeking to assert his superiority at the same time. And although he didn’t know
it, Twelve-T had a numerical advantage. Quinn guessed there would be a troop of
gang soldiers on the other side of the hatch, congested with weapons and
hyped-on attitude. It’s what he would have done.
What I need, he thought, is the
kind of speed which boosting gives the military types. He felt the energistic
power shifting inside his body, churning through his muscles to comply with his
wishes. Light panels in the airlock chamber began to flicker uncertainly as his
robe shrank around his body, eradicating any fabric which could catch against
obstructions.
A cold joy of anticipation seeped
up within his mind as he prepared to unleash his serpent beast on the waiting
foe. For so long now he had been forced to restrain himself. It would be good
to advance the work of God’s Brother again, to watch pride shatter beneath
cruelty.
Twelve-T waited nervously in the
docking bay’s reception chamber as the airlock pressurized. His people were
spread around the dilapidated chamber, wedged behind tarnished support ribs,
sheltered by bulky, broken-down cubes of equipment. All of them covered the
ash-grey circular carbotanium hatch with their weapons, sensors focused and
fire-control programs switched to millisecond response triggers.
That shit Quinn might have raged
about the delays, but Twelve-T knew he’d put together a slick operation. This
whole deal needed the master’s touch. A fucking frigate, for shit’s sake! He’d
busted his balls arranging for the starship to dock without the cops realizing
what was going down. But then the gang had interests all over New Georgia, half
their money came from legitimate businesses. Companies like Iowell—a small
operation established decades ago—were easy to muscle in on. The spaceport crew
did as the union told them, managers could be persuaded to take their cut.
Getting his soldiers up to Jesup
had been a bitch, too. Like him, they all had the gang’s distinctive silver
skull; skin from their eyebrows back to the nape of the neck had been replaced
by a smooth cap of chrome flexalloy. Metal and composite body parts were worn
like medals, showing how much damage you’d taken for the gang.
Try slipping twenty of them into
Jesup without the administration cops taking an interest.
But he’d done it. And now he was
going to find out just what the fuck was really going on. Because sure as turds
floated to the top, Quinn Dexter wasn’t on the level.
The instrument panel beside the
hatch let out a weak bleep.
“It’s ready,” Lucky Vin datavised.
“Shit, Twelve-T, I can’t get anything from the sensors in the tube. They’ve
crashed.”
“Quinn do that, man?”
“I ain’t too sure. This place . . .
it ain’t the maintenance hotspot of the galaxy, you know.”
“Okay. Pop the hatch.” He opened
the datavise to include the rest of his soldiers. “Sharpen up, people, this is
it.”
The hatch seal disengaged, allowing
the actuators to hinge it back. Absolute blackness filled the airlock tube.
Twelve-T craned his neck forwards,
scar tissue stretching tightly. Even with his retinal implants switched to
infrared there was nothing to see in the tube. “Screw this—”
The blackness at the centre of the
tube bulged out, a bulbous cone devouring the chamber’s photons. Five maser
carbines and a TIP pistol fired, skewering the anti-light chimera from every
direction. It broke open, petals of night peeling apart from the centre to
splash against the chamber walls.
Twelve-T’s neural nanonics began to
crash. Blocks clipped to his belt chased them into electronic oblivion. The
last datavise he received was from his maser carbine, telling him the power
cells were dropping out. He tried to grasp the ten-millimetre machine gun
velcroed to his hip, only to find his arm shuddering; the pistonlike actuators
he’d replaced the forearm muscles with were seizing up.
A missile composed of tightly
whorled shadow swelled up out of the centre of the flowering blackness. Too
fast for the eye to follow in real-time—certainly as far as Twelve-T’s
faltering retinal implants were concerned—it shot across the chamber and
bounced.
The first scream clogged the
chamber’s air. One of the soldiers was crumpling up, his body imploding in a
series of rapid strikes. He seemed to be dimming, as if he were caught at the
middle of a murky nebula. Then his head caved in, and it was blood not the
sounds of agony that went spraying across the chamber.
A second soldier convulsed, as if
she were trying to jam her head down towards her buttocks. She managed a single
bewildered grunt before her spine snapped.
The third victim darkened, his
clothes starting to smoulder. Both of his titanium hands turned cherry-red,
glowing brightly. When he opened his mouth to scream a column of pink steam
puffed out.
Twelve-T had it worked out by then.
There was always a translucent cloud around the soldiers as they were
slaughtered, a grey shadow that flickered at subliminal speed. His disabled arm
levered the machine gun off the velcro, and he turned desperately towards the
source of the latest screams. His soldiers were losing it, flinging themselves
at the exit hatch, wrestling with each other in their struggle to escape.
The light panels were turning a
dark tangerine and beginning to sputter; black iron grids had materialized
across them, growing thicker. Oily smoke began to pour forth. The fractured
buzzing sound of the conditioning fans was dying away. Globules of blood oscillated
through the air, fringes rippling like restive jellyfish. Twelve-T knew then
he’d been fucked. It wasn’t Quinn Dexter, rat boy from the arcologies. This was
the worst it could possibly get.
He’d never liked Nyvan. But what
the fuck, it was his home planet. Now the possessed were going to violate it,
subdue every living body. And he was the total fucking asshole who’d let them
in.
Another of his soldiers was being
chopped apart, haloed in quivering dusk. Pure fury powered Twelve-T’s
malfunctioning body into a final act of obedience. He swung the machine gun
around on the macerated soldier and squeezed back on the trigger. It was only a
short burst. A blue flame spat out of the muzzle to the accompaniment of a
thunderous roar. Without a neural nanonics operational procedure program to
help him, the recoil was far more powerful than he expected. His shoes were
ripped free of the stikpad, and he was somersaulting backwards through the air,
hollering in surprise.
The universe paused.
“Shatter!” a furious voice
bellowed.
The machine gun obeyed, its cool
silicolithium fragmenting like a shrapnel grenade. Needle slivers sliced deep
into Twelve-T’s flesh, some ricochetting off the metal casings of his
replacement parts. He was flailing wildly now, trailing fantails of blood from
his shredded hand.
“Hold him,” someone instructed
curtly.
Quinn slowed himself back from the
speedstate, energistic currents sinking down to quiescent levels. As they did,
the rest of the world began to accelerate. It had been awesome, moving through
an airlock chamber populated by statues, time solidified to a single heartbeat.
Their time, not his. God’s Brother had granted him impunity from the actions of
any non-possessed. What greater sign that he was indeed the chosen one?
“Thank you, my Lord,” he whispered,
humbled. Planets would truly bow before him now; just as Lawrence had
prophesied.
Most of the blood had impacted on a
surface, splattering wide into big smears and sticking tenaciously. Grotesque
corpses drifted peacefully in the warm air streams. The remnants of the gang
were in a sorry state. With four possessed in the airlock chamber and pulsing
with malevolent power, their artificial body parts had either frozen or were
running out of control. And they were all combat vets, heavily dependent on
replacements, almost up to cosmonik level. Lawrence and Graper were plucking
weapons from unresisting hands, claws, and wrist sockets.
Quinn kicked off towards Twelve-T.
His robe resumed its usual extravagant cut as he glided across the compartment.
Twelve-T was sweating heavily. One
of the soldiers whose arms were mostly the original organic was bandaging the
gang lord’s ruined hands with strips torn from his own T-shirt.
“I admire your strength,” Quinn
said. “It can be harnessed to serve God’s Brother.”
“Ain’t no God, can’t have no
fucking—” Pain gripped his left arm, forcing him to cry out. His skin hissed as
it rose in huge blisters.
“You wanted to irritate me,” Quinn
said mildly.
Twelve-T glowered helplessly. He
wasn’t used to so much pain, none of them were. Neural nanonics always
protected them. That meant it was going to get bad, he realized, real bad.
Unless . . .
“And I won’t allow you to suicide,”
Quinn said. “I know that’s what you were thinking. Everybody does when they
grab what’s gonna happen.”
The strips of cloth bandaging
Twelve-T’s hands hardened into shiny nylon. Their ends flexed up like blind
snakes, then slowly knotted together.
“You’re so close to me, Twelve-T,”
Quinn said earnestly. “Your serpent beast is almost free. You would never have
become what you are without realizing what your true nature is. Don’t hold
back, embrace God’s Brother. Live in the Night with us.”
“You’ll make a mistake, asshole.
And I’ll be around waiting for it.”
“I don’t make mistakes. I am the
chosen one.”
“Holy fuck.”
“Follow me, Twelve-T. Submit to
your true self and know the glory of His word. Betray your people for greed and
profit. That way you will never know defeat again. My disciples fuck who they
want when they want. They see their enemies burn in torment. Enjoy rewards you
have never dared take before. Help me, Twelve-T. Tell me where the asteroid
cops are. Shunt your gang’s money into my credit disk. Show me where the
spaceplanes are that can take my disciples down to the surface. Do it,
Twelve-T.”
“You won’t get down to the planet,”
Twelve-T grunted. “People are too frightened of the possessed landing. There’s
all kinds of weird checks going on down there. You might have beaten my troops,
big deal; but you dead freaks ain’t going to turn my planet into holiday
hellpark.”
“You understand nothing,” Quinn
said. “I don’t give a fuck about the souls in the beyond. I’m not here to save
anyone, least of all them. God’s Brother has chosen me to help Him bring down
the Night.”
“Oh, sweet shit,” Twelve-T
whimpered. Quinn was a loon. A motherfucking twenty-four-karat loon.
“I want two things from this
planet,” Quinn continued. “A starship I can use to take me home to Earth;
because that’s where I can hurt the Confederation most. It’ll have to be a
cargo ship of some kind, one which Govcentral’s defences will accept is
harmless. I’m sure there are plenty docked here right now, right?”
A small jaw muscle twitched on
Twelve-T’s face.
“Good,” said Quinn. The gang lord’s
thoughts had betrayed him, bitter defeat mingling with the dregs of resentment
and anger. “You want to know what the other thing is, don’t you? It’s simple, I
intend Nyvan to be the first planet the Light Brother can bring into His
kingdom. I’m going to bring the Night to this planet, Twelve-T. Endless Night.
Night without hope. Until He comes from the other side of the beyond to grant
you salvation.”
Making sure every word was
perfectly clear, Twelve-T said: “Go fuck yourself.” He braced himself for the
retribution.
Quinn laughed softly. “Not that
easy, shithead. I told you, I want your help. I need a local smartarse to
straighten out crap like a ship and how to sneak my possessed disciples past
the pigs guarding the planet. Someone who knows all the access codes around
here. And that’s you, Twelve-T. As He chose me, so I have chosen you.” He
glanced around at the gang’s remaining soldiers. “We’ll open the rest of this
worthless trash for possession; then convert all of Jesup. After that, nobody
down below will be able to resist us.”
“Oh, Jesus, help us,” Twelve-T
begged. “Please.”
“Ain’t no God,” Quinn mimicked
savagely. “So he ain’t got no son, has he?” Laughing, he pushed Twelve-T down
towards the decking. The gang lord’s knees bent, allowing the stikpad to fasten
to his trousers. Quinn stood in front of the supplicant and beckoned Lawrence
over. “I know you’re a tough mother, Twelve-T. If you’re possessed you’ll only
try to fool your new owner, jazz me about as best you can. You and your dumb
pride. I can’t afford that kind of shit anymore. That means I’m gonna have to
squeeze what I want to know out of you myself, so I know you’re being honest.”
Kneeling before the monster, head
bowed, Twelve-T said: “I will never help you.”
“You will. I have many ways of
binding my disciples to me. For most it is love or fear. For you, I choose
dependence.” He placed his hands on either side of Twelve-T’s silver head. The
feat was the converse of a coronation. Quinn lifted the silver cap from the
gang lord’s skull with an almost gentle reverence. It came loose with a soft
sucking sound. The bone underneath was covered in a sticky red mucus. Ichor
dribbled over Twelve-T’s face, mingling with sticky tears.
Lawrence took the cap from Quinn,
acting as jester to the king. A little mad giggle escaped from the boy’s lips
as he held it in front of the stricken gang lord, its mirror surface ensuring
he witnessed his own reduction to impotent vassal.
Quinn’s hands descended again. This
time the noise was louder as the bone creaked and split. He lifted the top of
the skull high, smiling at the bloody trophy. Twelve-T’s naked brain glistened
below him, wrapped in delicate membranes, small beads of fluid weeping up from
the tightly packed ribbons of tissue.
“Now I can keep a real close eye on
what you’re thinking,” Quinn said.
Chapter 04
“So your group has no organized
structure, as such?” Alkad asked.
“We’re organized, all right,” Lodi
Shalasha insisted. “But nothing formal. We’re just like-minded people who keep
in touch and help each other out.”
Alkad pushed her legs down into the
chameleon suit trousers. There was still a residue of cold sweat smearing the
fabric from when she’d worn the suit last night. Her nose wrinkled up in
distaste, but she kept on working the trousers up her shins. “You said you had
junior cadres, the ones clearing the spiders away. That sounds like a regular
underground movement hierarchy to me.”
“Not really. Some of us work in day
clubs, that way we help to keep the memory of the genocide alive for the
children. Nobody should be allowed to forget what was done to us.”
“I approve.”
“You do?” He sounded surprised.
“Yes. The original refugees seem to
have forgotten. That’s why I’m in this mess right now.”
“Don’t worry, Doctor; Voi will get
you off Ayacucho.”
“Perhaps.” Alkad prided herself
that the somnolence program had been for the best. When the girl had woken this
morning she’d been subdued, but still functional. The grief for her father was
still there, as it should be, but it hadn’t debilitated her.
Over breakfast, Alkad had explained
what her priorities were: to get away from the Dorados as fast as possible now
her location was blown to the intelligence agencies, and the remaining
principal requirement for a combat-capable starship (she still couldn’t bring
herself to mention the Alchemist). It would be too much to hope for the ship to
be crewed by Garissan patriot types; a mercenary crew would just have to do
now. The three of them had discussed possible options, and Voi and Lodi had
started arguing over names, who to contact for what.
Voi had left by herself to secure a
starship. It would be inviting disaster for Alkad to be seen with her again. As
a pair they were too distinctive, however adroit the chameleon suits were at
hiding their peripheral features.
“Hey, you’ve made the news.” Lodi
waved his communications block enthusiastically. He’d entered a reference
search program to monitor the media output. “Access the Cabral NewsGalactic
studio.”
Alkad struggled the suit on over
her shoulders, then datavised the room’s net processor for a channel to the
studio.
Cabral NewsGalactic was showing a
recording of a holomorph sticker which had a young cheerleader shouting: “Run,
Alkad, run!”
“Mother Mary,” Alkad muttered. “Is
this the work of your people?”
“No. I swear. I’ve never seen one
before. Besides, only Voi and I know your name. None of the others even know
you exist.”
Alkad went back to the studio. A
rover reporter was walking down one of Ayacucho’s main public halls. The
stickers were everywhere. A cleaner mechanoid was trying to spray one off the
wall, but its solvent wasn’t strong enough. Smears of black semi-dissolved
plastic dribbled down the metallic wall panel.
“It is as if a plague has visited
Ayacucho,” the rover reporter said cheerfully. “The first of these stickers
appeared about six hours ago. And if I didn’t know better I’d say they’ve been
breeding like bacteria. Police say that the stickers are being handed out to
children; and detectives are currently correlating security monitor recordings
to see if they can identify the main distributors. Though sources inside the
public prosecutor’s office tell me they’re not sure exactly what charges could
be brought.
“The question everyone is asking
is: Exactly who is Alkad, and what is she running from?”
The image went back to the studio
anchorman. “Our company’s investigations have uncovered one possible answer to
the mystery,” he said in a sombre bass voice. “At the time of the genocide, the
Garissan navy employed a Dr Alkad Mzu to work on advanced defence projects. Mzu
is said to have survived the genocide and spent the last thirty years under an
assumed name teaching physics at the Dorados university. But now foreign
intelligence agencies, acting in response to Omutan propaganda, have started
hunting her under the pretext of illegal technology violations. A senior member
of the Dorados governing council, who asked not to be named, said today: ‘Such
an action by these foreign agents is a gross violation of our sovereignty. I
find it obscene that the Omutans can lay these unfounded allegations against
one of our citizens who has dedicated her life to educating our brightest
youngsters. If this is their behaviour after thirty years of sanctions, then we
must ask why the Confederation ever lifted those sanctions in the first place.
They certainly do not seem to have had the desired effect in remedying the
aggressive nature of the Omutan government. Their current cabinet is just a new
collar on the same dog.’
“The council member went on to say
that if Alkad Mzu turned up at his apartment he would certainly offer her
sanctuary, and that every true Dorados citizen would do the same. He said he
would not rest until all suspected foreign agents had been expelled from the
asteroids.”
“Holy Mother Mary,” Alkad groaned.
She cancelled the channel and
slumped down onto the bed, the suit’s hood hanging flaccidly over her shoulder.
“I don’t believe this is happening. Mother Mary, they’re turning me into a
media celebrity.”
“That’s my uncle for you,” Lodi
said. “Did you check out the positive bias in those reports? Mary, you’d be
elected president tomorrow if we were ever allowed to vote around here.”
“Your uncle?”
He flinched. “Yeah, sure. Cabral’s
my uncle. He’s made a mint out of exploiting the little-Garissan attitude. I
mean, just look at the kind of people living here, they lap it up.”
“He’s insane. What does he think
he’s doing giving me this kind of public profile?”
“Whipping up public support in your
favour. This kind of propaganda is going to make life ten times harder for the
agencies chasing you. Anyone tries to take you out of Ayacucho against your
will today, they’ll wind up getting lynched.”
She stared at him. That eager face
which permitted so much inner anger to show without ever dimming the natural
innocence. Child of the failed revolutionaries. “You’re probably right. But
this isn’t happening the way I ever expected it to.”
“I’m sorry, Doctor.” He pulled a
worn shoulder bag out of the cupboard. “Do you want to try some of these
clothes now?”
He was proffering some long sports
shorts and an Ayacucho Junior Curveball Team sweatshirt. With a short cut wig
and the chameleon suit reprogrammed, they intended her to walk out of the room
as an average sports-mad teenager. A male one.
“Why not?”
“Voi will call soon. We ought to be
ready.”
“You really believe she can get us
off this asteroid in a starship, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Lodi, do you have any idea how
difficult that is to arrange, now of all times? Underground movements need to
have contacts infiltrated right through the local administrative structure;
dedicated, devoted people who will risk everything for the cause. What have you
got? You’re rich kids who’ve found a new way to rebel against their parents.”
“Yes, and we can use that money to
help you, if you’d just let us. Voi taught us that. If we need something, we
buy it. That way there’s no network for the agencies to discover and penetrate.
We’ve never been compromised. That’s why you stayed in this room all night
without anyone storming the door with an assault mechanoid.”
“You may have a point there. I have
to admit the old partizans didn’t do too well, did they.” She gave the
chameleon suit hood a reluctant grimace, then started to smooth back her hair
ready to slip it on.
Joshua held the petri dish up to
the cabin’s light panel, squinting at the clear glass. It looked completely
empty; his enhanced retinas couldn’t even find dust motes. But lurking inside
the optically pure dish were thirteen nanonic monitor bugs which the medical
packages had extracted from Lady Mac’s crew and the serjeants. They were
subcutaneous implants, agents stinging them by casually brushing up against an
unsuspecting victim.
“How come I rated three?” Ashly
complained.
“Obvious subversive type,” Sarha said. “Bound to be up to no good.”
“Thanks.”
“You’re all in the clear,” she
said. “The medical analysis program can’t spot any unusual infections or
viruses. Looks like they weren’t playing nasty.”
“This time,” Joshua said. As soon
as the scanners in the starship’s surgery had located the first of the monitor
bugs he’d ordered Sarha to run a full biochemical analysis on everyone.
Microbes and viruses were far easier to introduce in a target than nanonics.
Fortunately, the agencies had been
curious rather than hostile. But this was the sharpest reminder to date of the
stakes involved. They’d been lucky thus far. It wouldn’t last, he thought. And
he wasn’t the only one who realized that. The cabin had a kind of after-game
locker-room atmosphere, with a team that was very relieved to have scraped a
draw.
“Let’s start from the beginning,”
he said. “Sarha, are we secure now?”
“Yes. These bugs can’t datavise
through Lady Mac’s screening. They’re only a problem outside.”
“But you don’t know when we got
stung?”
“There’s no way of knowing, sorry.”
“Your friend Mrs Nateghi,” Melvyn
suggested. “It was rather odd.”
“You’re probably right,” Joshua
said reluctantly. “Okay, assume everything we’ve done up until now has been
compromised. First off, is there any point in continuing? Jesus, it’s not as if
we don’t know she’s here. The bloody news studios have been broadcasting
nothing else. Our problem is how difficult it’s going to be to contact her
without anyone else tagging along. They’re bound to try and sting us again.
Sarha, will our electronic warfare blocks work against these monitor bugs?”
“They should be able to scramble
them; we picked up top-of-the-range systems before we left Tranquillity.”
“Fine. From now on, nobody goes
into Ayacucho without one. We also take a serjeant each when we venture out.
Ione, I want you to carry those chemical projectile guns we brought.”
“Certainly, Joshua,” said one of
the four serjeants in the cabin.
He couldn’t tell if it was the one
who’d accompanied him earlier. “Right, what kind of data have we pulled in so
far? Melvyn?”
“Ashly and I got around to the five
major defence contractors, Captain. The only orders coming in are for upgrades
to the asteroid’s SD platforms, and there’s precious few of them. We got
offered some magnificent discounts when we asked about supplying Lady Mac with
new systems. They’re absolutely desperate for work. Mzu hasn’t ordered any
equipment from anybody. And nobody is refitting starships.”
“Okay. Beaulieu?”
“Nothing, Captain. Daphine Kigano
disappeared within fifteen minutes of arriving here. There’s no eddress for
her, no credit records, no hotel booking, no citizenship register, no public
record file.”
“All right. That just leaves us
with Ikela.”
“He’s dead, Joshua,” Dahybi said.
“Hardly the best lead.”
“Pauline Webb was very keen to stop
me having any contact with T’Opingtu’s management. Which means that’s the
direction to take. I’ve been reviewing every byte I can find on Ikela and
T’Opingtu. He came to the Dorados with a lot of money to start up that company.
There’s no mention of where it came from; according to his biography he used to
work for a Garissan engineering company as a junior manager. Which doesn’t add
up.
“Now if you were Alkad Mzu, on the
run and in need of a starship that can deploy the Alchemist, who are you going
to go to when you get here? Ikela fits the search program perfectly: the owner
of a company which manufactures specialist astroengineering components.
Remember she fooled the intelligence agencies for close on thirty years.
Whatever plan she formatted with her colleagues after the genocide, it was well
thought out.”
“Not perfect, though,” Ashly said.
“If it was, Omuta’s star would be turning nova right now.”
“The possessed glitched it for
them, that’s all,” Sarha said. “Who could anticipate this quarantine?”
“Whatever,” Joshua said. “The point
is, T’Opingtu was probably set up to provide Mzu with the means to deploy the
Alchemist. Ikela would have made sure that policy continued in the event he
didn’t live long enough to see her arrive.”
“Which he did, but only just,”
Ashly said. “It must have been the agencies who snuffed him.”
“But not Mzu,” Melvyn said. “This
media campaign backing her sprang up too quickly after the murder. Somebody
knows she’s out there. Somebody with a shitload of influence, but not in
contact with her. It’s going to be almost impossible for us to snatch her with
public opinion being whipped up like this, Captain.”
“Which is exactly the intention,”
Dahybi said. “Though it’s more likely aimed at the intelligence agencies rather
than us.”
“We’ll deal with that problem if we
ever get to it,” Joshua said. “Right now our priority is to establish a trace
on Mzu.”
“How?” Sarha asked.
“Ikela has a daughter; according to
his public record file she’s the only family he’s got.”
“She’ll inherit,” Beaulieu said
bluntly.
“You got it. Her name’s Voi, and
she’s twenty-one. She’s our way in to whatever organization her daddy built up
in preparation for Mzu.”
“Oh, come on, Joshua,” Ashly
protested. “Her father’s just been murdered, she’s not going to make
appointments with perfect strangers, let alone tell us anything about the
Garissan underground, even if she has any data. Which is questionable. I
wouldn’t involve my daughter in anything like that. And the agencies will be
wanting to question her, too.”
Joshua wasn’t going to argue. As
soon as he reviewed Ikela’s public record file he’d known Voi was the link.
Ione would call it his intuition. She might even have been right. The old burn
of conviction was there. “If we can just get close to her, we stand a chance,”
he said firmly. “Mzu can’t afford to remain here now. She’s going to have to
make a break for it, and sooner rather than later. One way or another, Voi will
be involved. It’s our best shot.”
“I’m not disagreeing with you,”
Dahybi said. “It’s as good a chance as any. But how the hell are you going to
get near her?”
“Weren’t you listening?” asked one
of the serjeants. “Voi is female and twenty-one.”
Joshua grinned evilly at Dahybi.
“You have got to be joking,” the
stupefied node specialist insisted.
“I’ll just lie back and think of
the Confederation.”
“Joshua . . .”
Joshua burst out laughing. “Your
faces! Don’t worry, Dahybi, I’m not that conceited. But she will have friends.
There are quite a lot of rich entrepreneurs in the Dorados, their kids will
cling together in their own little social clique. And I am a starship owner
captain, after all. One of them will get us in. All I have to do now is find
her.” He smiled broadly at his crew, who were regarding him with a mixture of
umbrage and resignation. “Time to party.”
Prince Lambert sealed the straps
around the lanky girl’s wrists, then activated the sensenviron program. His
bedroom dissolved into a circular stone-walled chamber at the top of a castle
tower, its bed at the centre of the flagstone floor. His male slaves began to
file through the iron-bound door. Ten of them stood around the bed, looking
down dispassionately at the spread-eagled figure.
He took the remote response collar
from under the pillow and fastened it around her neck.
“What is it?” the girl asked,
anxiety rising into her voice. She was very young; it was highly probable she’d
never heard of the device before.
He kissed her silent, and datavised
the collar’s activation sequence. The technology was a bastardization of
medical nanonic packages, sending filaments to merge with her spinal cord. He
could use it to manipulate her body into reacting exactly how he wanted,
fulfilling each of the fantasies in turn.
“Do hope I’m not interrupting,” one
of the slaves said in a sharp female voice.
Prince Lambert gave a start,
jumping up from the bed. The girl wailed in dismay as the collar began to knit
smoothly with her skin.
He cancelled the sensenviron
program, retrieving the reality of his darkened bedroom, and stared at the tall
skinny figure which replaced the muscle-bound slave. “For Mary’s sake, Voi! I’m
going to change this bloody apartment’s door code, I should never have let you
have it.” He squinted at the figure. “Voi?”
She was pulling her chameleon suit
hood off, allowing her little crown of dreadlocks to wriggle free. A wig of
unkempt gingerish hair was held carelessly in her hand. Her clothes were
standard-issue biosphere agronomist overalls. “I want to talk to you.”
His jaw dropped. One hand gestured
ineffectually at the girl on the bed, who was tugging at the straps. “Voi!”
“Now.” She went back out into the
living room.
He swore, then datavised a shutdown
order at the collar and started to open the strap seals.
“How old is she?” Voi asked when he
emerged into the living room.
“Does it matter?”
“It might to Shea. Has she found
out about your little kinks yet?”
“Why the sudden interest in my sex
life? Do you miss it?”
“Like a sunbather misses birdcrap.”
“That’s not what you said at the
time.”
“Who cares?”
“I do. We were good together, Voi.”
“History.”
“Then why have you come running
back?”
“I need something of yours.”
“Mother Mary, that detox procedure
was a big mistake. I preferred you as you were before.”
“I’m really interested in
everything you say, P.L.”
“What the hell are you doing here?”
“I want you to flight prep the Tekas,
and take me and some friends outsystem.”
“Oh, sure, no problem.” He
collapsed into the living room’s leather settee, and favoured her with a
pitying gaze. “Any particular destination? New California? Norfolk? Hey, why
don’t we go for the big one and see if we can break through Earth’s SD
network?”
“It’s important. It’s for Garissa.”
“Oh, Mary. Your poxy revolution.”
“It isn’t revolution, it’s called
honour. Access your dictionary file.”
“Haven’t got one. And for your
information, there’s a civil starflight quarantine in operation. I couldn’t fly
the Tekas away if I wanted to.”
“Do you?”
“Yes. All right, one nil. If I’d
known about this quarantine in advance I would have left. The Dorados might be
home, but I don’t think they’re the best place to live while the possessed are
roaming around. You’ve got the right idea, Voi, you’re just too late.”
She held up a flek. “The Dorados
governing council flight authorization: it’ll be an official voyage.”
“How the hell . . .”
“Daddy was on the council. I have
his access codes.”
Temptation haunted him like a
curse. “Is it still valid?”
“Yes. Myself and three others.
Deal?”
“There’s a few people I’d like to
bring along.”
“No. You can operate that yacht by
yourself, that’s why I chose it. This isn’t a bloody pleasure cruise, P.L. I
need you to fly some complex manoeuvres for me.”
“Tekas isn’t combat-capable,
you know. Who are these others?”
“Need-to-know only. And you don’t.
Do we have a deal?”
“Do we get to try out free-fall
sex?”
“If fucking me means you’ll fly the
yacht for me, fuck away.”
“Mother Mary, you are a complete
bitch!”
“Deal?”
“All right. Give me a day to wind
things up here.”
“We leave in three hours.”
“No way, Voi. I doubt I could even
fill the cryogenic tanks by then.”
“Try.” She waved the flek. “If you
don’t; no authorization.”
“Bitch.”
The girl was extravagantly
attractive; early twenties with lustrous ebony skin and dry chestnut hair that
fell just below her bottom. Her dress was a shimmering metallic grey-blue with
a skirt hem higher than the dangling ends of her hair.
Melvyn suspected she was a typical
insecure rich kid. Though Joshua didn’t seem to mind, the two of them were busy
French-kissing on the Bar KF-T’s dance floor.
“He’s a devil for it,” Melvyn said
peevishly. He felt he should explain to Beaulieu, who was sitting at the table
with him. “Never works for me. I mean, fusion specialist is a tough job. And
I’m crew, that’s glamorous enough, isn’t it? But they just bloody stampede at
him when we dock. I think he got his pheromones geneered along with everything else.”
He started searching through the cluster of beer bottles on the table for one
that had something left inside. There were rather a lot of them.
“You don’t think it’s anything to
do with the fact he’s thirty years younger than you?” the cosmonik asked.
“Twenty-five!” Melvyn corrected
indignantly.
“Twenty-five.”
“Certainly not.”
The cosmonik gave the Bar KF-T
another automatic scan. Joshua’s direction of investigation was obviously
puzzling the intelligence agents who were on observation duty. Melvyn and
Beaulieu had identified five of them in the club, making a game of it as they
sat drinking beer and waiting for Joshua to score. It wasn’t that the agents
didn’t mix; they drank, they danced, they chatted to people, the betraying
factor was the way they maintained a rigid distance from the Lady Mac’s
crew.
Joshua waved a sunny farewell to
the girl and sat down at Melvyn’s table with a satisfied sigh. “Her name’s
Kole, and she’s invited me to a party this evening.”
“I’m surprised she can hold back
that long,” Melvyn muttered.
“I’m meeting her and her friends at
tonight’s benefit gig, then they’re going on to a private bash at someone’s
apartment.”
“A benefit gig?” Beaulieu
questioned.
“Some local MF bands are getting
together so they can raise money for Alkad Mzu’s legal costs, should she ever
need to fight Confederation extradition warrants.”
“She’s becoming a bloody religion,”
Melvyn said.
“Looks that way.” Joshua started
counting the bottles on the table. “Come on, we need to get back to Lady Mac.”
He slipped his arm under Melvyn’s shoulder and signalled Beaulieu to help.
Between them, they got the drunk fusion specialist to his feet. Ashly and Sarha
walked over from the bar. All four serjeants rose from their seats.
None of the agents moved. That
would have been too blatant.
A pair of possessed walked into Bar
KF-T. A man and woman, dressed in clothes which almost matched current
fashions.
Joshua’s electronic warfare block
datavised an alarm.
“Get down!” the four serjeants
shouted in unison.
The threat-response program which
had gone primary as soon as the alarm came on sent Joshua diving for cover amid
the tables and chairs. He hit the floor, rolling expertly to absorb the impact.
A couple of empty chairs went flying as his legs struck them. His crew was following
him down; even Melvyn, though his alcohol-polluted nerves made him slower.
Screams broke out across the club
as the serjeants drew their stubby machine guns. The agents were also moving,
boosted muscles turning their actions into a blur.
Both the possessed gasped at the
near-instantaneous reaction to their appearance. An unnerving number of weapons
were lining up on them amid the chaos of a terrified and bewildered clientele.
“Freeze,” a quadriphonic voice
ordered them.
They didn’t have functional neural
nanonics to run combat programs, but instinct was almost as fast. Both of them
started to raise their arms, white fire bursting from their fingertips.
Six machine guns, three
semi-automatic pistols, and a carbine opened fire.
Joshua had never heard a chemical
projectile weapon before. Ten of them shooting at once was louder than a fusion
rocket exhaust. He slammed his hands over his ears. The fusillade couldn’t have
lasted more than a couple of seconds. He risked raising his head.
Only the agents (there were
actually six—Melvyn had missed one) and the serjeants were standing. Everyone
else was on the floor, sprawled flat or curled up in fetal balls. Tables and
chairs rolled and spun. The music and dance-floor holograms were still playing.
He heard several peculiar
mechanical snicking sounds as fresh magazines were slammed into the
guns.
Bullets had shredded the wall
behind the possessed, chewing apart the composite panelling. Large splatters of
blood covered the tattered splinters of composite. The two bodies—
Joshua squirmed at the sight. There
wasn’t much left to identify as human. A nausea suppression program switched
smoothly into primary mode, though that only stopped the physical symptoms.
Moans and cries rose over the
music. Several people had been hit by ricochets.
“Joshua!”
It was Sarha. She had her hand
clamped around Ashly’s left thigh. Blood was staining her fingers scarlet.
“He’s been hit.”
The pilot was staring with a calm
morbid interest at his wound. “Damn stupid thing.” He blinked in confusion.
“Ione,” Joshua shouted. “Medical
nanonic.”
One of the serjeants took a package
from its equipment belt. Beaulieu was slitting Ashly’s trouser fabric with a
small metal blade that had slid out of her left wrist attachments. A dribble of
grey-green fluid was leaking from a bullet hole in her brass breastplate.
“I say, do be careful,” Ashly
murmured.
When the wound had been fully
exposed, Sarha slapped the package over it.
“Let’s go,” Joshua said. “Beaulieu,
take Melvyn. Sarha and I will handle Ashly. Ione, cover us.”
“Now wait a minute,” one of the
agents said. Joshua recognized him as one of the heavyweights accompanying
Pauline Webb. “You’re staying right here until the police arrive.”
It was a barman who had recovered
fast enough to think of the financial possibilities that started recording the
scene in a memory cell. Later that day and all through the night the news
companies repeated it almost constantly. Six armed men in a shouting match with
a young starship captain (later everyone realized it was Lagrange Calvert
himself) and his crew. The captain saying that no one was going to prevent him
from taking his injured friend to get proper treatment. And what authority have
you got anyway? Four identical and disturbingly menacing cosmoniks stood between
Calvert and the armed men. There was a short pause, then everyone’s guns seemed
to disappear. The starship crew left the club, carrying their wounded with
them.
Anchormen speculated long and loud
on the possibility that the six armed men were in fact foreign intelligence
agents. Rover reporters tried desperately to hunt them down, with no success.
The police officially confirmed
that the two people shot dead by the agents had been possessed (though no
details about how they knew for sure were forthcoming). Ayacucho’s governing
council issued a statement urging everyone to remain calm. Total priority was
given to search and identification procedures which were being put into
operation to locate any further possessed in the asteroid. All citizens and residents
were asked to cooperate fully.
There was no physical expression of
panic, no angry mobs gathering in the biosphere cavern, or marches on the
council chamber. People were too fearful of what might be lying in wait outside
their apartment doors. Those companies and offices which had remained open
started to wind down or conduct their businesses purely over the communications
net; anything as long as personal contact was reduced. Parents took their
children out of day clubs. Emergency services were brought up to full alert
status. Company security staff were seconded to the police to help with the
search.
By late afternoon several starships
had been given official flight authorization by the council. Most of them were
taking councillors, their families, and close aides away for conferences or
defence negotiations with allies.
“And we can’t stop them,” Monica
complained bitterly. She was sitting at the back of the office which the
Edenists were using, sipping a mug of instant tea. There was little else for her
to do now, which aggravated her intensely. All the ESA’s assets had been
activated. None of them had any idea where Mzu was; few had even heard of Voi
let alone any underground group the girl was connected with.
Locating Mzu was all down to the
Edenist observation operation now, and the slender hope they would get a lucky
break.
“She has not embarked on any
starship,” Samuel said. “We are sure of that. Both axial chambers have been
under constant observation, and not just by us. Nobody who comes within twenty-five
per cent of Mzu’s height and mass has passed into the spaceports without being
positively identified.”
“Yes yes,” Monica said irritably.
“If we don’t find her in another
four hours we are going to withdraw from Ayacucho.”
She’d known it was coming, but that
didn’t make it any easier. “That bad?”
“Yes. I’m afraid so.” He had just
finished watching another possession through a spider in one of the residential
sections. It was the apartment of an ordinary family of five, doing as they’d
been advised, staying at home and not allowing anyone else in. Until the police
arrived. All three officers were possessed; and after seven minutes so were the
family. “We estimate eight per cent of the population has been possessed now.
With everyone isolated and sitting tight, it is becoming easier for them to
spread. They have taken over the police force in its entirety.”
“Bastards. They’ve gone for
officialdom every time since Capone used the police and civil service to take
over New California.”
“A remarkably perceptive man, Mr
Capone.”
“I don’t suppose it would do any
good broadcasting a general warning, now?”
“We think not. There are few
weapons available to the general populace; and most of those are energy
weapons, which are worse than useless. We would be adding to the suffering.”
“And since that bloody media
campaign, nobody would trust us.”
“Exactly.”
“What do we do if Mzu doesn’t
escape?”
“That depends on what happens here.
If the possessed take Ayacucho out of this universe, the problem is solved,
albeit not very satisfactorily. If they remain here, then the voidhawks will
enforce a permanent blockade.”
She gritted her teeth, hating the
mounting feeling of frustration. “We could try broadcasting a message to her,
offer to take her off.”
“I’ve considered it; and I might
well use it as a last resort before we evacuate.”
“Great. So now we just sit and pray
she walks in front of a spider.”
“You have an alternative?”
“No. I don’t think any of us do.”
“Perhaps not, though I remain
intrigued by what Joshua Calvert and his crew were doing in that club.”
“Trying to get laid by the look of
it.”
“No. Calvert is shrewd. If you want
my guess he is attempting to approach Voi through her friends.”
“He can’t know who her friends are,
he doesn’t have the resources. We’ve only got three of her friends on our list,
and that took five hours to acquire.”
“Possibly. But he’s already
inserted himself in her social strata with that invitation to a party. And it’s
a small asteroid.”
“If Voi is hiding Mzu, she’s not
going to reveal herself.”
“True.” His grin was childlike in
its mischievousness.
“What?” Monica asked in annoyance.
“The irony. From being an amateur
irritant, Calvert is now our only lead.”
Ashly had said very little during
the trip back to the spaceport. Joshua guessed the pilot’s neural nanonic
programs were busy suppressing the shock. But Sarha didn’t seem unduly worried,
and she was monitoring the medical package around his thigh.
Melvyn was doing his best to sober
up fast. One of the serjeants had given him a medical nanonic package which was
now wrapped around his neck to form a thick collar. It was busy filtering all
traces of alcohol out of the blood entering his brain.
Joshua’s only concern was the fluid
which was still trickling out of the bullet hole in Beaulieu’s breastplate.
Medical nanonics would be of no value at all in treating the cosmonik. None of
them had standardized internal systems; each was unique, and proud of it. He
wasn’t even sure if she was mostly mechanical or biological underneath her
brass carapace.
“How are you doing?” he asked her.
“The bullet damaged some of my
nutrient synthesis glands. It’s not critical.”
“Do you have any . . . er, spares?”
“No. That function has multiple
redundancy backup. It looks worse than it is.”
“Don’t tell me, just a flesh
wound,” Ashly grunted.
“Correct.”
The commuter lift’s doors opened.
Two serjeants slid out into the corridor first, checking for any possessed
between them and the docking bay’s airlock tube. “Joshua,” one of them called.
His electronic warfare detector
block wasn’t acting up. “What?”
“Someone here for you.”
He learned nothing from the tone,
so he pushed off with his feet and glided out into the corridor. “Oh, Jesus
wept.”
Mrs Nateghi and her two fellow
goons from Tayari, Usoro and Wang were waiting outside the airlock tube.
Another man was floating just behind them.
The crew followed Joshua out of the
lift.
“Captain Calvert.” Mrs Nateghi’s
voice was indecently happy.
“Can’t get enough of me, can you?
So what is it this time? A million-fuseodollar fine for littering? Ten years
hard labour for not returning my empties to the bar? Penal colony exile for
farting in public?”
“Humour is an excellent defence
mechanism, Captain Calvert. But I would advise you to have something stronger
in court.”
“I’ve just saved your asteroid from
being taken over by the possessed. Will that do?”
“I’ve accessed the NewsGalactic
recording. You were lying on the floor with your hands over your head the whole
time. Captain Calvert, I have a summons for you to be present at a preliminary
hearing to establish proceedings which will determine the ownership of the
starship Lady Macbeth, pursuant to the claim my client has filed upon
said ship.”
Joshua stared at her, too
incredulous to speak.
“Ownership?” Sarha asked. “But it’s
Joshua’s ship; it always has been.”
“That is incorrect,” Mrs Nateghi
said. “It was Marcus Calvert’s ship. I have a sensorium recording of Captain
Calvert admitting that.”
“He was never trying to deny it.
His father is dead. Lady Mac’s registration is filed with the CAB. You
can’t challenge that.”
“Yes I can.” The man who had been
keeping himself behind the other two lawyers slowly edged forwards.
“You!” Sarha exclaimed.
“Me.”
Joshua stared at him, a very
unpleasant chill sluicing into his thoughts. The angular, ebony face was . . .
Jesus, I know him. But where from? “So who the hell are you?”
“My name is Liol. Liol Calvert,
actually. I’m your big half brother, Joshua.”
The last place Joshua wanted to
bring this . . . this fraud was the captain’s cabin. It was his father’s
cabin, for Christ’s sake, even though most of the old fittings and personal
mementos had been removed during the last refit. This was the closest Joshua
had ever come to knowing a home.
But Ashly needed the deep-invasion
packages in Lady Mac’s sickbay to remove the bullet in his thigh. That
bitch queen Mrs Nateghi wasn’t going to be deflected, and the summons was real
enough. He also had a mission. So it was back to basics.
As soon as the cabin hatch shut
behind them, Joshua asked: “Okay, shithead, how much?”
Liol didn’t answer immediately, he
was gazing around the cabin. His face carried an expression which was close to
trepidation. “I’m finally here,” he said falteringly.
“Do you know how many hours I’ve
spent in sensevise simulations learning to fly a starship? I qualified for my
C.A.B. pilot’s licence when I was just nineteen.” He glanced awkwardly at
Joshua. “This must be very strange for you, Joshua. It is for me.”
“Cut the crap, how much?”
Liol’s face cleared. “How much for
what?”
“To drop the claim and bugger off,
of course. It’s a neat scam, I’ll give you that. Normally I’d just let the
courts break you apart, but I’m a little pushed for time right now. I don’t
need complications. So name your price, but you’d better make it less than
fifty grand.”
“Nice one, Josh.” Liol smiled and
held out his Jovian Bank credit disk, silver side up. Green figures glowed on
the surface.
Joshua blinked as he read out the
amount of money stored inside: eight hundred thousand fuseodollars. “I don’t
understand.”
“It’s very simple, I am your
brother. I’m entitled to joint ownership, at the very least.”
“Not a chance. You’re a con artist
who knows how to use a cosmetic adaptation package, that’s all. Right now, my
face is as famous as Jezzibella’s. You saw an opportunity to make a nuisance of
yourself, and remodelled your features.”
“This is my face. I’ve had it ever
since I was born, which was before you. Access my public file if you want
proof.”
“I’m sure someone as smart as you
has planted all the appropriate data in Ayacucho’s memory cores. You’ve done
your research, and you’ve shown me you have the money to buy official access
codes.”
“Really? And what about you?”
“Me?”
“Yes. How come you acquired this
ship after my father died? In fact, how did he die? Is he even dead at all?
Prove you’re a Calvert. Prove you are Marcus’s son.”
“I didn’t acquire it, I inherited
it. Dad always wanted me to have it. His will is on file in Tranquillity.
Anybody can access it.”
“Oh, that’s nice. So Tranquillity’s
public records are beyond reproach, while anything stored in the Dorados was
put there by criminals. How convenient. I wouldn’t try that one in court if I
were you.”
“He’s my father,” Joshua shouted
angrily.
“Mine too. And you know it.”
“I know you’re a fake.”
“If you were a true Calvert, you’d
know.”
“What the fuck are you talking
about?”
“Intuition. What does your
intuition tell you about me, Josh?”
For the first time in his life,
Joshua knew what vertigo must feel like. To be teetering on the edge of some
monstrously deep chasm.
“Ah.” Liol’s grin was triumphant.
“Our little family quirk can be a real downer at times. After all, I knew you
were real the second I accessed Kelly Tirrel’s report. I also know what you’re
going through, Joshua. I felt exactly the same way about you. All that terrible
anger, refusing to believe despite all the evidence. We’re more than brothers,
we’re almost twins.”
“Wrong. We don’t even come from the
same universe.”
“What exactly worries you the most,
Josh? That I am your brother, or I’m not?”
“I’ll scuttle Lady Mac before
I let anyone else have her. If you’ve got any intuition, you’ll know how true
that is.”
“My mistake.” Liol stroked the
acceleration couch beside the hatch, the longing obvious in his eyes. “I can
see the ship means as much to you as it does to me. No surprise there, we’ve
both got the Calvert wanderlust. Hitting you with a big legal scene first off
was bound to create some hostility. But I’ve been waiting for this starship to
dock here for every day of my life. Dad left Ayacucho before I was even born.
In my mind the Lady Macbeth has always been mine. She’s my inheritance,
too, Josh. I belong here just as much as you do.”
“A starship only has one captain.
And you, asteroid boy, don’t know the first thing about piloting or captaining.
Not that it’s relevant, you’ll never be in a position to fly Lady Mac.”
“Don’t fight this, Josh. You’re my
brother, I don’t want to alienate you. Christ, just finding out you existed was
a hell of a shock. Family feuds are the worst kind. Don’t let’s start one the
moment we meet. Think how Dad would feel, his sons going at each other like
this.”
“You are not family.”
“Where was Lady Macbeth docked
in 2586, Josh? What ports?”
Joshua clenched his fists, a
free-fall assault program working out possible trajectories he could leap
along. He hated how smug this arrogant bastard was. Wiping that knowing
superiority from his ugly flat face would be wonderful.
“The disadvantage with white skin
like yours, Josh, is that I can see every blush. It’s a dead giveaway. Me? I
always win at poker.”
Joshua seethed silently.
“So, do you want to discuss this
sensibly?” Liol asked. “Personally, I’d hate to face Mrs Nateghi across a
courtroom.”
“I don’t suppose, Lie, this
sudden urge to acquire a starship has anything to do with your asteroid being
overrun by possessed?”
“Lovely.” Liol clapped his hands
enthusiastically. “You’re a Calvert, all right. Never see a belt without
wanting to hit below it.”
“That’s right. So, I’ll see you in
court here in about a week’s time. How does that sound?”
“Would you really abandon your own
brother to the possessed?”
“If I had one, probably not.”
“I think I’m going to like you
after all, Josh. I thought you’d be soft; after all, you’ve had it dead easy.
But you’re not.”
“Easy?”
“Compared to me. You knew Dad. You
had the big inheritance waiting. I’d call that easy.”
“I’d call that bollocks.”
“If you don’t believe in your own
intuition, a simple DNA profile will tell you if we’re related. I’m sure your
sick bay could run one for you.”
And Joshua was absolutely stumped
at that. There was something about this complete stranger that was deeply
unsettling, yet obscurely comforting at the same time. Jesus, he does look like
me, and he knows about the intuition, and Dad wiped the log for 2586. It’s not
utterly impossible. But Lady Mac is mine. I could never share her.
He stared at Liol for a moment
longer, then made a command decision.
The crew were all hanging around on
the bridge, along with Mrs Nateghi. Nobody would make eye contact. Joshua shot
out of the captain’s cabin, rotated ninety degrees, and slapped his feet on a
stikpad. “Sarha. Take our guest down to the sick bay. Get a blood sample, use a
dagger if you want, and run a DNA profile.” He jabbed a finger at Mrs Nateghi.
“Not you. You’re leaving. Right now.”
She ignored him while managing to
project her complete disdain at the same time. “Mr Calvert, what are your
instructions?”
“I just told you . . . Oh.”
“Thank you so much for your help,”
Liol said with flawless courtesy. “I’ll be in touch with your office if I
decide any further legal action is required against my brother.”
“Very well. Tayari, Usoro and Wang
will be delighted to help. Forcing recidivists to acknowledge their
responsibilities is always rewarding.”
Combating her amusement, Sarha held
up a warning finger as Joshua’s face turned beacon red.
“Dahybi, show the lady out,
please,” he said.
“Aye, Captain.” The node specialist
gestured generously at the floor hatch and followed Mrs Nateghi through.
Liol flashed Sarha an engaging
grin. “You wouldn’t really use a dagger on me, would you?”
She winked. “Depends on the
circumstances.”
“Fancy that, Joshua,” one of the
serjeants said as the pair of them left the bridge. “There’s two of you.”
Joshua glared at the bitek
construct, then executed a perfect midair somersault and zoomed back into his
cabin.
Alkad’s tranquillizer program
wasn’t nearly strong enough to keep the claustrophobia at bay. Eventually she
had to admit defeat and switch a somnolence program to primary. Her only
thought as she fell into oblivion was: I wonder who will be there when I wake?
The rendezvous was an elaborate
one, which decreased the chances of success. But even that wasn’t her main
worry. Getting out of Ayacucho undetected was the big problem.
The asteroid had two counter-rotating
spaceports, one at each end. The main one was used by starships and larger
inter-orbit craft; while the second was mainly for heavy-duty cargo and utility
tankers delivering fresh water and liquid oxygen for the biosphere. It was also
the operations base for the personnel commuters and MSVs and tugs which flew
between the asteroid and its necklace of industrial stations.
Both were under heavy surveillance
by agents. There was no chance of getting through the axial chambers and taking
a commuter lift to the docking bays, so Voi had arranged for Alkad and herself
to be shipped out in cargo pods.
Lodi and another youth called
Eriba, who claimed to be a molecular structures student, worked on a couple of
standard pods in one of T’Opingtu’s storage facilities. They were converted
into heavily padded coffins moulded to hold someone wearing a SII spacesuit.
Both boys swore the insulation would prevent any thermal or electromagnetic
leakage. The cargo pods would appear perfectly inert to any sensor sweep.
Of course, the insulation meant
that Alkad couldn’t datavise out for help if anything went wrong and nobody
opened her pod. She believed she held her composure pretty well while she
allowed them to seal her in. After that there was nothing but the tranquillizer
program for the twenty minutes before she sought refuge in sleep.
A tug was scheduled to take the
cargo pods out to one of T’Opingtu’s foundry stations. From there they would be
transferred to an inter-orbit craft that was heading for Mapire.
Alkad woke to find herself in free
fall. At least we got out of the asteroid.
Her neural nanonics reported they
were picking up a datavise.
“Stand by, Doctor, we’re cracking
the pod now.”
She could feel vibrations through
her suit, then the collar sensors were showing her slash-lines of red light
cavorting around her. The top of the cargo pod came free, and someone in an SII
suit and a manoeuvring pack was sliding into view in front of her.
“Hello, Doctor, it’s me, Lodi. You
made it, you’re out.”
“Where’s Voi?” she datavised.
“I’m here, Doctor. Mary, but that
was horrible. Are you all right?”
“Yes. Fine, thank you.” As well as
relief for herself, she felt strangely glad the girl had come through
unscathed.
She made sure she had a secure grip
on her crumpled old backpack before she let Lodi draw her out of the pod. Held
in front of him, with the manoeuvring pack puffing out fast streamers of gas,
she sank into the déjà vu of Cherri Barnes towing her back to the Udat.
Then, space had been frighteningly empty, with so little light her collar
sensors had struggled to resolve anything. Now, she was deep within Tunja’s
disk, gliding through a redout blizzard. No stars were visible anywhere, the
particles were too thick. Their size was inordinately difficult to judge, a grain
of dust a centimetre from her nose, or a boulder a kilometre away, both looked
exactly the same.
Ahead of her she could see the
waiting starship, its fuselage shining a dim burgundy, much darker than the
particles skipping across it like twisters of interference in an empty AV
projection. Two thermo-dump panels were extended, resembling slow-motion
propeller blades as rills of dust swirled around them. The airlock hatch was
open, emitting a welcoming beam of white light.
She sank along it, relishing the return
of normal colour. They entered a cylindrical chamber with grab hoops, utility
sockets, harsh light tubes, environment grilles, and small instrument panels
distributed at random. The sensation that reality was solidifying around her
was inescapable.
The hatch closed, and she clung to
a grab hoop as air flooded in. Her SII suit flowed back into a globe hanging
off the collar, and she was inundated with sounds.
“We did it!” Voi was jubilant. “I
told you I could get you out.”
“Yes, you did.” She looked around
at them, Voi, Lodi, and Eriba, so dreadfully young to be sucked into this world
of subterfuge, hatred, and death. Beaming faces desperate for her approval.
“And I’d like to thank you; you did a magnificent job, all of you.”
Their laughter and gratitude made
her shake her head in wonder. Such odd times.
Five minutes later Alkad was
dressed in her old ship-suit, backpack tight against her waist, following Voi
into the Tekas’s upper deck lounge. The yacht was only large enough for
one life-support capsule, with three decks. Despite the lack of volume, the
fittings were compact and elegant, everything blending seamlessly together to
provide the illusion of ample space.
Prince Lambert was reclining in a
deep circular chair, datavising a constant stream of instructions to the flight
computer. Tekas was under way, accelerating at a twentieth of a gee,
though the gravity plane was flicking about.
“Thank you for offering us the use
of your ship,” Alkad said after they were introduced.
He gave Voi a sterling glance. “Not
at all, Doctor, the least I could do for a national heroine.”
She ignored the sarcasm, wondering
what the story was with him and Voi. “So what’s our current status? Did anyone
follow you?”
“No. I’m fairly sure about that. I
flew outside the disk for a million kilometres before I went through it. Your
inter-orbit craft did the same thing, but on the other side. In theory no one
will realize we rendezvoused. Even the voidhawks can’t sense what happens
inside the disk, not from a million kilometres away, it’s too cluttered.”
Unless they want to follow me right
to the Alchemist, Alkad thought. “What about a stealthed voidhawk just outside
the disk, or even inside with us?” she asked.
“Then they’ve got us cold,” he
said. “Our sensors are good, but they’re not military grade.”
“We’d know by now if we were being
followed,” Voi said. “As soon as we rendezvoused they would have moved to
intercept.”
“I expect so,” Alkad said. “How
long before we can clear the disk and jump outsystem?”
“Another forty minutes. You don’t
rush a manoeuvre like this; there are too many sharp rocks out there. I’m going
to have to replace the hull foam as it is; dust abrasion is wearing it down to
the bare silicon.” He smiled unconvincingly at Alkad. “Am I going to be told
what our mission is?”
“I require a combat-capable
starship, that’s all.”
“I see. And I suppose that is
connected with the work you did for the Garissan navy before the genocide?”
“Yes.”
“Well, you’ll excuse me if I leave
the party before that.”
Alkad thought of the remaining
devices in her backpack, and just how tight her security margin had become.
“Nobody will force you to do anything.”
“Nice to hear.” He gave Voi another
pointed glance. “For once.”
“What jump coordinate does this
course give us?” Alkad asked.
“Nyvan,” he said. “It’s a hundred
and thirty light-years away, but I can get a reasonable alignment on it without
using up too much fuel. Voi told me you wanted a planet with military
industrial facilities, and wouldn’t ask too many questions.”
The last of the starships with
official flight authorization had departed ninety minutes earlier when Joshua
made his way out of the spaceport. Service and maintenance staff had gone home
to be with their families. Utility umbilicals supporting the remaining
starships were becoming less than reliable.
Three agents were loitering in the
axial chamber, talking in quiet tones. They were the only people there. Joshua
gave them a blasé wave as he and his escort of three serjeants emerged from the
commuter lift.
One of the agents frowned. “You’re
going back in there?” she asked incredulously.
“Try keeping me from a party.”
He could hear the argument start
behind him as the lift doors closed. Holomorph sticker cheerleaders began their
chant all around him.
“If she’s worried enough to
question you openly, then the possessed must be gaining ground,” a serjeant
said.
“Look, we’ve been over this. I’m
just going to check out the gig, and see if Kole has turned up. If she hasn’t,
we head straight back.”
“It would have been much safer if I’d
gone alone.”
“I don’t think so.” Joshua wanted
to say more, but the lift was probably overloaded with nanonic bugs. He
datavised the net for a channel to Lady Mac.
“Yes, Joshua?” Dahybi responded.
“Certain people out here are
getting twitchy about the possessed. I want you to monitor the asteroid’s
internal systems: transportation, power, environment, the net, everything. If
any of them start downgrading I want to know right away.”
“Okay.”
Joshua glanced at the rigid,
expressionless face of the nearest serjeant. Right now he really wanted Ione to
confide in, to be able to ask her opinion, to talk things through. If anyone
knew how to handle awkward family, it was her. Some deep-buried prejudice
prevented him from saying anything to the serjeants. “One other thing, Dahybi.
Call Liol, tell him to get himself over to the Lady Mac right away. Give
him a passenger cabin in capsule C. Don’t let him on the bridge. Don’t give him
any access codes for the flight computer. And make sure you check him for
possession when he arrives.”
“Yes, Captain. Take care.”
A datavise couldn’t convey
emotional nuances, but he knew Dahybi well enough to guess at the amused
approval.
“You accept his claim, then?” Ione
asked.
“The DNA profile seems similar to
mine,” Joshua said grudgingly.
“Yes, I’d say ninety-seven per cent
compatibility is roughly in the target area. It’s not unusual for starship
crews to have extended families spread over several star systems.”
“Thank you for reminding me.”
“If your father was ever anything
like you, then it’s possible Liol isn’t your only sibling.”
“Jesus.”
“I’m just preparing you for the
eventuality. Kelly Tirrel’s recording has enhanced your public visibility
rating by a considerable factor. Others may seek you out in the same way.”
He pulled an ironic face. “Wouldn’t
that be something? The gathering of the Calverts. I wonder if there are more of
us than there are Saldanas?”
“I very much doubt it, not if you
include our illegitimates.”
“And black sheep.”
“Quite. What do you intend to do
about Liol?”
“I haven’t got a clue. He’s not
touching the Lady Mac, though. Can you imagine having board meetings
every time to decide her next destination? It’s the opposite of everything I
am, not to mention the old girl herself.”
“He’ll probably come to realize this.
I’m sure you can come to some arrangement. He appears to be quite smart.”
“The word is smarmy.”
“There’s very little difference
between you.”
The lift dropped him off in a
public hall a couple of hundred metres from the Terminal Terminus club where the
benefit gig was being played. Not everyone was obeying the governing council’s
request to stay put at home. Kids filled the hall with laughter and shouts.
Everyone was wearing a red handkerchief on their ankle.
For a moment Joshua felt
disconnected from his own generation. He had formidable responsibilities (not
to mention problems); they were just stimheads sliding around their perpetual
circuit from one empty good time to the next. They didn’t understand the
universe at all.
Then a couple of them recognized
Lagrange Calvert and wanted to know what it was like rescuing the children from
Lalonde, and had there really been possessed in Bar KF-T? They were peppy, and
the girls in the group were giving him the eye. He began to loosen up; the
barriers weren’t so solid after all.
The Terminal Terminus looked like
some kind of chasmal junction between tunnels. Big, old mining machines were
parked in arching recesses, their conical, worn-down drill mechanisms jutting
out into the main chamber. Obsolete mechanoids clung to the ceiling, spider-leg
waldos dangling down inertly. Drinks were served over a long section of
heavy-duty caterpillar track.
A fantasy wormhole squatted in the
centre, a rippling gloss-black column five metres wide stretching between floor
and ceiling. Things were trapped inside, undefined creatures who clawed at the
distortion effect in desperate attempts to escape; the black surface bent and
distended, but never broke.
“Very tasteful, under the
circumstances,” Joshua muttered to a serjeant.
A stage had been set up between two
of the mining machines. AV projectors powerful enough to cover a stadium stood
on each side.
One of the serjeants went off to
guard an emergency exit. The remaining two stuck by Joshua.
He found Kole standing with a group
of her friends under one of the mining machines. Her hair had been woven
through with silver and chrome-scarlet threads, which every now and then made
it fan open like a peacock tail.
He paused for a moment. She was so
phony; rich without Dominique’s cosmopolitan verve, and absolute trash compared
to Louise’s simple honesty.
Louise.
Kole caught sight of him and
squealed happily, kissed him, rubbed against him. “Are you all right? I
accessed what happened after I left.”
He grinned brashly, the legend in
the flesh. “I’m fine. My . . . er, cosmoniks here are a tough bunch. We’ve seen
worse.”
“Really?” She cast a respectful eye
over the two serjeants. “Are you male?”
“No.”
Joshua couldn’t tell if Ione was
annoyed, amused, or plain didn’t care. On second thought, he doubted the
latter.
Kole kissed him again. “Come and
meet the gang. They didn’t believe I’d hooked you. Mother, I can’t believe I
hooked you.”
He braced himself for the worst.
From her vantage point lounging
casually on a coolant feed duct a third of the way up the side of a mining
machine, Monica Foulkes watched Joshua greeting Kole’s posse of friends. He
knew exactly the attitude to take to be accepted within seconds. She took a
gulp of iced mineral water as her enhanced retinas scanned the young faces below.
It was hot wearing the chameleon suit, but it gave her the skin tone of
Ayacucho’s Kenyan-ethnic population; “foreign agents” were about as popular as
the possessed right now. Except Calvert, of course, she thought sorely, he was
being greeted like a bloody hero. Her characterization recognition program ran
a comparison against the youngsters she was scanning, and signalled a
ninety-five per cent probable match.
“Damn!”
Samuel (now black-skinned,
twenty-five years old, and wearing jazzy purple sports gear) looked up from the
base of the mining machine. “What?”
“You were right. Kole has just
introduced him to Adok Dala.”
“Ah. I knew it. He was Voi’s
boyfriend up until she dumped him eighteen months ago.”
“Yes yes, I can access the file for
myself, thank you.”
“Can you hear what’s being said?”
She glanced down contemptuously.
“Not a chance. This place is really filling up now. My audio discrimination
programs can’t filter over that distance.”
“Come down please, Monica.”
Something in his tone halted any protest.
She slithered down the pitted yellow-painted titanium bodywork of the mining
machine.
“We have to decide what to do.
Now.”
She flinched. “Oh, God.”
“Do you believe Adok Dala will know
where Voi is?”
“I don’t think so, but there’s no
guarantee. And if we snatch Dala now, it isn’t going to make a whole lot of
difference as far as official repercussions are concerned. He’s hardly going to
complain about being taken off Ayacucho, is he?”
“You’re right. And it will prevent
Calvert from learning anything.”
Joshua’s neural nanonics reported a
call from Dahybi. “Two voidhawks from the defence delegation have just left the
docking ledge, Captain. Our sensors can’t see much from inside the bay, but we
think they’re keeping station five kilometres off the spaceport.”
“Okay, keep monitoring them.”
“No problem. But you should know
that Ayacucho is suffering localized power failures. They’re completely random,
and the supervisor programs can’t locate any physical problem in the supply
system. One of the news studios has gone off-line, as well.”
“Jesus. Start flight prepping Lady
Mac; I’ll wind things up here and get back to you within thirty minutes.”
“Aye, Captain. Oh, and Liol has
arrived. He’s not possessed.”
“Wonderful.”
Kole was still clinging
magnetically to his side. No one she’d introduced him to had mentioned Voi. His
original idea had been to ask them about Ikela’s murder and see what was said.
But now time was running out. He looked around to find out where the serjeants
were, hoping Ione wasn’t going to make an issue of pulling out. Hell, we gave
it our best.
The compere was striding out on the
stage, holding her arms out for silence as the rowdy crowd cheered and started
catcalling. She started into her spiel about the Fuckmasters.
“This is Shea,” Kole told him.
It was hard for Joshua to smile;
Shea was tall and skinny, almost identical to Voi’s size and height. He
datavised his electronic warfare block to scan her, but she was clean. What he
saw was real, not a chameleon suit. It wasn’t Voi.
“This is Joshua Calvert,” Kole
boasted, raising her voice against the rising whistle of the giant AV
projectors. “He’s my starship captain.”
Shea’s melancholia became outright
distress. She started crying.
Kole gave her an astonished look.
“What’s the matter?”
Shea shook her head, lips sealed
together.
“I’m sorry,” Joshua said, earnestly
sympathetic. “What did I do?”
Shea smiled bravely. “It’s not you.
It’s just . . . my boyfriend left this afternoon. He’s captaining a starship,
too, and that reminded me. I don’t know when I’m going to see him again. He
wouldn’t say.”
Intuition was starting a
major-league riot in Joshua’s skull. The first MF band was strolling onstage.
He put a protective arm around Shea’s shoulders, ignoring Kole’s flash of ire.
“Come on, I’ll buy you a drink. You can tell me about it. You never know, I
might be able to help. Stranger things happen in space.”
He signalled the two serjeants
frantically, and turned away from the stage just as the AV projectors burst
into life. A thick haze of coherent light filled the Terminal Terminus. Even
though he was looking away, sensations spirited down his nerves; fragmented
signals saturated with crude activant sequences. He felt good. He felt hot. He
felt randy. He felt slippery.
A glance back over his shoulder had
him sitting on a saddle astride a giant penis, urging it forwards.
Honestly, kids today. When he was
younger MF was about the giddy pursuit, how it felt when your partner adored
you in return, or spurned you without reason. Making up and breaking up. The
infinite states of the heart, not the dick.
The kids around him were laughing
and giggling, joyous expressions on their incredulous faces as the AV dazzle
poured down their irises. They all swayed from side to side in unison.
“Joshua, four Edenists are coming
this way,” a serjeant warned.
Joshua could see them in the
sparkling light cloud which pervaded the audience. Taller than everyone else,
some kind of visor over their eyes, moving intently through the swinging
throng.
He grabbed Shea’s hand tightly. “This
way,” he hissed urgently, and veered off towards the mock wormhole in the
centre of the club. One of the serjeants cleared a path, forcing people aside.
Frowns and snarls lined his route.
“Dahybi,” he datavised. “Get the
rest of the serjeants out of zero-tau, fast. Secure a route through the
spaceport from the axial chamber to Lady Mac. I might be needing it.”
“It’s being done, Captain. Parts of
the asteroid’s net are crashing.”
“Jesus. Okay, we’ve got the
serjeants’ affinity to keep communications open if it goes completely. You’d
better keep one in the bridge with you.”
He reached the writhing black
column and looked back. Shea was breathless and confused, but not protesting.
The Edenists weren’t chasing after him. “What . . . ?” Some sort of struggle
had broken out over where he’d left Kole’s friends. Two of the tall agents were
pulling an inert body between them. It was Adok Dala, unconscious and shaking,
victim of a nervejam shot. The other pair of agents and someone else were
holding back some irate kids. A nervejam stick was raised and fired.
Joshua turned his head a little too
far, and he was tasting nipple while he slid over dark pigmentation as if he
were snowboard slaloming, leaving a huge trail of glistening saliva behind him.
His neck muscles flicked back a couple of degrees, and the Edenists were
retreating, completely unnoticed by the entranced euphoric audience they were
shoving their way through. Behind them, Kole’s friends clung together; those
still standing wept uncomprehendingly over those felled by the violence which
had stabbed so unexpectedly into their moment of erotic rapture.
Shea gasped at the scene and made
to rush over.
“No,” Joshua shouted. He pulled her
back, and she recoiled, as frightened by him as the agents. “Listen to me, we
have to get out of here. It’s only going to get worse.”
“Is it the possessed?”
“Yeah. Now come on.”
Still keeping hold of her hand he
slid around the wormhole. It felt like dry rubber against his side, flexing in
queasy movements.
“Nearest exit,” he told the
serjeant in front of him. “Go.” It began to plough through tightly packed
bodies at an alarming speed. Blissfully unaware people were sent tumbling.
Joshua followed on grimly. The Edenists must have wanted Adok Dala for the same
reason he wanted Shea. Had he got the wrong friend? Oh, hell.
The cavern wall was only ten metres
ahead of him now, a red circle shining above an exit. His electronic warfare
block datavised an alarm.
Jesus! “Ione.”
“I know,” the lead serjeant
shouted. It drew its machine gun.
“No,” he cried. “You can’t, not in
here.”
“I’m not inhuman, Joshua,” the
burly figure retorted.
They reached the wall and hurried
along to the exit. That was when he realized Kole was still with them.
“Stay here,” he told her. “You’ll
be safe with all these people.”
“You can’t leave me here,” she
gasped imploringly. “Joshua! I know what’s happening. You can’t. I don’t want
that to happen to me. You can’t let them. Take me with you, for Mary’s sake!”
And she was just a stricken young
girl whose broken hair was flapping wildly.
The first serjeant slammed the door
open and went through. “I’ll stay here,” the second said. The machine gun was
held ready in one hand. It took out an automatic pistol and held it in the
other. “That’s a bonus, these things are ambidextrous. Don’t worry, Joshua.
They’ll suffer if they try and get past me.”
“Thanks, Ione.” Then he was out in
the corridor, urging the two girls along. “Dahybi,” he datavised. His neural
nanonics reported they couldn’t acquire a net processor. “Bugger.”
“The other serjeants are securing
the spaceport,” the serjeant told him. “And the Lady Mac is flight
prepped. Everything is ready.”
“Great.” His electronic warfare
block was still datavising its alarm. He took his own nine-millimetre pistol
out of its holster. Its operating procedure program went primary.
They came to a crossroads in the
corridor. And Joshua wasted a second querying the net on the direction he
wanted. Cursing, he requested the Ayacucho layout he’d stored in a memory cell.
There would be too much risk using a lift now; power supplies were dubious,
transport management processors more so. His neural nanonics devised the
shortest route to the axial chamber, it seemed depressingly far.
“This way.” He pointed down the
left hand corridor.
“Excuse me,” someone said.
Joshua’s electronic warfare block
gave out one final warning, then shut down. He whirled around. Standing ten
metres down the other corridor were a man and a woman, dressed in heavy black
leather jackets and trousers with an improbable number of shiny zips and
buckles.
“Run,” the serjeant ordered. It
stepped squarely into the middle of the corridor and levelled its compact
machine gun.
Joshua didn’t hesitate. Shoving at
the girls, he started running. He heard a few heated words being shouted behind
him. Then the machine gun fired.
He took the first turning,
desperate to escape from the line of sight. His neural nanonics immediately
revised his route. The corridors were all identical, three metres high, three
metres wide, and apparently endless. Joshua hated that, trapped in a maze and
utterly reliant on a guidance program susceptible to the possessed. He wanted
to know exactly where he was, and be able to prove it. Being unaware of his
exact location was an alien experience. Human doubt was superseding
technological prowess.
He was looking over his shoulder as
he took the next turning, making sure the girls were keeping up and there was
no sign of any pursuit. His peripheral vision monitor program indexed the
figure striding down the corridor towards him milliseconds before his neural
nanonics crashed.
It was a man in white Arab robes.
He smiled in simple gratitude as Joshua and the girls stumbled to a halt in
front of him.
Joshua swung his pistol around, but
the lack of any procedural program meant he misjudged its weight. The arc was
too great. Before he could bring it back to line up on the target, a ball of
white fire struck his hand.
Joshua howled at the flare of
terrible pain as the pistol fell from his grip. No matter how vigorously he waved
his arm the deadly white flame could not be dislodged from its grip around his
fingers. Oily stinking smoke spouted out.
“Time to say goodbye to your life,”
the smiling possessed said.
“Fuck you.”
He could hear the girls crying out
behind him, the wails of their revulsion and horror. Shock was diminishing the
pain in his hand slightly. He could feel the puke rising in his throat as more
and more of his flesh charred. His whole right arm was stiffening. Somewhere
behind his assailant a vast crowd of invisible people were whispering all at
once. “No.” It wasn’t a coherent word, just a defiant grunt mangled by his
contorted throat muscles. I will not submit to that. Never.
A cascade of water burst out of the
corridor’s ceiling to the accompanying sound of a high-pitched siren. The edge
of the lighting panels turned red and started to flash.
Shea was laughing with brittle
hysteria as she withdrew her fist from the fire alarm panel. Dots of blood
oozed up from her grazed knuckles. Joshua punched his own hand upwards,
straight underneath a nozzle. He roared triumphantly. The white flame vanished
in a gust of steam, and he collapsed down onto his knees, his whole body
shaking violently.
The Arab regarded the three of them
with a degree of aristocratic annoyance, as if any hint of defiance was
unprecedented. Water splattered on his dark headgear, turning his robe
translucent as it clung to his body.
Joshua raised his head against the
icy torrent to snarl at his enemy. His right hand was dead now; a supreme crush
of coldness had devoured his wrist. A few spittles of vomit emerged from his
mouth before he managed to growl: “Okay, shithead, my turn.”
The Arab frowned as Joshua reached
into a pocket with his left hand and brought out Horst Elwes’s small crucifix.
He thrust it forwards.
“Holy Father, Lord of Heaven and
the mortal world, in humility and obedience, I do ask Your aid in this act of
sanctification, through Jesus the Christ who walked among us to know our
failings, grant me Your blessing in this task.”
“But I am a Sunni Muslim,” the
bemused Arab said.
“Eh?”
“A Muslim. I have no belief in your
false Jewish prophet.” He raised his arms, palms upwards. The deluge of water
from the nozzles turned to snow. Every flake stuck to Joshua’s ship-suit,
smearing him in a coat of slush. Most of his skin was numb now.
“But I believe,” Joshua ground out
through vibrating teeth. And did. The revelation was as shocking as the cold
and the pain. But he’d come to this moment of pure clarity through reason and
ordeal. All he knew, all he’d seen, all he’d done; it spoke to him that there
was order in the universe. Reality was too complex for chance evolution.
Medieval prophets were a convenient
lie, but something had made sense out of the chaos which existed before time
began. Something started time itself flowing.
“My Lord God, look upon this
servant of Yours before me, fallen to a misguided and unclean spirit.”
“Misguided?” The Arab glowered,
trickles of static electricity crawling up his robes. “You brain-dead infidel!
Allah is the only true—oh shit.”
The serjeant fired, aiming for the
Arab’s head.
Joshua drooped limply onto the
floor. “That’s always how religious arguments end, isn’t it?” He was only dimly
conscious of the serjeant dragging him out of the downpour. His neural nanonics
came back on line, and immediately started erecting axon blockades. It was a
different kind of numbness than the snow had brought, less severe. The serjeant
wrapped a medical nanonic package around his hand. A stimulant program coaxed
Joshua’s brain back to full alertness. He blinked up at the three faces peering
down at him. Kole and Shea were clinging together, both of them in a shambles,
drenched and stupefied. The serjeant had taken a bad pounding, deep scorch
marks crisscrossed its body, all-too-human blood was bubbling out from crusted
wounds.
Joshua climbed slowly to his feet.
He wanted to smile reassuringly at the girls, but the will just wasn’t there.
“Are you okay?” he asked the serjeant.
“I’m mobile.”
“Good. What about you two, any
damage?”
Shea shook her head timidly, Kole
was still sobbing.
“Thanks for helping,” he said to
Shea. “That was fast thinking. I don’t know what I would have done without the
water. It was all a little bit too close for comfort. But we’re through the
worst now.”
“Joshua,” the serjeant said.
“Dahybi says that three of the Capone Organization’s warships have just
arrived.”
Seven Edenists in full body armour
were guarding the docking ledge departure lounge. Monica was tremendously glad
to see them. Along with Samuel, she’d been covering their retreat from the
Terminal Terminus, no easy duty. There had been three encounters with the
possessed on the way, and the shapeshifting magicians terrified her. Nerves and
neural nanonics were hyped to the maximum. Never once had she given them the
opportunity to surrender or back off. Locate and shoot, that was the way to do
it. And she noticed that for all his worthiness and respect for life, Samuel
was wired pretty much the same.
The lighting panels were flickering
and dimming as the group rushed across the lounge towards the airlock door and
the waiting crew bus outside. Monica waited until the airlock hatch slid shut
before taking her combat programs off line. She flicked the machine gun’s
safety catch on, and slowly pulled off her chameleon suit hood. The bus’s cool
air felt gloriously refreshing as it gusted over her sweat-soaked hair.
“Well, that was easy,” she said.
The bus was rolling towards the Hoya,
the last voidhawk left on the ledge. Nothing else moved on the shelf of smooth
dark rock.
“Unfortunately, you might be
right,” Samuel said. He was bent over the unconscious form of Adok Dala,
checking the boy with a sensor from a medical block. “Capone’s ships are here.”
“What?”
“Don’t worry. The Duida Consensus
has dispatched a squadron of voidhawks to support us. We are in little physical
danger.”
An inane impulse made Monica stare
out through the bus’s window in search of the Organization ships. She could
barely make out the non-rotational spaceport, an eclipsed crescent with the
funereal red mist of the disk swirling around its edges. “We’re a long way from
New California. Is this another invasion?”
“No, there are only three ships.”
“Then why . . . Oh, God, you don’t
think he’s looking for Mzu as well?”
“It is the most obvious possibility.”
They reached the voidhawk, and the
bus extended its airlock tube over the upper hull. Despite their situation,
Monica glanced around curiously once she was on board. The crew toroid wasn’t
that much different from an Adamist starship’s life-support capsule in terms of
technology; it was a lot roomier, though. Samuel led her around the central
corridor to the bridge and introduced her to Captain Niveu.
“My thanks to Hoya,” she
said, remembering her etiquette.
“Our pleasure, you have been performing
a difficult job under extreme circumstances.”
“Tell me about it. What’s happening
with the Capone ships?”
“They are accelerating down into
the disk, though they have made no threatening moves. The squadron from the
Duida habitats is here, we’re moving out to join them now. What happens next
depends on the Capone ships.”
“We’re under way?” Monica asked.
The gravity field was rock steady.
“Yes.”
“Are there any electronic sensors I
can access?”
“Certainly.”
Monica’s neural nanonics received a
datavise from the bridge’s bitek processor array. Hoya was already
sliding up through the fringes of the disk, like a bird emerging from a rain
cloud. Purple and green symbols outlined the three Capone Organization ships,
half a million kilometres away, and heading in towards Ayacucho at a steady
third of a gravity. The squadron of voidhawks was clustered together just
outside the top of the disk.
“They’re not in any hurry,” Monica
observed.
“They probably don’t wish to appear
hostile,” Niveu said. “If it came to a battle with us they would lose.”
“Are you going to allow them to
dock?”
Niveu glanced at Samuel.
“Consensus is undecided,” Samuel
said. “We don’t have sufficient information yet. To attack them without reason
is not an action we can undertake lightly.”
“They can’t be here on an assault
mission,” Niveu said. “Ayacucho has almost fallen now, attacking it would be
pointless. The asteroid’s new masters would probably welcome an alliance with
Capone.”
“Destroying them now might be the
best course for us all in the long run,” Monica said. “If they walk in, they’ll
be able to squeeze every byte of data from Voi’s friends. And if Voi and Mzu
didn’t get off, then we really are up shit creek.”
“Good point,” Samuel said. “We must
find out what we can. Time to talk to our guest.”
Only Sarha, Beaulieu, and Dahybi
were on the bridge when Joshua sailed through the floor hatch. He’d told the
serjeants to take both girls to capsule C where Melvyn, Liol, and Ashly were
waiting in the sick bay.
Sarha’s expression was a blend of anger
and worry as he drifted past her acceleration couch. “God, Joshua!”
“I’m all right, really.” He showed
her the medical nanonic which had enveloped his right hand. “All under
control.”
She scowled as he moved away
trailing droplets of cold water. A neat midair twist, and he was lying on his
acceleration couch with the webbing folding over him.
“The net has gone completely,”
Dahybi said. “We can’t monitor the asteroid’s systems.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Joshua said.
“I know exactly what’s happening in there. That’s why we’re leaving.”
“Did the girl help?” Beaulieu
asked.
“Not yet. I just want to get us
clear first. Dahybi, are any of the voidhawks screwing around with our nodes?”
“No, Captain, we can jump.”
“Good.” Joshua optimistically
ordered the flight computer to release the cradle clamps. He was rather pleased
to see them disengage, some processors were still working back in the
spaceport.
The chemical verniers fired,
lifting them straight up out of the bay. Sarha winced as the drab metal wall
slid past the tips of the sensor clusters, there was only about five metres
clearance. But Lady Mac never wavered. As soon as they emerged from the
bay Joshua cut the rockets, letting the starship fly free. The sensor clusters
sank down into their jump recesses. An event horizon claimed the hull. They
jumped half a light year. A second after they emerged energy flashed through
the patterning nodes again. This time the jump was three light-years.
Joshua let out a juddering sigh.
Sarha, Beaulieu, and Dahybi looked
at him. He was completely motionless, staring at the ceiling.
“Why don’t you join the others in
the sick bay?” Sarha said compassionately. “Your hand should be checked
properly.”
“I heard them, you know.”
Sarha gave Dahybi an anxious look.
The node specialist gave her a curt gesture with his hand.
“Heard who?” she asked. Her webbing
peeled back, allowing her to haul herself over to Joshua. A stikpad at the side
of his couch captured her feet.
He didn’t acknowledge her presence.
“The souls in the beyond. Jesus, they’re real all right, they’re there waiting.
One tiny act of weakness, that’s all it takes, and they’ve got you.”
Her fingers stroked his waterlogged
hair. “They didn’t get you.”
“No. But they lie and lie about how
they can help. I was angry, and stupid enough to think Horst’s damn cross would
save me.” He held up the little crucifix and snorted at it. “Jesus, he was a
Muslim.”
“You’re not making a lot of sense.”
He looked up at her with bloodshot
eyes. “Sorry. They can hurt you very badly, you know. He’d only just started
with my hand, that was a warm-up. I don’t know if I could have held out. I told
myself I would, or at least that I wouldn’t give in. I think the only way to do
that is to die.”
“But you didn’t give in, and you’re
still alive, and it’s only you inside your skull. You won, Joshua.”
“Luck, and the tank is about
empty.”
“It wasn’t luck you had three
serjeants with you. It was healthy paranoia and good planning. You knew the
possessed are extremely dangerous, and took it into account. And that’s what
we’ll do again next time.”
He gave a nervous laugh. “If I can
manage a next time. It’s quite something to look right down into the abyss and
see what’s there waiting for you, one way or the other, as possessed or
possessor.”
“We were up against it at Lalonde,
and we’re still flying.”
“That was different, I was ignorant
then. But now I know for sure. We’re going to die, and be condemned to live in
the beyond. All of us. Every sentient entity in the universe.” His face screwed
up in pain and anger. “Jesus, I can’t believe that’s all there is: life and
purgatory. After tens of thousands of years, the universe finally reveals that
we have souls, and then we have the glory snatched right back and replaced with
terror. There has to be something more, there has to be. He wouldn’t do
that to us.”
“Who?”
“God, he, she, it, whatever. This
torment, it’s too . . . I don’t know. Personal. Why the fuck build a universe
that does this to people? If you’re that powerful, why not make death final, or
make everyone immortal? Why this? We have to know, have to find out why
it works the way it does. That way we can know what the answer to all this is.
We have to find something that’s permanent, something which will last until the
end of time.”
“How do you propose to do that?”
she asked quietly.
“I don’t know,” he snapped, then
just as suddenly he was thoughtful again. “Maybe the Kiint. They say they’ve
solved all this. They won’t tell us outright, but they might at least point me
in the right direction.”
Sarha looked down at his intense
expression in astonishment. Joshua taking life so seriously was strange, Joshua
mounting a crusade was frankly astonishing. For one second she thought that he
had been possessed after all. “You?” she blurted.
All the suffering and angst vanished
from his angular face. The old Joshua swept back. He started chuckling. “Yeah,
me. I might be catching religion a little late in life, but the born-again are
always the most insufferable and devout.”
“It’s more than your hand which
needs checking out in the sick bay.”
“Thank you, my loyal crew.” His
restraint webbing parted, allowing him up. “But we’re still going to ask the
Kiint.” He ordered the flight computer to run a full star track search and
correlate their exact position. Then he ran an almanac search for Jobis’s file.
“Right now?” Dahybi asked tartly.
“You’re going to throw away all you achieved on Ayacucho just like that?”
“Of course not,” Joshua said
smoothly.
“Good. Because if we don’t find Mzu
and the Alchemist before the possessed do, there probably won’t be any
Confederation left for you to save.”
Adok Dala returned to consciousness
with a loud cry. He looked around fearfully at the Hoya’s sick bay. Not
reassured by his surroundings. Not at all.
Samuel removed the medical nanonic
package from the base of his neck. “Easy there. You’re quite safe, Adok. Nobody
is going to hurt you here. And I must apologize for the way we treated you in
the club, but you are rather important to us.”
“You’re not the possessed?”
“No. We’re Edenists. Well, apart
from Monica, here; she’s from the Kulu Kingdom.”
Monica did her best to smile at the
nervous boy.
“You’re foreign agents, then?”
“Yes.”
“I won’t tell you anything. I’m not
helping you catch Mzu.”
“That’s very patriotic. But we’re
not interested in Mzu. Frankly, we hope she got away clean. You see, the
possessed are in charge of Ayacucho now.”
Adok moaned in distress, clamping
his hand over his mouth.
“What we’d like to know about is
Voi,” Samuel said.
“Voi?”
“Yes. Do you know where she is?”
“I haven’t seen her for days. She
put us all on standby. It was silly, we had to organize the kids in the day
clubs to kill spiders. She said Lodi figured out you were using them to spy on
us.”
“Clever man, Lodi. Do you know
where he is?”
“No. Not for a couple of days.”
“Interesting. How many are there in
this group of yours?”
“About twenty, twenty-five. There’s
no real list. We’re just friends.”
“Who started it?”
“Voi. She’d changed when she came
out of detox. The genocide became a real cause for her. We just got sucked
along by her. Everybody does when Voi gets serious about an issue.”
Monica datavised a request to her
processor block, retrieving a memory image from the file she’d recorded at the
Terminal Terminus. It had bothered her since the snatch. The last glimpse she
had of Joshua Calvert showed him tugging a girl along. She showed the enhanced
image to Adok. “Do you know her?”
He blinked blearily at the little
screen. Whatever drugs Samuel had administered to loosen his tongue were making
him drowsy. “That’s Shea. I like her, but . . .”
“Is she one of your group?”
“Not really, but she’s Prince
Lambert’s girlfriend. He’s sort of a member; and she’s done a few things for us
occasionally.”
Monica looked at Samuel. “What have
we got on this Prince Lambert character?”
“A moment.” He consulted his bitek
processor block. “He’s registered as a pilot for the Tekas, an executive
yacht owned by his family corporation. Monica, it was one of the starships
which left Ayacucho this afternoon.”
“Damn it!” She slammed her fist
down on one of the cabinets beside Adok Dala’s couch. “Does Voi know Prince
Lambert?”
Adok smiled blithely. “Yes. They
used to be lovers. He was the reason she wound up in detox.”
Do you have a jump coordinate
for the Tekas? Samuel
asked Niveu.
No. It flew outside our mass
perception range. None of the voidhawks registered its jump. But we do have the
flight vector. It was an odd course, the ship was heading back down to the disk
when it passed beyond us. If it didn’t perform any drastic realignment
manoeuvres there are three possible stars it could have flown to: Shikoku,
Nyvan, and Torrox.
Thank you. We’ll check them.
Of course. I’ll inform Duida’s
defence command. We’ll leave immediately.
Shea had changed into a grey
ship-suit when Joshua floated into the sickbay. She was talking quietly to
Liol, but broke off to give him a shy grin. Ashly and Melvyn were busy packing
equipment away. One of the serjeants held on to a grab hoop just inside the
hatch.
“How are you feeling?” Joshua asked
her.
“Fine. Ashly gave me a
tranquillizer. I think it helps.”
“I wish he’d give me one.”
Her grin brightened. “Is your hand
very bad?”
He held it up. “Most of the bone is
intact, but I’m going to need some clone vat tissue to build the fingers up.
The package can’t regenerate quite that much.”
“Oh. I’m sorry.”
“Tranquillity will pay for it,” he
said, straight-faced. “Where’s Kole?”
“Zero-tau,” Melvyn said.
“Good idea.”
“Do you want me to go in as well?”
Shea asked.
“Up to you. But I need some help
before you decide.”
“From me?”
“Yes. Let me explain. Contrary to
everything the news studios were saying, I’m not a foreign agent.”
“I know that, you’re Lagrange
Calvert.”
Joshua smiled. “I knew it would
come in useful one day. The thing is, we are looking for Alkad Mzu, but not
because of any Omutan propaganda.”
“Why then?”
He took her hand in his, squeezing
emphatically. “There is a reason, Shea, it’s a good reason, but not a very nice
one. I’ll tell you if you really want to know; because if you’re anything like
the person I think you are, you’d help us find her if you knew what’s actually
going on. But if you’ll trust me on this, you don’t want to know. It’s up to
you.”
“Are you going to kill her?” she
asked sheepishly.
“No.”
“Promise?”
“I promise. We just want to take
her back to Tranquillity where she’s been living since the genocide. As prisons
go, it isn’t bad. And if we can get to her in time, it’ll save an awful lot of
people. Maybe an entire planet.”
“She’s going to drop a
planet-buster on Omuta, isn’t she?”
“Something like that.”
“I thought so,” she said in a tiny
voice. “But I don’t know where she is.”
“I think you do. You see, we
believe she’s with Voi.”
“Oh, her.” Shea’s face
darkened.
“Yes, her. I’m sorry, this sounds
painful for you. I didn’t realize.”
“She and Prince Lambert had a
thing. He still . . . well, he’d go back to her if she’d have him.”
“This Prince Lambert is your
boyfriend, the starship captain?”
“Yes.”
“Which ship?”
“The Tekas.”
“And it left Ayacucho today?”
“Yes. Do you really think Alkad Mzu
was on board?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“Is he going to be in trouble with
the authorities?”
“I couldn’t care less about him. I
just want to locate Mzu. Once I’ve done that, once she knows I’m on her tail
and watching every move, the threat will be neutered. She’ll have to come back
with me then. Now, are you going to tell me where the Tekas went?”
“I’m sorry, I wish I could help,
but he wouldn’t tell me where they were going.”
“Shit!”
“P.L. is flying the Tekas to
Nyvan,” Liol said. He looked around inquiringly at the startled faces. “Did I
say something wrong?”
“How the bloody hell do you know
where he was going?” Joshua demanded.
“P.L.’s a good friend of mine; we
grew up together. Quantum Serendipity has the contract to service the Tekas.
He’s not the most experienced pilot, and Voi had given him a very odd manoeuvre
to fly. So I helped him program the flight vector.”
Chapter 05
André Duchamp had half expected to
be shot at by the Ethenthia asteroid’s SD platforms when the Villeneuve’s
Revenge jumped into its dedicated emergence zone three thousand kilometres
away. He certainly had a lot of explaining to do to the local defence command,
followed up by testimony from the rover reporters. When he did finally receive
docking permission he assumed the famed Duchamp forcefulness and integrity had won
through again.
What actually happened was that
while he was busy claiming to be a defector from the Capone Organization, Erick
opened a channel to the local Confederation Navy Bureau and asked them to press
the local authority for clearance. Even so, the authorities were extremely
cautious. Three SD platforms were locked on to the Villeneuve’s Revenge as
it approached the spaceport.
The security teams which ransacked
the life-support capsules in search of treachery were exceptionally thorough.
André put on a brave face as composite panels were split open and equipment
modules broken down into component parts for high-definition scanning. The
cabins hadn’t exactly been in optimum shape before. It would take weeks to
reassemble the trashed fittings to comply with even the minimum of CAB
flight-worthiness requirements.
But Kingsley Pryor was hauled away
by the emotionless officers from an unnamed division of the defence forces. A
big credit bonus to the intrepid crew who had outsmarted Capone.
The only possible flaw was Shane
Brandes. So the Dechal’s fusion engineer was brought out of zero-tau
while they were still on the approach phase and given a simple ultimatum:
cooperate or you’re going to be a dead crewman who we’re in mourning over. He
chose cooperation; explaining to the Ethenthia authorities why they’d abducted
him in the first place would have been a little too confusing, he felt.
Thirteen hours after they docked,
the last of Ethenthia’s security officers departed. André gazed around
lugubriously at his bridge. The consoles were little more than open grids of
processor boards; walls and decking had been stripped down to the bare metal;
environmental ducts were making stressed whining sounds, and dirty condensation
was building up on every surface.
“We did it.” His clown face
exhibited a genuine smile as he looked from Erick, to Madeleine, and finally
Desmond. “We’re home free.”
Madeleine and Desmond began to
chuckle, sharing the realization. They really had come through.
“I have a few bottles in my cabin,”
André said. “If those thieving scum anglo police haven’t stolen them. We
must celebrate. Ethenthia is as good a place as any to sit out this war. We can
keep busy with some proper maintenance. I’m sure I can get the insurance to pay
for some of this wreckage; after all, we’re war heroes now. Who will argue,
eh?”
“Tina might,” Erick said.
The flatness in the voice dispelled
André’s smile. “Tina who?”
“The girl we killed on the Krystal
Moon. Murdered, actually.”
“Oh, Erick. Dear enfant. You
are tired. You have done more work than most.”
“Certainly more than you. But
what’s new there?”
“Erick,” Desmond said. “Come now,
it has been a terrible time for all of us. Perhaps we should get some rest
before we decide what to do next.”
“Good suggestion. I admit I haven’t
quite made up my mind what to do with you yet.”
“What you are going to do
with us?” André asked indignantly. “I think your medical modules are
malfunctioning; your brain is being fed the wrong chemicals. Come, we will go
to bed, and in the morning none of this will be mentioned again.”
“Shut up, you pompous geek,” Erick
said. It was the contemptuous indifference of the voice which shocked André
into silence.
“My problem is that I owe Madeleine
and Desmond my life,” Erick went on. “But then, if you hadn’t been such an
arsehole, Duchamp, none of us would ever have been put in the crazy position we
were. That’s the kind of hazard I have to accept when I take on missions like
this.”
“Missions?” André didn’t like the
cold passion which had suddenly overtaken his crewman.
“Yes, I’m an undercover officer in
the CNIS.”
“Oh, fuck,” Madeleine grunted
helplessly. “Erick . . . Shit, I liked you.”
“Yeah. That’s my problem, too. I’m
in a little bit deeper than I ever expected. We made a good team fighting the
possessed.”
“So now what?” she asked numbly. “A
penal colony?”
“After everything we went through,
I’m prepared to make you an offer. I owe you that, I think.”
“What sort of offer?” André asked.
“An exchange. You see, I’m your
case officer, I’m the one who decides if the Service prosecutes, I’m the one
who provides the evidence that we attacked the Krystal Moon and killed a
fifteen-year-old girl because you’re such an incompetent captain you can’t keep
up the payments on a ship that isn’t worth ten fuseodollars.”
“Ah! Of course, money is no
problem, my dear enfant. I can mortgage the ship, it will be done for
you by tomorrow. What currency do you—”
“Shut up!” Madeleine bellowed. “Just shut the fuck up,
Duchamp. What is it, Erick? What’s he got to do? Because whatever it is, he’s
going to do it with a big smile on his fat stupid face.”
“I want to know something,
Duchamp,” Erick said. “And I think you can tell me. In fact, I’m sure you can.
Because it’s information which only the vilest, most deceitful pieces of shit in
the galaxy are entrusted with.” He drifted over until he was centimetres from
the captain. Duchamp had started to tremble.
“What is the coordinate of the
antimatter station, André?” he asked softly. “I know you know.”
André blanched. “I . . . I cannot. Not
that.”
“Oh, really? Do you know why the
Confederation is so unsuccessful in finding antimatter production stations,
Madeleine?” Erick asked. “It’s because we can’t use debrief nanonics on people
we suspect of knowing where they are. Nor can we use drugs, or even torture.
It’s their neural nanonics, you see. The price of learning a station’s
coordinate is a very special set of neural nanonics. The black cartel supplies
them absolutely free of charge. Top-of-the-range, whatever marque you like, but
always with one small modification. If they detect the owner is being subjected
to any form of interrogation, such as debrief nanonics, they kamikaze. The only
way the coordinate is passed on is voluntarily. So what is it, Duchamp?”
“They’ll kill me,” André whimpered.
He made to reach out and clasp Erick’s shoulder, but his hand fisted just
before contact and drew back. “Did you not hear? They’ll kill me!”
“Fucking tell him!” Madeleine
shouted.
“Non.”
“It won’t be a penal colony after
the trial,” Erick said. “We’ll take you away to a quiet little laboratory deep
in Trafalgar, and try and see if this time we can beat the kamikaze mechanism.”
“They’ll know. They always find
out. Always!”
“One of the stations is supplying
Capone with antimatter. That means the cartel has already lost it to the
possessed, so they’re not going to care. And what about you? Do you care, do
you want Capone to keep winning? And if he does beat us, what do you think
he’ll do with you when he finally catches up with you?”
“But suppose the station I know of
isn’t the one?”
“The only good antimatter station
is one which has been destroyed. Now what’s it going to be? The CNIS lab? The
cartel? Capone? Or do I load a no further action code in your file? Make your
mind up.”
“I despise you, anglo. I want
your precious Confederation to die right in front of you. I want your entire
family possessed and made to fuck animals. I want your soul trapped in the
beyond for all time. Only then will I have justice for what you and your kind
have done to me and my life.”
“The coordinate, Duchamp,” Erick
said impassively.
André datavised the star’s almanac
file over.
Lieutenant Commander Emonn Verona,
the CNIS’s head of station on Ethenthia, sat behind his desk and stared at
Erick in what was almost a state of reverence. “You have the name of the next
system Capone intends to invade, and an antimatter station coordinate?”
“Yes, sir. According to Pryor,
Capone is going to send his fleet to the Toi-Hoi system.”
“Good God. If we can ambush that
fleet, we’ve got the bastard cold. He’ll be finished.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Right. This bureau’s only goal now
is to get your information back to Trafalgar. There aren’t any navy ships
stationed here; I’m going to have to signal the Edenist habitats orbiting Golmo
and request some voidhawks. That’s fifteen light-hours away.” He eyed the
exhausted captain whose skin seemed to be half nanonic packages; the medical
ancillary modules fastened to his belt had several orange LEDs winking on them.
“We ought to have a voidhawk here within sixteen hours. That’ll give you some
time to have a decent rest first.”
“Thanks. All of us got pretty
strung out searching the ship for that nuke.”
“I’ll bet. Are you sure you want to
drop the charges against Duchamp?”
“Not really. But I gave my word,
even though that means nothing to a man like him. Besides, he knows the navy
has a file on him now, he knows we’ll be watching him, he’ll never trust
another crew member again. He’ll never be able to fly another illegal flight
again. And given the state of that ship, and his own abilities, he isn’t going
to be able to make enough from legal charters to keep going. The banks will
take the Villeneuve’s Revenge off him. For someone like him, that’s
worse than a penal colony or the death sentence.”
“I hope I never get you at my
court-martial,” Emonn Verona said.
“He deserves it.”
“I know. What do you want to do
about Pryor?”
“Where is he now?”
“He’s being remanded in custody.
There are any number of charges we can bring. I can’t believe a Confederation
Navy officer turned like that.”
“It will be interesting to find out
the reason. I think there’s a lot more to Kingsley Pryor than we know. The best
course would be for me to take him back to Trafalgar. He can be debriefed
properly there.”
“Okay. I’m going to step up
security around the bureau, and I don’t want you to leave it until the voidhawk
arrives. There’s a spare office you can use to sleep in, my executive officer
will show you. And I’ll organize a medical team to examine you before you
depart.”
“Thank you, sir.” Erick stood up,
saluted, and walked out. Emonn Verona had been fifteen years in the navy, and
undercover officers like Erick Thakrar still unnerved him.
The office light panel dimmed for a
few seconds, then flickered annoyingly up to its full brightness. Emonn Verona
gave it a resigned glare: the damn thing had been getting worse for a couple of
days now. He made a note in his neural nanonics general file to get an engineer
in once Thakrar was safely on his way.
Right from the start, Gerald
Skibbow had disliked asteroid settlements. They were worse than an arcology;
the corridors were claustrophobic, while the biosphere caverns had a forced
grandeur which lessened them considerably. Those initial impressions had come
from Pinjarra, where the Quadin had left him.
It hadn’t taken long, even for
someone as ingenuous as himself, to find out that despite the quarantine,
nongovernmental cargoes were still arriving at Pinjarra from outsystem. They
didn’t arrive on starships, though, Quadin was virtually the only one
docked to the asteroid’s spaceport, the rest were inter-orbit craft. Hours
spent in the bars which their crews used gave him an outline of the operation,
and a name: Koblat. An asteroid which was open to quarantine-busting flights,
acting as a distribution hub for the Trojan cluster. A berth on an inter-orbit
ship returning empty cost him five thousand fuseodollars.
It was the starships Gerald wanted,
whose captains might conceivably accept a charter to Valisk. He had money in
his Jovian Bank credit disk; so perhaps it was his manner which caused them all
to shake their heads and turn their backs on him. He knew he was too anxious,
too insistent, too desperate. He’d made progress in controlling the extremes of
his behaviour; there were fewer tantrums when his requests were refused, and he
really tried to remember to wash and shave and find clean clothes. But still
the captains rejected him. Perhaps they could see the ghosts and demons dancing
inside his head. They didn’t understand. It was Marie they were condemning, not
him.
This time he had come very close to
screaming at the captain as she made a joke of his pleas. Very close to raising
his fists, to punching the truth and the need into her.
Then she had looked into his eyes
and realized the danger caged in there, and her smile had emptied away. Gerald
knew the barman was watching closely, one hand under the bar to grip whatever
it was he used to quell trouble. There was a long moment spent looking down at
the captain as silence rippled out from her table to claim the Blue Fountain.
He took the time to think the way Dr Dobbs said he should, to focus on goals
and the proper way to achieve them, how to make himself calm when his thoughts
were febrile with rage.
The possibility of violence passed.
Gerald turned and made for the door. Outside, naked rock pressed in on him,
creating a sense of suffocation. There were too few light panels in the
corridor. Hologram signs and low-wattage AV projections tried to entice him
into other clubs and bars. He shuffled past, reaching the warren of smaller
corridors which served the residential section. He thought his rented room was
close, the signs at every intersection were confusing, numbers and letters
jumbled together; he wasn’t used to them yet. Voices rumbled down the corridor,
male laughs and jeers, the tone was unpleasant. They were coming from the
junction ahead. Dim shadows moved on the walls. He almost stopped and turned
around. Then he heard the girl’s cry, angry and fearful at the same time. He
wanted to run away. Violence frightened him now. The possessed seemed to be at
the heart of all conflicts, all evil. It would be best to leave, to call others
to help. The girl cried out again, cursing. And Gerald thought of Marie, and
how lonely and afraid she must have been when the possessed claimed her. He
edged forwards, and glanced around the corner.
At first, Beth had been furious
with herself. She prided herself on how urban-wise she was. Koblat might be
small, but that didn’t mean it had much community spirit. There were only the
company cops to keep order; and they didn’t much bother unless they’d had their
bung. The corridors could get tough. Men in their twenties, the failed rebels
who now had nothing in front of them but eighty years work for the company,
went together in clans. They had their own turf, and Beth knew which corridors
they were, where you didn’t go at any time.
She hadn’t been expecting any
trouble when the three young men walked down the corridor towards her. She was
only twenty metres from her apartment, and they were in company overalls, some
kind of maintenance crew. Not a clan, nor mates coming back from a clubbing
session. Mr Regulars.
The first one whistled admiringly
when they were a few metres away. So she gave them the standard blank smile and
moved over to one side of the corridor. Then one of them groaned and pointed at
her ankle. “Christ, she’s wearing one too, a deadie.”
“Are ya gay, doll? Fancy giving
that Kiera one, do ya? Me too.”
They all laughed harshly. Beth
tried to walk past. A hand caught her arm. “Where you going, doll?”
She attempted to pull herself free,
but he was too strong.
“Valisk? Going to shag Kiera? We
not good enough for you here? You got something against your own kind?”
“Let go!” Beth started to struggle.
More hands grabbed her. She lashed out with her free arm, but it was no good.
They were bigger, older, stronger.
“Little cow.”
“She’s got some fight in her.”
“Hold the bitch. Take that arm.”
Her arms were forced behind her
back, holding her still. The man in front of her grinned slowly as she twisted
about. He grabbed her hair suddenly and pushed her head back. Beth flinched,
very near to losing it. His face was centimetres from hers, triumphant eyes
gloating.
“Gonna take you home with us,” he
breathed. “We’ll straighten you out good and proper, doll; you won’t want girls
again, not after we’ve finished with you.”
“Fuck off!” Beth screamed. She
kicked out. But he caught her leg and shoved it high into the air.
“Dumb slut.” He tugged at the knot
which held the red handkerchief around her ankle. “Reckon this might come in
useful, guys. She’s got a mouth on her.”
“You . . . you just bloody well
leave her alone.”
All four of them stared at the
speaker.
Gerald stood in the corridor’s
junction, his grey ship-suit wrinkled and dirty, hair ruffled, three days of
beard shading his face. Even more alarming than the nervejam stick he was
pointing at them in a two-handed grip was the way it shook. He was blinking as
if he were having great difficulty focusing.
“Whoa there, fella,” the man
holding Beth’s leg said. “Let’s not get excited here.”
“Get away from her!” The nervejam stick juddered violently.
Beth’s leg was hurriedly dropped.
The hands let go of her arms. Her three would-be rapists began to back off down
the corridor. “We’re going, okay? You got this all wrong, fella.”
“Leave! I know what you are. You’re
part of it. You’re part of them. You’re helping them.”
The three men were retreating fast.
Beth looked at the unstable nervejam stick and the persecuted face behind it,
and almost felt like joining them. She tried to get her breathing back under
control.
“Thanks, mate,” she said.
Gerald sucked on his lower lip and
gradually slid down the wall until he was squatting on his heels. The nervejam
stick dropped from his fingers.
“Hey, you okay?” Beth hurried
forwards.
Gerald looked up at her with a
pathetically placid face and started whimpering.
“Jeeze—” She looked around to make
certain her assailants had gone, then hunkered down beside him. Something made
her hold back from making a grab for the nervejam. She was desperately
uncertain what he’d do. “Listen, they’ll probably come back in a minute. Where
do you live?”
Tears started streaming down from
his eyes. “I thought you were Marie.”
“No such luck mate, I’m Beth. Is
this your corridor?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, do you live near here?”
“Help me please, I have to get to
her, and Loren’s left me here all alone. I don’t know what to do next. I really
don’t.”
“You’re not the only one,” Beth
grunted.
“Well who is he?” Jed asked.
Gerald was sitting at the
dining-room table in Beth’s apartment, staring at the mug of tea he was
holding. It was a pose he’d maintained for the last ten minutes.
“Says his name’s Gerald Skibbow,”
Beth said. “Reckon he’s telling the truth.”
“Okay. How about you? You all right
now?”
“Yeah. Those manky bastards got a
real fright. Don’t reckon we’ll be seeing them again.”
“Good. You know, we might be better
off if we stop wearing our handkerchiefs. People are getting real uptight about
it.”
“What? No way! Not now. It says
what I am: a Deadnight. If they can’t stomach that, it ain’t my problem.”
“It nearly was.”
“It won’t happen again.” She held
up the nervejam and gave a brutish smirk.
“Jeeze. Is that his?”
“Yep. Said I could borrow it.”
Jed regarded Gerald in dismayed confusion.
“Blimey. Bloke must be pretty far gone.”
“Hey.” She tapped his belly with
the tip of the nervejam. “Watch what you’re saying. Maybe he’s a little cranky,
but he’s my mate.”
“A little cranky? Look at
him, Beth, the guy’s a walking dunny.” He saw the way she tensed up. “Okay.
He’s your mate. What are you going to do with him?”
“He’ll have a room somewhere.”
“Yeah, a nice quiet one with lots
of padding on the walls.”
“Quit that, will you. How much
you’ve changed, huh? We’re supposed to be wanting a life where people don’t
jump down each other’s throats the whole time. Least, that’s what I thought. Am
I wrong?”
“No,” he grumbled. Beth these days
was hard to understand. Jed had thought she’d appreciate the fact he wasn’t
making moves on her anymore. If anything that had made her even more
intractable. “Hey, look don’t worry. My head’ll get straightened when we reach
Valisk.”
Gerald slewed around in his chair.
“What did you say?”
“Hey, mate, thought you’d gone
switch-off on us there,” Beth said. “How you feeling?”
“What did you say about Valisk?”
“We want to go there,” Jed said.
“We’re Deadnights, see. We believe in Kiera. We want to be part of the new
universe.”
Gerald stared at him, then gave a
twisted giggle. “Believe her? She’s not even Kiera.”
“You’re just like all the others.
You don’t want us to have a chance just because you blew yours. That stinks,
man!”
“Wait wait.” Gerald held up his
arms in placation. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know you were a Deadnight. I don’t know
what Deadnights are.”
“It’s what she said, that Kiera: Those
of us who have emerged from the dead of night can break the restrictions of
this corrupt society.”
“Oh, right, that bit.”
“She’s going to take us away from
all this,” Beth said. “Where arseholes like those three blokes don’t do what
they did. Not anymore. There won’t be any of that in Valisk.”
“I know,” Gerald said solemnly.
“What? You taking the piss?”
“No. Honestly. I’ve been searching
for a way to Valisk ever since I saw the recording. I came here all the way
from Ombey on the one hope that I’d find a way. I thought one of the starships
might take me.”
“No way, mate,” Jed said. “Not the
starships. We tried. The captains have all got closed minds. I told you, they
hate us.”
“Yes.”
Jed glanced at Beth, trying to
judge what she thought, if he should risk it. “You must have quite a bit of
money, you come here from Ombey,” he said.
“More than enough to charter a
starship,” Gerald said bitterly. “But they just won’t listen to me.”
“You don’t need a starship.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’ll tell you how to get to Valisk
if you take us with you. It’s ten times cheaper than the way you were planning,
but we still can’t put that much together ourselves. As you’ve got to charter a
whole ship for the flight anyway, it won’t cost you any more for us to be on
board.”
“All right.”
“You’ll take us?”
“Yes.”
“Promise?” Beth asked, her voice
betraying a multitude of vulnerabilities.
“I promise, Beth. I know what it’s
like to be let down, to be abandoned. I wouldn’t do that to anyone, least of
all you.”
She shifted around uncomfortably,
rather pleased by what he’d said, the fatherly way he’d said it. Nobody on
Koblat ever spoke to her like that.
“Okay,” Jed said. “Here it is: I’ve
got a pickup coordinate timetable for this system.” He took a flek from his pocket
and slotted it in the desktop block. The block’s holoscreen flashed up a
complex graphic. “This shows where and when a starship from Valisk will be
waiting to take on anyone who wants to go there. All you have to do is charter
an inter-orbit craft to get us to it.”
As always, Syrinx found Athene’s
house relaxing. No doubt Wing-Tsit Chong and the psychological team would call
it a return to the womb. And if she found that amusing, she told herself, she
must be virtually recovered.
She had returned from Jobis two
days earlier. After relating everything she had learned from Malva to Wing-Tsit
Chong, Oenone had flown to Romulus and a berth in an industrial station.
I suppose I ought to be glad
you’re flying courier duty for our intelligence service, Athene said. The doctors must think you’re
recovered.
And you don’t? Syrinx was walking with her mother across the
garden which seemed to grow shaggier with each passing year.
If you’re not sure yourself, how
can I be, my dear?
Syrinx grinned, somehow cheered by the
uncanny perception. Oh, Mother, don’t fuss. Work is always a great anodyne,
especially if you love your work. Voidhawk captains do nothing else.
I want us flying missions
together again, Oenone insisted. It is good for both of us.
For a moment, mother and daughter
were aware of the gridwork surrounding Oenone. Technicians were busy
working on the lower hull, installing combat wasp launch cradles, maser
cannons, and military-grade sensor pods.
Ah well, Athene said. Looks like I’m outvoted.
I’ll be all right, Mother,
really. Going straight into the defence force would be a little too
confrontational. But courier work is important. We have to act with unity
against the possessed; that’s vital. Voidhawks have an important role to play
in that.
I’m not the one you’re trying to
convince.
Jesus, Mother. Everyone I know
is mutating into a psychiatrist. I’m a big girl now, and my brain’s back in
good enough shape to make decisions.
Jesus?
Oh. Syrinx could feel the blush rising to her
cheeks—only Mother could do that! Someone I met always used it as an
expletive. I just thought it was appropriate these days.
Ah, yes. Joshua Calvert. Or
Lagrange Calvert, as everyone calls him now. You had quite a thing about him,
once, didn’t you?
I did not! And why is he called
Lagrange Calvert?
Syrinx listened with growing
incredulity as Athene explained the events which had occurred in orbit around
Murora. Oh, no, fancy Edenism having to be grateful to him. And what a
stupid stunt jumping inside a Lagrange point at that velocity. He could have
killed everybody on board. How thoughtless.
Dear me, it must be love.
Mother!
Athene laughed in delight at being
able to needle her daughter so successfully. They’d come to the first of the
big lily ponds which verged one side of the garden. It was heavily shaded now;
the rank of golden yews behind it had swelled considerably in the last thirty
years, their boughs reaching right across the water. She looked into the black
water. Bronze-coloured fish streaked for the cover of the lily pads.
You ought to get the servitor
chimps to prune the yews, Syrinx
said. They steal too much light. There are far fewer lilies than there used
to be.
Why not see what happens
naturally?
It’s untidy. And a habitat isn’t
natural.
You never did like losing
arguments, did you?
Not at all. I’m always willing
to listen to alternative viewpoints.
A burst of good-humoured scepticism
filled the affinity band. Is that why you’re turning to religion all of a
sudden? I always thought you would be the most susceptible.
What do you mean?
Remember when Wing-Tsit Chong
called you a tourist?
Yes.
It was a polite way of saying
that you lack the confidence in yourself to find your own answers to life. You
are always searching, Syrinx, though you never know what for. Religion was
inevitably going to exert a fascination on you. The whole concept of salvation
through belief offers strength to those who doubt themselves.
There’s a big difference between
religion and spirituality. That is something the Edenist culture is going to
have to come to terms with; us, the habitats, and the voidhawks.
Yes, you’re uncomfortably right
there. I have to admit I was rather pleased to know that Iasius and I will be
reunited again, no matter how terrible the circumstances. It does make life
more tolerable.
That’s one aspect. I was
thinking more about transferring our memories into the habitat when we die. It
forms the basis of our entire society. We never feared death as much as
Adamists, which always strengthened our rationality. Now we know we’re destined
to the beyond, it rather makes a mockery of the whole process. Except—
Go on.
Laton, damn him. What did he
mean? Him and his great journey, and telling us that we don’t have to worry
about being trapped in the beyond. And then Malva as good as confirmed he was
telling the truth.
You think that’s a bad thing?
No. If we’re interpreting this
properly, there is more to the beyond than eternal purgatory. That would be
wondrous.
I agree.
Then why didn’t he tell us
exactly what awaits? And why would it only be us who escape the entrapment, and
not the Adamists?
Perhaps Malva was being more
helpful than you realized when she told you the answer lies within us. If you
were told, you would not have found it for yourself. You wouldn’t have known
it, you would simply have been taught.
It had to be Laton, didn’t it?
The one person we can never truly trust.
Even you can’t trust him?
Not even I; despite the fact I
owe him my life. He’s Laton, Mother.
Perhaps that’s why he didn’t
tell us. He knew we wouldn’t trust him. He did urge us to research this
thoroughly.
And so far we’ve failed
thoroughly.
We’ve only just started, Syrinx.
And he gave us one clue, the kind of souls that have returned. You encountered
them, darling, you have the most experience of them. What type are they?
Bastards. All of them.
Calm down, and tell me what they
were like.
Syrinx smiled briefly at the
reprimand, then gazed at the pink water lilies, trying to make herself remember
Pernik. Something she still shied away from. I was being truthful. They really
were bastards. I didn’t see that many. But none of them cared about me, about
how much they were hurting me. It didn’t bother them, as if they were
emotionally dead. I suppose being in the beyond for so long does that to them.
Not quite. Kelly Tirrel recorded
a series of interviews with a possessed called Shaun Wallace. He wasn’t
callous, or indifferent. If anything he seemed a rather sad individual.
Sad bastards, then.
You’re being too flippant. But
consider this. How many Edenists are sad bastards?
No, Mother, I can’t accept that.
You’re saying that there’s some kind of selection process involved. That
something is imprisoning sinners in the beyond and letting the righteous go on
this final journey into the light. That cannot be right. You’re saying there is
a God. One that takes an overwhelming interest in every human being, that cares
how we behave.
I suppose I am. It would
certainly explain what’s happened.
No it doesn’t. Why was Laton
allowed to go on the great journey?
He wasn’t. Souls and memory separate
at death, remember? It was Laton’s personality operating within Pernik’s neural
strata that freed you and warned us, not his soul.
Do you really believe this?
I’m not sure. As you say, a God
who takes this much interest in us as individuals would be awesome. Athene turned from the pool and slipped her arm
through her daughter’s. I think I’ll keep hoping for another explanation.
Good!
Let’s hope you find it for me.
Me?
You’re the one gallivanting
around the galaxy again. It gives you a much better chance than me.
All we’re going to do is pick up
routine reports from embassies and agents about possible infiltrations by the
possessed, and how local governments are coping with the problem. Tactics and
politics, that’s all, not philosophy.
How very dull-sounding. She pulled Syrinx a little closer, allowing the
worry and concern in her mind to flow freely through affinity. Are you sure
you’re going to be all right?
Yes, Mother. Oenone and
the crew will take good care of me. I don’t want you to worry anymore.
When Syrinx had left to supervise
the last stages of Oenone’s refit, Athene sat in her favourite chair on
the patio and attempted to involve herself in the household routine again.
There were plenty of children to supervise at the moment, the adults were all
away working long hours, mainly in support of the defence force. Jupiter and
Saturn were both gearing up for the Mortonridge Liberation.
You shouldn’t try to hold her so
tight, Sinon said. It
doesn’t help her confidence seeing you have so little in her.
I have every confidence, she bridled.
Then show it. Let go.
I’m too frightened.
We all are. But we should be
free to face it by ourselves.
How do you feel, then, knowing
your soul has gone on?
Curious.
That’s all?
Yes. I already exist in tandem
with the others of the multiplicity. The beyond is not too different from that.
You hope!
One day we will know.
Let’s pray it’s later rather
than sooner.
Like daughter, like mother.
I don’t think I need a priest
right now. More like a stiff drink.
Sinner. He laughed.
She watched the shadows deepen
under the trees as the light tube enacted a rose-gold dusk. “There can’t be a
God, can there? Not really.”
He doesn’t look terribly happy, Tranquillity said as Prince Noton stepped into
one of the ten tube stations which served the hub.
Ione pivoted her perceptual
viewpoint through a complete circle, as if she were walking around the Prince.
She was intrigued by his air of stubborn dignity, the kind of face and body
posture that indicated he knew he was old and outdated but still insisted on
interpreting the universe the way he wanted to. He wore the dress uniform of a
Royal Kulu Navy admiral, with five small medal pins on his chest. When he
removed his cap to climb into the tube carriage there was little hair left, and
that grey; a telling sign for a Saldana.
I wonder how old he is? she mused.
A hundred and seventy. He is
King David’s youngest exowomb sibling. He ran the Kulu Corporation for a
hundred and three years until Prince Howard took over in 2608.
How strange. Her attention flicked back to the Royal Kulu
Navy battle cruiser docked in the spaceport (the first active duty ship from
the Kingdom in a hundred and seventy-nine years). A diplomatic mission of the
highest urgency, its captain had said when he requested permission to approach.
And Prince Noton had an entourage of five Foreign Office personnel. He’s
part of the old order. We’re hardly likely to have anything in common. If
Alastair wants something from me, surely someone younger would have been a
better bet? Maybe even a Princess.
Possibly. Though it would be
hard not to respect Prince Noton. His seniority is part of the message the King
is sending.
For a moment she felt a twist of
worry. I wonder. If anyone knows your true capabilities, it is my royal
cousins.
I doubt he will ask anything
dishonourable.
Ione had to jog down the last
twenty metres of the corridor, fumbling with the seal on the side of her skirt.
She had chosen a formal business suit of green tropical weave cotton and a
plain blouse; smart but not imperious. Trying to impress Prince Noton with
power dressing, she suspected, would be a waste of time.
The tube carriage had already
arrived at the station of De Beauvoir Palace, her official residence. Two
serjeants were escorting the Prince and his entourage down the long nave. Ione
raced across the audience chamber in her stockinged feet, sat behind the
central desk, and jammed her shoes on.
How do I look?
Beautiful.
She growled at the lack of
objectivity and combed her hair back with a hand. I knew I should have had
this cut. She glanced around to check the arrangements. Six high-backed
chairs were positioned in front of the desk. Human caterers were preparing a
buffet in one of the informal reception rooms (housechimps would have been a
faux pas given the Kingdom’s attitude to bitek, she felt). Change the
lighting.
Half of the floor-to-ceiling panes
of glass darkened; the remainder altered their diffraction angle. Ten large
planes of light converged on the desk, surrounding her in a warm astral glow. Too
much—oh, hell.
The doors swung open. Ione rose to
her feet as Prince Noton walked across the floor.
Go around the desk to greet him.
Remember you are family, and technically there has never been any rift between
us and the Kingdom.
Ione did as she was told, putting
on a neutral smile: one she could turn to charm or ice. It was up to him.
When she put out her hand, there
was only the slightest hesitation on Prince Noton’s part. He gave her a
politely formal handshake. His eyes did linger on her signet ring, though.
“Welcome to Tranquillity, Prince
Noton. I’m very flattered that Alastair should honour me with an emissary of
your seniority. I only wish we were meeting in happier times.”
The staff from the Foreign Office
were staring ahead rigidly. If she didn’t know better she would have said they
were praying.
Prince Noton took an awkwardly long
time to answer. “It is a privilege to serve my King by coming here.”
Ah! “Touché, cousin,” she drawled.
They locked gazes while the Foreign
Office staff watched nervously.
“You had to be female, didn’t you?”
“Naturally, though it was
completely random. Daddy never had any exowomb children. Our family tradition
of primogeniture doesn’t apply here.”
“You hate tradition so much?”
“No, I admire a lot of tradition. I
uphold a lot of tradition. What I will not tolerate is tradition for
tradition’s sake.”
“Then you must be in your element.
Order is falling across the Confederation.”
“That, Noton, was below the belt.”
He nodded gruffly. “Sorry. I don’t
know why the King chose me for this. Never was a bloody diplomat.”
“I don’t know, I think he chose
rather well, actually. Sit down, please.” She went back to her own chair.
Tranquillity showed her the Foreign Office personnel exchanging relieved
expressions behind her back. “So what exactly does Alastair want?”
“These fellers.” Prince Noton
clicked his finger in the direction of a serjeant. “I’m supposed to ask you if
we can have their DNA sequence.”
“Whatever for?”
“Ombey.”
She listened with dawning unease as
Prince Noton and the Foreign Office personnel related the details of the
proposed Mortonridge Liberation. Do you think this will work?
I don’t have the kind of
information available to the Royal Navy, so I cannot provide an absolute. But
the Royal Navy would not undertake such an action unless they were confident of
the outcome.
I can’t believe this is the
right way to go about saving people who have been possessed. They’re going to
destroy Mortonridge, and a lot of people will get killed in the process.
Nobody ever claimed war is
clean.
Then why do it?
For the overall objective, which
is usually political. Certainly it is in this case.
So I can halt it then? If I
refuse to give Alastair the sequence.
You can be the voice of sanity,
certainly. Who would thank you?
The people who wouldn’t get
killed, for a start.
Who are the people currently
possessed, and would endure any sacrifice to be freed. They do not have the
luxury of your academic moral choices.
That’s not fair. You can’t
condemn me for wanting to prevent bloodshed.
Unless you can offer an
alternative, I would recommend handing over the sequence. Even if you
prevaricated, you would not halt the liberation campaign. At the most you would
delay it for a few weeks while the Edenists spliced together a suitable warrior
servitor.
You know damn well I don’t have
any alternative.
This is politics, Ione; you
cannot prevent the liberation from going ahead. By helping, you will form
valuable alliances. Do not overlook that. You are pledged to defend all those
who live within me. We may need help to do this.
No we don’t. You alone of all
the habitats are the final sanctuary against the possessed.
Even that is not definite.
Prince Noton is correct: old orders, old certainties, are falling everywhere.
What must I do, then?
You are The Lord of Ruin.
Decide.
When she looked at the old Prince,
his immobile face, and his impassioned thoughts, she knew there was no choice,
that there never had been. The Saldanas had sworn to defend their subjects. And
in return their subjects believed in them to provide that defence. Over the
Kingdom’s history, hundreds of thousands had died to maintain that mutual
trust.
“Of course I will provide the DNA
sequence for you,” Ione said. “I only wish there was more I could do.”
With an irony Ione found almost painful,
two days after Prince Noton departed for Kulu with the DNA sequence, Parker
Higgens and Oski Katsura told her they had located a Laymil memory of the
spaceholm suicide.
Almost all other research work on
the Laymil project campus had stopped to allow staff from every division to
assist in reviewing the decrypted sensorium memories. However, despite being
the prime focus of activity, the Electronics Division was no busier than the
last time she had visited. The decryption operation had been finalized,
allowing all of the information within the Laymil electronics stack to be
reformatted into a human access standard.
“It’s only the review process
itself which is causing a bottleneck now,” Oski Katsura said as she ushered
Ione into the hall. “We have managed to copy all of the memories in the stack,
so we now have permanent access. In the end, only twelve per cent of the files
were scrambled, which leaves us with eight thousand two hundred and twenty
hours of recordings available. Though of course we have a team working on the
lost sequences.”
The Laymil electronics stack had
finally been powered down. Technicians were gathered around its transparent
environment sphere, checking and disconnecting it from the conditioning units.
“What are you going to do with it?”
Ione asked.
“Zero-tau,” Oski Katsura said.
“Unfortunately, it is really too venerable to be put on exhibition. That is,
unless you want it displayed to the public for a little while first?”
“No. This is your field, that’s why
I appointed you as division chief.”
Ione saw the members of the
Confederation Navy science bureau mingling with the ordinary project staff at
the various research stations in the hall. It was a sign of the times that she
drew no more than a few idly curious glances.
Parker Higgens, Kempster Getchell,
and Lieria were standing together to watch the technicians prepare the stack
for zero-tau.
“End of an era,” Kempster said as
Ione joined them. He appeared oblivious to any connotations in the statement.
“We can’t go on depending on stolen knowledge anymore. Much to the distress of
the navy people, of course, no giant ray guns for them to play with. Looks like
we’ll have to start thinking for ourselves again. Good news, eh?”
“Unless you happen to have a
possessed knocking on your door,” Parker Higgens said coldly.
“My dear Parker, I do access the
news studios occasionally, you know.”
“How is the search for Unimeron
going?” Ione asked.
“From a technical point of view,
very well,” Kempster said enthusiastically. “We’ve finished the revised design
for the sensor satellite we want to use. Young Renato has taken a blackhawk
down to the orbital band we intend to cover to test fly a prototype. If all
goes well, the industrial stations will begin mass production next week. We can
saturate the band by the end of the month. If there are any unusual energy
resonances there, we ought to find them.”
It wasn’t going to be as quick as
Ione had hoped for. “Excellent work,” she told the old astronomer. “Oski tells
me you have found a memory of the spaceholm suicide.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Parker Higgens said.
“Did they have a weapon to use
against the possessed?”
“Not a physical one, I’m happy to
say. They seemed inordinately complacent about the suicide.”
“What do the navy people think?”
“They were disappointed, but they
concur the spaceholm culture made no attempt to physically defeat the possessed
Laymil approaching from Unimeron.”
Ione sat at an empty research
station. “Very well.” Show me.
She never could get used to the
illusive sensorium squeeze of emerging into a Laymil body. This time, her
appropriated frame was one of the two male varieties, an egg producer. He was
standing amid a group of Laymil, his current family and co-habitees, on the
edge of their third marriage community. His clarion heads bugled softly, a
keening joined by hundreds of throats around him. The melody was a slow one,
rising and falling across the gentle grassy slope. Its echo sounded in his
mind, gathered by the mother entity from every community in the spaceholm.
Together they sang their lament, a plainsong in unison with the life spirit of
the forests and meadows, the shoalminds of the animals, the mother entity. A
chant taken up by every spaceholm as the cozened dead approached their
constellation.
The aether was resonant with sadness,
its weight impressing every organic cell within the spaceholm. Sunspires were
dipping to their early and final dusk, draining away the joyful colours he had
lived with all his life. Flowers relaxed into closure, their curling petals
sighing for the loss of light, while their spirits wept for the greater loss
which was to follow.
He linked arms with his mates and
children, ready to share death as they shared life: together. The families
linked arms. Drinking strength from the greater concord. They had become a
single triangle on the valley floor. Component segments of three adults. Inside
them, the children, protected, cherished. The whole, a symbol of strength and
defiance. As with minds, so with bodies; as with thoughts, so with deeds.
“Join into rapture,” he instructed his children.
Their necks wove around, heads
bobbing with enchanting immaturity. “Sorrow. Fear failure. Death essence
triumphant.”
“Recall essencemaster teaching,”
he instructed. “Laymil
species must end. Knowledge brings birthright fulfillment. Eternal exaltation
awaits strong. Recall knowledge. Believe knowledge.”
“Concur.”
Beyond the rim of the spaceholm
constellation, the ships from Unimeron slid out of the darkness. Stars gleaming
red with the terrible power of the death essence, riding bright prongs of
fusion flame.
“Know truth,” the massed choir of spaceholms sang at them. “Accept
knowledge gift. Embrace freedom.”
They would not. The pernicious
light grew as the ships advanced, silent and deadly.
The Laymil in the spaceholms raised
their heads to the vertical and bellowed a single last triumphant note. Air
rippled at the sound. The sunspires went out, allowing total darkness to seize
the interior.
“Recall strength,” he pleaded with his children. “Strength
achievement final amity.”
“Confirm essencemaster victory.”
The spaceholm mother entity cried
into the void. A pulse of love which penetrated to the core of every mind. Deep
within its shell, cells ruptured and spasmed, propagating fractures clean
through the polyp.
Sensation ended, but the darkness
remained for a long time. Then Ione opened her eyes.
“Oh, my God. That was their only
escape. They were so content about it. Every Laymil rushed into death.
They never tried to outrun them; they never tried to fight them. They willfully
condemned themselves to the beyond to avoid being possessed.”
“Not quite, ma’am,” Parker Higgens
said. “There are some very interesting implications in those last moments. The
Laymil didn’t consider they had lost. Far from it. They showed enormous
resolution. We know full well how much they worship life; they would never
sacrifice themselves and their children simply to inconvenience the possessed
Laymil, for that is all suicide is. There are any number of options they could
have explored before resorting to such an extreme measure. Yet the one whose
sensorium we accessed made constant references to knowledge and truth derived
from the essencemasters. That knowledge was the key to their ‘eternal
exaltation.’ I suspect the essencemasters solved the nature of the beyond. Am I
right, Lieria?”
“An astute deduction, Director
Higgens,” the Kiint said through her processor block. “And one which confirms
the statement Ambassador Roulor made to your Assembly. For each race, the
solution is unique. Surely you do not anticipate suicide as the answer for the
problems facing humankind?”
Parker Higgens faced the big xenoc,
his anger visible. “It was more than suicide. It was a victory. They won.
Whatever the knowledge was they carried with them, it meant they were no longer
afraid of the beyond.”
“Yes.”
“And you know what it was.”
“You have our sympathy, and
whatever support we can provide.”
“Damn it! How dare you study us
like this. We are not laboratory creatures. We are sentient entities, we have
feelings, we have fears. Have you no ethics?”
Ione stood behind the trembling
director and laid a cautionary hand on his shoulder.
“I am well aware of what you are,
Director Higgens,” Lieria said. “And I am empathic to your distress. But I must
repeat, the answer to your problem lies within you, not us.”
“Thank you, Parker,” Ione said. “I
think we’re all quite clear now on where we stand.”
The director gave a furious wave of
his hand and walked away.
I apologize for his temper, Ione told the Kiint. But as I’m sure you
know, this terrifies us all. It is frustrating for us to know you have a
solution, even though it cannot apply to us.
Justly so, Ione Saldana. And I
do understand. History records our race was in turmoil when we first discovered
the beyond.
You give me hope, Lieria. Your
existence is proof that satisfactory solutions can be found for a sentient
race, something other than genocidal suicide. That inspires me to keep
searching for our own answer.
If it is of any comfort, the
Kiint are praying humans succeed.
Why, thank you.
Erick was woken by his neural
nanonics. He had routinely set up programs to monitor his immediate
environment, physical and electronic, alert for anything which fell outside
nominal parameters.
As he sat up in the darkened
office, his neural nanonics reported an outbreak of abnormal fluctuations in
Ethenthia’s power supply systems. When he datavised a query at the supervisor
programs, it turned out that no one in the asteroid’s civil engineering service
was even examining the problem. A further review showed that fifteen per cent
of the habitation section’s lifts appeared to be inoperative. The number of
datavises into the net was also reducing.
“Oh, dear God. Not here, too!” He
swung his legs off the settee. A wave of nausea twisted along his spine.
Medical programs sent out several caution warnings; the team Emonn Verona
promised hadn’t been to see him yet.
When he datavised the lieutenant
commander’s eddress to the office’s net processor there was no response.
“Bloody hell.” Erick pulled on his ship-suit, easing it over his medical
packages. There were two ratings standing guard outside the office; both armed
with TIP carbines. They came to attention as soon as the door opened.
“Where’s the lieutenant commander?”
Erick asked.
“Sir, he said he was going to the
hospital, sir.”
“Bugger. Right, you two come with
me. We’re getting off this asteroid, right away.”
“Sir?”
“That was an order, mister. But in
case you need an incentive, the possessed are here.”
The two of them swapped a worried
glance. “Aye, sir.”
Erick started accessing schematics
of the asteroid as they went through the Navy Bureau and out into the public
hall. He followed that up by requesting a list of starships currently docked at
the spaceport. There were only five; one of which was the Villeneuve’s
Revenge, which cut his options down to four.
His neural nanonics designed a
route to the axial chamber which didn’t use any form of powered transportation.
Seven hundred metres, two hundred of which were stairs. But at least the
gravity would be falling off.
They went in single file, with
Erick in the centre. He ordered both ratings to put their combat programs into
primary mode. People turned to stare as they marched down the middle of the
public hall.
Six hundred metres to go. And the
first stairwell was directly ahead. The hall’s light panels started dimming.
“Run,” Erick said.
Kingsley Pryor’s cell measured five
metres by five. It had one bunk, one toilet, and one washbasin; there was a
small AV lens on the wall opposite the bed, accessing one local media company.
Every surface—fittings, floor, walls—was the same blue-grey lofriction
composite. It was fully screened, preventing any datavises.
For the last hour the light panel
on the ceiling had been flickering. At first, Kingsley had thought the police were
doing it to irritate him. They had been almost fearful as they escorted him
from the Villeneuve’s Revenge with a Confederation Navy officer. A
member of the Capone Organization. It was only to be expected that they
would try to re-establish their superiority with such sad psychology,
demonstrating who was in control. But the shifts of illumination had been too
fitful for any determined effort. The AV images were also fragmenting, but not
at the same time as the light. Then he found the call button produced no
response.
Kingsley realized what was
happening, and sat patiently on his bunk. Quarter of an hour later the humming
sound from the conditioning grille fan faded away. Nothing he could do about
it. Twice in the next thirty minutes the fan started up again briefly, once to
blow in air which stank of sewage. Then the light panel went out permanently.
Still Kingsley sat quietly.
When the door did finally open, it
shone a fan of light directly across him, highlighting his almost prim posture.
A werewolf crouched in the doorway, blood dripping from its fangs.
“Very original,” Kingsley said.
There was a confused puppylike yap
from the creature.
“I really must insist you don’t
come any closer. Both of us will wind up in the beyond if you do. And you’ve
only just got here, haven’t you?”
The werewolf outline shimmered away
to reveal a man wearing a police uniform. Kingsley recognized him as one of his
escorts. There was a nasty pink scar on his forehead which hadn’t been there
before.
“What are you talking about?” the
possessed man asked.
“I am going to explain our
situation to you, and I want you to observe my thoughts so that you know I’m
telling the truth. And after that, you and your new friends are going to let me
go. In fact, you’re going to give me every assistance I require.”
A hundred and fifty metres to the
axial chamber. They were almost at the top of the last flight of stairs when
the well’s lights went out. Erick’s enhanced retinas automatically switched to
infrared. “They’re close,” he shouted in warning.
A narrow flare of white fire
fountained up the centre of the stairwell, arching around to burst over the
rating behind him. He grunted in pain and swung around, firing his TIP carbine
at the base of the streamer. Purple sparks bounced out of the impact point.
“Help me,” he cried. A smear of
white fire was cloaking his entire shoulder. Terror and panic were negating all
the suppression programs which his neural nanonics had doused his brain with.
He stopped firing to flail at the fire with his free hand.
The other rating slithered past
Erick to fire back down the stairs. A flat circle of brilliant emerald light
sprang over the floor of the stairwell, then started to rise as if it were a
fluid. The flare of white fire withdrew below its surface. Shadows were just
visible beneath it, darting about sinuously.
The burned rating had collapsed
onto the stairs. His partner was still shooting wildly down into the advancing
cascade of light. The TIP pulses were turning to silver spears as they
penetrated the surface, trailing bubbles of darkness.
The next door was eight metres
above Erick. The ratings would never last against the possessed, he knew, a few
seconds at best. That few seconds might enable him to escape. The information
he had was vital, it had to get to Trafalgar. Millions of innocents
depended on it, on him. Millions. Against two.
Erick turned and flung himself up
the last few steps. In his ears he could hear a voice shouting: “. . . two of
my crew are dead. Fried! Tina was fifteen years old!”
He barged through the door, ten per
cent gravity projecting him in a long flat arc above the corridor floor,
threatening to crack his head against the ceiling. The persecuting noises and
fog of green light shut off as the door slid shut behind him. He touched down,
and powered himself in another long leap forwards along the corridor. Neural
nanonics outlined his route for him as if it were a starship vector plot; a
tube of orange neon triangles that flashed past. Turning right. Right again.
Left.
Gravity had become negligible when
he heard the scream ahead of him. Fifteen metres to the axial chamber. That was
all; fifteen bloody metres! And the possessed were ahead of him. Erick snatched
at a grab hoop to halt his forwards flight. He didn’t have any weapons. He didn’t
have any backup. He didn’t even have Madeleine and Desmond to call on, not
anymore.
More screams and pleas were
trickling down the corridor from the axial chamber as the possessed chased down
their victims. It wouldn’t be long before one of them checked this corridor.
I have to get past. Have to!
He called up the schematic again,
studying the area around the axial chamber. Twenty seconds later, and he was at
the airlock hatch.
It was a big airlock, used to
service the spaceport spindle. The prep room which led to it had dozens of
lockers, all the equipment and support systems required to maintain space
hardware, even five deactivated free-flying mechanoids.
Erick put his decryption program
into primary mode and set it to work cracking the first locker’s code. He
stripped off his ship-suit as the lockers popped open one after the other.
Physiological monitor programs confirmed everything he saw as the fabric
parted. Pale fluid tinged with blood was leaking out of his medical nanonic
packages where the edges were peeling from his flesh; a number of red LEDs on
the ancillary modules were flashing to indicate system malfunctions. His new
arm was only moving because of the reinforced impulses controlling the muscles.
But he still functioned. That was
all that mattered.
It was the fifth locker which
contained ten SII spacesuits. As soon as his body was sealed against the vacuum
he hurried into the airlock, carrying a manoeuvring pack. He didn’t bother with
the normal cycle, instead he tripped the emergency vent. Air rushed out. The
outer hatch irised apart as he secured himself into the manoeuvring pack. Then
the punchy gas jets fired, sending him wobbling past the hatch rim and out into
space.
André hated the idea of Shane
Brandes even being inside the Villeneuve’s Revenge. And as for the man
actually helping repair and reassemble the starship’s systems . . . merde. But
as with most events in André’s life these days, he didn’t have a lot of choice.
Since the showdown with Erick, Madeleine had retreated into her cabin and
refused to respond to any entreaties. Desmond, at least, performed the tasks
requested of him, though not with any obvious enthusiasm. And, insultingly, he
would only work alone.
That just left Shane Brandes to
help André with the jobs that needed more than one pair of hands. The Dechal’s
ex-fusion engineer was anxious to please. He swore he had no allegiance to his
previous captain, and harboured no grudges or ill will towards the crew of the Villeneuve’s
Revenge. He was also prepared to work for little more than beer money, and
he was a grade two technician. One could not afford to overlook gift horses.
André was re-installing the main
power duct in the wall of the lower deck lounge, which required Shane to feed
the cable to him when instructed. Someone glided silently through the ceiling
hatch, blocking the beam from the bank of temporary lights André had rigged up.
André couldn’t see what he was doing. “Desmond! Why must . . .” He gasped in
shock. “You!”
“Hello again, Captain,” Kingsley
Pryor said.
“What are you doing here? How did
you get out of prison?”
“They set me free.”
“Who?”
“The possessed.”
“Non,” André whispered.
“Unfortunately so. Ethenthia has
fallen.”
The anti-torque tool André was
holding seemed such a pitiful weapon. “Are you one of them now? You will never
have my ship. I will overload the fusion generators.”
“I’d really rather you didn’t,”
Pryor datavised. “As you can see, I haven’t been possessed.”
“How? They take everybody, women,
children.”
“I am one of Capone’s liaison
officers. Even here, that carries enormous weight.”
“And they let you go?”
“Yes.”
A heavy dread settled in André’s
brain. “Where are they? Are they coming?” He datavised the flight computer to
review the internal sensors (those remaining—curse it). As yet no systems were
glitching.
“No,” Pryor said. “They won’t come
into the Villeneuve’s Revenge. Not unless I tell them to.”
“Why are you doing this?” As if I
didn’t know.
“Because I want you to fly me away
from here.”
“And they’ll let us all go, just
like that?”
“As I said, Capone has a lot of
influence.”
“What makes you think I will take
you? You blackmailed me before. It will be simple to throw you out of the
airlock once we are free of Ethenthia.”
Pryor smiled a dead man’s smile.
“You’ve always done exactly as I wanted, Duchamp. You were always supposed to
break away from Kursk.”
“Liar.”
“I have been given other, more
important objectives than ensuring a third-rate ship with its fifth-rate crew
stay loyal to the Organization. You have never had any free will since you
arrived in the New California system. You still don’t. After all, you don’t
really think there was only one bomb planted on board, do you?”
Erick watched the Villeneuve’s
Revenge lift from its cradle. The starship’s thermo-dump panels extended,
ion thrusters took over from the verniers. It rose unhurriedly from the
spaceport. When he switched his collar sensors to high resolution he could see
the black hexagon on the fuselage where plate 8-92-K was missing.
He didn’t understand it, Duchamp
was making no attempt to flee. It was almost as if he was obeying traffic
control, departing calmly along an assigned vector. Had the crew been
possessed? Small loss to the Confederation.
His collar sensors refocused on the
docking bay he was approaching, a dark circular recess in the spaceport’s
gridiron exterior. It was a maintenance bay, twice as wide as an ordinary bay.
The clipper-class starship, Tigara, which sat on the docking cradle
seemed unusually small in such surroundings.
Erick fired his manoeuvring pack jets
to take him down towards the Tigara. There were no lights on in the bay;
all the gantries and multi-segment arms were folded back against the walls.
Utility umbilicals were jacked in, and an airlock tube had mated with the
starship’s fuselage; but apart from that there was no sign of any activity.
The silicon hull showed signs of
long-term vacuum exposure—faded lettering, micrometeorite impact scuffs,
surface layer ablation stains—all indicating hull plates long overdue for
replacement. He drifted over the blurred hexagons until he was above the EVA
airlock, and datavised the hatch control processor to cycle and open. If anyone
was on board, they would know about him now. But there were no datavised
questions, no active sensor sweeps.
The hatch slid open, and Erick
glided inside.
Clipper-class starships were
designed to provide a speedy service between star systems, carrying small
high-value cargoes. Consequently, as much of their internal volume as possible
was given over to cargo space. There was only one life-support capsule, which
accommodated an optimum crew of three. That was the principal reason Erick had
chosen the Tigara. In theory, he would be able to fly it solo.
Most of the starship systems were
powered down. He kept his SII suit on as he moved through the two darkened
lower decks to the bridge. As soon as he was secured in the captain’s
acceleration couch he accessed the flight computer and ordered a full status
review.
It could have been a lot better. Tigara
was in the maintenance bay for a complete refit. One of the fusion
generators was inoperative, two energy patterning nodes were dead, heat
exchangers were operating dangerously short of required levels, innumerable
failsoft components had been allowed to decay below their safety margins.
None of the maintenance work had
even been started. The owners hadn’t been prepared to commit that much money
while the quarantine was in force.
Dear Lord, Erick thought, the Villeneuve’s
Revenge was in better condition than this.
He datavised the flight computer to
disengage the bay’s airlock tube, then initiated a flight prep procedure. The Tigara
took a long time to come on-line. At every stage he had to order backup
sequences to take over, or override safety programs, or re-route power
supplies. He didn’t even bother with the life-support functions, all he wanted
was power in the energy patterning nodes and secondary drive tubes.
With a fusion generator active, he
ordered some sensor clusters to deploy. An image of the bay filled his mind,
overlaid with fragile status graphics. He scanned the electromagnetic spectrum
for any traffic, but there was only the background hash of cosmic radiation.
Nobody was saying anything to anybody. What he wanted was someone asking
Ethenthia what was happening, why they’d gone off the air. A ship close by that
could help.
Nothing.
Erick fired the emergency release
pins which the docking cradle’s load clamps were gripping. Verniers sent out a
hot deluge of gas which shimmered across the bay’s walls, shaking loose
blankets of thermal insulation from the gantries. Tigara rose a metre
off its cradle, straining at the nest of umbilical hoses jacked into its rear
fuselage. The snapfree couplings began to break, sending the hoses writhing.
The starship was low on cryogenic
fuel; he couldn’t afford to waste delta-V reserve aligning himself on an ideal
vector. The astrogration program produced a series of options for him.
None of them were what he’d been
hoping for. So what else was new?
The last of the umbilicals broke,
and the Tigara lurched up out of the bay. Erick ordered the flight
computer to extend the communications array and align it on Golmo and the
Edenist habitats orbiting there. Sensor clusters began to sink down into their
recesses as energy poured into the patterning nodes.
The flight computer alerted him
that an SD platform was sweeping the ship with its radar. Then it relayed a
signal from traffic control into his neural nanonics.
“Is that you, Erick? We think it’s
you. Who else is this stupidly ballsy? This is Emonn Verona, Erick, and I’m
asking you: Don’t do it. That ship is completely fucked; I’ve got the CAB logs
in front of me. It can’t fly. You’re only going to hurt yourself, or worse.”
Erick transmitted a single message
to Golmo, then retracted the communications array down into its jump
configuration. The SD platform had locked on. Some of the patterning nodes were
producing very strange readings in the prejump diagnostic run-through. CAB
monitor programs flashed up jump proscription warnings. He switched them off.
“Game over, Erick. Either return to
the docking bay or you join our comrades in the beyond. You don’t want that.
Where there’s life, there’s hope. Right? Of all people, you must believe that.”
Erick ordered the flight computer
to activate the jump sequence.
Chapter 06
The hellhawk Socratous was a
flat V-shaped mechanical spacecraft with a grey-white fuselage made up from
hundreds of different component casings, a veritable jigsaw of mismatched
equipment, not all of it astronautic. Two long engine nacelles were affixed to
the stern, transparent tubes filled with a heavy opaque gas which fluoresced
its way through the spectrum in a three-minute cycle.
It was an impressive sight as it
slid down out of the starfield for a landing on Valisk’s docking ledge. Had it
been real, it would be capable of taking on an entire squadron of Confederation
Navy ships with its exotic weapons.
The illusion popped as a crew bus
rolled across the ledge towards it. Socratous reverted to a muddy-brown
egg-shape with a crew toroid wrapped around its midsection. Rubra could just
see two small ridges on the rear quarter which hadn’t been there before. They
corresponded roughly with the nacelles of the fantasy starship. He wondered if
the tumours would be benign. Did the energistic ability prevent metastasis from
exploding inside possessed bodies as the wished-for changes became less
illusion and cells multiplied to obey the will of the dominant soul? It seemed
an awfully complex requirement for such a crude power, modifying the molecular
structure of DNA and taming the mitosis process. The apparent milieux of their
energistic ability was blasting holes through solid walls and contorting matter
into new shapes; he’d never seen any demonstrations of subtlety.
Perhaps the whole possession
problem would burn itself out in an orgy of irreversible cancer. Few of the
returned souls were content with the physical appearance of the bodies they had
claimed.
How superbly ironic, Rubra thought,
that vanity could be the undoing of entities who had acquired near-godlike
powers. It was also a dangerous prospect, once they realized what was
happening. Those people remaining free would become even more valuable, the
attempts to possess them ever more desperate. And Edenism would be the last
castle to besiege.
He decided not to mention the
prospect to the Kohistan Consensus. It was another small private advantage; no
one else in the Confederation had such a unique and extensive vantage point of
the possessed and their behaviour as him. He wasn’t sure if he could exploit
the knowledge, but he wasn’t going to give it away until he was certain.
A sub-routine of his principal
personality was designated to observe the aberrant melanomata and carcinomas
developing on the possessed inside the habitat. If the growths turned malignant
the current situation would change drastically right across the Confederation.
The crew bus had left the Socratous
to trundle back across the ledge. Kiera and about forty of her cronies were
flocking into a reception lounge. When the bus docked, it disgorged about
thirty-five Deadnight kids. Eager besotted youngsters with red handkerchiefs
worn proudly around their ankles and wonder in their eyes that they’d reached
the promised land after so much difficulty.
Damn it, you have to stop these
flights, Rubra complained to
the Kohistan Consensus. That’s nearly two thousand victims this week. There
must be something you can do.
We really cannot interdict every
hellhawk flight. Their objective does not affect the overall balance of
strategic events, and is relatively harmless.
Not to these kids it isn’t!
Agreed. But we cannot be
everyone’s keeper. The effort and risk involved in arranging clandestine
rendezvous to pick up the Deadnights is disproportionate to the reward.
In other words, as long as the
hellhawks are busy with this, they can’t cause much trouble elsewhere.
Correct. Unfortunately.
And you used to call me a
heartless bastard.
Everybody is suffering from the
effects of possession. Until we discover a solution to the entire problem, all
we can hope for is to reduce it to an absolute minimum wherever possible.
Right. I’d like to point out
that when Kiera reaches the magic number, it’s me who is going to be the one
suffering.
That is some time off yet.
Asteroid settlements have been alerted to these clandestine rendezvous flights.
There should be less of them in future.
I bloody well knew I could never
trust you lot.
We did not inflict any of this
on you, Rubra. And you are quite welcome to transfer into the neural strata of
one of our habitats should it look like Kiera Salter is preparing to shift
Valisk out of this universe.
I’ll keep it in mind. But I
don’t think you’ll need to welcome this particular prodigal. Dariat is almost
ready. Once he comes over, it’ll be Kiera who is going to have to worry about
where I shift Valisk.
Your attempt at subversion is a
risky strategy.
That’s how I built Magellanic
Itg, through sheer balls. It’s also why I rejected you. You don’t have any.
This is not getting us anywhere.
If it works, I’ll be able to
start fighting back on a level you can’t conceive of. Risk makes you alive,
that’s what you never understood. That’s the difference between us. And don’t
try coming over all smarmy superior with me. It’s me who’s got an idea, me who
stands a chance. Have you got any suggestions to make, an alternative?
No.
Exactly. So don’t lecture me.
We would urge caution, though.
Please.
Urge away.
Rubra dismissed the affinity link
with his usual contempt. Circumstances might have forced him into an alliance
with his old culture; but all the renewed contact had done was convince him how
right he had been to reject them all those centuries ago.
He switched his primary routine’s
attention inward. The group of newly arrived Deadnights had been split up and
taken away to be opened for possession. A temporary village had sprung up at
the base of the northern endcap, extravagant tents and small cosy cottages for
the possessed to dwell in. A smaller version of the camps which ringed the
starscraper foyers halfway down the interior. The teams Kiera had working to
make the starscrapers safe were finding progress difficult. And in any case,
the possessed didn’t entirely trust the areas they claimed to have secured.
Rubra had never stopped his continual harassment. Nearly ten per cent of the servitor
population had been killed as he deployed them on sneak attacks, but he still
managed to eliminate a couple of possessed every day.
Separated from their companions,
the Deadnights were easily overwhelmed. Piteous screams and pleas hung over the
village like smog.
One of Rubra’s newest monitor
routines alerted him to a minuscule electrical discrepancy within the
starscraper where Tolton was hiding. He had discovered electricity was the key
to locating Bonney Lewin when she was using her energistic ability to fox his
visual observation. A series of extremely sensitive routines which now
monitored his own biolectric patterns could sometimes detect a possessed from
the backwash of their energistic power. In effect, the entire polyp structure
had become an electronic warfare detector. It was hardly reliable, but he was
constantly refining the routines.
He tracked down the wraithish
presence to the twenty-seventh floor vestibule where it was moving towards the
stairwell muscle membrane door. Visually, the vestibule was empty. At least,
according to his local autonomic sub-routines it was. The current in one of the
organic conductor cables buried behind the wall fluctuated subtly.
Rubra reduced the power to the
electrophorescent cells covering the polyp ceiling. The visual image remained
the same for a couple of seconds, then the ceiling darkened. It should have
been instantaneous. Whatever was causing the electrical disturbance stopped
moving.
He opened a channel to Tolton’s
processor block. “Get going, boy. They’re coming for you.”
Tolton rolled off the bed where
he’d been dozing. He’d been staying in the apartment for five days. The
original occupant’s wardrobes had been ransacked for a new ensemble. He’d
accessed a good number of the MF and bluesense fleks in the lounge. And he’d
sampled all of the imported delicacies in the kitchen, washing them down with
fine wines and a lot of Norfolk Tears. For a suffering social poet, he’d
adapted to hedonism with the greatest of ease. Small wonder there was a
graceless scowl on his face as he snatched up his leather trousers and wriggled
his bulk into them.
“Where are they?”
“Ten floors above you,” Rubra
assured him. “Don’t worry, you’ve got plenty of time. I’ve got your exit route
ready for you.”
“I’ve been thinking, maybe you
ought to steer me toward some weapons hardware. I could start evening up the
score a little.”
“Let’s just concentrate on the
essentials, shall we? Besides, if you get close enough to a possessed to use a
weapon, they’re close enough to turn it against you.”
Tolton addressed the ceiling. “You
think I can’t handle it?”
“I thank you for the offer, son,
but there are just too many of them. You staying free is my victory against all
of them, don’t blow it for me.”
Tolton clipped the processor block
to his belt and fastened his straggly hair back in a ponytail. “Thanks, Rubra.
We all got it way wrong about you. I know it don’t mean shit to you probably,
but when this is over, I’m going to tell the whole wide Confederation what you
done.”
“That’s one MF album I’ll buy.
First in a long time.”
Tolton stood in front of the
apartment’s door, breathed in like a yogamaster, flexed his shoulders like a
sport pro warming up, nodded briskly, and said: “Okay, let’s hustle.”
Rubra felt an obdurate burst of
sympathy and, strangely enough, pride as the poet stepped out into the
vestibule. When Kiera started her takeover he assumed Tolton would last a
couple of days. Now he was one of only eighty non-possessed left. One of the
reasons he’d survived was because he followed instructions to the letter; in
short, he trusted Rubra. And Rubra was damned if Bonney would get him now.
The invisible energistic swirl was
on the move again, descending the stairwell. Rubra started to modify the output
of the electrophorescent cells in the ceiling. HELLO, BONNEY, he printed. I
HAVE A PROPOSITION FOR YOU.
The swirl stopped again.
COME ON, TALK TO ME. WHAT HAVE YOU
GOT TO LOSE?
He waited. A column of air
shimmered silver, as if a giant cocoon had sprung up out of the polyp. Rubra
experienced it most as a slackening of pressure in the local sub-routines; a
pressure he hadn’t even been aware of until then. Then the silver air lost its
lustre, darkening to khaki. Bonney Lewin stood on the stairs, her Enfield
searching for hazards.
“What proposition?”
ABANDON YOUR CURRENT VICTIM, I WILL
GIVE YOU A BETTER ONE.
“I doubt it.”
DOESN’T KIERA WANT DARIAT ANYMORE?
Bonney gave the glowing letters a
thoughtful stare. “You’re trying to sucker me.”
NO. THIS IS GENUINE.
“You’re lying. Dariat hates you;
he’s totally bonkers about beating seven bells out of you. If we help him,
he’ll succeed.”
SO WHY HASN’T HE COME TO YOU FOR
HELP?
“Because he’s . . . weird.”
NO. IT IS BECAUSE USING YOU TO
DEFEAT ME WOULD MEAN HAVING TO SHARE THE POWER WHICH WOULD RESULT FROM HIS
DOMINATION OF THE NEURAL STRATA. HE WANTS IT ALL. HE HAS SPENT THIRTY YEARS
WAITING FOR AN OPPORTUNITY LIKE THIS. DO YOU THINK HE WILL GIVE THAT AWAY? AND
AFTER ME, KIERA IS GOING TO BE NEXT. THEN PROBABLY YOU.
“So you hand him over to us. That
still doesn’t make any sense; either way, we get to nail you.”
DARIAT AND I ARE PLAYING OUR OWN
GAME. I DO NOT EXPECT YOU TO UNDERSTAND. BUT I DO NOT INTEND TO LOSE TO HIM.
She worried at a fingernail. “I
don’t know.”
EVEN WITH MY HELP, HE WILL BE
DIFFICULT TO CATCH. DO YOU FEAR FAILURE?
“Don’t try working that angle on
me, it’s pathetic.”
VERY WELL. SO DO YOU ACCEPT?
“Difficult one. I really don’t
trust you. But it would be a superb hunt, you’ve got me there. I haven’t had a
single sniff of that tricky little boyo yet, and I’ve been trying for long
enough.” She shouldered her rifle. “All right, we’ve got a deal. But just
remember, if you are trying to get me to walk into some ten-thousand-volt power
cable, I can still come back. Kiera’s recording is hauling in thousands of
morons. I’ll return in one of them, and then you’ll wish all you had to worry
about was Dariat.”
UNDERSTOOD. FIND A PROCESSOR BLOCK
AND SWITCH IT TO ITS BASIC ROUTINES, THAT SHOULD KEEP IT FUNCTIONING. I WILL
UPDATE YOU ON HIS LOCATION.
Dariat walked along the shoreline
of the circumfluous saltwater reservoir as the light tube languished to a
spectacular golden-orange. The cove was backed by a decaying earth bluff which
tipped an avalanche of the pink Tallok-aboriginal grass onto the sand. Curving
outgrowths of the xenoc plant resembled a meandering tideline, which gave him
the impression of walking along a spit between two different coloured seas. The
only sounds were of the water lapping against the sand, and the birds crying
out as they flew back to land for the night.
He had walked here many times as a
child, an era when being alone meant happiness. Now he welcomed the solitude
again; it gave him the mindspace to think, to formulate new subversion routines
to insert into the neural strata; and he was free of Kiera and her greed and
shallow ambitions. That second factor was becoming a dominant one. They had
been looking for him ever since the Edenists destroyed the industrial stations.
With both his knowledge of the habitat and energistically enhanced affinity it
was absurdly easy to elude them. Few ever ventured down to the vast reservoir,
preferring to cling to the camps around starscraper foyers. Without the tubes,
it was a long journey across the grassland where malevolent servitor creatures
lay in wait for the negligent.
Trouble, Rubra announced.
Dariat ignored him. He could hide
himself from the possessed easily enough. None of them knew enough about
affinity to access the neural strata properly. As a consequence he no longer
bothered hiding himself from Rubra anymore, nor did he bother with the
linen-suited persona. It was all too stressful. The price of release came in
the form of taunts and nerve games emanating from Rubra with unimaginative
regularity.
She’s found you, Dariat, she’s
coming for you. And boy is she pissed.
Certain he’d regret it, Dariat
asked: Who?
Bonney. There’s nine of them
heading right at you in a couple of trucks. I think Kiera was saying something
about returning with your head. Apparently, attachment to your body was considered
optional.
Dariat opened his affinity link
with the neural strata just wide enough to hitch onto the observational
sub-routines. Sure enough, two of the rugged trucks which the rentcops used
were arrowing across the rosy grassland. “Shit.” They were heading straight for
the cove, with about five kilometres left to go. How the hell did she find
me?
Beats me.
Dariat stared straight up,
following the line of the coast which looped behind the light tube. Is there
someone above me with a high-rez sensor?
If there is, I can’t spot them.
In any case, I doubt a sensor would work for a possessed.
Binoculars? Hell, it hardly
matters.
He couldn’t see the trucks with his
eyes yet, the tall grass hid them. And his mind couldn’t perceive their
thoughts, they were too far away. So just how had they found him?
There is a tube station at the
end of the cove, Rubra said. They’ll
never be able to catch you in that. I can take you to anywhere in the habitat.
Thanks. And you’ll be able to
run a thousand volts through me as soon as I step inside a carriage. Or had you
forgotten?
I don’t want you blown into the
beyond. You know that. I’ve made my offer, and it stands. Come into the neural
strata. Join your mind with me. Together we will annihilate them. Valisk can be
purged. We will take them to dimensions where simply existing is an agony for
them. Both of us will have revenge.
You’re crazy.
Make your mind up. I can hide
you for a while while you decide. Is it to be me? Or is it to be Kiera?
Dariat was still receiving the image
of the trucks from the sensitive cells. They were rocking madly over the uneven
ground as the drivers held them at their top speed.
I think I’ll take a while longer
to make up my mind. Dariat
started jogging for the tube station. After a minute, the trucks swung around
to intercept him. “Bloody hell.” Horgan’s body was reasonably fit, but he was
only fifteen years old. Dariat’s imagination bestowed him with athlete’s legs,
bulky slabs of muscle packed tight under oil-glossed skin. His speed picked up.
I wonder what that kind of
overdrive does to your blood sugar levels? I mean, the power has to come from
somewhere. Surely you’re not converting the energistic overspill from the
beyond directly into protein?
Save the science class till
later. He could see the
station ahead of him, a squat circular polyp structure bordering the bluff,
like some kind of storage tank half-buried in the sand. The trucks were only a
kilometre away. Bonney was standing up in the passenger seat of the lead
vehicle, aiming her Enfield at him over the windscreen. Motes of white fire
punched into the sand around him. He ducked down for the last fifty metres,
using the bluff as cover as he scuttled for the station entrance.
Inside, two broad escalators
spiralled around each other, their steps moving sedately. A garishly coloured
tubular hologram punctured the air up the centre of the shaft, adverts sliding
along it. Dariat leapt onto the down escalator and sprinted recklessly, hands
barely touching the rail.
He made it to the bottom just as
the trucks braked outside; Bonney charged towards the entrance. There was a
carriage waiting on the station, a shiny white aluminum bullet. Dariat stopped,
panting heavily, staring at the open door.
Get in!
Rubra’s mental voice contained a
strong intimation of alarm, which Dariat could hardly credit. If you’re
fucking me, I’ll come back. I’ll promise myself to Anstid for that one wish to
be granted.
Imagine my terror. I’ve told
you, I need you intact and cooperative. Now get in.
Dariat closed his eyes and took a
step forwards, directly into the carriage. The door slid shut behind him, and
there was a faint vibration as it started accelerating along the track. He
opened his eyes.
See? Rubra taunted. Not such a bogey man after
all.
Dariat sat down and took some deep
breaths to calm his racing heart. He used the sensitive cells to watch an
apoplectic Bonney Lewin jump down from the empty platform to fire her Enfield
along the dark tunnel. She was screaming obscenities. The accompanying hunters
were standing well back. One of her boots was treading on the magnetic guide
rail.
Fry her, Dariat said. Now!
Oh, no. This is much more fun.
This way I get to find out if the dead can have heart attacks.
You are a complete bastard.
That’s right. And to prove it,
I’m going to show you Anastasia’s secret now. The one thing she never showed
you.
Dariat was instantly wary. More
lies.
Not this time. Don’t tell me you
don’t want to find out. I know you, Dariat. Fully. I’ve always known. I know
what she means to you. I know how much she means to you. Your memory of her was
strong enough to power a grudge over thirty years. That’s almost inhuman,
Dariat. I respect it enormously. But it leaves you wide open to me. Because you
want to know, don’t you? There’s something I’ve got, or heard, or saw, that you
didn’t. A little segment of Anastasia Rigel you don’t have. You won’t be able
to live with that knowledge.
I’ll be able to ask her soon.
Her soul is waiting for me in the beyond. When I’ve dealt with you, I’ll go to
her, and we’ll be together again.
Soon will be too late.
You’re unbelievable, you know
that?
Good. I’ll take you there.
Whatever you like. Dariat pushed his weariness behind the thought,
showing just how unconcerned he was. Behind that, clutched away from the
bravado and outward confidence, his teenage self huddled in worry. That same
self which so idolized her. Now there was the chance, the remotest possibility
that the image was flawed, less than honest. The doubt cut into him, weakening
the core of resolution which had supported him for so terribly long.
Anastasia would never keep anything
from him. Would she? She loved him, she said so. The last thing she ever said,
ever wrote.
Rubra guided the tube carriage to a
starscraper lobby station and opened the door. It’s waiting on the
thirty-second floor.
Dariat glanced cautiously out onto
the little station and the wide passage which led to the lobby itself. His mind
could sense the thoughts of the possessed camped outside the lobby. No one
showed any interest in him. He hurried across the floor to the bank of lifts in
the centre, reaching them unnoticed.
The lift deposited him at the
thirty-second-floor vestibule. A completely normal residential section;
twenty-four mechanical doors leading to apartments, and three muscle membranes
for the stairwells. One of the mechanical doors slid open to show a darkened
living room.
Dariat could sense someone inside,
a dozing mind, its thought currents placid. When he tried to use the
observation sub-routines for the bedroom he found he couldn’t, Rubra had wiped
them.
Oh, no, my boy, you go right in
there and face your fate like a man.
Dariat flinched. But . . . one
unaware non-possessed. How bad could it be? He walked into the apartment,
ordering the electrophorescent cells to full intensity. Thankfully, they
responded.
It was a woman who lay on the big
bed, a duvet had worked downwards to reveal her shoulders. Her skin was very
black, with the minute crinkles which spelt out the onset of middle age and the
start of weight problems for anyone without much geneering in their ancestry. A
tangle of finely braided jet-black hair was fanned out over the pillows, every
strand tipped with a moondust-white bead.
She groaned sleepily as the light
came on, and turned over. Despite a face which cellulite was busy inflating,
she had a petit nose.
NO! For one moment horror claimed
his senses. She was similar to Anastasia. Features, colour, even the age was
almost right. If a medical team had gone out to the tepee, they might have
reanimated the body, a hospital might conceivably have used extensive gene
therapy to regenerate the dead brain cells. It could be done, for the President
of Govcentral or Kulu’s heir apparent, the effort would be made. But not a
Starbridge girl regarded as vermin by the personality of the habitat in which
she dwelt. The cold shock subsided.
Whoever she was, as soon as she saw
him, she screamed.
“It’s all right,” Dariat said. He
couldn’t even hear his own voice above her distraught wails.
“Rubra! One of them’s here. Rubra,
help me.”
“No,” Dariat said. “I’m not. Well .
. .”
“Rubra! RUBRA.”
“Please,” Dariat implored.
That silenced her.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” he
said. “I’m running from them myself.”
“Uh huh?” Her gaze darted to the
door.
“Really. Rubra brought me here,
too.”
The duvet was readjusted. Slim
bronze and silver bracelets tinkled as she moved.
Dariat’s chill returned. They were
exactly the same kind of bracelets Anastasia wore. “Are you a Starbridge?”
She nodded, wide-eyed.
Wrong question, Rubra said. Ask her what her name is.
He hated himself. For giving in,
for playing to Rubra’s rules. “Who are you?”
“Tatiana,” she gulped. “Tatiana
Rigel.”
Rubra’s mocking, triumphant
laughter shook his skull from the inside. Got it now, boy? Meet Anastasia’s
little sister.
Another day, another press
conference. At least this new technology had progressed beyond flashbulbs; Al
had always hated them back in Chicago. More than once he had been photographed
raising a hand to ward off the brilliant bursts of light; photos which the papers
always ran, because it looked as if he were trying to hide, confirming his
guilt.
He had held the press conference in
the Monterey Hilton’s big ballroom, sitting at a long table with his back to
the window. The idea was that the reporters would see the formation of
victorious fleet ships which had just returned from Arnstadt, and were holding
station five kilometres off the asteroid. Leroy Octavius said it should make an
impressive backdrop for the dramatic news announcement.
Except the starships weren’t quite
in the right coordinate, so they were only just visible when rotation did bring
them into view; the reporters had to look around the side of the table to see
them. And everybody knew the Organization had conquered Arnstadt and Kursk, it
wasn’t new even though this made it sort of official.
Drama and impact, that was the sole
purpose. So Al sat at the long table with its inappropriate vases of flowers;
Luigi Balsmao on one side, and a couple of other ship captains on the other. He
told the reporters how easy it had been to break open Arnstadt’s SD network,
the eagerness of the population to accept the Organization as a government
after a “minimum number” of key administrative people had been possessed. How
the star system’s economy was turning around.
“Did you use antimatter, Al?” Gus
Remar asked. A weary veteran of these affairs now, he reckoned he knew what
liberties he could take. Capone did have a weird sense of honour operating;
nobody got blasted for trying to work an angle, only outright opposition earned
his disapprobation.
“That’s a dumb kinda question,
pal,” Al replied, keeping the scowl from his face. “What do you want to ask
that for? We got plenty of interesting dope on how the Organization is curing
all sorts of medical problems which the non-possessed bring to our lieutenants.
You people, you always look for the bad side. It’s like a goddamn obsession
with you.”
“Antimatter is the biggest horror
the Confederation knows, Al. People are bound to be interested in the rumours.
Some of the ships’ crews say they fired antimatter powered combat wasps. And
the industrial stations here are producing antimatter confinement systems. Have
you got a production station, Al?”
Leroy Octavius, who was standing
behind Al, leaned forwards and whispered something in his ear. Some of the
humour returned to Al’s stony face. “I can neither confirm nor deny the
Organization has access to invincible weapons.”
It didn’t stop them from asking
again and again. He lost the press conference then. There wasn’t any chance to read
out the dope Leroy had prepared on the medical bonus, and how they’d prevented
the kind of food shortages on Arnstadt which were being reported as affecting
other possessed worlds.
Asked at the end if he was planning
another invasion, Al just growled: “Wait and see,” then walked out.
“Don’t worry about it, we’ll
embargo the whole conference,” Leroy said as they took a lift down to the
bottom of the hotel.
“They ought to show some goddamn
respect,” Al grunted. “If it wasn’t for me they’d be possessed and screaming
inside their own heads. Those bastards never fucking change.”
“You want us to lean on them a
little?” Bernhard Allsop asked.
“No. That would be stupid. The only
reason the Confederation news companies take our reports is because they’re
from non-possessed.” Al hated it when Bernhard tried to be tough and
demonstrate his loyalty. I should have him wasted, he’s becoming a complete
pain in the ass.
But wasting people wasn’t so easy
these days. They’d come back in another body, and carry a grudge the size of
Mount Washington.
Goddamn the problems kept
hitting on him.
The lift doors opened on the
hotel’s basement, a windowless level given over to environmental machinery,
large pumps, and condensation-smeared tanks. A boxing ring had been set up at
the centre, surrounded by the usual training paraphernalia of exercise bikes,
histeps, weights, and punch bags: Malone’s gym.
Whenever he wanted to loosen up, Al
came down here. He’d always enjoyed sports back in Chicago; going to the game
was an event in those days. One he missed. If he could bring back the
Organization, and the music, and the dancing from that time, he reasoned, then
why not the sports, too?
Avram Harwood had run a check on
professions listed in the Organization’s files, and found Malone, who claimed
to have worked as a boxing trainer in New York during the 1970s.
Al marched into the gym area
trailed by five of his senior lieutenants, Avram Harwood, and a few other
hangers-on like Bernhard. It was noisy in the basement anyway, with the pumps
thrumming away, and in the gym with music playing and men pounding away at
leather punch bags you had to shout to be heard. This was the way it should be:
the smell of leather and sweat, grunts as sparring blows hit home, Malone
yelling out at his star pupils.
“How’s it going?” Al asked the
trainer.
Malone shrugged, his heavy face
showing complete misery. “Today’s people, they gone soft, Al. They don’t want
to hit each other, they think it’s immoral or something. We ain’t gonna find no
Ali or Cooper on this world. But I got a few contenders, kids who’ve had it
hard. They’re working out okay.” A fat finger indicated the two young men in
the ring. “Joey and Gulo, here, they could have what it takes.”
Al cast an eye over the two boxers
dancing around in the ring. Both of them were big, fit-looking kids, wearing
colourful protective gear. He knew enough about the basics to see they were
holding themselves right, though they were concentrating too much on defence.
“I’ll just watch awhile,” Al told
Malone.
“Sure thing, Al. Help yourself.
Hey! Gulo, close the left, the left, asswipe.”
Joey saw his opening and landed a
good right on Gulo’s face. Gulo went for a body lock, and both of them bounced
on the ropes.
“Break, break,” the ref cried.
Al pulled up a stool and gazed
contentedly at the two combatants. “All right, what’s the order of play for
today? Speak to me, Avvy.” The ex-mayor’s body twitches were getting worse, Al
noticed. And some of the weals still hadn’t healed over despite a couple of
attempts by Al’s possessed lieutenants to heal them. Al didn’t like having so
much resentment and hostility festering close by. But the guy sure knew how to
administrate; replacing him now would be a bitch.
“We now have fifteen delegations
from outsystem who have arrived,” Avram Harwood said. “They all want to see
you.”
“Outsystem, huh?” Al’s flagging
interest started to perk up. “What do they want?”
“Your assistance, basically,” Avram
said. He didn’t hide his displeasure.
Al ignored it. “For what?”
“All of them are from asteroid
settlements,” Patricia Mangano said. “The first bunch that came here are from
Toma, that’s in the Kolomna system. Their problem is that the asteroid only has
a population of ninety thousand. That gives them enough energistic power to
shift it out of this universe easily enough. But then they realized that
spending the rest of eternity inside a couple of modestly sized biosphere
caverns which are totally dependent on technology wasn’t exactly going to be a
whole load of fun. Especially when nearly a third of the possessed come from
pre-industrial eras.”
“Goddamn, this is what I’ve been
telling people all along,” Al said expansively. “There ain’t no point in
vanishing whole planets away, not until we got the Confederation licked.”
Several of the trainee boxers had
drifted over to stand close by. As if aware of the growing interest, Joey and
Gulo were increasing their efforts to knock each other senseless. Malone’s
rapid-fire monotone picked up momentum.
“So what has this got to do with
me?” Al asked.
“The Toma people want to move
everyone to Kolomna.”
“Je-zus!”
“They want our fleet to help them.
If we chose Kolomna as our next invasion target we will receive their total
cooperation for as long as you want it. Every industrial station in the system
will be given over to supporting the fleet, every starship captured will be
converted to carry weapons or troops, they’ll bring the planetary population
into order along Organization lines. They say they want to sign up as your
lieutenants.”
Al was flattered, it turned his
whole day around.
Out in the ring, both boxers were
perspiring heavily. Blood was trickling out of Gulo’s mouth. Joey’s left eye
was bruised. Cheers and whistles were swelling from the spectators.
“Risky,” Luigi said. “Kolomna is
First Admiral Aleksandrovich’s homeworld. He probably wouldn’t take too kindly
to it. I wouldn’t if I was him. Besides, we’re still getting things in order for
Toi-Hoi.”
Al rocked back on the stool and
materialized one of his Havanas, its end was already alight. “I’m not too worried
about that Admiral getting pissed with me, not with what I’ve got in store for
him. Any chance we can split the fleet, send some ships to Kolomna?”
“Sorry, boss, that’s some of the
bad news I’ve got for you,” Luigi said. “The Confederation is really hassling
us bad at Arnstadt. They’ve got voidhawks flying above both poles dropping
invisible bombs on the SD platforms in orbit. Stealth, the bastards call it.
We’re losing a shitload of hardware every day. And the non-possessed population
are putting up some resistance—quite a lot, actually. The new lieutenants we’ve
appointed are having to use a whole load of force to establish our authority.
It gives them a sense of independence, so we have to use the SD platforms to
make them see reason, too. Except the Confederation is knocking the platforms
out one at a time, so instead we gotta use starships to substitute, and they’re
just as vulnerable.”
“Well, fuck it, Luigi,” Al stormed.
“Are you telling me, we’re gonna lose?”
“No way!” an indignant Luigi
protested. “We’re launching our own patrols up above the poles. We’re hassling
them right back, Al. But it takes five or six of our ships to block one of
their goddamn voidhawks.”
“They’re bogging us down out
there,” Silvano Richmann said. “It’s quite deliberate. We’re also losing ships
out among Arnstadt’s settled asteroids. The voidhawks make lightning raids,
fling off a dozen combat wasps and duck away before we can do anything about
it. It’s a shitty way of fighting, Al, nothing is head on anymore.”
“Modern navies are built around the
concept of rapid tactical assault,” Leroy said. “Their purpose is to inflict
damage over a wide front so that you have to overstretch your defences. They’ve
adopted a guerilla policy to try and wear down our fleet.”
“Fucking cowards’ way of fighting,”
Silvano grumbled.
“It’ll get worse,” Leroy warned.
“Now they’ve seen how effective it is against Arnstadt, they’ll start doing it
here. New California’s SD network is just as vulnerable to stealth mines. Our
advantage is that the Organization is now up and running on the planet. We
don’t need to enforce it the way we do on Arnstadt. I think we only used a
ground strike ten times last week.”
“Twelve,” Emmet corrected. “But we
do have a lot of industrial capacity in orbit. I’d hate to lose much of it to a
stealth strike campaign. Our outer system asteroid settlements really aren’t
supplying us with anything like the material they should be, production simply
doesn’t match capacity at all.”
“That’s because we essentially have
the same problem as the outsystem delegations,” Leroy said.
“Go on,” Al said glumly; he was
rolling the cigar absently between his fingers, its darkened tip pointing down.
But he still hadn’t taken his eyes off the fight. Joey was sagging now, swaying
dazedly, while the blood from Gulo’s face was flowing freely down his chest to
splatter the floor of the ring. No bell was going to be rung; it wouldn’t
finish now until one of them fell.
“Every possessed wants to live on a
planet,” Leroy said. “Asteroids don’t have an adequate population base to
sustain a civilization for eternity. We’ve started to see a lot of inter-orbit
craft heading towards New California from the settlements. And for every
possessed on their way, there are another ten waiting for the next ship.”
“Goddamnit,” Al shouted. “When
those skid-row assholes get here, you send them right back where they came
from. We need those asteroid factories working at full steam ahead. You got
that?”
“I’ll notify SD Command,” Leroy
said.
“Make sure they know I ain’t fucking
joking.”
“Will do.”
Al relit his cigar by glaring at
it. “Okay, so, Luigi, when can we start to take out the Toi-Hoi system?”
Luigi shrugged. “I’ll be honest
with you, Al, our original timetable ain’t looking too good here.”
“Why not?”
“We thought we’d almost double the
fleet size with Arnstadt’s ships. Which we have done. But then we need a lot of
them to keep order in that system, and reliable crews are getting hard to find.
Then there’s Kursk. We made a mistake with that one, Al, the place ain’t worth
a bucket of warm spit. It’s those hillbilly redneck farmers. They just won’t
roll over.”
“That’s where Mickey is right now,”
Silvano said. “He’s trying to run an offensive which will bring them to heel.
It’s not easy. The tricky bastards have taken to the countryside. They’re
hiding in trees and caves, a whole load of places the satellite sensors can’t
find them. And the Confederation is hitting us big-time with those stealth
weapons, like Arnstadt was just a warm-up. We’re losing three or four ships a day.”
“I think Luigi is right when he
said we made a mistake invading Kursk,” Emmet said. “It’s costing us a bundle,
and returning zippo. I say pull the fleet out; let the possessed on the ground
take care of the planet in their own time.”
“That’ll mean the Organization
won’t have any clout there,” Patricia said. “Once everyone’s possessed, they’ll
snatch it clean out of the universe.”
“The only thing it ever gave to us
was propaganda,” Leroy said. “We can’t work that angle anymore. Emmet’s right.
I don’t think we should be aiming at any planet lower than stage four, one that
can replace our losses, as a minimum requirement.”
“That sounds solid to me,” Al
agreed. “I don’t like losing Kursk, but spelt out like that I don’t see that
we’ve got one whole hell of a choice. Luigi, get Mickey back here, tell him to
bring all the ships and as many of our soldiers as he can. I want to go for
Toi-Hoi as soon as you can load up with supplies. People will think we’ve
stalled otherwise; and it’s important to keep the momentum going.”
“You got it, boss. I’d like to send
Cameron Leung as the messenger, if you ain’t using him. It’ll be the quickest
way, cut down on any more of our losses.”
“Sure, no problem. Send him
pronto.” Al blew a smoke ring at the distant ceiling. “Anything else?”
Leroy and Emmet gave each other a
resigned look. “There’s a lot of currency cheating going on,” Emmet said. “I
suppose you could call it forgery.”
“Je-zus, I thought you rocket
scientists had that all figured out.”
“Foolproof, you said,” Silvano said
with a demon’s grin.
“It should have been,” Emmet
insisted. “Part of it is due to the way it’s being implemented. Our soldiers
aren’t being entirely honest about the amount of time the possessed are
devoting to redeeming their energistic debts. People are starting to complain.
There’s a lot of restlessness building up down there, Al. You’re going to have
to make it clear to the lieutenants how important it is to stick with the
rules. The economy we’ve rigged up is shaky enough already without suffering this
confidence crisis. If it fails, then we lose control and the planet goes wild,
just like Kursk. You can’t use the SD platforms to waste everyone who disagrees
with us; we need to be subtle about how we keep the majority in line.”
“All right, all right.” Al waved a
hand, nettled at the schoolmaster tone Emmet was using.
“Based on what we’ve seen so far,
I’m not sure a wild possessed population could even feed themselves. Certainly
the cities would have to be abandoned as soon as the supply infrastructure
collapses. You do need a large area of land under cultivation to support a city
like San Angeles.”
“Will you cut this crap. I
fucking understand, okay? What I want to know is, what are you going to do
about it?”
“It’s about time you met with the
groundside lieutenants again, Al,” Leroy said. “We can build on the fleet’s
return, show how together we are up here, how they’d be nothing without us.
Make them toe the line.”
“Oh, Jesus H. Christ, not another
fucking tour. I just got back!”
“You’re in charge of two star
systems, Al,” Leroy said matter-of-factly. “There are some things which have to
be done.”
Al winced. The fatboy manager was
right, as goddamn always. This wasn’t a game to be picked up when he felt like
it, this was different from before. In Chicago he’d climbed on the back of the
power structure to advance himself; now he was the structure. That was when he
finally realized the responsibility, and enormity, of what he’d created.
If the Organization crashed,
millions—living and resurrected—would fall beside him, their hopes smashed on
the rocks of his selfish intransigence. Alcatraz was the result of his last
brush with hubris. Alcatraz would be bliss compared to the suffering focused on
him should he fail again.
The fight which was limping to its
conclusion was no longer the centre of attention; most of the possessed in the
gym were staring at him strangely. They could see the muddle and horror in his
mind. Leroy and Avram were waiting, puzzled by the sudden, uneasy silence.
“Sure thing, Leroy,” Al said
meekly. “I know what I’m in charge of. And I ain’t never been scared of doing
what has to be done. Remember that. So set up that tour. You got that?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Makes a fucking change. Right, you
guys all know what you gotta do. Do it.”
Gulo landed one final blow in
Joey’s stomach which sent him staggering backwards to collapse in a corner.
Malone hopped over the ropes to examine the fallen man. Gulo stood over them,
uncertain what to do next. Blood was dripping swiftly from his chin.
“Okay, kid,” Malone said. “That’s
it for the day.”
Al flicked his cigar away and stood
by the ropes. He beckoned Gulo over. “You did pretty damn good out there, boy.
How long you been training?”
Gulo slipped a blood-soaked
gumshield from his mouth. “Nine days, Mr Capone, sir,” he mumbled. Little
flecks of blood splattered Al’s suit jacket as he wheezed painfully.
Al took hold of the kid’s head with
one hand and turned it from side to side, examining the bruises and cuts inside
the sparring helmet. He concentrated hard, feeling a cold tingle sweeping along
his arm to infect the kid’s face through his fingertips. The bleeding stopped,
and the grazed bruising deflated slightly. “You’ll do okay,” Al decided.
Jezzibella was lounging on the
circular bed. A wall-mounted holoscreen showed her an image of the gym relayed
by a sensor high in the ceiling. Emmet, Luigi, and Leroy clustered together,
discussing something in sober tones, their amplified murmurs filling the
bedroom.
“Hard day at the office, lover?”
Jezzibella asked. It was a persona of toughness wrapping a tender heart. Her
face was very serious, fine features slightly flushed. A longish bob hairstyle
cupped her cheeks.
“You saw it,” he said.
“Yeah.” She uncurled her legs and
stood up, wrestling with the fabric of her long silky white robe. There was no
belt, and it was open to the waist, allowing a very shapely navel to peek out.
“Come here, baby. Lie down.”
“Best goddamn offer I’ve had all
day.” He was bothered by his own lack of enthusiasm.
“Not that; you need to relax.”
Al grunted disparagingly, but did
as he was told. When he was lying on his back he stuck his hands behind his
head, frowning at the ceiling. “Crazy. Me of all people; I should’ve known what
was going to happen with the money. Everyone skims and everyone scams. What
made me think my soldiers were going to be square shooters?”
Jezzibella planted a foot on either
side of his hips, then sat down. Her robe’s fabric must have carried one hell
of a static charge, he guessed, there was no other reason why it should cling
to her skin at all the strategic zones. Her fingers dug into the base of his
neck, thumbs probing deep.
“Hey, what is this?”
“I’m trying to get you to relax,
remember? You’re so tense.” Her fingers were moving in circles now, almost
strumming his hot muscle cords.
“That’s good,” he admitted.
“I should really have some scented
oils to do this properly.”
“You want I should try and dream
some up?” He wasn’t too certain he could imagine smells the way he could
shapes.
“No. Improvising can be fun, you never
know what you might discover. Turn over, and get rid of your shirt.”
Al rolled over, yawning heavily. He
rested his chin on his hands as Jezzibella began to move her fingertips along
his spine.
“I dunno what I hate most,” Al
said. “Retreating from Kursk, or admitting how right that shitty slob Leroy
was.”
“Kursk was a strategic withdrawal.”
“Running away is running away,
doll. Don’t matter how you dress it up.”
“I think I’ve found something that
might help you with Arnstadt.”
“What’s that?”
She leaned over to the bedside
cabinet and picked up a small processor block, tapping the keyboard. “I only
saw this recording today. Leroy should have brought it to me earlier.
Apparently it’s all over the Confederation. We got it from one of the outsystem
delegations that arrived to plead with you.”
The holoscreen switched from the
gym to showing Kiera Salter lounging on her boulder.
“Yep, that certainly perks me up,”
Al said cheerfully.
Jezzibella slapped his rump. “Just
you behave, Al Capone. Forget her tits, listen to what she’s saying.”
He listened to the enticing words.
“She’s actually rather good,”
Jezzibella said. “Especially considering it’s AV only, no naughty sensory
activants to hammer home the message. I could have done it better, of course,
but then I’m a professional. But that recording is pulling in dissatisfied kids
from every asteroid settlement that ever received a copy. They call it
Deadnight.”
“So? Valisk is one of those
frigging freaky habitat places. She’s hardly gonna be a threat to us no matter
how many people go there.”
“It’s how they get there which
interests me. Kiera has managed to take over Valisk’s blackhawks, they call
them hellhawks.”
“Yeah?”
“Yes. And all they’re doing is
ferrying idiot kids to the habitat. She is facing the same problem as all the
possessed asteroid settlements. They’re not the kinds of places you want to
spend eternity in. My guess is that she’s trying to beef up Valisk’s population
so the ones already there don’t push to land on a planet. It makes sense. If
they did move, Kiera wouldn’t be top dog anymore.”
“So? I never said she was dumb.”
“Exactly. She’s organized. Not on
the scale you are, but she’s smart, she understands politics. She’d make an
excellent ally. We can supply her with people a lot faster than she can acquire
them through clandestine flights. And in return, she loans us a couple of
squadrons of these hellhawks, which the fleet desperately needs. They’d soon
put a stop to the Confederation’s stealth attacks.”
“Damn!” He shuffled around inside
the cage of her legs to see her poised above him, hands on her hips, content
smile on her lips. “That’s good, Jez. No it ain’t, it’s fucking brilliant.
Hell, you don’t need me, you could run this Organization by yourself.”
“Don’t be silly. I can’t do what
you do to me, not solitaire.”
He growled hungrily and reached for
the robe. Marie Skibbow’s golden face smiled down on them as more and more of
their clothing vanished, some into thin air, some into torn strips.
The First Admiral waited until
Captain Khanna and Admiral Lalwani seated themselves in front of his desk, then
datavised the desktop processor for a security level one sensenviron
conference. Six people were waiting around the oval table in the featureless
white bubble room which formed around him. Directly opposite Samual
Aleksandrovich was the Confederation Assembly President, Olton Haaker, with his
chief aide Jeeta Anwar next to him; the Kulu ambassador, Sir Maurice Hall, was
on her left, accompanied by Lord Elliot, a junior minister from the Kulu
Foreign Office; the Edenist ambassador, Cayeaux, and Dr Gilmore took the
remaining two chairs.
“This isn’t quite our usual
situation briefing today, Admiral,” President Haaker said. “The Kulu Kingdom
has made a formal request for military aid.”
Samual Aleksandrovich knew his face
was showing a grimace of surprise, his sensenviron image, however, retained a
more dignified composure. “I had no idea any of the Kingdom worlds were under
threat.”
“We are not facing any new
developments, Admiral,” Sir Maurice said. “The Royal Navy is proving most
effective in protecting our worlds from any strikes by possessed starships.
Even Valisk’s hellhawks have stopped swallowing into our systems to peddle
their damnable Deadnight subversion. And our planetary forces have contained all
the incursions quite successfully. With the sorry exception of Mortonridge, of
course. Which is why we are requesting your cooperation and assistance. We
intend to mount a liberation operation, and free the citizens who have been
possessed.”
“Impossible,” Samual said. “We have
no viable method of purging a body of its possessor. Dr Gilmore.”
“Unfortunately, the First Admiral
is correct,” the navy scientist said. “As we have found, forcing a returned
soul to relinquish a body it has captured is extremely difficult.”
“Not if they are placed in
zero-tau,” Lord Elliot said.
“But there are over two million
people on Mortonridge,” Samual said. “You can’t put that many into zero-tau.”
“Why not? It’s only a question of
scale.”
“You’d need . . .” Samual trailed
off as various tactical programs went primary in his neural nanonics.
“The help of the Confederation
Navy,” Lord Elliot concluded. “Exactly. We need to move a large number of
ground troops and matériel to Ombey. You have transport and assault starships
which aren’t really involved with enforcing the civil starflight quarantine.
We’d like them to be reassigned to the campaign. The combined resources of our
own military forces, our allies, and the Confederation Navy ought to be
sufficient to liberate Mortonridge.”
“Ground troops?”
“We will initially be providing the
Kingdom with half a million bitek constructs,” Ambassador Cayeaux said. “They
should be able to restrain individual possessed, and force them into a zero-tau
pod. Their deployment will insure the loss of human life is kept to a minimum.”
“You are going to help the
Kingdom?” Samual couldn’t be bothered to filter his surprise out of the
question. But . . . the Edenists and the Kingdom allied! At one level he was
pleased, prejudice can be abandoned if the incentive is great enough. What a
pity it had to be this, though.
“Yes.”
“I see.”
“The Edenist constructs will have
to be backed up by a considerable number of regular soldiers to hold the ground
they take,” Sir Maurice said. “We would also like you to assign two brigades of
Confederation Marines to the campaign.”
“I’ve no doubt your tactical
evaluations have convinced you about the plausibility of this liberation,”
Samual said. “But I must go on record as opposing it, and certainly I do not
wish to devote my forces to what will ultimately prove a futile venture. If
this kind of combined effort is to be made, it should at least be directed at a
worthwhile target.”
“His Majesty has said he will go to
any lengths to free his subjects from the suffering being inflicted on them,”
Lord Elliot said.
“Does his obligation only extend to
the living?”
“Admiral!” Haaker warned.
“I apologize. However you must
appreciate that I have a responsibility to the Confederation worlds as a
whole.”
“Which so far you have demonstrated
perfectly.”
“So far?”
“Admiral, you know the status quo
within the Confederation cannot be maintained indefinitely,” Jeeta Anwar said.
“We cannot afford it.”
“We have to consider the political
objectives of this conflict,” Haaker said. “I’m sorry, Samual, but logic and
sound tactics aren’t the only factors at play here. The Confederation must be
seen to be doing something. I’m sure you appreciate that.”
“And you have chosen Mortonridge as
that something?”
“It is a goal which the Kingdom and
the Edenists think they can achieve.”
“Yes, but what would happen
afterwards? Do you propose to take on every possessed planet and asteroid in a
similar fashion? How long would that take? How much would it cost?”
“I sincerely hope such a process
would not have to be repeated,” Cayeaux said. “We must use the time it takes to
liberate Mortonridge to search for another approach to the problem. However, if
there is no answer, then similar campaigns may indeed have to be mounted.”
“Which is why this first one must
succeed,” Haaker said.
“Are you ordering me to redeploy my
forces?” Samual asked.
“I’m informing you of the request
the Kulu Kingdom and the Edenists have made. It is a legitimate request made by
two of our strongest supporters. If you have an alternative proposal, then I’ll
be happy to receive it.”
“Of course I don’t have an
alternative.”
“Then I don’t think you have any
reason to refuse them.”
“I see. If I might ask, Ambassador
Cayeaux, why does your Consensus agree to this?”
“We agreed to it for the sake of
the hope it will provide to all the living in the Confederation. We do not
necessarily approve.”
“Samual, you’ve done a magnificent
job so far,” Lalwani said. “We know this liberation is only a sideshow, but it
will gain us a great deal of political support. And we are going to need every
scrap of support we can find in the coming weeks.”
“Very well.” Samual Aleksandrovich
paused in distaste. What upset him most was how well he understood their
argument, almost sympathising with it. Image had become the paramount
motivation, the way every war was fought for politicians. But in this I am no
different from military commanders down the centuries, we always have to play
within the political arena in order to fight the real battle. I wonder if my
illustrious predecessors felt so soiled? “Captain Khanna, please ask the
general staff to draw up fleet redeployment orders based on the request from
the Kulu Kingdom ambassador.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I wish your King every success,
Ambassador.”
“Thank you, Admiral. We do not wish
to disrupt your current naval operations. Alastair does understand the
importance of the role you are playing.”
“I’m glad of that. There are going
to be some difficult decisions for all of us ahead; his patronage will be
essential. As I have said from the beginning, this requires an ultimate
solution that can never be purely military.”
“Have you considered the proposal
Capone made?” Sir Maurice asked. “I know if any of the possessed can be seen in
terms of a conventional enemy, it’s him. But could bitek construct bodies be
made to work?”
“We examined it,” Maynard Khanna
said. “In practical terms it is completely inviable. The numbers are
impossible. A conservative estimate for the Confederation’s current population
is nine hundred billion, which averages out at just over one billion per star
system. Even if you assume only ten dead people for everyone living, there must
be approximately ten trillion souls in the beyond. If they were each given a
construct body, where would they live? We would have to find between three to
five thousand new terracompatible planets for them. Clearly an impossible
task.”
“I would contend that number,”
Cayeaux said. “Laton quite clearly said that not every soul remains imprisoned
in the beyond.”
“Even if it was only a single
trillion, that would still mean locating several hundred planets for them.”
“Laton’s information interests me,”
Dr Gilmore said. “We have been assuming all along that it is incumbent on us to
provide a final solution. Yet if souls can progress from the beyond to some
other state of existence, then clearly it is up to them to do so.”
“How would we make them?” Haaker
asked.
“I’m not sure. If we could just
find one of them who would cooperate we could make so much more progress;
someone like that Shaun Wallace character who was interviewed by Kelly Tirrel.
Those we have here in Trafalgar are all so actively hostile to our
investigation.”
Samual thought about making a
comment concerning relevant treatment and behaviour, but Gilmore didn’t deserve
public rebukes. “I suppose we could try a diplomatic initiative. There are
several isolated asteroid settlements which have been possessed and yet haven’t
moved themselves out of the universe. We could make a start with them; send a
message asking them if they will talk to us.”
“An excellent proposal,” Haaker
said. “It would cost very little, and if we obtain a favourable response I
would be prepared to give a joint research project my full support.”
The sensenviron ended, leaving Dr
Gilmore alone in his office. He did nothing for several minutes while the last
part of the meeting ran through his mind. A man who prided himself on his
methodical nature, the embodiment of the scientific method, he wasn’t angry
with himself, at the most he felt a slight irritation that he hadn’t reasoned
this out earlier. If Laton was correct about souls moving on, then the beyond
was not the static environment he had assumed until now. That opened up a whole
range of new options.
Dr Gilmore entered the examination
room containing Jacqueline Couteur to find the staff on an extended break. Both
quantum signature sensor arrays were missing from the overhead waldo arms. The
electronics lab was rebuilding them once again, a near-continual process of
refinement as they sought out the elusive transdimensional interface.
Jacqueline Couteur was being fed. A
trolley had been wheeled in beside the surgical bed, sprouting a thick hose
which hung just over her mouth. Her black head restraint had been loosened
slightly, allowing her to switch between the two nipples; one for water, the
other a meat paste.
Dr Gilmore walked through to stand
next to the surgical bed. Her eyes followed his movement.
“Good morning, Jacqueline; how are
you today?”
Her eyes narrowed contemptuously.
Little wisps of steam licked up from the electrodes pressing against her skin.
She opened her mouth and circled the plastic nipple with her tongue. “Fine,
thank you, Dr Mengele. I’d like to speak to my lawyer, please.”
“That’s interesting. Why?”
“Because I’m going to sue you for
every fuseodollar you own, and then have you shot down to a penal world in a
one-way capsule. Torture is illegal in the Confederation. Read the Declaration
of Rights.”
“If you are in discomfort, you
should leave. We both know you can do that.”
“We’re not discussing my options at
the moment. It is your actions which are in question. Now may I have my one
phone call?”
“I had no idea an immortal soul had
civil rights. You certainly don’t show your victims much in the way of
autonomy.”
“My rights are for the courts to
decide. By denying me access to legal representation for such a test case you
are compounding your crime. However, if it bothers you, then I can assure you
that Kate Morley would like to see a lawyer.”
“Kate Morley?”
“This body’s co-host.”
Dr Gilmore gave an uncertain smile.
This wasn’t going to plan at all. “I don’t believe you.”
“Again, you take the role of the
court upon yourself. Do you really think Kate enjoys being strapped down and
electrocuted? You are violating her basic human rights.”
“I’d like to hear her ask for a
lawyer.”
“She has just done that. If you
don’t believe me, try running a voice print analysis. She said it.”
“This is absurd.”
“I want my lawyer!” Her voice rose
in volume. “You, Marine, you are sworn to uphold the rights of Confederation
citizens. I want a lawyer. Get me one.”
The captain of the marine guard
looked at Dr Gilmore for guidance. Everyone on the other side of the glass
partition was staring in.
Dr Gilmore relaxed and smiled. “All
right, Jacqueline. You cooperate with us, we’ll cooperate with you. I will
raise the topic with the First Admiral’s legal staff to see if they consider
you are entitled to legal representation. But first I want you to answer a
question for me.”
“The accused have a right of
silence.”
“I’m not accusing you of anything.”
“Clever, Doctor. Ask then. But
don’t insult me by asking me to incriminate myself.”
“When did your body die?”
“In 2036. Do I get my lawyer now?”
“And you were conscious the whole
time you were in the beyond?”
“Yes, you moron.”
“Thank you.”
Jacqueline Couteur gave him a
highly suspicious glance. “That’s it?”
“Yes. For now.”
“How did that help you?”
“Time passes in the beyond. That
means it is subject to entropy.”
“So?”
“If your continuum decays, then the
entities within it can die. More pertinently, they can be killed.”
“She wants a what?” Maynard
Khanna asked.
Dr Gilmore flinched. “A lawyer.”
“This is a joke, right?”
“I’m afraid not.” He sighed
reluctantly. “The problem is, while ordinarily I would dismiss such a request
as sheer nonsense, it has opened something of a debate among the investigating
staff. I know the Intelligence Service has extremely wide-ranging powers that
supersede the Declaration of Rights; but personality debrief is normally
conducted by another division. I’m not saying that what we’re doing to Couteur
and the others isn’t necessary, I would just like to establish that our orders
were drafted correctly, that is: legally. Naturally, I don’t wish to bother the
First Admiral with such trivia at this time. So if you could raise the matter
with the Provost General’s office I’d be grateful. Just for clarification, you
understand.”
In appearance, Golomo was no
different from any of the other gas giants found among the star systems of the
Confederation. A hundred and thirty-two thousand kilometres in diameter, its
ring band slightly denser than usual, its storm bands a raucous mix of twirled
vermillion, pale azure, splashed with coffee-cup swirls of white strands. The
abnormality for which it was renowned lurked several hundred kilometres below
the furrowed surface of the outer cloud layer, down where the density and
temperature had risen considerably. That was where the Edenists whose habitats
colonized the orbital space above located life; a narrow zone where pressure
reduced the speed of the turbulence, and the strange hydrocarbon gases
developed an easy viscosity. Single cells like airborne amoebas, but the size
of a human fist, could survive there. They always clustered together in great
colonies, resembling blankets of beluga. Why they did it, nobody could work
out, none of them were specialized, all of them were independent. Yet to find
singletons was unusual, at least in the areas so far observed by the probes,
which admittedly was a minute percentage of the planet.
At any other time, Syrinx would
dearly have loved to pay the research sites a visit. The old curiosity was
still itching when Oenone slid out of its wormhole above the gas giant.
Other days, other priorities, the voidhawk chided.
Syrinx felt a hand patting hers;
affinity was filled with if not quite sympathy, then certainly tolerance. She
gave Ruben a droll glance and shrugged. Okay, another time. She borrowed
the voidhawk’s powerful affinity voice to identify them to the Golomo
Consensus; SD sensors were already locking on.
The routine for each system they
visited was identical: impart a summary of the Confederation’s strategic
disposition, then there were accounts of new developments in neighbouring
systems, which asteroids and planets faced the possibility of takeovers. In
exchange, the Consensus provided an intelligence update on the local system. Oenone
could cover two, sometimes three star systems a day. So far the picture of
conditions they were building up was depressing. The Edenist habitats were
managing to stay on top of the situation, remaining loyal to the designated
isolation and confinement policies. Adamist populations were less observant.
Everywhere she went there were complaints about the hardships resulting from
the quarantine, Edenist worries of local navies falling short of their
designated duties, stories of illegal starship flights, a steady trickle of
asteroids falling to the possessed, of political manoeuvring and
advantage-trading.
We are generally more law
abiding than Adamists, Oxley
said. And there are more of them than us. That’s bound to produce a weighted
picture.
Don’t make excuses for them,
Caucus said.
Lack of education, and fear, Syrinx said. That’s what’s doing it. We have
to make allowances, I suppose. But at the same time, their attitude is going to
be a real problem in the long term. In fact, it might mean there won’t even be
a long term as far as they’re concerned.
Apart from the Kulu Kingdom, and
one or two other of the more disciplined societies, Ruben’s suggestion was infected with irony.
She delayed her answer as she
became aware of a growing unease in Golomo’s Consensus. Voidhawks from the
local defence force were popping in and out of wormholes, filling the affinity
band with an excited buzz. What is the problem? she inquired.
We are confirming that the
Ethenthia asteroid settlement has fallen to possession, Consensus informed Oenone and its crew. We
have just received a message from its Confederation Navy Bureau concerning the
arrival of a CNIS captain, Erick Thakrar, from Kursk. According to the bureau
chief, Thakrar had obtained information of an extremely important nature. A
voidhawk was requested to carry the captain and his prisoner to Trafalgar.
Unfortunately there is a fifteen-hour delay to Ethenthia. In the intervening time
the possessed appear to have . . .
Along with everyone else attuned to
Consensus, Syrinx and her crew were immediately aware of the incoming message.
Habitat senses perceived it as a violet star-point of microwaves, shining
directly at Golomo from Ethenthia.
“This is Erick Thakrar, CNIS
captain; I’m the one Emonn Verona told you about. Or at least I hope he did.
God. Anyway, the possessed have taken over Ethenthia now. You probably know
that by now. I managed to make it to a starship, the Tigara, but they’re
on to me. Listen, the information I’ve got is vital. I can’t trust it to
an open com link; if they find out what I know, it’ll become useless. But right
now this ship is totally fucked, and I’m not much better. I’ve got a partial
alignment on the Ngeuni system, but there’s barely anything about it in this
almanac. I think it’s a stage one colony. If I can’t transfer to a flightworthy
starship there, I’ll try and slingshot back here. God, the SD platform is
locking on. Okay, I’m jumping now—”
Ngeuni is a stage one colony, Oenone responded immediately.
Syrinx was automatically aware of
its spatial location eleven light years away. When correlated with Ethenthia’s
current position the alignment must have been very tenuous indeed. If Thakrar’s
ship was as bad as he implied . . .
The colony is still in its
start-up stage, Oenone continued. However, there may be some
starships available.
This is something I should
follow up, Syrinx told
Consensus.
We concur. It will be another
day before Thakrar returns here, assuming his ship remains flightworthy.
We’ll check Ngeuni to see if he
got there. Even as she spoke,
energy was flowing through the voidhawk’s patterning cells.
Stephanie heard a loud mechanical
screeching sound followed by a raucous siren blast. She grinned around at the
children sitting at the kitchen table. “Looks like your uncle Moyo has found us
some transport.”
Her humour faded when she reached
the bungalow’s front porch. The bus which was parked on the road outside was
spitting light in every spectrum; its bodywork a tight-packed mass of cartoon
flowers growing out of paisley fields. LOVE, PEACE, and KARMA flashed in
nightclub neon on the sides. The darkest areas were its gleaming chrome
hubcaps.
Moyo climbed down out of the cab,
busily radiating embarrassment. The doors at the back of the bus hissed open,
and another man climbed down. She’d never seen anyone with so much hair before.
The children were crowding around
her, gazing out eagerly at the radiant carnival apparition.
“Is that really going to take us to
the border?”
“How do you make it light up?”
“Please, Stephanie, can I get
inside?”
Stephanie couldn’t say no to them,
so she waved them on with a casual gesture. They swarmed over the small front
lawn to examine the wonderment.
“I can see how this should help us
avoid any undue attention,” she said to Moyo. “Have you lost your mind?”
A guilty finger indicated his new
companion. “This is Cochrane, he helped me with the bus.”
“So it was your idea?”
“Surely was.” Cochrane bowed low.
“Man, I always wanted a set of wheels like this.”
“Good. Well now you’ve had it, you
can say goodbye. I have to take these children out of here, and they’re not
going in that thing. We’ll change it into something more suitable.”
“Won’t do you no good.”
“Oh?”
“He’s right,” Moyo said. “We can’t
sneak about, not here. You know that. Everybody can sense everything in
Mortonridge now.”
“That’s still no reason to use this
. . . this—” She thrust an exasperated arm out towards the bus.
“It’s like gonna be a mobile Zen
moment for those with unpure thoughts,” Cochrane said.
“Oh, spare me!”
“No really. Any cat catches sight
of that bus and they’re gonna have to confront like their inner being, you
know. It’s totally neat, a soul looking into its own soul. With this, you’re
broadcasting goodness at them on Radio Godhead twenty-four hours a day; it’s a
mercy mission that makes mothers weep for their lost children. My Karmic
Crusader bus is going to shame them into letting you through. But like if you
hit on people with a whole heavy military scene, like some kind of covert
behind-the-lines hostility raid, you’ll waste all those good vibes your karma
has built up. It’ll make it easy for all the cosmically uncool redneck dudes
running loose out there to make it hard for us.”
“Humm.” He did make an odd kind of
sense, she admitted grudgingly. Moyo gave her a hopeful shrug, a loyalty which
lent her a cosy feeling. “Well, we could try it for a few miles I suppose.”
Then she gave Cochrane a suspicious look. “What do you mean, us?”
He smiled and held his arms out
wide. A miniature rainbow sprang up out of his palms, arching over his head.
The children laughed and clapped.
“Hey, I was at Woodstock, you know.
I helped rule the world for three days. You need the kind of peaceful influence
I exert over the land. I’m a friend to all living things, the unliving, too,
now.”
“Oh, hell.”
Erick still hadn’t activated the
life-support capsule’s internal environmental systems. He was too worried what
the power drain would do to the starship’s one remaining functional fusion
generator. There certainly wasn’t enough energy stored in the reserve electron
matrix cells to power up the jump nodes.
Ngeuni’s star was a severe
blue-white point a quarter of a light-year away. Not quite bright enough to
cast a shadow on the hull, but well above first magnitude, dominating the
starfield. His sensor image was overlaid with navigation graphics, a tunnel of
orange circles which seemed to be guiding the Tigara several degrees
south of the star. After five jumps he was still matching delta-v.
Thankfully, the clipper’s fusion
drive was capable of a seven-gee acceleration, and they weren’t carrying any
cargo. It meant he had enough fuel to align the ship properly. Getting back to
Golomo was going to be a problem, though.
The flight computer warned him that
the alignment manoeuvre was almost complete. Tigara was flashing towards
the jump coordinate at nineteen kilometres per second. He started to reduce
thrust and ordered the fusion generator to power up the nodes. As soon as the plasma
flow increased he started receiving datavised caution warnings. The confinement
field which held the ten-million-degree stream of ions away from the casing was
fluctuating alarmingly.
Erick quickly loaded an emergency
dump order into the flight computer, linking it to a monitor. If the
confinement field fell below five per cent the generator would shut down and
vent.
For some reason he was devoid of
all tension. Then he realized his medical program was flashing for attention.
When he accessed it, he saw the packages were filtering out a deluge of toxins
and neurochemicals from his bloodstream at the same time as they were issuing
chemical suppressors.
He grinned savagely around the SII
suit’s oxygen tube. Neutering his own reflexes at precisely the time he needed
them the most. Too many factors were building up against him. And still it
didn’t really bother him, not snug in the heart of his semi-narcotic
hibernation.
The flight computer signalled that
the jump coordinate was approaching. Sensors and heat dump panels began to sink
down into their recesses. The main drive reduced thrust to zero. Erick fired
the ion thrusters, keeping the Tigara on track.
Then the energy patterning nodes
were fully charged. Finally he felt a distant sense of relief, and reduced the
fusion generator output. The straining confinement field surged as the plasma
stream shrank by ninety per cent inside half a second. Decaying failsoft
components didn’t respond in time. An oscillation rippled along the tokamak
chamber, tearing the plasma stream apart.
The Tigara jumped.
It emerged deep inside the Ngeuni
system; at that instant a perfect inert sphere. The poise was shattered within
an instant as the raging plasma tore through the tokamak’s casing and ripped
out through the hull, loosing incandescent swords of ions in all directions. A
chain reaction of secondary explosions began as cryogenic tanks and electron
matrices detonated.
The ship disintegrated amid a blaze
of radioactive gases and ragged molten debris. Its life-support capsule came
spinning out of the core of the explosion; a silvered sphere whose surface was
gashed by veins of black carbon where energy bursts and tiny fragments had
peppered the polished nultherm foam.
As soon as it was clear of the
boiling gases, emergency rockets fired to halt the capsule’s wild tumbling
motion, a solid kick into stability. The beacon began to broadcast its shrill
distress call.
Chapter 07
Like most enterprises mounted by
governments and institutions on Nyvan, the Jesup asteroid was chronically short
of finance, engineering resources, and qualified personnel. The rock’s major
ore reserves had been mined out a long time ago. Ordinarily, the revenue would
have been invested in the development of the asteroid’s astroengineering
industry. But the New Georgia government had diverted the initial windfall
income to pay for more immediate and voter-friendly projects on the ground.
After the ore was exhausted, Jesup
spent the next decades limping along both economically and industrially.
Fledgling manufacturing companies shrank back to service subsidiaries and small
indigenous armament corporations. Its aging infrastructure was maintained one
degree from breakdown. Of the three planned biosphere caverns only one had ever
been completed, leaving a vast number of huge empty cavities spaced
strategically throughout the rock which would have been the kernels of fresh
mining activity.
It was when Quinn was striding
along one of the interminable bare-rock tunnels linking the discarded cavities
that he sensed the first elusive presence. He stopped so abruptly that Lawrence
almost bumped into him.
“What was that?”
“What?” Lawrence asked.
Quinn turned full circle, slowly
scanning the dust-encrusted rock of the wide tunnel. Dribbles of condensation
ran along the curving walls and roof, cutting small forked channels through the
ebony dust as they generated fragile miniature stalactites. It was as if the
tunnel were growing a fur of cactus spikes. But there was no place for anyone
to hide, only the waves of shadow between the widely spaced lighting panels.
His entourage of disciples waited
with nervous patience. After two days of slickly brutal initiation ceremonies
the asteroid now belonged to him. However, Quinn remained disappointed with the
number of true converts among the possessed. He had assumed that they of all
people would despise Jesus and Allah and Buddha and the other false Gods for
condemning them to an agonizing limbo. Showing them the path to the Light
Bringer ought to have been easy. But they continued to demonstrate a
bewildering resistance to his teachings. Some even interpreted their return to
be a form of redemption.
Quinn could find nothing in the
tunnel. He was sure he had caught a wisp of thought which didn’t belong to any
of the entourage; it had been accompanied by a tiny flicker of motion, grey on
black. First reaction was that someone was sneaking along behind them.
Irritated by the distraction, he
strode off again, his robe rising to glide above the filthy rock floor. It was
cold in the tunnel, his breath turning to snowy vapour before his eyes. His
feet began to crunch on particles of ice.
A frigid gust of air swept against
him, making an audible swoosh. His robe flapped about.
He stopped again, angry this time.
“What the fuck is going on here? There’s no environmental ducts in this
tunnel.” He held up a hand to feel the air, which was now perfectly still.
Someone laughed.
He whirled around. But the
disciples were looking at each other in confusion. None of them had dared mock
his bewilderment. For a moment he thought of the unknown figure at the
spaceport on Norfolk, the powerful swirl of flames he had unleashed. But that
was light-years away, and no one else had escaped the planet except the
Kavanagh girl.
“These tunnels are always acting
erratically, Quinn,” Bonham said. Bonham was one of the new converts,
possessing Lucky Vin’s body, which he was twisting into a ghoul-form, bleaching
the skin, sharpening the teeth, and swelling the eyes. Thick animal hair was
sprouting out of his silver skull. He said he had been born into a family of
Venetian aristocrats in the late nineteenth century, killed before his
twenty-seventh birthday in the First World War, but only after having tasted
both the decadence and blind cruelty of the era. A taste which had become a
voracious appetite. He had needed no persuading to embrace Quinn’s doctrines.
“I asked one of the maintenance
chappies, and he said it’s because there aren’t any ducts in the tunnels to
regulate them properly. There are all sorts of weird surges.”
Quinn wasn’t satisfied. He was sure
he’d sensed someone sneaking about. A dissatisfied grunt, and he was on his way
once more.
No further oddities waylaid him
before he reached the cavity where one of the teams was working. It was an
almost spherical chamber, with a small flat floor, acting as a junction to
seven of the large tunnels. A single fat metal tube hung downwards from the
apex, rattling loudly as it blew out a wind of warm dry air. Quinn scowled up
at it, then went over to the knot of five men working to secure the fusion bomb
to the floor.
The device’s casing was a blunt
cone, seventy centimetres high. Several processor blocks had been plugged into
its base with optical cables. The men stopped working and stood up respectfully
as Quinn approached.
“Did anyone come through here
earlier?”
They assured him no one had. One of
them was non-possessed, a technician from the New Georgia defence force. He was
sweating profusely, his thoughts a mixture of dread and outrage.
Quinn addressed him directly. “Is
everything going okay?”
“Yes,” the technician murmured
meekly. He kept glancing at Twelve-T.
The gang lord was in a sorry state.
Tiny jets of steam spluttered out of his mechanical body parts. Rheumy crusts
were building up around the rim of bone in which his brain was resting, as
though candle wax were leaking out. The membrane that clothed his brain had
thickened (as Quinn wished) but was now acquiring an unhealthy green tint. He
was blinking and squinting constantly as he fought the pain.
Quinn followed the man’s gaze with
pointed slowness. “Oh, yeah. The most feared gangster on the planet. Real
hard-arsed mother who isn’t gonna believe in God’s Brother no matter what I do
to him. Pretty dumb, really. But the thing is, he’s useful to me. So I let him
live. As long as he doesn’t stray too far from me, he keeps on living. It’s
sort of like a metaphor, see? Now, you going to be a hard-arse?”
“No, sir, Mr Quinn.”
“That’s fucking smart.” Quinn’s
head came forward slightly from the umbra of the hood to allow a faint light to
strike his ashen skin. The technician closed his eyes to hide from the sight,
lips mumbling a prayer.
“Now is this bomb going to work?”
“Yes, sir. It’s a hundred megaton
warhead, they all are. Once they’re linked into the asteroid’s net we can detonate
them in sequence. As long as there are no possessed near them, they’ll function
properly.”
“Don’t worry about that. My
disciples won’t be here when Night dawns in the sky.” He turned back to the
tunnel, giving it a suspicious look. Again he had the intimation of motion, a
flicker no larger than the flap of a bird’s wing, and twice as fast. He was
sure that someone had been watching the incident. A spoor of trepidation hung
in the air like the scent of a summer flower.
When he stood at the entrance he
could see the line of light panels shrink into distance before a curve took
them from sight. The gentle sound of pattering water was all that emerged. He
was half expecting to see that same blank human silhouette which had appeared
at the hangar on Norfolk.
“If you are hiding, then you are
weaker than me,” he told the apparently empty shaft. “That means you will be
found and brought before me for judgement. Best you come out now.”
There was no response.
“Have it your way, shithead. You’ve
seen what happens to people I don’t like.”
The rest of Quinn’s day was spent
issuing the instructions that would cause Night to fall on the innocent planet
below. He commanded New Georgia’s SD network now. It would be a simple matter
for the platforms to interfere with Nyvan’s two other functional networks, and
various national sensor satellites. Under cover of this electronic warfare
barrage, spaceplanes would slide down undetected to the surface. Every nation
would be seeded by a group of possessed from Jesup. And Nyvan’s curse of
national antagonism would prevent a unified planetary response to the problem,
which was the only response that could ever stand a chance of working.
The possessed would conquer here,
probably with greater ease than anywhere in the Confederation. They were a
single force, knowing nothing of borders and limits.
As for those who would actually be
sent down, Quinn chose carefully. A couple of the devout for every spaceplane
to make sure they followed their flight vectors and landed at the designated
zone, but the rest were ones for whom only fear and his own proximity kept in
line: unbelievers. It was quite deliberate. Free of his thrall, they would do
what they always did, and seek to possess as many people as they could.
He didn’t care that he would not be
there to move among them and bring the word of God’s Brother. Norfolk had shown
him that mistake. Conversion on an individual basis was totally impractical
when dealing with planetary populations.
Quinn’s duty, and that of the
disciples, was the same as all priests; they were simply to prepare the ground
for God’s Brother to walk upon, to build the temples and prepare the sacrament.
It was He who would bring the final message, showing all the light.
The spaceplanes were only half of
the scheme. Quinn was preparing to dispatch inter-orbit ships to the three
derelict asteroids under the command of his most trusted followers. Those
worthless rocks had now become a cornerstone in his plans to advance the Night.
It was after midnight when Quinn
returned to the tunnel. This time he was by himself. He stood motionless under
the arching entrance for a full minute, allowing whoever was there to notice
him. Then he raised a hand and fired a single bolt of white fire at the
electrical cable which ran along the crest of the tunnel. All the light panels
went out.
“Now we will know which of us is
the master of darkness,” he shouted into the black air. He searched with his
mind alone as he walked forwards, aware of the rock as an insubstantial pale
grey tube around him. It was all that existed in a blank universe.
Feeble zephyrs of cold air rustled
his robe. While out on the very cusp of perception, a tiny buzz increased;
similar to the Babel of the beyond, but so much weaker.
He experienced no fright, nor even
curiosity at confirming such an alien phenomenon existed. The Lords who battled
for the heart of the universe and its denizens worked in ways he could never
understand. All he had was his strength, and the knowledge that he knew
himself. He would never quail, no matter what.
“I got you now, fuckers,” Quinn
whispered back at the tremulous voices.
As if in response, the air grew
colder, its churning stronger. He concentrated hard, trying to focus his
eldritch sight on the air currents themselves. Elusive, twisting strands; they
were hard for his mind to grasp. But he persisted, seeking out the points where
heat was draining out of the gas molecules.
As he delved further and further
into the convoluted tides of energy a tide of light began to thicken in the air
around him, sending faint streaks of colour dancing across the tunnel. It was
as if the atmosphere’s atoms had expanded into vast vacuous blobs, rushing
around each other in frantic motion. When he slashed at one of the gliding
luminescent baubles, his hand was a matt-black shape that passed clean through
the hazy apparition. His fingers closed, snatching at nothing.
The misty glowing ball changed
direction, ploughing through the others of its kind, rushing away from Quinn.
“Come back!” Quinn bellowed in
fury, and let loose a blast of white fire in the direction it had gone. The
aerial swell of colour shrank back from the bolt of energy.
Quinn saw them then, people huddled
together in the darkness of the tunnel. Illuminated by the energistic
discharge, they had dour, frightened faces. All of them were staring at him.
The energy bolt vanished, and with
it the vision. Quinn gaped at the nebulous shoal which bobbled in agitation.
They were flowing away from him steadily, picking up speed.
He thought he knew what they were,
then. A whole group of possessed who had discovered how to make themselves
invisible. His own energistic power began to boil through his body, mimicking
the patterns inside the effervescent air. It was inordinately difficult,
requiring almost his entire strength. As the energy crackled around him in the
novel formation he realized what was happening. This was an effect similar to
the one sought by the wild possessed on their quest to escape this universe,
forcing open one of the innumerable chinks in quantum reality.
Quinn persevered, exerting himself
fully, clawing at the elusive opening. After all, if they could do it, he, the
chosen one, could achieve the same state. He hurried after the fleeing
spectres, down the tunnel to the cavity where the bomb had been placed. The
very last thing he could allow was a whole group of souls out of his control or
sight.
His emergence into the new realm
was gradual. The shadowy outlines of matter which his mind perceived began to
take on more substance, becoming less translucent. His skin tingled, as if he
were passing through a membrane of static. Then he was there. Weight was
different, his body felt as if it were lighter than a drop of rain. He realized
he wasn’t breathing. His heart had stopped, too. Though, somehow, his body
still functioned. Sheer willpower, he supposed.
He walked into the cavity to find
them all, maybe a couple of hundred people; men, women and children. A large
knot were gathered around the fusion bomb; if it wasn’t for their blatant
dismay they could have been praying to it. They were turning to face him; a
collective fearful gasp went up. Children were clutched to their parents.
Several held up shaking hands to ward him off.
“Peekaboo,” Quinn said. “I see you,
arseholes.”
There was something wrong,
something different between him and them. His own body glowed from the
energistic power he was exerting, an image of vigour. They, by contrast, were
uniformly pallid, almost monochrome. Wasted.
“Nice try,” he told them. “But
there’s nowhere you can hide from God’s Brother. Now I want you to all come
back to reality with me. I won’t be too hard; I’ve learned a useful trick
tonight.” He fixed his eyes on a teenage lad with flowing hair and smiled.
The lad shook his head. “We can’t
return,” he stammered.
Quinn took five fast steps forwards
and made a grab for the lad’s arm. His fingers didn’t exactly connect, but they
did slow down as they passed through the sleeve. The lad’s arm suddenly flared
with brilliant colour, and he screeched in shock, stumbling backwards. “Don’t,”
he pleaded. “Please, Quinn. It hurts.”
Quinn studied his pain-furrowed
face, rather enjoying the sight. “So you know my name, then.”
“Yes. We saw you arrive. Please
leave us alone. We can’t harm you.”
Quinn prowled along the front rank
of the cowed group, looking at each of them as they pressed together. All of
them shared the same dejection, few could meet his gaze. “You mean you were
like this when I came here?”
“Yes,” the lad replied.
“How? I was the first to bring the
possessed here. What the fuck are you?”
“We’re . . .” He glanced around at
his peers for permission. “We’re ghosts.”
The hotel suite was two stories
from the ground, which gave it a gravity field roughly a fifth of that which
Louise was used to on Norfolk. She found it even more awkward than free fall.
Every movement had to be well thought out in advance. Genevieve and Fletcher
didn’t much care for it either.
And then there was the air, or
rather the lack of it. Both of Phobos’s biosphere caverns were maintained at a
low pressure. It was an intermediate stage, double that of Mars to help people
en route to the planet to acclimatize themselves. Louise was glad she wasn’t
going down to the surface; each breath was a real effort to suck enough oxygen
down into her lungs.
But the asteroid was a visual
thrill—once she got used to the ground curving up over her head. The balcony
gave them an excellent view across the parkland and fields. She would have
loved to walk through the forests; many of the trees were centuries old. Their
dignity reassured her, making the worldlet seem less artificial. From where she
stood on the balcony she could see several cedars, their distinctive layered
grey-green boughs standing out against the more verdant foliage. There had been
no time for such leisurely activities, though. As soon as they’d left the Far
Realm, Endron had booked them in here (though it was her money which paid
for the suite). Then they’d been out shopping. She thought she would enjoy
that, but unfortunately, Phobos was nothing like Norwich. There were none of
the city’s department stores and exclusive boutiques. Their clothes had all
come from the SII general merchandise depository which was half shop, half
warehouse, but of course none of them fitted her or Gen. Their bodies were a
completely different shape to the asteroid’s Martian and Lunar residents.
Everything they chose had to be made-up. After that had come processor blocks
(everyone in the Confederation used them, Endron explained, certainly
travellers). Genevieve had plumped for one with a high-wattage AV projector and
went on to load it with over fifty games from the depository’s central memory
core. Louise bought herself a block which could control the medical nanonic
package around her wrist, allowing her to monitor her own physiological state.
Equipped and appearing like any
normal visiting Confederation citizen, Louise had then accompanied Endron to
the hostelries frequented by spaceship crews. It was a rerun of her attempts to
buy passage off Norfolk, but this time she had some experience in the matter,
and Endron knew his way around Phobos. Between them they took a mere two hours
to find the Jamrana, an inter-orbit cargo ship bound for Earth, and
agree on a price for Louise and the others.
That just left the passports.
Louise dressed herself in a tartan
skirt (with stiffened fabric to stop it dancing up in the low gravity), black
leggings, and a green polo-neck top. Clothes were the same as computers, she
thought. After using the Far Realm’s flight computer she could never go
back to the stupid keyboard-operated terminals on Norfolk, and now she had a
million styles of dress available, none of them shaped by absurd concepts of
what was appropriate . . .
She went out into the lounge.
Genevieve was in her bedroom, the thin sounds of music and muffled dialogue
leaking through the closed door as yet another game was run through her
processor block. Louise didn’t strictly approve, but objecting now would seem
churlish, and it did keep her out of mischief.
Fletcher was sitting on one of the
three powder-blue leather settees which made up the lounge’s conversation area.
He was sitting with his back to the glass window. Louise glanced at him, then
the view which he was ignoring.
“I know, my lady,” he said quietly.
“You believe me foolish. After all, I have undertaken a voyage between the
stars themselves, in a ship where I swam through the air with the grace of a
fish in the ocean.”
“There are stranger things in the
universe than asteroid settlements,” she said sympathetically.
“As ever, you are right. I wish I
could understand why the ground above us doesn’t fall down to bury us. It is
ungodly, a defiance of the natural order.”
“It’s only centrifugal force. Do
you want to access the educational text again?”
He gave her an ironic smile. “The
one which the teachers of this age have prepared for ten-year-old children? I
think I will spare myself repeated humiliation, my lady Louise.”
She glanced at her gold watch,
which was almost the last surviving personal item from Norfolk. “Endron should
be here in a minute. We’ll be able to leave Phobos in a few hours.”
“I do not relish our parting,
lady.”
It was the one topic which she had
never mentioned since the day when they had flown up to the Far Realm.
“You are still intent on going down to Earth, then?”
“Aye, I am. Though in my heart I
fear what awaits me there, I will not shirk from the task I have found for my
new body. Quinn must be thwarted.”
“He’s probably there already.
Goodness, by the time we reach the O’Neill Halo all of Earth could be
possessed.”
“Even if I knew that beyond all
doubt, I would still not allow myself to turn back. I am truly sorry, Lady
Louise, but my course is set. But do not worry yourself unduly, I will stay
with you until you have found passage to Tranquillity. And I will make sure
that there are no possessed on your vessel before it casts off.”
“I wasn’t trying to stop you,
Fletcher. I think I’m a little fearful of your integrity. People in this age
always seem to put themselves first. I do.”
“You put your baby first, dearest
Louise. Of that resolution, I am in awe. It is my one regret that by embarking
on my own reckless venture that I will in all likelihood never now meet your
beau, this Joshua of whom you speak. I would dearly like to see the man worthy of
your love, he must be a prince among men.”
“Joshua isn’t a prince. I know now
he is nowhere near perfect. But . . . he does have a few good points.” Her
hands touched her belly. “He’ll be a good father.”
Their eyes met. Louise didn’t think
she had ever seen so much loneliness before. In all the history texts they’d
reviewed, he had always taken care to avoid any which might have told him what
became of the family he’d left behind on Pitcairn Island.
It would have been so very easy for
her to sit beside him and put her arms around him. Surely a person so alone
deserved some comfort? What made her emotions worse was that she knew he could
see her uncertainty.
The door processor announced that
Endron was waiting. Louise made light of the moment with a chirpy smile and
went to fetch Genevieve from her room.
“Do we all have to go?” a reticent
Genevieve asked Endron. “I’d reached the third strata in Skycastles. The winged
horses were coming to rescue the princess.”
“She’ll still be there when we get
back,” Louise said. “You can play it on the ship.”
“He needs you there for a full
image scan,” Endron said. “No way out of it, I’m afraid.”
Genevieve looked thoroughly
disgusted. “All right.”
Endron led them along one of the
public halls. Louise was slowly mastering the art of walking in the asteroid’s
effete gravity field. Nothing you could do to stop yourself leaving the ground
at each step; so push strongly with your toes, angling them to project you
along a flat trajectory. She knew she’d never be as fluid as the Martians no
matter how much practise she had.
“I wanted to ask you,” Louise said
as they slid into a lift. “If you’re all Communists, how can the Far Realm’s
crew sell Norfolk Tears here?”
“Why shouldn’t we? It’s one of the
perks of being a crew member. The only thing we don’t like about bringing it in
is paying import duty. And so far we haven’t actually done that.”
“But doesn’t everybody own
everything anyway? Why should they pay for it?”
“You’re thinking of super-orthodox
communism. People here retain their own property and money. No society could
survive without that concept; you have to have something to show for your work
at the end of the day. That’s human nature.”
“So you have landowners on Mars as
well?”
Endron chuckled. “I don’t mean that
sort of property. We only retain personal items. Things like apartments are the
property of the state; after all, the state pays for them. Farming collectives
are allocated their land.”
“And you accept that?”
“Yes. Because it works. The state
has enormous power and wealth, but we vote on how it’s used. We’re dependent on
it, and control it at the same time. We’re also very proud of it. No other
culture or ideology would ever have been able to terraform a planet. Mars has
absorbed our nation’s total wealth for five centuries. Offworlders have no idea
of the level of commitment that requires.”
“That’s because I don’t understand
why you did it.”
“We were trapped by history. Our
ancestors modified their bodies to live in a Lunar gravity field before the ZTT
drive was built. They could have sent their children to settle countless
terracompatible worlds, but then those children would have needed geneering to
adapt them back to the human ‘norm.’ Parent and child would have been parted at
birth; they wouldn’t have been descendants, just fosterlings in an alien
environment. So we decided to make ourselves a world of our own.”
“If I have followed this discourse
correctly,” Fletcher said. “You have spent five centuries turning Mars from a
desert to a garden?”
“That’s right.”
“Are you really so powerful that
you can rival Our Lord’s handiwork?”
“I believe He only took seven days.
We’ve got a long way to go yet before we equal that. Not that we’ll ever do it
again.”
“Is the whole Lunar nation
emigrating here now?” Louise asked, anxious to halt Fletcher’s queries. She had
caught Endron giving him puzzled glances at odd times during the voyage. It was
something to watch out for; she was used to his naivete, thinking little of it.
Others were not so generous.
“That was the idea. But now it’s
happened, the majority of those living in the Lunar cities are reluctant to
leave. Those who do come here to settle are mostly the younger generation. So
the shift is very gradual.”
“Will you live on Mars once you’ve
finished flying starships?”
“I was born in Phobos; I find skies
unnatural. Two of my children live in Thoth city. I visit when I can, but I
don’t think I would fit in down there anyway. After all this time, our nation
is finally beginning to change. Not very swiftly, but it’s there, it’s happening.”
“How? How can communism change?”
“Money, of course. Now the
terraforming project no longer absorbs every single fuseodollar earned by our
state industries, there is more cash starting to seep into the economy. The
younger generation adore their imported AV blocks and MF albums and clothes,
they are placing so much value on these status symbols, ignoring our own
nation’s products purely for the sake of difference, which they see as
originality. And they have a whole planet to range over; some of us actually
worry that they might walk off into the countryside and reject us totally. Who
knows? Not that I’d mind if they do discard our tenets. After all, it is their
world. We built it so they could know its freedom. Trying to impose the old
restrictions on them would be the purest folly. Social evolution is vital if
any ethnic-nationhood is to survive; and five centuries is a long time to
remain static.”
“So if people did claim land for
themselves, you wouldn’t try to confiscate it back?”
“Confiscate? You say that with some
malice. Is that what the Communists on your world say they’re going to do?”
“Yes, they want to redistribute
Norfolk’s wealth fairly.”
“Well, tell them from me, it won’t
work. All they’ll ever do is cause more strife if they try and change things
now. You cannot impose ideologies on people who do not embrace it
wholeheartedly. The Lunar nation functions because it was planned that way from
the moment the cities gained independence from the companies. It’s the same
concept as Norfolk, the difference being your founders chose to write a
pastoral constitution. Communism works here because everybody supports it, and
the net allowed us to eliminate most forms of corruption within the civil
service and local governing councils that plagued most earlier attempts. If
people don’t like it, they leave rather than try and wreck it for everyone
else. Isn’t that what happens on Norfolk?”
Louise thought back to what
Carmitha had said. “It’s difficult for the Land Union people. Starflight is
expensive.”
“I suppose so. We’re lucky here,
the O’Neill Halo takes all our malcontents, some asteroids have entire low-gee
levels populated by Lunar émigrés. Our government will even pay your ticket for
you. Perhaps you should try that on Norfolk. The whole point of the
Confederation’s diversity is that it provides every kind of ethnic culture
possible. There’s no real need for internal conflict.”
“That’s a nice idea. I ought to
mention it to Daddy when I get back. I’m sure a one-way starship ticket would
be cheaper than keeping someone at the arctic work camps.”
“Why tell your father? Why not
campaign for it yourself?”
“Nobody would listen to me.”
“You won’t be your age forever.”
“I meant, because I’m a girl.”
Endron gave her a mystified frown.
“I see. Perhaps that would be a better issue to campaign about. You’d have half
of the population on your side from day one.”
Louise managed an uncomfortable
smile. She didn’t like having to defend her homeworld from sarcasm, people
should show more courtesy. The trouble was, she found it hard to defend some of
Norfolk’s customs.
Endron took them to one of the
lowest habitation levels, a broad service corridor which led away from the
biosphere cavern, deep into the asteroid’s interior. It was bare rock, with one
wall made up from stacked layers of cable and piping. The floor was slightly
concave, and very smooth. Louise wondered how old it must be for people’s feet
to have worn it down.
They reached a wide olive-green
metal door, and Endron datavised a code at its processor. Nothing happened. He
had to datavise the code another two times before it opened. Louise didn’t dare
risk a glance at Fletcher.
Inside was a cathedral-sized hall
filled with three rows of high voltage electrical transformers. Great loops of
thick black cabling emerged from holes high up in the walls, stretching over
the aisles in a complicated weave that linked them to the fat grey ribbed
cylinders. There was a strong tang of ozone in the air.
A flight of metal stairs pinned
against the rear wall led up to a small maintenance manager’s office cut into
the rock. Two narrow windows looked down on the central aisle as they walked
towards it, the outline of a man just visible inside. Fletcher’s alarm at the
power humming savagely all around them was clear in the sweat on his forehead
and hands, his small, precisely controlled steps.
The office had a large desk with a
computer terminal nearly as primitive as the models Louise used on Norfolk. A
large screen took up most of the back wall, its lucidly coloured symbols displaying
the settlement’s power grid.
There was a Martian waiting for
them inside; a man with very long snow-white hair brushed back neatly and a
bright orange silk suit worn in conjunction with a midnight-black shirt. He
carried a slim, featureless grey case in his left hand.
Faurax didn’t know what to make of
his three new clients at all; if they hadn’t been with Endron he wouldn’t even
have let them into the office. These were not the times to dabble in his usual
sidelines. Thanks to the current Confederation crisis, the Phobos police were
becoming quite unreasonable about security procedures.
“If you don’t mind me asking,” he
said after Endron had introduced everybody. “Why haven’t you got your own
passports?”
“We had to leave Norfolk very
quickly,” Louise said. “The possessed were sweeping through the city. There was
no time to apply to the Foreign Office for passports. Although there’s no
reason why we shouldn’t have been issued with them, we don’t have criminal
records or anything like that.”
It even sounded reasonable. And
Faurax could guess the kind of financial package which the Far Realm’s
crew would engineer concerning their passage. Nobody wanted questions at this
stage.
“You must understand,” he said, “I
had to undertake a considerable amount of research to obtain the Norfolk
government’s authentication codes.”
“How much?” Louise asked.
“Five thousand fuseodollars. Each.”
“Very well.”
She didn’t even sound surprised,
let alone shocked. Which tweaked Faurax’s curiosity; he would have dearly liked
to ask Endron who she was. The call he’d got from Tilia setting up the meeting
had been very sparse on detail.
“Good,” he said, and put his case
on the desk, datavising a code at it. The upper surface flowed apart, revealing
a couple of processor blocks and several fleks. He picked up one of the fleks,
which was embossed with a gold lion: Norfolk’s national symbol. “Here we are. I
loaded in all the information Tilia gave me; name, where you live, age, that
kind of thing. All we need now is an image and a full body biolectric scan.”
“What do we have to do?” Louise
asked.
“First, I’m afraid, is the money.”
She gave a hollow laugh and took a
Jovian Bank credit disk from her small shoulder bag. Once the money had been
shunted over to Faurax’s disk, he said: “Remember not to wear these clothes
when you go through the Halo’s immigration. These images were supposedly taken
on Norfolk before you left, and the clothes are new. In fact, I’d advise
dumping them altogether.”
“We’ll do that,” Louise said.
“Okay.” He slotted the first flek
into his processor block and read the screen. “Genevieve Kavanagh?”
The little girl smiled brightly.
“Stand over there, dear, away from
the door.”
She did as he asked, giving the
sensor lens a solemn stare. After he’d got the visual image filed, he used the
second processor block to sweep her so he could record her biolectric pattern.
Both files were loaded into her passport, encrypted with Norfolk’s
authentication code. “Don’t lose it,” he said and dropped the flek into her
hand.
Louise was next. Faurax found
himself wishing she were a Martian girl. She had a beautiful face, it was just
her body which was so alien.
Fletcher’s image went straight into
his passport flek. Then Faurax ran the biolectric sensor over him. Frowned at
the display. Ran a second scan. It took a long time for his chilly disquiet to
give way into full blown consternation. He gagged, head jerking up from the
block to stare at Fletcher. “You’re a—” His neural nanonics crashed, preventing
him from datavising any alarm. The air solidified in front of his eyes; he
actually saw it flowing like a dense heat shiver, contracting into a ten
centimetre sphere. It hit him full in the face. He heard the bone in his nose
break before he lost consciousness.
Genevieve squealed in shock as
Faurax went crashing to the floor, blood flowing swiftly from his nose.
Endron looked at Fletcher in total
shock, too numb to move. His neural nanonics had shut down, and the office
light panel was flickering in an epileptic rhythm. “Oh, my God. No! Not you.”
He glanced at the door, gauging his chances.
“Do not try to run, sir,” Fletcher
said sternly. “I will do whatever I must to protect these ladies.”
“Oh, Fletcher,” Louise groaned in
dismay. “We were almost there.”
“His device exposed my nature, my
lady. I could do naught else.”
Genevieve ran over to Fletcher and
hugged him tightly around his waist. He patted her head lightly.
“Now what are we going to do?”
Louise asked.
“Not you as well?” Endron bewailed.
“I’m not possessed,” she said with
indignant heat.
“Then what . . . ?”
“Fletcher has been protecting us
from the possessed. You don’t think I could stand against them by myself, do
you?”
“But, he’s one of them.”
“One of whom, sir? Many men are
murderers and brigands, does that make all of us so?”
“You can’t apply that argument.
You’re a possessed. You’re the enemy.”
“Yet, sir, I do not consider myself
to be your enemy. My only crime, so it sounds, is that I have died.”
“And come back! You have stolen
that man’s body. Your kind want to do the same to mine and everyone else’s.”
“What would you have us do? I am
not so valiant that I can resist this release from the torture of the beyond.
Perhaps, sir, you see such weakness as my true crime. If so, I plead guilty to
that ignominy. Yet, know you this, I would grasp at such an escape every time
it is offered, though I know it to be the most immoral of thefts.”
“He saved us,” Genevieve protested
hotly. “Quinn Dexter was going to do truly beastly things to me and Louise.
Fletcher stopped him. No one else could. He’s not a bad man; you shouldn’t say
he is. And I won’t let you do anything horrid to him. I don’t want him to have
to go back there into the beyond.” She hugged Fletcher tighter.
“All right,” Endron said. “Maybe
you’re not like the Capone Organization, or the ones on Lalonde. But I can’t
let you walk around here. This is my home, damn it. Maybe it is unfair, and
unkind that you suffered in the beyond. You’re still a possessor, nothing
changes that. We are opposed, it’s fundamental to what we are.”
“Then you, sir, have a very
pressing problem. For I am sworn to see these ladies to their destination in
safety.”
“Wait,” Louise said. She turned to
Endron. “Nothing has changed. We still wish to leave Phobos, and you know
Fletcher is not a danger to you or your people. You said so.”
Endron gestured at the crumpled
form of Faurax. “I can’t,” he said desperately.
“If Fletcher opens your bodies to
the souls in the beyond, who knows what the people who come through will be
like,” Louise said. “I don’t think they will be as restrained as Fletcher, not
if the ones I’ve encountered are anything to judge by. You would be the cause
of Phobos falling to the possessed. Is that what you want?”
“What the hell do you think? You’ve
backed me into a corner.”
“No we haven’t, there’s an easy way
out of this, for all of us.”
“What?”
“Help us, of course. You can finish
recording Fletcher’s passport for us, you can find a zero-tau pod for Faurax
and keep him in it until this is all over. And you’ll know for certain that
we’ve gone and that your asteroid is safe.”
“This is insane. I don’t trust you,
and you’d be bloody stupid to trust me.”
“Not really,” she said. “If you
tell us you’ll do it, Fletcher will know if you’re telling us the truth. And
once we’re gone you still won’t change your mind, because you could never
explain away what you’ve done to the police.”
“You can read minds?” Endron’s
consternation had deepened.
“I will indeed know of any
treachery which blackens your heart.”
“What do you intend to do once you
reach Tranquillity?”
“Find my fiancé. Apart from that,
we have no plans.”
Endron gave Faurax another fast
appraisal. “I don’t think I have a lot of choice, do I? If you stop this
electronic warfare effect, I’ll get a freight mechanoid to take Faurax to the Far
Realm. I can use one of the on board zero-tau pods without anyone asking
questions. Lord knows what I’ll say when this is over. They’ll just fling me
out of an airlock, I expect.”
“You’re saving your world,” Louise
said. “You’ll be a hero.”
“Somehow, I doubt that.”
The cave went a long way back into
the polyp cliff, which allowed Dariat to light a fire without having to worry
about it being spotted. He’d chosen the beach at the foot of the endcap as
today’s refuge. Surely here at least he and Tatiana would be safe? There were
no bridges over the circumfluous reservoir. If Bonney came for them she’d have
to use either a boat or one of the tube carriages (however unlikely that was).
Which meant that for once they’d have a decent warning.
The hunter’s ability to get close before
either he or Rubra located her was unnerving. Even Rubra seemed genuinely
concerned by it. Dariat never could understand how she ever located them in the
first place. But locate them she did. There hadn’t been a day since he met
Tatiana when Bonney hadn’t come after them.
His one guess was that her
perception ability was far greater than anyone else’s, allowing her to see the
minds of everybody in the habitat. If so, the distance was extraordinary; he
couldn’t feel anything beyond a kilometre at the most, and ten metres of solid
polyp blocked him completely.
Tatiana finished gutting the pair
of trout she’d caught, and wrapped them in foil. Both were slipped into the
shallow hole below the fire. “They ought to be done in about half an hour,” she
said.
He smiled blankly, remembering the
fires he and Anastasia had made, the meals she had prepared for him. Campfire
cooking was an outlandish concept to him then. Used to regulated, heat inducted
sachets, he was always impressed by the cuisine she produced from such
primitive arrangements.
“Did she ever say anything about
me?” he asked.
“Not much. I didn’t see much of her
after she set herself up as a mistress of Thoale. Besides which, I was
discovering boys myself about then.” She gave a raucous laugh.
Apart from the physical
resemblance, it was difficult to accept any other connection between Tatiana
and Anastasia. It was inconceivable that his beautiful love would have ever
grown into anything resembling this cheery, easygoing woman, with an overloud
voice. Anastasia would have kept her quiet dignity, her sly humour, her
generous spirit.
It was hard for him to feel much
sympathy for Tatiana, and harder still to tolerate her behaviour, especially
given their circumstances. He persisted, though, knowing that to desert her now
would make him unworthy, a betrayal of his own one love.
Damn Rubra for knowing that.
“Whatever she did say, I’d
appreciate you telling me.”
“Okay. I suppose I owe you that at
least.” She settled herself more comfortably into the thin sand, her bracelets
tinkling softly. “She said her new boy—that’s you—was very different. She said
you’d been hurt by Anstid since the day you were born, but that she could see
the real person buried underneath all the pain and loneliness. She thought she
could free you from his thrall. Strange, she really believed it; as if you were
some sort of injured bird she’d rescued. I don’t think she realized what a
mistake she’d made. Not until the end. That was why she did it.”
“I am true to her. I always have
been.”
“So I see. Thirty years planning.”
She whistled a long single note.
“I’m going to kill Anstid. I have
the power now.”
Tatiana began to laugh, a big belly
rumble that shook her loose cotton dress about. “Ho yes, I can see why she’d
fall for you. All that sincerity and retention. Cupid tipped his arrows with a
strong potion that day you two met.”
“Don’t mock.”
Her laughter vanished in an
instant. Then he could see the resemblance to Anastasia, the passion in her
eyes. “I would never mock my sister, Dariat. I pity her for the trick Tarrug
played on her. She was too young to meet you, too damn young. If she’d had a
few more years to gather wisdom, she would have seen you are beyond any
possible salvation. But she was young, and stupid the way we all are at that age.
She couldn’t refuse the challenge to do good, to bring a little light into your
prison. When you get to my age, you give lost causes a wide passage.”
“I am not lost, not to Chi-ri, not
to Thoale. I will slay Anstid. And that is thanks to Anastasia, she broke that
Lord’s spell over me.”
“Oh, dear, oh, dear, listen to him.
Stop reading the words, Dariat, learn with your heart. Just because she told
you the names of our Lords and Ladies, doesn’t mean you know them. You won’t
kill Anstid. Rubra is not a realm Lord, he’s a screwed-up old memory pattern.
Sure, his bananas mind makes him bitter and vindictive, which is an aspect of
Anstid, but he’s not the real thing. Hatred isn’t going to vanish from the
universe just because you nuke a habitat. You can see that, can’t you?”
Yes, go on, boy, answer the
question. I’m interested.
Fuck off!
Pity you never went to
university; the old school of hard knocks is never quite enough when you need
to stand up for yourself in the intellectual debating arena.
Dariat made an effort to calm
himself, aware of the little worms of light scurrying over his clothing. A
sheepish grin unfurled on his lips. “Yes, I can see that. Besides, without
hatred you could never know how sweet love is. We need hatred.”
“That’s more like it.” She started
applauding. “We’ll make a Starbridge of you yet.”
“Too late for that. And I’m still
going to nuke Rubra.”
“Not before I’m out of here, I
hope.”
“I’ll get you out.”
Yeah, and whose help are you
going to need for that?
“How?” Tatiana asked.
“I’ll be honest. I don’t know. But
I’ll find a way. I owe you and Anastasia that much.”
Bravo, Sir Galahad. In the
meantime, three ships have arrived.
So?
So they’re from New California,
a frigate and two combat-capable traders. I think our current status quo might
be changing.
The voidhawks on observation duty
perceived the three Adamist starships emerge from their ZTT jump twelve
thousand kilometres out from Valisk. As their thermo-dump panels, sensor
clusters, and communications arrays deployed, the voidhawks started to pick up
high-bandwidth microwave transmissions. The ships were beaming out news reports
all over the Srinagar system, telling everyone who was interested how well the
Organization was doing, and how New California was prospering. There were several
long items on the possessed curing injuries and broken bones in the
non-possessed.
The one thing the voidhawks
couldn’t intercept was the signal between the ships and Valisk. Whatever was
said, it resulted in eight hellhawks arriving to escort the New California
starships to the habitat’s spaceport.
Alarmed by the implication of
Capone extending his influence into the Srinagar system, Consensus requested
Rubra monitor developments closely. For once, he wasn’t inclined to argue.
Kiera waited for Patricia Mangano
at the end of the passageway which led up to the axial chamber three kilometres
above her. Without the tube carriages, every ascent and descent had to be on
foot. Starting at the axial chamber, the passageway contained a ladder for the
first kilometre, then gave way to a staircase for the final two as the
curvature became more pronounced. It ended two kilometres above the base of the
endcap, emerging from the polyp shell onto a shelflike plateau which was
reached by a switchback road.
Thankfully, similar plateaus around
the endcap gave them admission to the docking ledge lounges. Which meant they’d
all but stopped using the counter-rotating spaceport.
If Patricia was annoyed by the time
and physical effort it took her to descend, it was hidden deeper than Kiera’s
perception was able to discern. Instead, when Capone’s envoy emerged into the
light, she smiled with a simple delight as she looked around. Kiera had to
admit, the little plateau was an excellent vantage point. The distinct bands of
colour which comprised Valisk’s interior shone lucidly in the light tube’s
relentless emission.
Patricia shielded her eyes with one
hand as she gazed about the worldlet. “Nothing anybody says can prepare you for
this.”
“Didn’t you have habitats in your
time?” Kiera asked.
“Absolutely not. I’m strictly a
twentieth-century gal. Al prefers us as his lieutenants, that way we understand
each other better. Some modern types, I can only comprehend about one word in
ten.”
“I’m from the twenty-fourth century
myself. Never set foot on Earth.”
“Lucky you.”
Kiera gestured at the open-top
truck parked at the end of the road. Bonney was sitting in the backseat, ever
vigilant.
Kiera switched on the motor and
began the drive down the road. “I’ll warn you from the start, anything you say
in the open is overheard by Rubra. We think he tells the Edenists just about
everything that goes on in here.”
“What I have to say is private,”
Patricia said.
“I thought so. Don’t worry, we have
some clean rooms.”
It wasn’t too difficult for Rubra
to infiltrate the circular tower at the base of the northern endcap. He just
needed to be careful. The possessed could always detect small animals like mice
and bats, which were simply blasted by a bolt of white fire. So he had to
resort to more unusual servitors.
Deep in the birthing caverns of the
southern endcap, incubators were used to nurture insects whose DNA templates
had been stored unused since the time when Valisk was germinated. Centipedes
and bees began to emerge, each one affinity-controlled by a sub-routine.
The bees flew straight out into the
main cavern, where they hovered and loitered among all the temporary camps set
up around the starscraper lobbies. Coverage wasn’t perfect, but they provided
him with a great deal of information about what went on inside the tents and
cottages, where his usual perception was blocked.
The centipedes were carried aloft
by birds, to be deposited on the roof of the tower and other substantial
buildings. Like the spiders which the Edenist intelligence agency used to
infiltrate their observation targets, they scuttled along conditioning ducts
and cable conduits, hiding just behind grilles and sockets where they could
scrutinize the interior.
Their deployment allowed Rubra and
the Kohistan Consensus to watch as Kiera led Patricia Mangano into Magellanic
Itg’s boardroom. Patricia had one assistant with her, while Kiera was
accompanied by Bonney and Stanyon. No one else from Valisk’s new ruling council
had been invited.
“What happened?” Patricia asked
after she had claimed a chair at the big table.
“In what respect?” Kiera replied
cautiously.
“Come on. You’ve got your hellhawks
flitting about the Confederation with impunity to bring back warm bodies. And
when they get here, the habitat looks like it’s a Third World refugee camp left
over from my own century. You’re living in the iron age, here. It doesn’t make
any sense. Bitek is the one technology that keeps working around us. You should
be lording it up in the starscraper apartments.”
“Rubra happened,” Kiera said bitterly.
“He’s still in the neural strata. The one expert we had on affinity who could
possibly remove him has . . . failed. It means we’ve got to go through the
starscrapers a centimetre at a time to make them safe. We’re getting there.
It’ll take time, but we’ve got eternity, after all.”
“You could leave.”
“I don’t think so.”
Patricia lounged back, grinning.
“Ah, right. That would mean evacuating to a planet. How would you keep your
position and authority there?”
“The same way Capone does. People
need governments, they need organizing. We’re a very socially oriented race.”
“So why didn’t you?”
“We’re doing all right here. Have
you really come all this way just to take cheap shots?”
“Not at all. I’m here to offer you
a deal.”
“Yes?”
“Antimatter in return for your
hellhawks.”
Kiera glanced at Bonney and
Stanyon; the latter’s face was alive with interest. “What exactly do you think
we can do with antimatter?”
“The same as us,” Patricia said.
“Blow Srinagar’s SD network clean to hell. Then you’ll be able to get
off this dump. The planet will be wide open to you. And as you’ll be running
the invasion, you’ll be able to shape whatever society springs up among the
possessed down there. That’s the way it works for the Organization. We begin
it, we rule it. Whether it works here, depends on how good you are. Capone is
the best.”
“But not perfect.”
“You have your problems, we have
ours. The Edenist voidhawks are causing a lot of disruption to our fleet
activities. We need the hellhawks to deal with them. Their distortion fields
can locate the stealth bombs being flung at us.”
“Interesting proposition.”
“Don’t try and bargain, please.
That would be insulting. We have an irritant; you have a potential disaster
looming.”
“If you don’t take too much offence
at the question, I’d like to know how much antimatter you’ll deliver.”
“As much as it takes, and the ships
to deploy them, providing you can keep your end. How many hellhawks can you
offer?”
“We have several out collecting
Deadnight kids. But I can probably let you have seventy.”
“And you can keep them under
control, make them follow orders?”
“Oh, yes.”
“How?”
Kiera gloated. “It’s not something
you’ll ever be able to duplicate. We can return the souls possessing the
hellhawks directly into human bodies. That’s what they all want eventually, and
that’s what we’ll give them, providing they obey.”
“Smart. So do we have a deal?”
“Not with you. I’ll travel to New
California myself and talk to Capone. That way we’ll both know how much we can
trust the other.”
Kiera hung back after Patricia left
the boardroom. “This changes everything,” she said to Bonney. “Even if we don’t
get enough antimatter to knock over Srinagar, it’ll give us the deterrence to
prevent another voidhawk attack.”
“It looks like it. Do you think
Capone is on the level?”
“I’m not sure. He must need the
hellhawks pretty badly, or he wouldn’t have offered us the antimatter. Even if
he’s got a production station, it won’t exactly be plentiful.”
“You want me to come with you?”
“No.” The tip of her tongue licked
over her lips, a fast movement by a lash of forked flesh. “We’re either going
to be leaving here for Srinagar, or I’ll deal with Capone to provide us with
enough bodies to fill the habitat. Either way, we won’t be needing that shit
Dariat anymore. See to it.”
“You bet.”
Can you stop the hellhawks from
leaving? Rubra asked.
No, the Kohistan Consensus said. Not seventy of
them. They are still armed with a considerable number of conventional combat
wasps.
Bugger.
If Kiera does acquire antimatter
combat wasps from Capone, we don’t think we will be able to provide an adequate
level of reinforcement to Srinagar’s Strategic Defence network. The planet may
fall to her.
Then call in the Confederation
Navy. Srinagar’s been paying its taxes, hasn’t it?
Yes. But there is no guarantee
the navy will respond. Its resources are being deployed over a wide area.
Then call Jupiter. They’re bound
to have spare squadrons.
We will see what can be done.
Do that. In the meantime, there
are some important decisions to be taken. By me and Dariat both. And I don’t
think Bonney Lewin is going to give us much more time.
Erick was sure that the explosion,
followed by the capsule’s equally violent stabilization manoeuvre, had torn
loose some of his medical nanonic packages. He could feel peculiar lines of
pressure building up under the SII suit, and convinced himself it was fluid
leakage. Blood or artificial tissue nutrient from the packages and their
supplements, he wasn’t sure which. Over half of them no longer responded to his
datavises.
At least it meant they couldn’t
contribute to the medical program’s dire pronouncements of his current
physiological state. His right arm wouldn’t respond to any nerve impulses at
all, nor was he receiving any sensation from it. The only positive factor was a
confirmation that blood was still circulating inside the new muscles and
artificial tissue.
There wasn’t much he could do to
rectify the situation. The capsule’s reserve electron matrices didn’t have
enough power to activate the internal life-support system. The thin atmosphere
was already ten degrees below zero, and falling rapidly. Which meant he was
unable to take the suit off and replace the nanonic packages. And just to twist
the knife, an emergency survival gear locker containing fresh medical nanonic packages
had popped open in the ceiling above him.
Backup lighting had come on,
casting a weak pale blue glow across the compartment. Frost was forming on most
of the surfaces, gradually obscuring the few remaining active holoscreen
displays. Various pieces of refuse had been jolted loose from their nesting
places to twirl whimsically through the air, throwing avian-style shadows
across the acceleration couches.
Potentially the most troubling
problem was the intermittent dropouts from which the flight computer’s
datavises were suffering. Erick wasn’t entirely sure he could trust its status
display. It still responded to simple commands, though.
With his personal situation stable
for a moment, he instructed the capsule’s sensors to deploy. Three of the five
responded, pistonlike tubes sliding up out of the nultherm foam coating. They
began to scan around.
Astrogration programs slowly
correlated the surrounding starfield. If they were working correctly, then the Tigara
had emerged approximately fifty million kilometres from the coordinate he
was aiming for. Ngeuni was only an unremarkable blue-green star to one side of
the glaring A2 primary.
He wasn’t sure if they would pick
up the capsule’s distress beacon. Stage one colonies did not have the most
sophisticated communications satellites. When he instructed the capsule’s
phased array antenna to focus on the distant planet, it didn’t acknowledge. He
repeated the instruction, and there was still no activity.
The flight computer ran a
diagnostic, which gave him a System Inviable code. Without actually going
outside to examine it, there was no way of telling what was wrong.
Alone.
Cut off.
Fifty million kilometres from
possible rescue.
Light-years from where he
desperately needed to be.
All that was left for him now was
to wait. He began switching off every piece of equipment apart from the
attitude rockets, the guidance system which drove them, and the computer
itself. Judging by the frequency of the thruster firings, the capsule was
venting something. The last diagnostic sweep before he shut down the internal
sensors couldn’t pinpoint what it was.
After he’d reduced the power drain
to a minimum, he pressed the deactivation switch for his restraint webbing.
Even that seemed reluctant to work, taking a long time to fold back below the
side of the cushioning. At this movement, levering himself up from the couch,
fluid stirred across his abdomen. He found that by moving very slowly, the
effect (and perhaps the harm) was moderated.
Training took over, and he began to
index the emergency gear which had deployed from the ceiling. That was when the
emotional shock hammered him. He suddenly found himself shaking badly as he
clung to a four person programmable silicon dinghy.
Indexing his position! Like a good
little first-year cadet.
A broken laugh bubbled around the
SII suit’s respirator tube. The glossy black silicon covering his eyes turned
permeable to vent the salty fluid burning his squeezed up eyelids.
Never in his life had he felt so
utterly helpless. Even when the possessed were boarding the Villeneuve’s
Revenge he’d been able to do something. Fight back, hit them. Orbiting
above New California with the Organization poised to obliterate them at the
first false move, he’d been able to store most of the sensor images. There had
always been something, some way of being positive.
Now he was humiliatingly aware of
his mind crumbling away in mimicry of his tattered old body. Fear had risen to
consume him, flowing swiftly out of the dark corners of the bridge. It produced
a pain in his head far worse than any physical injury ever could.
Those muscles which still
functioned disobeyed any lingering wishes he might have, leaving him
ignominiously barnacled to the dinghy. Every last reserve of determination and
resolve had been exhausted. Not even the ubiquitous programs could shore up his
mentality anymore.
Too weak to continue living, too
frightened to die: Erick Thakrar had come to the end of the line.
Eight kilometres west of Stonygate,
Cochrane tooted the horn on the Karmic Crusader bus and turned off the road.
The other three vehicles in the convoy jounced over the grass verge and came to
a halt behind it.
“Yo, dudettes,” Cochrane yelled
back to the juvenile rioters clambering over the seats. “Time out for like the
big darkness.” He pressed the red button on the dash, and the doors hissed
open. Kids poured out like a dam burst.
Cochrane put his purple glasses
back on and climbed down out of the cab. Stephanie and Moyo walked over to him,
arm in arm. “Good place,” she said. The convoy had halted at the head of a
gentle valley which was completely roofed over by the rumbling blanket of
crimson cloud, rendering the mountain peaks invisible.
“This whole righteous road trip is
one major groove.”
“Right.”
He materialized a fat reefer. “Hit?”
“No thanks. I’d better see about
cooking them some supper.”
“That’s cool. I can’t psyche out
any hostile vibes in this locale. I’ll like keep watch, make sure the nazgul
aren’t circling overhead.”
“You do that.” Stephanie smiled
fondly at him and went to the back of the bus, where the big luggage hold was.
Moyo started pulling out the cooking gear.
“We should manage to reach
Chainbridge by tomorrow evening,” he said.
“Yes. This isn’t quite what I
expected when we started out, you know.”
“Predictability is boring.” He put
a big electric camping grille on the ground, adjusting the aluminum legs to
make it level. “Besides, I think it’s worked out for the best.”
Stephanie glanced around the
improvised campsite, nodding approval; nearly sixty children were scampering
around the parked vehicles. What had started off as a private mission to help a
handful of lost children had rapidly snowballed.
Four times during the first day
they had been stopped by residents who had told them where non-possessed
children were lurking. On the second day there were over twenty children packed
on board; that was when Tina Sudol had volunteered to come with them. Rana and
McPhee joined up on the third day, adding another bus.
Now there were four vehicles, and
eight possessed adults. They were no longer making a straight dash for the
border at the top of Mortonridge. It was more of a zigzag route, visiting as
many towns as they could to pick up children. Ekelund’s people, who had evolved
into the closest thing to a government on Mortonridge, maintained the
communications net between the larger towns, albeit with a considerably reduced
bit capacity than previously. News of Stephanie’s progress had spread widely.
Children were already waiting for the buses when they reached some towns; on a
couple of occasions dressed smartly and given packed lunches by the possessed
who had taken care of them. They had borne witness to some very tearful
partings.
After the children had eaten and
washed and been settled in their tents, Cochrane and Franklin Quigley sliced
branches off a tree and piled them up to form a proper campfire. The adults
came to sit around it, enjoying the yellow light flaring out to repel the
clouds’ incessant claret illumination.
“I think we should forget going
back to a town when we’re done with the kids,” McPhee said. “All of us get
along okay, we should try a farm. The towns are starting to run out of food,
now. We could grow some and sell it to them. That would give us something to
do.”
“He’s been back a whole week, and
he’s already bored,” Franklin Quigley grunted.
“Bore-ing,” Cochrane said.
He blew twin streams of smoke out of his nostrils. They spiralled through the
air to jab at McPhee’s nose like a cobra.
The giant Scot made a pass of his
hand, and the smoke wilted, turning to tar and splattering on the ground. “I’m
not bored, but we have to do something. It makes sense to think ahead.”
“You might be right,” Stephanie
said. “I don’t think I’d like to live in any of the towns we’ve passed through
so far.”
“The way I see it,” said Moyo, “is
that the possessed are developing into two groups.”
“Please don’t use that
word,” Rana said. Sitting cross-legged next to the flamboyantly feminine Tina
Sudol, Rana appeared fastidiously androgynous with her short hair and baggy
blue sweater.
“What word?” Moyo asked.
“Possession. I find it offensive
and prejudicial.”
“That’s right, babe,” Cochrane
chortled. “We’re not possessors, we’re just like dimensionally disadvantaged.”
“Call our cross-continuum placement
situation whatever you wish,” she snapped back. “You cannot alter the fact that
the term is wholly derogatory. The Confederation’s military-industrial complex
is using it to demonize us so they can justify increased spending on their
armaments programs.”
Stephanie pressed her face into
Moyo’s arm to smother her giggles.
“Come on, we’re not exactly on the
side of the saints,” Franklin observed.
“The perception of common morality
is enforced entirely by the circumstances of male-dominated society. Our new
and unique circumstances require us to re-evaluate that original morality. As
there are clearly not enough living bodies to go around the human race, sensory
ownership should be distributed on an equitable basis. It’s no good the living
protesting about us. We have as much right to sensory input as they do.”
Cochrane took the reefer from his
mouth and gave it a sad stare. “Man, I wish I could manifest your trips.”
“You ignore him, darling,” Tina
Sudol said to Rana. “He’s a perfect example of male brutality.”
“I suppose a fuck is out of the
question tonight, then?”
Tina sucked in her cheeks
theatrically as she glowered at the unrepentant hippie. “I’m only interested in
men.”
“And always have been,” McPhee
said, in an unsubtle whisper.
Tina flounced her glossy,
highlighted hair back with a manicured hand. “You men are animals, all of you,
simply rancid with hormones. No wonder I wanted to escape that prison
of flesh I was in.”
“The two groups,” Moyo said,
“seem to be divided into those that stay put, like the café proprietors, and
the restless ones—like us I suppose, though we’re an exception. They complement
each other perfectly. The wanderers go around playing tourist, drinking down
the sights and experiences. And wherever they go, they meet the stayers and
tell them about their journeys. That way both types get what they want. Both of
us exist to relish experience; some like to go out and find it, others like it
brought to them.”
“You think that’s what it’s going
to be like from now on?” McPhee asked.
“Yes. That’s what we’ll settle down
into.”
“But for how long? Wanting to see
and feel is just a reaction from the beyond. Once we’ve had our fill, human
nature will come back. People want to settle down, have a family. Procreation
is our biological imperative. And that’s one thing we never can do. We will
always be frustrated.”
“I’ll like give it a try,” Cochrane
said. “Me and Tina can make babies in my tepee anytime.”
Tina gave him a single disgusted
look, and shuddered.
“But they wouldn’t be yours,”
McPhee said. “That isn’t your body, and it certainly isn’t your DNA. You will
never have a child again, not one of your own. That phase of our lives is over,
it cannot be regained no matter how much of our energistic ability we expend.”
“You’re also forgetting the third
type walking among us,” Franklin said. “The Ekelund type. And I do know her. I
signed up with her for the first couple of days. She seemed to know what she
was doing. We had ‘objectives’ and ‘target assignments,’ and ‘command
structures’—and God help anyone who disobeyed those fascists. She’s a straight
power nut with a Napoleonic complex. She’s got her little army of wannabe
toughs running around in combat fatigues thinking they’re reborn special forces
brigades. And they’re going to keep sniping away at the Royal Marines over the
border until the Princess gets so pissed with us she nukes Mortonridge down to
the bedrock.”
“That situation won’t last,” McPhee
said. “Give it a month, or a year, and the Confederation will fall. Don’t you
listen to the whispers in the beyond? Capone is getting his act together out
there. It won’t be long before the Organization fleet jumps to Ombey. Then
there will be nobody left for Ekelund to fight, and her command structure will
simply fade away. Nobody is going to do what she tells them for the rest of time.”
“I don’t want to live for the rest
of time,” Stephanie said. “I really don’t. That’s almost as frightening as
being trapped in the beyond. We’re not made to live forever, we can’t handle
it.”
“Lighten up, babe,” Cochrane said.
“I don’t mind giving eternity a try; it’s the flipside which is the real
bummer.”
“We’ve been back a week, and
Mortonridge is already falling apart. There’s hardly any food left, nothing
works properly.”
“Give it a chance,” Moyo said.
“We’re all badly shocked, we don’t know how to control this new power we’ve
got, and the non-possessed want to hunt us down and fling us back. You can
hardly expect instant civilization under those circumstances. We’ll find a way
to adjust. As soon as the rest of Ombey is possessed we’ll take it out of this
universe altogether. Once that happens, things will be different. You’ll see;
this is just an interim stage.” He put his arm around her as she leaned into
him. She kissed him lightly, mind shining with appreciation.
“Yo, love machines,” Cochrane said.
“So while you two screw like hot bunnies for the rest of the night, who’s going
into town to track down some food?”
Got a beacon, Edwin announced. His mind was hot with triumph.
Around Oenone’s bridge, the
communal tension level reduced with a strong mental sigh. They had arrived
above Ngeuni twenty minutes ago. Every sensor extended. The crew in alert
status one. Weapons powered up. Ready for anything. To retrieve Thakrar. To
fight possessed starships that had captured Thakrar.
And there had been nothing. No
ships in orbit. No response from the small development company advance camp on
the planet.
Oenone accelerated into a high polar orbit, and Edwin
activated every sensor they had.
It’s very weak, some kind of
capsule emergency signal. Definitely the Tigara’s identification code,
though. The ship must have broken up.
Lock on to it, please, Syrinx said. She was aware of the astrogration
data from the sensors flooding into the bitek processor array. From that, she
and Oenone understood exactly where the signal was in relation to
themselves.
Go.
The voidhawk swallowed through a
wormhole that barely had any internal length at all. Starlight blue-shifted
slightly as it twisted into a tight rosette, kissing the hull, then expanding.
A life-support capsule was spinning idly ten kilometres in front of the
terminus as Oenone shot out. Local space was smeared with scraps of
debris from the Tigara’s violent end. Syrinx could feel the capsule’s
mass in her mind as it hung in Oenone’s distortion field. Sensors and communications
dishes in the lower hull pods swung around to point at the dingy sphere.
There’s no response from the
capsule, Edwin said. I’m
registering some power circuits active in there, but they’re very weak. And
it’s been venting its atmosphere.
Oxley, Serina, take the MSV over
there, Syrinx ordered. Bring
him back.
Oenone’s crew watched through Serina’s armour suit
sensors as she crept through the decks of the life-support capsule, searching
for Captain Thakrar. It was a shambles inside, with equipment torn off
bulkheads, hatches jammed, lockers broken open to send junk and old clothes
floating free. The air had gone, allowing several pipes to burst and release
globules of fluid, which had subsequently frozen solid. She had to use a
high-powered fission cutter on the latches around the final hatch before she
could worm her way into the bridge. At first she didn’t even recognize the
SII-suited figure clutching at one of the emergency supply cases on the
ceiling. Granules of frost had solidified on him as they had on every surface,
glinting a dusty grey in the beams thrown out by her helmet lights. In his
fetal position he looked like some kind of giant mummified larva.
At least he got into a suit, Oxley said. Is there any infrared emission?
Check the electronic warfare
block first, Syrinx said.
Negative electronic warfare
emission. He’s not possessed. But he is alive. The suit’s a couple of degrees
above ambient.
Are you sure it’s not just
natural body heat residue? Those suits are a good insulator. If he’s alive,
then he hasn’t moved since the frost formed on him. That must have been hours
ago.
Serina’s bitek processor block
converted her affinity voice into a straight datavise. “Captain Thakrar? Are
you receiving this, sir? We’re Edenists from Golomo; we received your message.”
The ice-encrusted figure didn’t move. She waited a moment, then made her way
towards him. I’ve just datavised his suit processor for a status update.
He’s still breathing. Oh, damn.
They all saw it at the same time:
ancillary medical modules anchored to Thakrar by small plastic tubes which
burrowed through the SII suit material. Two of the modules had red LEDs shining
under their coating of frost, the others were completely dark. The tubes had
all frozen solid.
Get him back here, Syrinx instructed. Fast as you can, Serina.
Caucus was waiting with a stretcher
right outside the MSV’s airlock. Oenone had stopped generating a gravity
field in the crew torus so that Serina and Oxley could tow Thakrar’s inert form
through the cramped little tube without too much difficulty. He was shedding
droplets as they went, the layer of frost melting in the warm air. They got him
onto the stretcher, and Oenone immediately reinstated gravity in the
torus, tugging the crew down to the decking again. Oxley held on to the dead
medical modules as they raced around the central corridor to the sick bay.
Deactivate the suit, please, Caucus told Serina as the stretcher was wheeled
under the diagnostic scanner. She issued the order to the suit’s control
processor, which examined the external environment before obeying. The black
silicon retreated from Thakrar’s skin, sliding from his extremities to glide
smoothly toward his throat. Dark fluids began to stain the stretcher. Syrinx
wrinkled her nose up at the smell, putting a hand over her nose.
Is he all right? Oenone asked.
I don’t know yet.
Please, Syrinx, it is him who is
hurt, not you. Please don’t remember like this.
I’m sorry. I didn’t know I was
being so obvious.
To the others, perhaps not.
It does make me remember, I
won’t deny that. But his injuries are very different.
Pain is pain.
My pain is only a memory, she recited; in her mind it was Wing-Tsit
Chong’s voice which spoke the phrase. Memories do not hurt, they only
influence.
Caucus winced at the sight which
was unveiled. Thakrar’s lower right arm was new, that much was obvious. The
medical packages wrapped around it had shifted, opening large gashes in the
translucent immature skin. AT muscles lay exposed, their drying membranes
acquiring a nasty septic tint. Scars and skin grafts on the legs and torso were
a livid red against the snowy skin. The remainder of his packages appeared to
have withered, green surfaces crinkling up like aging rubber, pulling the edges
back from the flesh they were supposed to heal. Sour nutrient fluids dripped
out of torn inlet plugs.
For a moment, all Caucus could do
was stare in a kind of revolted dismay. He simply didn’t know where to start.
Erick Thakrar’s bruised eyelids
slowly opened. What alarmed Syrinx the most was the lack of confusion they
showed.
“Can you hear me, Erick?” Caucus
said in an overloud voice. “You’re perfectly safe now. We’re Edenists, we
rescued you. Now please don’t try and move.”
Erick opened his mouth, lips
quivering.
“We’re going to treat you in just a
moment. Are your axon blocks functional?”
“No!” It was very clear, very
determined.
Caucus picked up an anaesthetic
spray from the bench. “Is the program faulty, or have your neural nanonics been
damaged?”
Erick brought his good arm around
and pressed his knuckles into Caucus’s back. “No, you will not touch me,” he
datavised. “I have a nerve burst implant. I will kill him.”
The spray fell from Caucus’s hand
to clatter on the deck.
Syrinx could barely credit what was
happening. Her mind instinctively opened to Caucus, offering support to his own
frightened thoughts. All the crew were doing the same.
“Captain Thakrar, I am Captain
Syrinx, this is my voidhawk Oenone. Please deactivate your implant.
Caucus was not going to harm you.”
Erick laughed, an unsteady gulp
which shook his whole body. “I know that. I don’t want to be treated. I’m not
going back, not out there. Not again.”
“Nobody is going to send you
anywhere.”
“They will. They always do. You do,
you navy people. Always one final mission, one little bit of vital information
to collect, then it will all be over. It never is, though. Never.”
“I understand.”
“Liar.”
She gestured to the outlines of the
medical packages visible through her ship-tunic. “I do have some knowledge of
what you have been through. The possessed had me for a brief time.”
Erick gave her a scared glance.
“They’ll win. If you saw what they can do, you’ll know that. There’s nothing we
can do.”
“I think there is. I think there
must be a solution.”
“We’ll die. We’ll become them.
They’re us, all of us.”
Captain? I’ve got a clean shot
at him.
Syrinx was aware of Edwin, out in
the central corridor, a maser carbine raised. The blank muzzle was pointing at
Erick Thakrar’s back. A feed from the weapon’s targeting processor showed it
was aimed precisely on Thakrar’s spinal column. The coherent microwaves would
sever his nerves before he could use the implant.
No, she said. Not yet. He deserves our efforts
to talk him out of this. For the first time in a long time, she was angry
at an Adamist for being just that, an Adamist. Closed mind, locked up tight in
its skull. No way of knowing what others were thinking, never really knowing
love, kindness, or sympathy. She couldn’t take the simple truth to him
directly. Not the easy way.
“What do you want us to do?” she
asked.
“I have information,” Erick
datavised. “Strategic information.”
“We know. Your message to Golomo
said it was important.”
“I will sell it to you.”
There was a collective burst of
surprise from the crew.
“Okay,” Syrinx said. “If I have the
price on board, you will have it.”
“Zero-tau.” Erick’s face became
pleading. “Tell me you have a pod on board. For God’s sake.”
“We have several.”
“Good. I want to be put inside.
They can’t get to you in there.”
“All right, Erick. We’ll put you in
zero-tau.”
“Forever.”
“What?”
“Forever. I want to stay in
zero-tau forever.”
“Erick . . .”
“I thought about this; I thought
about it a lot, it can work. Really it can. Your habitats can resist the
possessed. Adamist starships don’t work for them, not properly. Capone is the
only one who has any military ships, and he won’t be able to keep them going
for long. They’ll need maintenance, spares. He’ll run out eventually. Then
there won’t be any more invasions, only infiltrations. And you won’t let your
guard down. We will, Adamists will. But not you. In a hundred years from now
there will be nothing left of our race, except for you. Your culture will live
forever. You can keep me in zero-tau forever.”
“There’s no need for this, Erick.
We can beat them.”
“No,” he brayed. “Can’t can’t
can’t.” The effort of speaking made him cough painfully. His breathing was very
heavy now. “I’m not going to die,” he datavised. “I’m not going to be one of
them; not like little Tina. Dear little Tina. God, she was only fifteen. Now
she’s dead. But you don’t die in zero-tau. You’re safe. It’s the only way. No
life, but no beyond, either. That’s the answer.” Very slowly, he took his hand
away from Caucus. “I’m sorry. I wouldn’t have hurt you. Please, you have to do
this for me. I can tell you where Capone is going to invade next. I can give
you the coordinate of an antimatter station. Just give me your word, as an
Edenist, as a voidhawk captain; your word that you will take my pod to a
habitat, and that your culture will always keep me in zero-tau. Your word,
please, it’s so little to ask.”
What do I do? she asked her crew.
Their minds merged, awash with
compassion and distress. The answer, she felt, was inevitable.
Syrinx walked over and took Erick’s
cold, damp hand in hers. “All right, Erick,” she said softly. Wishing once more
for a single second of genuine communication. “We’ll put you in zero-tau. But I
want you to promise me something in return.”
Erick’s eyes had closed. His
breathing was very shallow now as he datavised several files into the toroid’s
net. Caucus was exuding concern at the read-out from the diagnostic scanner. Hurry,
he urged.
“What?” Erick asked.
“I want your permission to take you
out of zero-tau if we find a proper solution to all this.”
“You won’t.”
“But if we do!”
“This is stupid.”
“No it isn’t. Edenism was founded
on hope, hope for the future, the belief that life can get better. If you have
faith in our culture to preserve you for eternity, you must believe in that.
Jesus, Erick, you have to believe in something.”
“You are a very strange Edenist.”
“I am a very typical Edenist. The
rest just don’t know it yet.”
“Very well, deal.”
“I’ll talk to you soon, Erick. I’ll
be the one who wakes you up and tells you.”
“At the end of the universe,
perhaps. Until then . . .”
Chapter 08
Alkad Mzu hadn’t seen snow since
she left Garissa. Back in those days she’d never bothered indexing a memory of
winter in her neural nanonics. Why waste capacity? The season came every year,
much to Peter’s delight and her grudging acceptance.
The oldest human story of all: I
never knew what I had until I lost it.
Now, from her penthouse in the
Mercedes Hotel, she watched it falling over Harrisburg, a silent cascade as
inexorable as it was gentle. The sight made her want to go outside and join the
children she could see capering about in the park opposite.
The snow had begun during the
night, just after they landed at the spaceport, and hadn’t let up in the seven
hours since. Down on the streets tempers were getting shorter as the traffic
slowed and the pavements turned slippery with the slush. Ancient municipal
mechanoids, backed up by teams of men with shovels, struggled to clear the deep
drifts which blockaded the main avenues.
The sight didn’t exactly bode well.
If the Tonala nation’s economy was so desperate that they used human labour to
clean the streets of their capital . . .
So far Alkad had managed to keep
her objective in focus. She was proud of that; after every obstacle thrown in
her way she had proved herself resourceful enough to keep the hope alive. Even
back on the Tekas she’d thought she would soon be retrieving the
Alchemist.
Nyvan had done much to wreck her
mood and her confidence. There were starships docked at the orbiting asteroids,
and the local astroengineering companies could probably provide her with the
equipment she wanted; yet the decay and suspicion native to this world made her
doubt. The task was slipping from her grasp once more. Difficulties were piling
up against her, and now she had no more fallback positions. They were on their
own now: she, Voi, Lodi, and Eriba, with money as their only resource. True to
his word, Prince Lambert had taken the Tekas out of orbit as soon as
they’d disembarked. He said he was flying to Mondul, it had a strong navy, and
he knew people there.
Alkad resisted accessing her time
function. Prince Lambert must have made his third ZTT jump by now, and another
potential security hazard was no more.
“That’s a new one,” Eriba
announced. He was stretched out along the settee, bare feet dangling over the
armrest. It meant he could just see the holoscreen on the far wall. A local
news show was playing.
“What is?” Alkad asked him. He had
been consuming news ever since they arrived, switching between the holoscreen
and the communications net’s information cores.
“Tonala has just ordered every
border to be closed and sealed. The cabinet claims that New Georgia’s actions
are overtly hostile, and other nations can’t be trusted. Apparently, the SD
networks are still blasting each other with electronic warfare pulses.”
Alkad grimaced. That clash had been
going on when the Tekas arrived. “I wonder how that affects us? Are
those the land borders, or are they going to prohibit spaceflight as well?”
“They haven’t said.”
The door chimed as it admitted Voi.
She strode into the big living room shrugging out of her thick navy-blue coat
and shaking grubby droplets of melted snow on the white carpet. “We’ve got an
appointment for two o’clock this afternoon. I told the Industry Ministry we
were here to buy defence equipment for the Dorados, and they recommended the
Opia company. Lodi ran a check through the local data cores, and they own two
asteroid industrial stations along with a starship service subsidiary.”
“That sounds promising,” Alkad said
guardedly. She had left all the organization to Voi. The agencies would be
looking for her; zipping around town would be asking for trouble. As it was,
using the Daphine Kigano passport when they arrived was a risk, but she didn’t
have any others prepared.
“Promising? Mary, it’s spot on. What
do you want, the Kulu Corporation?”
“I wasn’t criticising.”
“Well it sounded like it.”
Voi had slowly reverted to her
original temper during the voyage. Alkad wasn’t sure if the waspy girl was
recovering from her father’s death or reacting to it.
“Has Lodi found out if there are
any suitable starships for hire?”
“He’s still checking,” Voi said.
“So far he’s located over fifty commercial vehicles stranded insystem due to
the quarantine. Most of them are docked in low orbit stations and the asteroid
ports. He’s running performance comparisons against the requirements you gave
us. I just hope he can find us one at a Tonala facility. Did you hear about the
border restrictions? They’re even closing down net interface points with the
other nations.”
“That’s a minor problem compared to
the one we’ll have crewing the ship.”
“What do you mean?”
“Our flight is not the kind of job
you normally give mercenaries. I’m not sure money will guarantee loyalty for
this mission.”
“Why didn’t you say so, then? Mary,
Alkad, how can I help if you keep complaining after the fact? Be more
cooperative.”
“I’ll bear it in mind,” Alkad said
mildly.
“Is there anything else we should
know?”
“I can’t think of anything, but
you’ll be the first to be told if I do.”
“All right. Now, I’ve arranged for
a car to take us to Opia’s offices. The security company which supplied it is
also providing bodyguards. They will be here in an hour.”
“Good thinking,” Eriba said.
“Elementary thinking,” Voi shot
back. “We’re foreigners who have arrived in the middle of an Assembly-imposed
quarantine. That’s hardly an optimum low-visibility scenario. I want to
downgrade our risk to a minimum.”
“Bodyguards ought to help, then,”
Alkad said prosaically. “You should go and take a rest before we visit Opia.
You haven’t slept since we landed. I’ll need you to be fresh for the
negotiations.”
Voi gave a distrustful nod, and
went into her bedroom.
Alkad and Eriba exchanged a glance
and smiled simultaneously.
“Did she really say low-visibility
scenario?” he asked.
“Sounded like it to me.”
“Mary, that detox therapy was a bad
idea.”
“What was she like before?”
“About the same,” he admitted.
Alkad turned back to the window and
the snow softening the city skyline.
The door chimed again.
“Did you order something from room
service?” she asked Eriba.
“No.” He gave the door a worried
look. “Do you think it’s the bodyguards Voi hired?”
“They’re very early, then; and if
they’re professional they would datavise us first.” She picked up her shoulder
bag and selected one of the devices inside. When she datavised the penthouse’s
net processor to access the camera in the corridor outside there was no
response. The cut crystal wall lights began to flicker. “Stop!” she told Eriba,
who had drawn his laser pistol. “That won’t work against the possessed.”
“Do you think . . .”
He trailed off just as Voi burst
back into the lounge. She was gripping a maser carbine tight in her hand.
The penthouse’s entrance door swung
open. Three people were standing behind it, their features lost in the darkened
corridor.
“Do not come in,” Alkad said
loudly. “My weapons will work, even against you.”
“Are you quite sure, Doctor?”
Sections of Alkad’s neural nanonics
were dropping out. She datavised a primer code at the small sphere she held in
her hand before she lost even that ability. “Fairly sure. Do you want to be the
first experimental subject?”
“You haven’t changed; you were
always so confident you were right.”
Alkad frowned. It was a female
voice, but she couldn’t place it. She didn’t have the processing power left in
her neural nanonics to run an audio comparison program. “Do I know you?”
“You used to. May we come in,
please? We really aren’t here to harm you.”
Since when did the possessed start
saying please? Alkad thought the circumstances out and said: “It only needs one
of you to speak. And if you’re not a threat, stop glitching our electronics.”
“That last request is difficult,
but we will try.”
Alkad’s neural nanonics started to
come back on-line. She quickly re-established full control over the device.
“I’ll call the police,” Voi
datavised. “They can send a Tac Squad. The possessed won’t know until it’s too
late.”
“No. If they wanted to hurt us,
they would have done it by now. I think we’ll hear what she has to say.”
“You shouldn’t expose yourself to a
negative personal safety context. You are the only link we have to the
Alchemist.”
“Oh, shut up,” Alkad said aloud.
“All right, come in.”
The young woman who walked into the
penthouse was in her early twenties. Her skin was several shades lighter than
Alkad’s, though her hair was jet black, and her face was rounded by a little
too much cellulite for her to be pretty; it fixed her expression to one of
continual shy resentment. She wore a long tartan-print summer dress, with a
kilt-style skirt that had been the fashion on Garissa the year of the genocide.
Alkad ran a visual comparison
program search through her memory cells. “Gelai? Gelai, is that really you?”
“My soul, yes,” she said. “Not my
body. This is just an illusion, of course.” For a moment the solid mirage
vanished, revealing a teenaged Oriental girl with fresh jagged scars on her
legs.
“Mother Mary!” Alkad croaked. She’d
hoped the tales of torture and atrocity were just Confederation propaganda.
Gelai’s usual profile returned. The
flicker of exposure was so fast, it made Alkad’s mind want to believe Gelai’s
was the true shape; the abused girl was something decency rejected.
“What happened?” Alkad asked.
“You know her?” Voi demanded
indignantly.
“Oh, yes. Gelai was one of my
students.”
“Not one of your best, I’m sorry to
say.”
“You were doing all right, as I
recall.”
“This enhances stress relief
nicely,” Voi said. “But you haven’t told us why you’re here.”
“I was killed in the planet-buster
attack,” Gelai said. “The university campus was only five hundred kilometres
from one of the strikes. The earthquake levelled it. I was in my residence hall
when it hit. The thermal flash set half of the building alight. Then the quake
arrived; Mary alone knows how powerful it was. I was lucky, I suppose. I died
in the first hour. That was reasonably quick. Compared to a lot of them,
anyway.”
“I’m so sorry,” Alkad said. She had
rarely felt so worthless; confronted by the pitiful evidence of the greatest
failure it was possible to have. “I failed you. I failed everybody.”
“At least you were trying,” Gelai
said. “I didn’t approve at the time. I took part in all the peace
demonstrations. We held vigils outside the continental parliament, sang hymns.
But the media said we were cowards and traitors. People actually spat on us in
the streets. I kept going, though, kept protesting. I thought if we could just
get our government to talk to the Omutans, then the military would stop
attacking each other. Mary, how naive.”
“No, Gelai, you weren’t naive, you
were brave. If enough of us had stood for that principle, then maybe the
government would have tried harder to find a peaceful solution.”
“But they didn’t, did they?”
Alkad traced Gelai’s cheeks with
her finger, touching the past she’d thought was so far behind her, the cause of
the present. Feeling the ersatz skin was all she needed to know she had been
right to do what she’d done thirty years ago. “I was going to protect you. I
thought I’d sold my very soul so that you would all be safe. I didn’t care
about that. I thought you were worth the sacrifice; all you bright young minds
so full of the silliest hopes and proudest ideals. I would have done it, too,
for you. Slain Omuta’s star, the biggest crime in the galaxy. And now all
that’s left of us are the ones like these.” She waved a hand limply at Voi and
Eriba. “Just a few thousand kids living in rocks that mess with their heads. I
don’t know which of you suffered the worst fate. At least you had a taste of
what our people might have achieved if we’d lived. This new generation are just
poor remnants of what they could’ve been.”
Gelai puffed up her lips and stared
firmly at the floor. “I wasn’t sure what I was going to do when I came here.
Warn you or kill you.”
“And now?”
“I didn’t realize why you were
doing it, why you went off to help the military. You were this aloof professor
that we were all a bit in awe of, you were so smart. We respected you so much,
I never gave you human motives, I thought you were a lump of chilled bitek on
legs. I see I was wrong, though I still think you are wrong to have built
anything as evil as the Alchemist.”
Alkad stiffened. “How do you know
about the Alchemist?”
“We can see this universe from the
beyond, you know. It’s very faint, but it’s there. I watched the Confederation
Navy trying to get people off Garissa before the radiation killed them. I’ve
seen the Dorados, too. I even saw you a few times in Tranquillity. Then there
are the memories that we tear from each other. Some soul I encountered knew
about you. Perhaps it was more than one, I don’t know. I never kept count; you
don’t, not when you do that hundreds of times a day. So that’s how I know what
you built, although no one knows what it is. And I’m not the only one, Doctor;
Capone knows about it too, and quite a few other possessed.”
“Oh, Mother Mary,” Alkad groaned.
“They’ve shouted into the beyond,
you see. Promised every soul bodies if they cooperated in finding you.”
“You mean the souls are watching us
now?” Voi asked.
Gelai smiled dreamily. “Yes.”
“Fuck!”
Mzu glanced at the penthouse’s
door, which was closed on Gelai’s two companions. “How many possessed are on
Nyvan?”
“Several thousand. It will belong
to us within a week.”
“That doesn’t leave us much time,”
Alkad said.
Voi and Eriba were starting to look
panic-stricken.
“Forget the Alchemist,” Voi said
heatedly. “We must get ourselves outsystem.”
“Yes. But we have a few days grace.
That gives us time to be certain about our escape, we can’t afford a mistake
now. We’ll charter a ship as we always intended; Opia’s service subsidiary can
do that for us. But I don’t think there will be enough time to have the carrier
built. Ah well, if it comes to it, we can always load the Alchemist onto a
combat wasp.”
“You can fit it on a combat wasp?”
Voi was suddenly intrigued. “Just how big is it?”
“You don’t need to know.”
The tall girl scowled.
“Gelai, will you warn us if any of
the possessed come close?”
“Yes, Doctor, we’ll do that much.
For a couple of days anyway, just while you find a ship. Are you really going
to use the Alchemist after all this time?”
“Yes, I am. I’ve never been as sure
about it as I am now.”
“I don’t know if I want you to, or
not. I can never accept that revenge wrought on such a scale is right. What can
it ever achieve except make a few bitter old refugees feel better? But if you
don’t use it against Omuta, then someone else will take it from you and fire it
at another star. So if it must be fired, then I suppose I’d rather it was
Omuta.” Naked distress swarmed over her face. “Funny how we all lose our
principles at the end, isn’t it?”
“You haven’t,” Alkad told her.
“Killed by the Omutans, thirty years in the beyond, and you would still spare
them. The society that can produce you is a miracle. Its destruction was a sin
beyond anything our race had committed before.”
“Except perhaps possession.”
Alkad slipped her arms around the
distraught girl and hugged her. “It will be all right. Somehow, this dreadful
conflict will finish up without us destroying ourselves. Mother Mary wouldn’t
condemn us to the beyond forever, you’ll see.”
Gelai broke away to study Mzu’s
face. “You think so?”
“Strange as it seems for a
semi-atheist, yes. But I know the structure of the universe better than most,
I’ve glimpsed order in there, Gelai. There has always been a solution to the
problems we’ve posed. Always. This won’t be any different.”
“I’ll help you,” Gelai said. “I
really will. We’ll make sure all three of you get off the planet unharmed.”
Mzu kissed her forehead. “Thank
you. Now what about the two who came with you, are they Garissans as well?”
“Ngong and Omain? Yes. But not from
the same time as me.”
“I’d like to meet them. Ask them to
come in, then we can all decide what to do next.”
“What bloody high life?” Joshua
challenged. “Listen, I risked everything—balls included—to earn the money to
refit Lady Mac. You wouldn’t catch me crawling to the banks and finance
companies like you did. True Calverts are independent. I’m independent.”
“How we established ourselves was
due entirely to circumstances,” Liol retorted. “My only prospect came from the
Dorados Development Agency grants. And by God did I take it. Quantum
Serendipity was built up from nothing. I’m self-made and proud of it, I wasn’t
born with your kind of privileges.”
“Privileges? All Dad left me was a
broken down starship and eighteen years unpaid docking fees. Hardly a plus
factor.”
“Crap. Just living in Tranquillity
is a privilege which half of the Confederation aspires to. A plutocrat’s
paradise floating in the middle of a xenoc gold mine. You were never not going
to make money. All you had to do was stick your hand out to grab a nugget or
two.”
“They tried to kill me in that
fucking Ruin Ring.”
“Then you shouldn’t have been so
sloppy, should you? Earning your wealth is always only half of the problem.
Hanging on to it, now that’s tough. You should have taken precautions.”
“Absolutely,” Joshua purred. “Well
I’ve certainly learned that lesson. I’m hanging on to what I’ve got now.”
“I’m not going to stop you from
captaining Lady Mac. But . . .”
“If it’s of any interest,”
Sarha announced loudly. “We’ve emerged in the middle of a hostile electronic
environment. I’ve got two of Nyvan’s SD networks asking for our flight
authorization at the same time they’re saturating our sensors with overload
impulses.”
Joshua grunted disparagingly, and
returned his attention to the datavised displays from the flight computer. He
chided himself for the lapse, it wasn’t like him not to pay attention to the
jump emergence sequence. But when you’ve got a so-called brother with a
lofriction conscience . . .
Sarha was right. Space between
Nyvan and its orbiting asteroids was being subjected to a variety of powerful
electronic disruption effects. Lady Mac’s sensors and discrimination
programs were sophisticated enough to pierce most of the clutter; Nyvan’s SD
networks were using archaic techniques, it was the sheer wattage behind them
that was causing the trouble.
With Sarha’s help, Joshua managed
to locate the network command centres and transmit Lady Mac’s standard
identification code, followed by their official Tranquillity flight
authorization. Only Tonala and Nangkok responded, giving him permission to
approach the planet. New Georgia’s SD network, based at Jesup, remained silent.
“Keep trying them,” Joshua told
Sarha. “We’ll head in anyway. Beaulieu, how are you doing tracing the Tekas?”
“Give me a minute more, Captain,
please. This planet has a very strange communications architecture, and their
usual interfaces seem to be down today. I expect that is a result of the
network barrage. I am having to access several different national nets to find
out if the ship arrived.”
On the other side of the bridge
from the cosmonik, Ashly snorted bitterly. “Boneheads, nothing on this damned
world ever changes. They always brag about how different they are to each
other; I never noticed myself.”
“When were you here last?” Dahybi
asked.
“About 2400, I think.”
Joshua watched Liol slowly turn his
head to look at the pilot; his eyebrow was raised in quizzical dissension.
“When?” Liol asked.
“Twenty-four hundred. I remember it
quite well. King Aaron was still on Kulu’s throne. There was some kind of
dispute between Nyvan’s countries because the Kingdom had sold one of them some
old warships.”
“Right,” Liol said. He was waiting
for the punch line.
Lady Mac’s crew propagated dispassionate expressions
right across the bridge.
“I’ve found a reference,” Beaulieu
said. “The Tekas arrived yesterday. According to Tonala’s public
information core it had an official flight authorization issued by the Dorados
council. It docked at one of their national low orbit stations, the Spirit
of Freedom, then departed an hour later; with a flight plan filed for
Mondul. Four people disembarked, Lodi, Voi, Eriba, and Daphine Kigano.”
“Jackpot,” Joshua said. He
datavised traffic control for an approach vector to the Spirit of Freedom.
After the eighth attempt, traffic control confirmed contact through the jamming
and gave him a vector.
Spirit of Freedom was Tonala’s main low-orbit civil spaceport,
orbiting seven hundred and fifty kilometres above the equator. A free-floating
hexagonal grid two kilometres in diameter and a hundred metres thick. Tanks,
lounges, corridor tubes, thermal-dump panels, and docking bays were sandwiched
between the framework of grey-white alloy struts, tapering spires extended out
from each corner, tipped with a cluster of fusion drive tubes to hold the
structure’s attitude stable.
As well as a port for commercial
starships and cargo spaceplanes, it was also the flight hub for the huge tugs
which brought down the metal mined from Floreso asteroid. Several of the
heavy-duty craft were keeping station alongside the Spirit of Freedom as
Lady Mac approached; open lattice pyramids with a clump of ten big
fusion drive tubes at the tip, and load attachment points at each corner.
They were designed to ferry down
four ironbergs apiece. Seventy-five thousand tonnes of spongesteel: incredibly
pure metal foamed with nitrogen while it was still in its molten state.
Floreso’s industrial teams solidified it into a squat pear shape, with a base
that was scalloped by twenty-five gently rounded ridges. After that, the
ironbergs were attached to the tugs for a three-week flight, spiralling down
into a slightly elliptical two-hundred-kilometre orbit. For the last two days
of the voyage, electric motors in the load attachment points would spin them up
to one rotation per minute. In effect, they became the biggest gyroscopes in
the galaxy, their precession keeping them perfectly aligned as they flew free
along the final stretch of their trajectory.
Injecting the ironbergs into the
atmosphere was an inordinately difficult operation for the tugs, requiring
extreme precision. Each ironberg had to be at the correct attitude, and
following its designated flight path exactly, so that its blunt base could
strike the upper atmosphere at an angle which would create the maximum
aerobrake force. Once its velocity started to drop off, gravity would pull it
down in a steepening curve, which created yet more drag, accelerating the whole
process. Hypersonic airflow around the scalloped base would also perpetuate the
spin, maintaining stability, keeping it on track.
If everything went well—if the
asteroid crews had got the internal mass distribution balanced right, if the
injection point was correct—the ironberg would be aerobraked to subsonic
velocity about five kilometres above the ocean. After that, nothing else
mattered, no force in the universe could affect that much mass hanging in the
sky in a standard gravity field. It fell straight down at terminal velocity to
splash into the water amid an explosion of steam that resembled the mushroom
cloud of a small nuclear bomb. And there it bobbed among the waves, its foamed
interior making it buoyant enough to float without any aids.
When all four ironbergs from one
tug had splashed down, the recovery fleet would sail in. The ironbergs would be
towed into a foundry port ready to be broken up and fed to Tonala’s eager
mills. An abundant supply of cheap metal, obtained without any ecological
disturbance, was a healthy asset to the nation’s economy.
So not even the chaotic electronic
war being fought between the SD networks was allowed to interrupt the
operation. The tugs around the Spirit of Freedom continued to receive
their regular maintenance schedule. SII-suited engineering crews crawled over
the long struts, while MSVs and tankers drifted in close attendance. The
service craft were the only other vehicles flying apart from Lady Mac.
Joshua had a trouble-free approach, making excellent time. As they flew over
the station, sensors showed him eleven other starships nestled snugly in the
docking bays.
The inspection from port officers
was one he was expecting; checking everyone on board for possession, then going
through the life-support capsules and the two ancillary craft with electronic
warfare blocks to make sure there were no unexplained glitches. Once they’d
been cleared, Joshua received an official datavised welcome from Tonala’s
Industry Ministry, with an invitation to discuss his requirements and how local
firms could help. They were also authorized to fly Lady Mac’s spaceplane
down to Harrisburg.
“I’ll take a pair of serjeants,
Dahybi, and Melvyn,” Joshua announced. “You too, Ashly, but you stay in the
spaceplane in case we need evacuating. Sarha, Beaulieu, I want Lady Mac maintained
at flight-ready status. Same procedure as before, we may have to leave in a
hurry, so keep monitoring groundside, I want to be told if and when the crap
hits the fan.”
“I can come with you,” Liol said.
“I know how to handle myself if it gets noisy down there.”
“Do you trust my command
judgement?”
“Of course I do, Josh.”
“Good. Then you stay up here.
Because my judgement is that you won’t follow my orders.”
It was dark in Jesup’s biosphere
cavern now, a permanent joyless twilight, and cold. Quinn had ordered it so.
The solartubes strung out along the axial gantry were producing an enfeebled
opalescent glow, whose sole purpose was to show people where they were going.
As a result, an impossible autumn
had visited the lush tropical vegetation. After a futile search twisting around
on their stems in search of light, the leaves were yellowing. In many places
they had begun to fall, their edges crisping black from the bitter air. Already
the neat filigree of pretty streams was clogging with soggy mush, overspill
channels were blocked, pools were flooding the surrounding ground.
The experience of accelerated decay
was one which Quinn savoured. It demonstrated his power over his surroundings.
No reality dysfunction this, making things different as long as you didn’t
blink. This was solid change, irreversible. Potent.
He stood before the stone altar
which had been built in the park, studying the figure bound to the inverted
cross on top. It was an old man, which in some ways was good. This way Quinn
confirmed his zero-rated compassion; only children held equal status.
His loyal disciples stood in a
circle around him, seven of them clad in blood-red robes. Faces shone as bright
as their minds, fuelled by greed and ominous desire.
Twelve-T was also in attendance,
sagging with the formidable burden of merely staying alive. His maltreated head
was permanently bowed now. No possessed was imposing change upon him, but he
was becoming almost Neanderthal in his posture.
Outside the elite coterie the
acolytes formed a broad semicircle. All of them were wearing grey robes with
the hoods thrown back. Their faces illuminated by the unnaturally hot bonfires
flanking the altar, a flickering topaz light caressing their skin with fake
expressions.
Quinn could sense several ghosts
standing among them. They were frightened and demoralized as always and, as he
had discovered, utterly harmless. They were completely unable to affect any
aspect of the physical world. Trivial creatures with less substance than the
shadows they craved.
In a way he was glad they were
attending. Spying. This ceremony would show them what they were dealing with.
They could be tyrannized, he was sure, in that they were no different from any
other human. He wanted them to realize that he would never hesitate to inflict
what pain he could upon them if they chose not to obey.
Satisfied, Quinn sang: “We are the
princes of the Night.”
“We are the princes of the Night,”
the acolytes chorused, it was a sound similar to the threat of thunder beyond
the horizon.
“When the false lord leads his
legions away into oblivion, we will be here.”
“We will be here.”
The old man was shaking now, moving
his lips in prayer. He was a Christian priest, which was why Quinn had selected
him. A double victory. Victory over the false lord. And victory for the serpent
beast. Taking a life for no reason other than you wished it, for the pain it
would cause others.
Such sacrifices had always focused
on authority and its enforcement. A spectacle to coerce the weak. In
pre-industrial times, this rite might have been about the summoning of dark
witchcraft; but in an age of nanonic technology man had long surpassed magic,
black or white. The sect arcology had known and encouraged the value of image,
the psychology of precise brutality. And it worked.
Who now among this gathering would
stand to challenge him? It was more ordination than anything else, confirming
his right to reign.
He held out a hand, and Lawrence
placed the dagger in his palm. Its handle was an elaborate ebony carving, but
the blade was plain carbotanium and very sharp.
The priest cried out as Quinn slid
the tip into his paunchy abdomen. It deepened to a whimper as Quinn recited:
“Accept this life as a token of our love and devotion.”
“We love you, and devote ourselves
to you, Lord,” growled the acolytes.
“God grant you deliverance, son,” the priest choked.
Blood was running down Quinn’s arm, splattering the altar.
“Go fuck yourself.”
Lawrence laughed delightedly at the
priest’s anguish. Quinn was immensely proud of the boy; he’d never known anyone
to offer himself up to God’s Brother so unreservedly.
The priest was dying to the harsh
cheers of the acolytes. Quinn could sense the old man’s soul rising from the
body, twining like smoke in a listless sky to vanish through a chink in
reality. He pressed himself forwards to lick ravenously at the ephemeral stream
with a narrow black tongue, enraptured.
Then another soul was pushing back
down the trickle of energy, surging into the body.
“Shithead!” Quinn spat. “This body
is not for you. It is our sacrament. Get the fuck out of it.”
The skin on the priest’s
upside-down face began to flow like treacle. The features twisted themselves
through a hundred and eighty degrees so that the mouth was superimposed on the
forehead. Then the skin hardened again and the eyes snapped open.
Quinn took a pace back in surprise.
It was his own face staring at him.
“Welcome to the beyond, you little
prick,” it told him. Then it smiled wickedly. “Remember this part?”
A streamer of white fire lashed out
of the knife which was plunged deep into the priest’s chest. It struck
Twelve-T’s right arm, puncturing his chrome and steel wrist. The smoking
mechanical hand dropped to the floor, fingers waggling as if they were playing
piano keys. His wrist joint was reduced to a jagged bracelet of metal with
green hydraulic fluid spraying out, and the frayed end of a power cable
fluttering about.
“Do it!” the forged face yelled.
Twelve-T lunged towards Quinn,
shoving his broken arm forwards. A mad smile cracked his face.
Lawrence wailed: “No,” and
flung himself into Twelve-T’s path.
The broken wrist joint rammed into
Lawrence’s throat. A bright spark of electricity twinkled at the end of the
ragged power cable as it touched the boy’s skin.
Lawrence shrieked as his whole body
silently detonated into sunlight brilliance. He froze with his arms still
outstretched, a frantic expression etched on his face. The light was so fierce
he became translucent—a naked angel bathing in the heart of a star. Then his
extremities began to shrivel, turning black. He had time to shriek once more
before the internecine fire ate him away.
The dreadful light shrank,
revealing a patch of baked earth and droppings of fine white ash. Twelve-T lay
next to it where he had stumbled, the fall jolting his brain out of his half skull
like wine from a goblet. It was rolling over the grass.
“Ah well,” said the forged face. “I
guess we both lost this time around. Be seeing you, Quinn.” It began to
untwist, reverting to the priest’s startled death rictus. The incursive soul
flowed away, retreating into the beyond.
“COME BACK!” Quinn roared.
There was a last ironic laugh, and
his tormenter was gone.
For all his power and strength,
there was nothing Quinn could do. Absolutely nothing. His impotence was an
agonizing humiliation. He screamed, and the altar shattered, sending the
priest’s battered body tumbling. The acolytes began to run. Quinn kicked
Twelve-T’s brain, and the grisly organ burst apart, sending a splat of gore
across his terrified disciples. He turned back and discharged a bolt of searing
white fire into the priest’s remnants. The body ignited instantly, but the
flames were only an effete mockery of the incendiary heat which had consumed
Lawrence.
The disciples shrank away as Quinn
sent blast after blast of white fire into the pyre, reducing the body and the
crumbling stones to radiant magma. When they reached the boundary of light
given off from the bonfires, they too turned and fled after the acolytes.
Only the ghosts remained, safe from
the fury of the black-robed figure in their secluded lifeless realm. After a
while they saw him sink to his knees and make the sign of the inverted cross on
his chest.
“I will not fail you, my Lord,” he
said quietly. “I will quicken the Night as I promised. All I ask as the price
of my soul is that when it has fallen you bring me the fucker who did this.”
He rose and made his way out of the
park. This time he was truly alone. Even ghosts quailed before the terrifying
thoughts alight inside his head.
Hoya was the first of the four voidhawks to emerge
above Nyvan. Niveu and his crew immediately began scanning the local
environment for threats.
“No ships within twenty thousand
kilometres,” he said, “but the SD networks are shooting off electronic warfare
blitzes at each other. Looks like the nations are in their usual
confrontational state.”
Monica accessed the sensor suite in
the voidhawk’s lower hull, and the starfield projected into her mind came alive
with vivid coloured icons. Two more voidhawks were holding formation a hundred
kilometres away. As she watched, another wormhole terminus opened to disgorge
the fourth. “Are we being targeted by the platforms?” she asked. She
appreciated the way the Edenists unfailingly spoke out loud in her presence,
keeping her informed. But their display symbology was very different to that
used by the Royal Navy, she hadn’t quite mastered the program yet.
“There are very few specific
targets,” Samuel said. “The networks appear intent on jamming and disrupting
every processor out to geosync orbit.”
“Is it safe for us to approach?”
Niveu shrugged. “Yes. For now.
We’ll monitor the local news to find out what’s going on. If there’s any
indication of them advancing the hostilities to an active stage, I’ll review
the situation again.”
“Does your service have any stations
down there?” she asked Samuel.
“There are some assets, but we
don’t have any active operatives. We don’t even have an embassy. There’s no gas
giant in this system, it was colonized long before their presence was deemed
necessary to develop an industrialized economy. Frankly, the price of having to
import all their He3 is partly responsible for Nyvan’s current
state.”
“It also means we have no backup,”
Niveu said.
“Okay, let me have a communications
circuit. We have a couple of embassies and several consuls. They should be
monitoring starship traffic.”
It took a long time to establish
contact. After hours subjected to the output from the SD platforms, the
national civil communications satellites were now almost completely
inoperative. She eventually got around the problem by aligning one of Hoya’s
antennae directly on the cities she wanted, which limited her to those on the
half of the planet ahead of the voidhawks.
“Mzu’s here,” she said at last. “I
got through to Adrian Redway, our station chief in the Harrisburg embassy. The Tekas
arrived yesterday. It docked at Tonala’s principal low orbit station, and
four people took a spaceplane down to Harrisburg. Voi was one of them, and so
was Daphine Kigano.”
“Excellent,” Samuel said. “Is the Tekas
still here?”
“No. It departed an hour later. And
no other starship has left since. She’s still down there. We’ve got her.”
“We have to go in,” Samuel told
Niveu.
“I understand. But you should know
that several governments are claiming New Georgia has fallen to the possessed.
New Georgia is denying it of course, though it does seem as though they have
lost their asteroid, Jesup. Apparently Jesup dispatched some inter-orbit ships
to the three abandoned asteroids. It is being heralded as a breach of
sovereignty, which of course is taken extremely seriously here.”
“Could the ships be carrying
escapees?” Monica asked.
“It is possible, I suppose.
Although I can’t think of any reason why anyone should consider those asteroids
to be a refuge; they were badly damaged in the ’32 conflict. No one even
bothered to salvage them. But we ought to know what the Jesup ships are doing
before too long; the governments which own the abandoned asteroids have
dispatched their own ships to investigate.”
“If it turns out those ships from
Jesup are crewed by possessed, then the situation will deteriorate rapidly,”
Samuel said. “The other governments are unlikely to come to New Georgia’s aid.”
“True enough,” Monica said
pensively. “They’re more likely to nuke the whole country.”
“I don’t imagine we will be staying
long,” Samuel said. “And we will have the flyers with us, we can evacuate
within minutes.”
“Yeah sure. There’s one other
thing.”
“Oh?”
“Redway said one other starship has
arrived since the Tekas left. The Lady Macbeth, she’s docked at
Tonala’s main low-orbit station.”
“How intriguing. The Lord of Ruin
obviously knew what she was doing when she chose this Lagrange Calvert.”
Monica was sure there was a note of
admiration in his voice.
The four voidhawks accelerated in
towards Nyvan. After receiving permission from traffic control, they slotted
into a six-hundred-kilometre orbit, adopting a diamond formation. Four ion
field flyers left their hangars and curved down towards the planet, heading
into the huge swirl of angry cloud that covered most of Tonala.
Jesup’s Strategic Defence control
centre had been hollowed out of the rock deep behind the habitation section. It
was New Georgia’s ultimate citadel: safe from any external attack which didn’t
actually crack Jesup open, equipped with enough security systems to fend off an
open mutiny by the asteroid’s population, and fitted with a completely
independent environmental circuit. No matter what happened to Jesup and New
Georgia’s government, the SD officers could continue to fight on for weeks.
Quinn waited for the monolithic
innermost door to slide open, displaying a serenity that was harrowing in its
depth. Only Bonham accompanied him now as he strode around the asteroid, the
other disciples were too afraid.
There had been a few modifications
to the control centre. Console technology had devolved considerably; in most
cases processors and AV projectors had abated to a simple telephone. A whole
rank of the black and silver machines were lined up along a wall, where they
were jangling incessantly. A group of officers in stiff grey uniforms were
snatching up the handsets as fast as they could. In front of them was a big
square table with a picture of Nyvan and its orbiting asteroids covering its
surface. Five young women were busy moving wooden markers across it with long
poles.
The adrenaline-powered clamour
faltered as Quinn walked in. There was no sign of any face inside his robe’s
hood; light fell into the oval opening never to return. Only the pearl-white
hands emerging from his sleeves suggested a human was in residence.
“Keep going,” he told them.
The voices sprang back, far louder
than before so as to demonstrate their loyalty and commitment.
Quinn went over to the commander’s
post, a pulpitlike podium which overlooked the table. “What is the problem?”
Shemilt, who was running the
control centre, saluted sharply. He was wearing a heavily decorated Luftwaffe
uniform from the Second World War, every inch the Teutonic warrior aristocrat.
“I regret to inform you, sir, that ships have been sent to intercept our teams
working in the other asteroids. The first will make contact in forty minutes.”
Quinn studied the table; it was
becoming cluttered. Four vultures were grouped together just above the planet.
New Georgia’s SD platforms were diamond-studded pyramids. Ruby pentagons showed
opposing platforms. Three red-flagged markers were being shoved slowly over the
starmap. “Are they warships?”
“Our observation stations are
having a lot of trouble in this foul weather, but we don’t think so. Not
frigates, anyway. I expect they will be carrying troops, though; they’re
definitely big enough for that.”
“Don’t get too carried away,
Shemilt.”
Shemilt stood to attention. “Yes, sir.”
Quinn pointed at one of the red
flags. “Can our SD platforms hit these ships?”
“Yes, sir.” Shemilt pulled a
clipboard off a hook inside his command post and flicked through the
typewritten sheets. “Two of them are in range of our X-ray lasers, and the
third can be destroyed with combat wasps.”
“Good. Kill the little shits.”
“Yes, sir.” Shemilt hesitated. “If
we do that, the other networks will probably shoot at us.”
“Then shoot back, engage every
target you can reach. I want an all-out confrontation.”
Activity around the table slowed as
operators glanced at Quinn. Resentment was building in their thoughts, capped,
as always, by fear.
“How do we get out, Quinn?” Shemilt
asked.
“We wait. Space warfare is very
fast, and very destructive. By the end of today, there won’t be a working laser
cannon or a combat wasp left orbiting Nyvan. We’ll get hit a few times, but
fuck, these walls are two kilometres thick. This is the mother of all fallout
shelters.” He gestured at the table, and every marker ignited, yellow
candlelike flames squirting out black smoke. “Then when it’s over, we can fly
away in perfect safety.”
Shemilt nodded hurriedly, using
speed to prove he’d never doubted. “I’m sorry, Quinn, it’s obvious really.”
“Thank you. Now kill those ships.”
“Yes, sir.”
Quinn left the control centre with
Bonham scurrying after him, always trailing by a few paces. The giant door slid
shut behind them, its bass grumbles echoing along the broad corridor.
“Are there really enough ships here
to take everyone off?” Bonham asked.
“I doubt it. And even if there
were, the spaceport will be a prime target.”
“So . . . some of us should leave
early, then?”
“Fast, Bonham, very fast. That’s
probably why you got where you did.”
“Thank you, Quinn.” He quickened
his steps; Quinn’s voice was slightly fainter.
“Of course, if they see me leaving
now, they’d know I’d abandoned them. Discipline would go straight to shit.”
“Quinn?” He could hardly hear the
dark figure at all now.
“After all, it’s not as if you
could bind them . . .”
Bonham squinted at the figure he
was now almost running to catch up with. Quinn seemed to be gliding smoothly
over the rock floor without moving his legs. His black robe had faded to grey.
In fact it was almost translucent. “Quinn?” This latest performance was
frightening him more than anything to date. The anger and wrath which Quinn
radiated so easily were simple to understand, almost reassuring in comparison.
This though, Bonham didn’t know if it was something being done to Quinn, or
something he was doing to himself. “What is this? Quinn?”
Quinn had become completely
transparent now, only the slightest rippling outline of rock betrayed his
position; even his thoughts were evaporating from Bonham’s perception. He
stumbled to a halt. Panic set in. Quinn was no longer present anywhere in the
corridor.
“Holy Christ, now what?”
He felt a breath of cold air strike
his face. He frowned.
A bolt of white fire smashed into
the back of his skull. Two souls were cast out of the corpse as it collapsed
onto the floor, both of them keening in dread at the fate which awaited.
“Wrong God.” A chuckle drifted down
the empty corridor.
When Joshua landed just after
midday local time, rumour was blanketing Harrisburg as thickly as the snow. It
seemed to be the one weapon in the armoury of the possessed which was the same
the Confederation over. The more people heard, the less they knew, the more
fearful they became. One freak outbreak of urban mythology and entire
populations would become paralysed, either that or regress straight into
survivalist siege mode.
On most worlds, government
assurances and rover reporters on the scene managed to restart the engines of
ordinary existence. People would creep sheepishly back to work and wait for the
next canard of Genghis Khan riding a Panzer tank into the suburbs.
Not on Nyvan. Here governments were
the ones gleefully shooting out savage accusations at their old antagonists. A
coordinated global response to the prospect of the possessed landing was never
even considered, a realpolitik impossibility.
As soon as they landed Joshua
loaded a search request into the city’s commercial data core. The number of
armed guards and lack of flights at the spaceport made his intuition rebel. He
knew they didn’t have much time; the quiet approach—questions, contacts,
money—would never work here.
They hired a car and set off down
hotel row, a potholed six-lane motorway which linked the spaceport to the city
ten kilometres away. Only two lanes were cleared of snow, and there was hardly
any other traffic.
Dahybi used his electronic warfare
detector block to sweep the eight-seater cabin for bugs. “Seems clean,” he told
the others.
“Okay,” Joshua said. “Our processor
technology is probably more advanced than the locals, but don’t count on it for
a permanent advantage. I need to find her as fast as we can, which is going to
mean sacrificing subtlety.”
As they approached the hotel they’d
booked, Joshua datavised an update into the car’s control processor. The car
swept past the hotel’s entrance, heading for the city.
“There goes our deposit,” Melvyn
complained.
“It bothers me,” Joshua said.
“Ione, are we being followed?”
One of the serjeants was sitting at
the back of the cab, pointing a small circular sensor pad through the rear
window. “One car, possibly two. I think there are three people in the first
one.”
“Probably some kind of local
security police,” Joshua decided. “I’d be surprised if they weren’t keeping
tabs on foreigners right now.”
“So what do we do about them?”
Dahybi asked.
“Not a damn thing. I don’t want to
give them an excuse to interfere.” He accessed the car’s net processor and
established an encrypted link to the spaceplane. “What’s your situation,
Ashly?”
“So far so good. I’ll have the
electron matrices completely recharged in another three minutes. That’ll expand
your options.”
“Good. We’ll keep a channel open to
you from now on. If the city’s net starts to crash, come get us. That’s our
cut-off point.”
“Aye, Captain. Lady Macbeth just
fell below the horizon, so I’ve lost contact. Every civil communications
satellite is out now.”
“If their situation alters, they’ll
change orbit and re-establish a link. Sarha knows what to do.”
“I certainly hope so. Before I lost
contact, Beaulieu told me four voidhawks have arrived. They’re heading for low
orbit.”
“They must have come from the
Dorados,” Joshua decided. “Ashly, when Lady Mac comes back on-line, tell
Sarha to monitor them as best she can. And let me know if any of their
spaceplanes land.”
The snowfall had thickened
considerably by the time Joshua’s car reached the address his search program
had identified for him. It reduced Harrisburg to a sequence of shabby granite
streets that were hard to tell apart. Nothing was alive apart from people,
wrapped in their insulated coats as they kicked their way through the pavement
slush. Hologram billboards and neon signs were all that remained unaffected by the
weather, flashing and morphing as always.
“I should have brought Liol down,”
Joshua muttered, half to himself. “He said he wanted a taste of exotic worlds.”
“You’re going to have to come to
terms with him eventually, Joshua,” Melvyn said.
“Maybe. Jesus, if he just wasn’t
such a pushy bastard. Can’t you tell him to lighten up, Ione? You spend a lot
of time talking to him.”
“It didn’t work before,” one of the
serjeants said.
“You’ve already told him?”
“Let’s say I’ve been through the
procedure earlier. He’s not the only one who needs to relax, Joshua. Neither of
you are going to make any progress the way you both carry on.”
He wanted to explain. How it was.
How he didn’t feel quite so alone anymore, and how that left him troubled. How
he wanted to welcome his brother, but at the same time knew him so well he
didn’t trust him. To be honest with him would be seen as a weakness. Liol was
the interloper. Let him make the first gesture. I saved his arse from the
Dorados, I was the honourable one, and what thanks do I get?
When he glanced around the car, he
knew that anything he said which verged on truth would make him sound petulant.
A year ago I would’ve told the lot of them to bugger off. Jesus, life was
simpler then, when there was just me. “I’ll do what I can,” he conceded.
Their car turned off the street and
dipped down into an underground garage. The building it served was a ten-storey
block with small shops at street level (half of them empty), and the upper
floors given over to offices and design bureaus.
“Going to tell us why we’re here
now?” Dahybi asked as they climbed out of the car.
“Simple,” Joshua said. “When you
need a job doing fast and effectively, go to a professional.”
The office of Kilmartin and Elgant,
Data Security Specialists, was on the seventh floor. There was nobody behind
the desk in the reception room. Joshua paused for a second, expecting a
secretarial program to query them, but the desktop processor wasn’t switched
on. The inner door slid open when he approached it.
In a rash of optimistic bravado
accompanying their firm’s launch, Kilmartin and Elgant had taken a fifty-year
lease on sufficient floor space to house fifteen operatives. There were still
enough desks for fifteen in the open-plan office; seven of them had dust covers
thrown over processors which were fairly dubious even by Nyvan’s technological
standards; four desks had niches where processors used to be; one patch of
carpet showed imprints where a desk used to stand.
Only one desk had a decent cluster
of modern blocks, which shared the surface with a thoroughly dead potted plant.
Two men were sitting behind it, staring intently into the hazy aura of an AV
pillar. The first was tall, young, and broad-shouldered, sporting a long blond
ponytail tied with a colourful leather lace. He wore an expensive black suit,
tailored to provide maximum freedom of movement. He was not openly belligerent,
but had a presence that would make people think twice before tackling him. The
second was well into middle age, dressed in a faded grey-brown jacket, tufty
chestnut hair askew. He looked as if he belonged behind the complaints desk in
a tax office.
They regarded Joshua and his odd
delegation with mild surprise.
Joshua looked from one to the
other, slightly uncertain as intuition tickled his skull. Then he clicked his
fingers decisively and pointed at the younger of the two. “I bet you’re the
data expert and your friend handles the combat routines. Good disguise, right?”
The aura from the AV pillar faded
as the younger man tilted his chair back and put his hands behind his head.
“Clever. Are we expecting you, Mr . . . ?”
Joshua gave a faint smile. “You
tell me.”
“All right, Captain Calvert, what
do you want?”
“I need to access some information,
and fast. Can you manage that for me?”
“Sure. Nationwide net access, no
problem, whatever file you want. Hey listen, I know what this place looks like.
Forget that. Talent isn’t something you can eyeball. And I’m so far on top of
things I’m getting oxygen starvation. Someone’s search program locates my public
file, I know about it before they do. You came down from the Lady Macbeth an
hour ago. One of your crew is still with your spaceplane. Want to know how much
the service company is ripping you off for your electron matrix recharge?
You’re in the right place.”
“I don’t care. Money doesn’t
concern me.”
“Okay, I think we’ve reached
interface here.” He turned to his colleague and muttered something. The older
man gave him a disgruntled look, then shrugged. He walked out of the office,
giving the two serjeants a curious glance as he passed.
“Richard Keaton.” The athletic
young man leaned over the desk, holding his hand out and smiling broadly. “Call
me Dick.”
“I certainly will.” They shook
hands.
“Sorry about Matty, there. He’s got
enough implants to chop up a squad of marines. But he gets overprotective, and
I don’t need him hovering right now. Smart of you to see which of us was which.
I don’t think anyone’s ever done that before.”
“Your secret’s safe with me.”
“So what can I do for you, Captain
Calvert?”
“I need to find someone.”
Keaton raised a forefinger. “If I
could just interrupt. First, there is my fee.”
“I’m not going to quibble. I might
even pay a bonus.”
One of the serjeants tapped a foot
pointedly on the worn carpet.
“Nice to hear, Captain. Okay then;
my fee is one flight off this planet on the Lady Macbeth, just as soon
as you leave. Destination: who cares.”
“That’s an . . . unusual fee. Any
particular reason?”
“Like I said, Captain, you came to
the right place. This might not be the biggest firm in town, but I fish the
data streams. There are possessed on Nyvan. They’ve already taken over Jesup,
that wasn’t just propaganda by our upstanding government. The electronic
warfare barrage in orbit? That was cover to help them get down here. There
aren’t too many in Tonala yet—not according to the Special Investigation
Bureau, anyway. But they’re spreading through the other countries.”
“So you want to be gone?”
“I sure do. And I figure you won’t
be here when they reach Harrisburg, either. Look, I won’t be any trouble on
board. Hell, shove me into zero-tau, I don’t mind.”
Joshua didn’t have the time to
argue. Besides, taking Keaton with them actually reduced the risk of exposure.
A flight off Nyvan wasn’t such a high price. “You bring only what you’ve got
with you; I’m not waiting while you go home to pack. We don’t have any slack
built into our mission profile.”
“We have a deal, Captain.”
“Very well, welcome aboard, Dick.
Now, the person I want is called Dr Alkad Mzu, alias Daphine Kigano. She
arrived on the starship Tekas last night with three companions. I don’t
know where she is or who she might attempt to contact; however, she will be
trying to stay hidden.” He datavised over a visual file. “Find her.”
Twenty thousand kilometres above
Nyvan, the Organization frigate Urschel emerged from its ZTT jump. It
was swiftly followed by the Raimo and the Pinzola. They were
nowhere near a designated emergence zone, but only the four voidhawks were
aware of their arrival. None of Nyvan’s gravitonic-distortion detector satellites
were functioning; the waves of electronic warfare assaults had crashed them
beyond repair.
After five minutes assessing the
local situation, their fusion drives came on, pushing them towards a low-orbit
injection point. Once they were on their way, Oscar Kearn, the small flotilla’s
commander, concentrated on the eternal, beseeching voices crying into his head.
Where is Mzu? he asked them.
The possessed among the crew,
including Cherri Barnes, joined his silky cajoling, adding to the tricksy
promises he made. Theirs was a multiple chant which hummed through the beyond,
a harmonic passed between every desperate soul. It agitated them, its very
existence a taunt; plots and scheming were an exquisitely tortuous reminder of
what lay on the other side of their dreadful continuum, what they could partake
of once again if they just helped.
Where is Mzu?
What is she doing?
Who is with her?
There are bodies waiting for worthy
hosts. Millions of bodies, out here among the light and air and experience,
held ready for Capone’s friends. One could be yours. If—
Where is Mzu? Exactly?
Ah.
When they reached a five hundred
kilometre orbit, each of the frigates dispatched a spaceplane. The three black
delta-shapes sliced down through Nyvan’s atmosphere, their tapering noses
lining up on Tonala, hidden behind the planet’s curvature seven thousand
kilometres ahead.
Oscar Kearn ordered the frigates to
manoeuvre again, and they began to raise their orbit.
“This really doesn’t look good,”
Sarha said. “The sensors are showing three of them. I don’t think their
transponders are responding to the station.”
“You don’t think?” Beaulieu
queried.
“Who knows? Those bloody SD
platforms are still at it. I doubt we could pick up an em pulse through all
this jamming.”
“What are their drive exhausts
like?” Liol asked.
Sarha ignored the datavised
displays inside her skull long enough to fire a disgusted glance at him. The
three of them were alone on Lady Mac’s bridge. All the remaining
serjeants were down in B capsule, guarding the airlock tube. “What?” There were
times when he was a little bit too much like Joshua, that is: quite
infuriating.
“If there are possessed on board,
they’ll be affecting the ship’s systems,” Liol recited. “Their drives will
fluctuate. The recordings from Lalonde taught us that. Remember?”
Sarha didn’t trust herself to
answer directly. Yes he was like Joshua, gallingly right the whole time. “I’m
not sure our discrimination programs will be much use at this distance. I can’t
get a radar lock to determine their velocity.”
“Want me to try?”
“No thank you.”
“When Josh said don’t give me
access to the flight computer, I don’t think he meant I wasn’t supposed to help
you survive an assault by the possessed,” Liol said peevishly.
“You will be able to ask him
directly soon,” Beaulieu said. “We should be over Ashly’s horizon in another
ninety seconds.”
“Those ships are definitely heading
for a rendezvous with the Spirit of Freedom,” Sarha said. “The optical
image is good enough for a rough vector analysis.”
“I’d like to point out that the
three highly similar ships which appeared at the Dorados before we left were
all from New California,” Liol said.
“I am aware of that,” Sarha snarled
back.
“Jolly good. I’d hate to be
possessed by anyone I didn’t know.”
“What are the voidhawks doing?”
Beaulieu asked.
“I don’t know. They’re on the other
side of the planet.” Sarha was uncomfortably aware of the perspiration
permeating her shipsuit. She datavised the conditioning grille above her for
some cool, dry air—cooler, dryer air. And to think, I’d always been slightly
envious about Joshua having command of a starship. “I’m disengaging the
airlock,” she told the other two. “Station staff might try to come on board
once they realize those starships are heading here.” It was a logical action. And
actually doing something made her feel a whole lot better.
“I’ve got the spaceplane beacon,”
Beaulieu announced.
“You’re still intact, then?” Ashly
datavised.
“Yeah, still here,” Sarha replied
gamely. “What’s your situation?”
“Stable. Nothing much is moving at
the spaceport. The four Edenist flyers arrived half an hour ago. They’re parked
about two hundred metres away from me right now. I tried datavising them, but
they’re not answering. A whole group of people set off into town as soon as
they landed. There were cars here waiting for them.”
The flight computer signalled that
Joshua was coming on line. “Any signs of possession on the planet yet?” he
asked.
“I’d have to say yes, Captain,”
Beaulieu told him. “The national nets are suffering considerable degrees of
dropout. But there’s no real pattern to it. Several countries don’t have a
single glitch.”
“They will,” Joshua datavised.
“Joshua, three Adamist starships
appeared an hour ago,” Sarha datavised. “We believe they sent some spaceplanes
or flyers down to the planet; they were in the right orbit for it. Liol thinks
they’re the same Organization ships that were at the Dorados.”
“Oh, well, if the starflight expert
says so . . .”
“Josh, those frigates are heading
for this station,” Liol datavised.
“Oh, Jesus. Okay, get clear of the
station. And, Sarha, try to get a positive ident.”
“Will do. How are things your end?”
“Promising, I think. Expect us . .
. today, what . . . outcome.”
“I’m losing the link,” Beaulieu
warned. “Heavy interference, and it’s focused directly at us.”
“Josh, let me have access authority
for the flight computer. Sarha and Beaulieu are being overloaded up here, for
Christ’s sake. I can help.”
“. . . think . . . mummy’s boy . .
. on my ship . . . fucking . . . because I’ll . . . first . . . trust . . .”
“Lost them,” Beaulieu said.
“The frigates have started jamming
us directly,” Sarha said. “They know we’re here.”
“They’re softening up the station
for an assault,” Liol said. “Give me the access codes, I can fly Lady Mac away.”
“No, you heard Joshua.”
“He said he trusted me.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Look, you two have to operate the
on-board systems, monitor the electronic warfare battle, and now you’ve got to
watch the frigates as well. If we launch now they might think we’re going to
defend the station. Can you fly Lady Mac and fight at the same time as
everything else?”
“Beaulieu?” Sarha asked.
“Not my decision, but he does have
a point. We need to leave, now.”
“Sarha, Josh is all emotionally
tangled up when it comes to me. Fair enough, I didn’t handle him well. But you
can’t endanger his life and ours on a single bad decision made from ignorance.
I’ll do my best here. Trust me. Please.”
“All right! Damn it. But fusion
drive authority only. You’re not jumping us anywhere.”
“Fine.” And the dream finally
happened, just as he’d always known it would. Lady Mac’s flight computer
opened to him, and all the systems were on-line, filling his mind with glorious
wing-sweeps of colour. They fitted just perfectly.
He designated the procedure menus
he needed, bringing the thrusters and drive tubes up to active flight status.
Beaulieu and Sarha were working smoothly together, activating the remaining on
board systems. Umbilicals retracted from the fuselage, and the cradle started
to elevate them out of the shallow docking bay. The viewfield which the flight
computer was datavising at him expanded as more of Lady Mac’s sensor
clusters lifted above the rim. Three bright, expanding stars were ringed in
antagonistic red as they crept up over the curvature of the brilliant blue
horizon.
Liol fired the verniers to take
them off the cradle, not caring if the other two could see the stupid smile on
his face. For a moment, all the envy and bitterness returned, the irrational
pique he’d felt when he first learned that Joshua existed, a usurper brother
who was captaining the ship which was rightfully his. This was the rush that
belonged to him. The power to traverse the galaxy.
One day, he and Joshua were going
to have to settle this.
But not today. Today was when he
proved himself to his brother and the crew. Today was when he started living
the life he knew belonged to him.
When they were a hundred metres
above the docking bay, Liol fired the secondary drive, selecting a third of a
gee acceleration. Lady Mac immediately veered off the vector he’d
plotted. He pumped a fast correction order into the flight computer, deflecting
the exhaust angle. Overcompensating. “Wowshit!” The acceleration couch webbing
gripped him tighter.
“The spaceplane hangar is empty,”
Sarha said witheringly. “That means our mass distribution is off centre.
Perhaps you’d care to bring the level seven balance calibration programs
on-line?”
“Sorry.” He searched desperately
around the flight control menus and found the right program. Lady Mac juddered
back onto her original vector.
“Joshua is going to throw me out of
the airlock,” Sarha decided.
It had taken some time for Lodi to
get used to having Omain sitting in the hotel suite with him. A possessed for
Mary’s sake! But Omain turned out to be quiet and polite (a little sad, to be
honest), keeping out of the way. Lodi slowly managed to relax, though this must
surely be the strangest episode in his life. Nothing was ever going to
out-weird this.
At first he had jumped every time
Omain even spoke. Now, he was relatively cool about the whole scene. His
processor blocks were spread out over one of the tables, enabling him to cast
trawl programs into the net streams, fishing out relevant information. It was
what he did best, so Voi had left him to it while she, Mzu, and Eriba went to
the Opia company. His main concern at the moment was monitoring the civil
situation now the government had closed the borders. Voi wanted to make sure
they would be allowed to get back into orbit. So far, it looked as if they
could. There had even been one piece of good luck, the first since they arrived
at Nyvan. A starship called Lady Macbeth had docked at the Spirit of
Freedom, and it was exactly the type of ship Mzu wanted.
“They are asking for her,” Omain
said.
“Huh?” Lodi cancelled the datavised
displays, blinking away the afterimage the graphics left in his mind.
“Capone’s people are in orbit,”
Omain said. “They know Mzu is here. They are asking for her.”
“You mean you can tell what’s going
on in orbit? Mary! I can’t, not with all the interference from the SD
platforms.”
“Not tell, exactly. This is
whispered gossip, distorted by the many souls it has passed through. I have
only the vaguest notion of the facts.”
Lodi was fascinated. Once he began
talking, Omain knew some seriously interesting facts. He’d lived on Garissa,
and was quite willing to share his impressions. (Lodi had never summoned the
courage to ask Mzu what their old world was like.) From Omain’s melancholic
descriptions it sounded like a good place to live. The Garissans, Lodi was
sure, had lost more than their world by the sound of it; their whole culture
was different now, too tight-arsed and Western-ethnic orientated.
One of the processor blocks
datavised a warning into Lodi’s neural nanonics. “Oh, bollocks!”
“What is it?”
They had to speak in raised voices,
almost shouting at each other. Omain was sitting in the corner of the living
room furthest from Lodi, it was the only way the blocks would remain
functional.
“Someone has accessed the hotel’s
central processor. They’ve loaded a search program for the three of us, and
it’s got a visual reference for Mzu, too.”
“It cannot be the possessed,
surely?” Omain said. “Neural nanonics don’t function for us.”
“Might be the Organization ships.
No. They’d never be able to access Tonala’s net from orbit, not with the
platforms still going at it. Hang on, I’ll see what I can find out.” He felt
almost happy as he started retrieving tracker programs from the memory fleks
he’d brought. The net dons in this city probably had ten times the experience
he’d got from snooping around Ayacucho’s communications circuits, but his
programs were still able to flash back through the junctions, tracing the
origin of the searchers.
The answer sprang into his mind
just as the hotel’s central processor crashed. “Wow, that was some guardian
program. But I got them. You know anything about a local firm called Kilmartin
and Elgant?”
“No. But I haven’t been here long,
not in this incarnation.”
“Right.” Lodi twitched a smile.
“I’ll see what . . . that’s odd.”
Omain had risen from his chair. He
was frowning at the suite’s double door. “What is?”
“The suite’s net processor is
down.”
The door chimed.
“Did you . . .” Lodi began.
Something very heavy smashed into
the door. Its panels bulged inwards. Splintering sounds were spitting out of
the frame.
“Run!” Omain shouted. He stood
before the door, both arms held towards it, palms outwards. His face was
clenched with effort. The air twisted frantically in front of him, whipping up
a small gale.
Another blow hammered the door, and
Omain was sent staggering backwards. Lodi turned to run for the bedroom. He was
just in time to see a fat three-metre-long serpent slither vertically up the
outside of the window. Its huge head reared back, levelling out to stare straight
at him. The jaws parted to display fangs as big as fingers. Then it lunged
forwards, shattering the glass.
From his elevated position in the
command post, Shemilt studied the ops table below him. One of the girls leaned
over and pushed a red-flagged marker closer to the deserted asteroid.
“In range, sir,” she reported.
Shemilt nodded, trying not to show
too much dismay. All three of the inter-orbit ships were in range of New
Georgia’s SD network now. And Quinn had not returned to change his orders. His
very specific orders.
If only we weren’t so bloody
terrified of him, Shemilt thought. He still felt sick every time he remembered
the zero-tau pod containing Captain Gurtan Mauer. Quinn had opened it up during
two of the black mass ceremonies.
If we all grouped together—But of
course, death was no longer the end. Throwing the dark messiah into the beyond
would solve nothing.
There was a single red telephone in
his command post. He picked up the handset. “Fire,” he ordered.
Two of the three inter-orbit ships on
their way to find out what the teams from Jesup were doing in the deserted
asteroids were struck by X-ray lasers. The beams shone clean through the life
support capsules and the fusion drive casings. Both crews died instantly.
Electronics flash evaporated. Drive systems ruptured. Two wrecks tumbled
through space, their hulls glowing a dull orange, vapour squirting from split
tanks.
The third was targeted by a pair of
combat wasps.
The officers of the other two
national SD networks saw them streaking away from New Georgia’s platform,
heading towards the helpless inter-orbit ship. They requested and received fire
authority codes. By then the attacking combat wasps had begun dispensing their
submunitions drones. Infrared decoys shone like micro-novas amid the shoal of
drive exhausts; electronic warfare pulses screamed at the sensors of any SD
platform within five thousand kilometres. The offensive was a valid tactic;
combat wasps launched to try to protect the remaining ship were confused for
several seconds. A time period which in space warfare was critical.
A flock of one-shot pulsers finally
got close enough to discharge into the remaining inter-orbit ship, killing it
immediately. That didn’t prevent the kinetic missiles from arrowing in on it at
thirty-five gees. Nor submunitions with nuclear warheads from detonating when
they were within range.
Lady Mac’s sensors picked up most of the brief battle,
though the overspill from the electronic warfare submunitions overlapping the
general assault waged by the SD platforms caused several overload dropouts.
“This is becoming a seriously
hazardous location,” Sarha mumbled. The external sensor image was quivering
badly as if something was shaking the starship about. Artificial circles of
green, blue, and yellow were splashing open against the starfield like raindrop
graffiti. Intense blue-white flares started to appear among them.
“It just went nuclear,” Beaulieu
said. “I don’t think I’ve seen overkill on that scale before.”
“What the hell is going on up
there?” Sarha asked.
“Nothing good,” Liol said. “A
possessed would have to be very determined to make a trip to one of those
abandoned asteroids; there are no biospheres left, that’ll leave them heavily
dependent on technology.”
“How are the Organization ships
reacting?” Sarha asked. Twenty minutes after Lady Mac had left the Spirit
of Freedom, the three frigates had docked. Quarter of an hour after that
all communication with the station had ceased. They were now holding orbit
eight hundred kilometres ahead of Spirit of Freedom, which gave their
sensors a reasonable resolution.
“I’m way ahead of you,” Liol said.
“Two of them are launching—wait, they all are. They’re going down into a lower
orbit. Damn, I wish we could see what the voidhawks are doing.”
“I’m registering activity within
the station’s defence sensor suite,” Beaulieu said. “They’re sweeping us.”
“Liol, take us another five hundred
kilometres away.”
“No problem.”
Sarha consulted the orbital
display. “We’ll be over Tonala in another thirty minutes. I’m going to
recommend Joshua pulls out.”
“There’s a lot of ship movements
beginning down here,” Beaulieu said. “Two more low-orbit stations are launching
ships; and those are the ones we can see.”
“Bugger it,” Sarha grunted. “Okay,
go to defence-ready status.”
Lady Mac’s standard sensor clusters retreated down into
their recesses; the smaller, bulbous combat sensors slid smoothly upwards to
replace them, gold-chrome lenses reflecting the last twinkling explosions in
high orbit. Her combat wasp launch tubes opened.
All around her, Nyvan’s national
navies and SD platforms were switching to the same status.
Since arriving at Jesup, Dwyer had
spent almost every hour helping to modify the bridge systems of the cargo
clipper Mount’s Delta. Given his minimal technical background, his time
was spent supervising the non-possessed technicians who did most of the
installation.
The bridge compartment was badly
cramped, which meant only a couple of people could work in it at any one time.
Dwyer had become highly proficient at dodging flying circuit boards and loose
console covers. But he was satisfied with the result, which was far less crude
than the changes they’d made to the Tantu. With the huge stock of
component spares available in the spaceport, the consoles looked as if they’d
slipped off the factory production line mere hours earlier. Their processors
were now all military grade, capable of functioning while they were subjected
to the energistic effect of the possessed. And the flight computer had been
augmented until it was capable of flying the ship following the simplest of
verbal orders.
This time there was none of the
black sculpture effect, every surface was standard. Quinn had insisted the
clipper’s life support capsule must stand up to inspection when they arrived at
Earth. Dwyer was confident he had reached that objective.
Now he was hovering just outside
the small galley alcove on the mid-deck watching a female technician replacing
the old hydration nozzles with the latest model. A portable sanitation sucker
hovered over her shoulder, its fan humming eagerly as it ingested the
occasional stale globule which burped out of the tubes she’d unscrewed.
The unit’s hum rose sharply,
becoming strident. A draught of cold air brushed Dwyer’s face.
“How’s it going?” Quinn asked.
Dwyer and the technician both
yelped in surprise. The clipper’s airlock was in the lower deck, and the floor
hatch was closed.
Dwyer spun around, grabbing at
support struts to wrestle his inertia back under control. Sure enough, Quinn
was sliding down through the ceiling hatch from the bridge. His robe’s hood was
folded back, sticking to his shoulders as if he were in his own private gravity
field. For the first time in days his flesh tone was almost normal. He grinned
cheerfully at Dwyer.
“God’s Brother, Quinn. How did you
do that?” Dwyer glanced over his shoulder to check the floor hatch again.
“It’s like style,” Quinn said.
“Some of us have it . . .” He winked at the female technician and flung a bolt
of white fire straight into her temple.
“Fuck!” Dwyer gasped.
The corpse banged back into the
galley alcove. Tools fluttered out of her hands like iron butterflies.
“We’ll dump her out of the airlock
when we’re under way,” Quinn said.
“We’re leaving?”
“Yes. Right now. And I don’t want
anyone to know.”
“But . . . what about the
engineering crew in the bay’s control centre? They have to direct the umbilical
retraction.”
“There is no more crew. We can
relay the launch instructions to the management computer through the bay’s
datanet.”
“Whatever you say, Quinn.”
“Come on, you’ll enjoy Earth. I
know I will.” He performed a somersault in midair, and slow-dived back up
through the hatch.
Dwyer took a moment to compose
himself, clenching his hands so the way his fingers trembled didn’t show, then
followed Quinn up into the bridge.
Anger and worry isolated Alkad from
the mundanities of the drive back to the hotel. She hadn’t thought this fast
and hard since the days she was working on the Alchemist theory. Options were
closing all around her, like the sound of prison doors slamming shut.
The meeting with two of Opia’s vice
presidents had been a typical sounding-you-out session. All very cordial, and
achieving very little. They had agreed on the principle of the company finding
her a starship and crew, which at some yet-to-be-specified time would be
equipped with specialist defence systems for duties in the Dorados’ defence
force.
The one hold she had over them was
the prospect that this would be the first order by the Dorados council; and if
all went smoothly, more would follow. Possibly a great deal more.
Greed had taken root. She had seen
it so many times before in the industrialists who had been supplying Garissa’s
navy.
They would have followed her
requests, ignoring the oddities of the situation. She was convinced of it. Then
just as the meeting was winding down the Tonala government announced a state of
emergency. New Georgia’s SD platforms had opened fire on three ships, one of
which belonged to Tonala. Such an action, the Defence Ministry insisted, proved
beyond any doubt that the possessed had captured Jesup, that the New Georgia
government was lying, and possibly even possessed itself.
Once again Nyvan’s national
factions were at war with each other.
The Opia executives loaded a
program for a crestfallen expression into their neural nanonics. Sorry, but the
contract would have to go into suspension. Temporarily. Just until Tonalan
might has reigned triumphant.
The car drew up underneath the
sweeping portico of the Mercedes Hotel. Ngong was first out, scouring the broad
street for threats. Now they had him and Gelai protecting them, Alkad had
dispensed with the security firm Voi had hired; although they’d kept the
company’s car with its armoured bodywork and secure circuitry.
There wasn’t much traffic on the
street. The team of men shovelling snow had vanished, leaving the dilapidated
mechanoids to struggle on by themselves. Ngong nodded and beckoned. Alkad eased
herself off the seat and scurried over to the lobby’s rotating door, Gelai a
pace behind her the whole time. They had told her of the Organization’s ships
during the trip back. It baffled Alkad how Capone had ever heard of her. But
there was no disguising Gelai’s rising concern.
The five of them bundled into the
penthouse lift, which rose smoothly. Only the annoying flicker of the light
panel betrayed Gelai and Ngong for what they were.
Alkad ignored the lighting. The
state of emergency was dangerous. It wouldn’t be long before Tonala retaliated
against New Georgia’s SD network. Those starships docked above Nyvan would be
pressed into service, if the captains didn’t simply ignore the quarantine and
leave. She would soon be trapped here without any transport and the Capone
Organization closing in. Unless she did something fast, she would belong to the
possessed one way or the other, and with her came the Alchemist.
The spectre of what the device
could do to the Confederation if it was used on a target other than Omuta’s
star was now preying on her mind. What if it was used against Jupiter? The
Edenist habitats would die, Earth would be deprived of the He3
without which it could never survive. Or what if it was used against Sol
itself? What if it was switched to the nova function?
There had never been any
conceivable prospect of this before. I was always in control. Mother Mary
forgive my arrogance.
She cast a sideways glance at Voi,
who was looking as irritable as always with the lift’s progress. Voi would
never entertain any change in their mission priorities. The concept of failure
was not allowed for.
Like me at that age.
I have to get off this planet, she
realized abruptly. I have to reopen the options again. I can’t let it end like
this.
The lift’s floor indicator said
they were three floors below the penthouse when Gelai and Ngong exchanged a
questioning glance.
“What’s the matter?” Voi asked.
“We can’t sense Omain, or Lodi,”
Gelai said.
Alkad immediately tried to datavise
Lodi. There was no response. She ordered the lift to stop. “Is there anyone up
there?”
“No,” Gelai said.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
Of all the facets of possession,
the perception ability fascinated Alkad the most. She’d only just started
considering the mechanism of possession. The whole concept would ultimately
mean quantum cosmology having to be completely restructured again. So far,
she’d made very little theoretical progress.
“I told him to stay put,” Voi said
indignantly.
“If his neural nanonics aren’t
responding, then this is rather more serious than him simply wandering off,”
Alkad told her.
Voi pulled a face, unconvinced.
Alkad ordered the lift to restart.
Gelai and Ngong were standing in
front of the doors when they opened on the penthouse vestibule. Trickles of
static skipped over their clothes as they readied themselves for trouble.
“Oh, Mary,” Eriba said. The double
doors to the penthouse had been smashed apart.
Gelai waved the others back as she
edged cautiously into the living room. Alkad heard an intake of breath.
The body Omain had been possessing
was lying across one of the big settees, covered with deep scorch marks. Snow
was blowing in through a gaping hole in the window.
Ngong hurriedly checked the other
rooms. “No body. He’s not here,” he told them.
“Oh, Mother Mary, now what?” Alkad
exclaimed. “Gelai, have you got any idea who did this?”
“None. Aside from the obvious that
it was some possessed.”
“They know about us,” Voi said.
“And now Lodi’s been possessed, they know too much about us. We must leave
immediately.”
“Yes,” Alkad said reluctantly. “I
suppose so. We’d better go directly to the spaceport, see if we can hook up
with a starship there.”
“Won’t they know we’re going to do that?” Eriba said.
“What else can we do? This planet can’t help us anymore.”
One of the processor blocks on the
table let out a bleep. Its AV projector sparkled.
Alkad looked straight into it. And
she was looking out through a set of eyes at a man dressed in a traditional
Cossack costume.
“Can you hear me, Dr Mzu?” he
asked.
“Yes. Who are you?”
“My name is Baranovich, not that it
particularly matters. The important fact here is that I have agreed to work for
Mr Capone’s Organization.”
“Oh, shit,” Eriba groaned.
Baranovich smiled and held a small
circular mirror up. Alkad could see Lodi’s frightened face reflected in the
surface.
“So,” Baranovich said. “As you can
see, we have not harmed your comrade. This is his datavise you are receiving.
If he was possessed, he would be unable to do this. No? Say something, Lodi.”
“Voi? Dr Mzu? I’m sorry. I
couldn’t—Look there are only seven of them. Omain tried . . .” Something hissed
loudly behind him. The image blurred. Then he blinked.
“A brave boy.” Baranovich clapped
Lodi on the shoulder. “The Organization has a place for those with such
integrity. I would hate to see another come to use this body.”
“You might have to,” Alkad said. “I
cannot consider swapping a lone man for the device, no matter how well I know
him. There have been far bigger sacrifices made to get me to this point. I
would be betraying those who made them, and that I can never do. I’m sorry,
Lodi, really I am.”
“My dear doctor,” Baranovich said.
“I was not offering you Lodi in exchange for the Alchemist. I am simply using
him as a convenient instrument through which I can deal with you, and perhaps
demonstrate our intent.”
“I don’t need to deal with you.”
“Your pardon, Doctor, I believe you
do. You will not get off this planet unless the Organization takes you off. I
think you know that now. After all, you weren’t going to try and run to the
spaceport, now were you?”
“I’m not about to discuss my
departure arrangements with you.”
“Bravo, Doctor. Resistance to the
very end. I respect that. But please understand, the circumstances in which you
find yourself have changed radically since you began your quest for vengeance.
There will be no revenge against Omuta anymore. What would be the point? In a
few short months Omuta as it is today will not exist. Whatever you can do to it
will not exceed the coming of possession. Will it, Doctor?”
“No.”
“So you see, you have only yourself
to consider now, and what will happen in your personal future. The Organization
can offer you a decent future. You know that with us millions of valuable
people remain unpossessed, and secure in their jobs. You can be one of them,
Doctor. I have the authority to offer you a place with us.”
“In return for the Alchemist.”
Baranovich shrugged magnanimously.
“That is the deal. We will take you—and your friends too if you want them—off
this planet today, before the orbital battle becomes any worse. Nobody else
will do that. You either stay here and become possessed, an eternity spent in
the humiliation of physical and mental bondage; or you come with us and live
out the rest of your life as fruitfully as possible.”
“As destructively as possible, you
mean.”
“I doubt the Alchemist would have
to be used many times, not if it’s as good as rumour says. Yes?”
“It wouldn’t need many
demonstrations,” Alkad agreed slowly.
“Alkad!” Voi protested.
Baranovich beamed happily.
“Excellent, Doctor, I see you are acknowledging the truth. Your future is with
us.”
“There’s something you should
know,” Alkad said. “The activation code is stored in my neural nanonics. If I
am killed and moved into another body in a bid to make me more compliant, I
will not be able to access them. If I am possessed, the possessor will not be
able to access them. And, Baranovich, there are no copies of the code.”
“You are a prudent woman.”
“If I come with you, then my
companions are to be given passage to a world of their choice.”
“No!” Voi shouted.
Alkad turned from the projection
and told Gelai: “Keep her quiet.”
Voi squirmed helplessly as the
possessed woman pinned her arms behind her back. A gag solidified out of thin
air to cover her mouth.
“Those are my terms,” Alkad told
Baranovich. “I have spent most of my life in pursuit of my goal. If you do not
agree to my terms, then I will not hesitate to defy you in the only way I have
left. I have that determination, it is the one real weapon I have always had.
You have pushed me into this position, do not doubt that I will use it.”
“Please, Doctor, there is no need
for such vehemence. We will be happy to carry your young friends to a safe
place.”
“All right. We have a deal.”
“Excellent. Our spaceplanes will
pick you and your friends up at the ironberg foundry yard outside the city.
We’ll be waiting at Disassembly Shed Four with Lodi. Be there in ninety
minutes.”
Chapter 09
Admiral Motela Kolhammer and Syrinx
arrived at the First Admiral’s office just as the Provost General was coming
out. He almost bumped into them, head down and scowling. Kolhammer was given a
brief grunt of apology before he strode off, chased by three aides in an
equally flustered mood. The admiral gave them a curious look before stepping
into the office.
Captain Maynard Khanna and Admiral
Lalwani were sitting in front of the First Admiral’s desk. Two more blue-steel
chairs were distending up out of the circular pools of silver on the floor.
“What was all that about?”
Kolhammer asked.
“We have a small legal problem with
one of our guests,” Lalwani said dryly. “It’s just a question of procedures,
that’s all.”
“Bloody lawyers,” Samual Aleksandrovich
muttered. He gestured Kolhammer and the voidhawk captain to sit.
“Is it relevant to Thakrar’s
information?” Kolhammer asked.
“No, fortunately.” Samual smiled a
fast welcome at Syrinx. “My thanks to Oenone for such a swift flight.”
“I’m happy to be contributing,
sir,” Syrinx said. “Our journey time from Ngeuni was eighteen hours.”
“That’s very good.”
“Good enough?” Kolhammer asked.
“We believe so,” Lalwani said.
“According to our New California surveillance operation, Capone is only just
starting to refuel and rearm his fleet again.”
“How up-to-date is that
information?” Kolhammer asked.
“There’s a voidhawk flight each day
from the Yosemite Consensus, so at the most we’re only thirty hours behind.
According to the Consensus, it will be another week at the most before they’re
ready to launch.”
“At Toi-Hoi, allegedly,” Kolhammer
mused. “Sorry to play the heretic, but how reliable is this Captain Thakrar?”
Syrinx could only give an empty
gesture. If only I had some way of imparting Erick’s intensity, his devotion,
to them. “I have no doubt Captain Thakrar’s data is genuine, Admiral. Apart
from his unfortunate collapse at the finish of his mission he’s proved an
absolute credit to the CNIS. Capone does intend to invade Toi-Hoi next.”
“I accept the information as
essentially accurate,” Lalwani affirmed. “We really are going to be able to
intercept the Organization fleet.”
“Which is going to eliminate the
Capone problem completely,” Maynard Khanna said. “With him gone, all we have to
concern ourselves with is the quarantine.”
“And that damnfool Mortonridge
Liberation which the Kingdom’s foisted on to us,” Kolhammer complained.
“Psychologically, the elimination
of Capone’s fleet will be considerably more important,” Lalwani said. “Capone
is interpreted as a far more active threat by Confederation citizens—”
“Yeah, thanks to the damn media,”
Kolhammer said.
“—so when they see there is no
further chance of his fleet appearing in their skies, and the navy has achieved
that for them, we will have a great deal more leverage with the Assembly when
it comes to implementing our policy.”
“Which is?” Samual Aleksandrovich
asked sardonically. “Yes, yes, Lalwani. I know. I simply don’t welcome the
notion of holding things together while we pray that Gilmore and all the others
like him can find a solution for us; it smacks of inactivity.”
“The more we thwart them, the more
we can expect them to cooperate in finding a solution,” she said.
“Very optimistic,” Kolhammer said.
Samual datavised a request into his
desktop processor and the fat AV cylinder hanging from the middle of the
ceiling began to sparkle. “This is our current strategic disposition,” he said
as the chairs swivelled their occupants around to face the projection. They
were looking down on the Confederation stars from galactic south, where
tactical situation icons orbited around the suns of inhabited worlds like
technicolour moons. At the centre, Earth’s forces were portrayed by enough
symbols to form a ring of gas giant proportions. “You’re going to get your chance,
Motela,” the First Admiral said quietly. “That 1st Fleet squadron you assembled
to deal with Laton is the only possible force we can engage Capone with. We
don’t have time to put anything else together.”
Kolhammer studied the projection.
“What does the Yosemite Consensus estimate Capone’s fleet size to be this
time?”
“Approximately seven hundred,”
Lalwani said. “Numerically, that’s slightly down on last time. Arnstadt is
tying up a lot of his mid-capacity ships. However, he has acquired a disturbing
number of Arnstadt’s navy ships. Consensus believes the fleet will contain at
least three hundred and twenty front-line warships. The rest are made up from
combat-capable traders and civil craft modified to carry combat wasps.”
“And they’re armed with antimatter,”
Kolhammer said. “My squadron has a maximum of two hundred ships. We both went
to the same academy, Lalwani, you need a two to one advantage to guarantee
success. And that’s just theoretically.”
“The Organization crews are not
highly motivated or efficient,” she replied. “Nor do their ships function at a
hundred per cent capacity with possessed on board screwing up the systems.”
“Neither of which will matter a
damn to their damn forty-gee combat wasps once they’re launched. They function
just fine.”
“I will assign you half of the 1st
Fleet vessels here at Avon,” the First Admiral said. “That will bring your
strength up to four hundred and thirty, including eighty voidhawks. In
addition, Lalwani has suggested that we request support from every Edenist
Consensus within a seventy-light-year radius of Toi-Hoi.”
“Even if they only release ten per
cent of their voidhawks, that should give you nearly three hundred and fifty
voidhawks,” she said.
“Seven hundred and eighty
front-line warships,” Kolhammer said. “A force that big is very cumbersome.”
Lalwani turned from the projection
to give him a reproachful stare. She found him grinning straight at her.
“But I think I can cope.”
“Our tactical staff want to use
Tranquillity as the rendezvous point,” Khanna said. “It’s only eighteen
light-years from Toi-Hoi; which means you can be there in five hours once you
know the Organization fleet is on its way.”
“One ship takes five hours, yes,
but we’re dealing with nearly eight hundred. I wasn’t joking about such a force
being cumbersome. Why don’t the tactical staff want us to use Toi-Hoi itself?”
“Capone must have it under
observation. If he sees that kind of task force arrive he’ll simply abort and
choose another target. We’d be back at square one. Tranquillity is close, and
it’s not an obvious military base. Once our observation operation confirms the
Organization fleet is leaving for Toi-Hoi a voidhawk will fly directly to
Tranquillity and alert you. You can be at Toi-Hoi before Capone’s ships arrive.
You can destroy them as they jump in.”
“Perfect tactics,” Kolhammer said,
almost to himself. “How long before the rest of the 1st Fleet ships can join
the squadron?”
“I’ve already issued recall
orders,” the First Admiral said. “The bulk will be at Trafalgar within fifteen
hours. The remainder can fly directly to Tranquillity.”
Kolhammer consulted the AV
projection again, then datavised a series of requests into the desktop
processor. The scale changed, expanding while the viewpoint slipped around to
put Toi-Hoi at the centre. “The critical factor here is that Tranquillity is
secure. We need to prevent any ship from leaving, and also make sure it’s not
under any kind of stealth observation before we arrive.”
“Suggestion?” Samual asked.
“It’ll be four and a half days
before the task force gets to Tranquillity. But Meredith Saldana’s squadron is
still at Cadiz, correct?”
“Yes, sir,” Khanna said. “The ships
were docked at a 7th Fleet supply base. The Cadiz government requested they
remain and support local forces.”
“So, a voidhawk could reach Cadiz
within . . .” He gave Syrinx an inquiring glance.
“From Trafalgar? Seven to eight
hours.”
“And Meredith could get to
Tranquillity in a further twenty hours. Which would give him almost three days
to check local space for any kind of clandestine surveillance activity, as well
as preventing any locals from leaving.”
“Get the orders drafted,” the First
Admiral told Khanna. “Captain Syrinx, my compliments to the Oenone, I’d
be obliged if you can convey them to Cadiz for me.”
Now this is real flying, Oenone said excitedly.
Syrinx concealed her own delight at
the voidhawk’s enthusiasm. “Of course, Admiral.”
Samual Aleksandrovich cancelled the
AV projection. He felt the same kind of anxiety that had beset him the day he
turned his back on his family and his world for a life in the navy. It came
from standing up and taking responsibility. Big decisions were always made
solo; and this was the biggest in his career. He couldn’t remember anyone
sending close-on eight hundred starships on a single combat assignment before.
It was a frightening number, the firepower to wreck several worlds. And by the
look of him, Motela was beginning to acknowledge the same reality. They swapped
a nervous grin.
Samual stood up and put out his
hand. “We need this. Very badly.”
“I know,” Kolhammer said. “We won’t
let you down.”
Nobody in Koblat’s spaceport
noticed the steady procession of kids slipping quietly down the airlock tube in
bay WJR-99 where the Leonora Cephei was docked. Not the port officials, not the
other crews (who would have taken a dim view of Captain Knox’s charter), and
certainly not the company cops. For the first time in Jed’s life, the company’s
policy meant that things were swinging his way.
The spaceport’s internal security
surveillance systems were turned off, the CAB docking bay logs had been
disabled, customs staff were on extended leave. No inconvenient memory file
would ever exist of the starships that had come and gone since the start of the
quarantine; nor would there be a tax record of the bonuses everyone was
earning.
Even so, Jed was taking no chances.
His small chosen tribe convened in the day club where he and Beth checked them
over, making them take off their red handkerchiefs before dispatching them up
to the spaceport at irregular intervals.
There were eighteen Deadnights he
and Beth reckoned they could trust to keep quiet; and that was stretching the Leonora
Cephei’s life-support capacity to its legal capacity. Counting himself and
Beth, there were four left when Gari finally arrived. That part was
pre-arranged; if both of them had been gone from the apartment for the whole
day, their mother might have wondered what they were up to. What had definitely
not been arranged was Gari having Navar in tow.
“I’m coming, too,” Navar said
defiantly as she saw Jed’s face darken. “You can’t stop me.”
Her voice was that same priggish
bark he had come to loathe over the last months, not just the tone but the way
it always got what it wanted. “Gari!” he protested. “What are you doing, doll?”
His sister’s lips squeezed up as a
prelude to crying. “She saw me packing. She said she’d tell Digger.”
“I will, I swear,” Navar said. “I’m
not staying here, not when I can go and live in Valisk. I’m going, all right.”
“Okay.” Jed put his arm around
Gari’s quivering shoulders. “Don’t worry about it. You did the right thing.”
“No she bloody didn’t,” Beth
exclaimed. “There’s no room on board for anyone else.”
Gari started crying. Navar folded
her arms, putting on her most stubborn expression.
“Thanks,” Jed said over his
sister’s head.
“Don’t leave me here with Digger,”
Gari wailed. “Please, Jed, don’t.”
“No one’s leaving you behind,” Jed
promised.
“What then?” Beth asked.
“I don’t know. Knox is just going
to have to find room for one more, I suppose.” He glared at Gari’s erstwhile
antagonizer. How bloody typical that even now she was messing things up, right
when he thought he was going to escape the curse of Digger forever. By rights
he should deck her one and lock her up until they’d gone. But in the world
Kiera promised them, all animosities would be forgiven and forgotten. Even a
mobile pain-in-the-arse like Navar. It was an ideal he was desperate to
achieve. Would dumping her here make him unworthy of Kiera?
Seeing his indecision, Beth
stormed: “Christ, you’re so useless.” She rounded on Navar, the nervejam
suddenly in her hand. Navar’s smirk faded as she found herself confronting
someone who for once wasn’t going to be wheedled or threatened. “One word out
of you, one complaint, one show of your usual malice, and I use this on your
bum before I shove you out of the airlock. Got that?” The nerve-jam was pressed
against the end of Navar’s nose for emphasis.
“Yes,” the girl squeaked. She
looked as miserable and frightened as Gari. Jed couldn’t remember seeing her so
disconcerted before.
“Good,” Beth said. The nervejam
vanished into a pocket. She flashed Jed a puzzled frown. “I don’t know why you
let her give you so much grief the whole time. She’s only a girly brat.”
Jed realized he must be blushing as
red as Gari. Explanations now would be pointless, not to mention difficult.
He pulled his shoulder bag out from
under the table. It was disappointingly light to be carrying everything he
considered essential to his life.
Captain Knox was waiting for them
in the lounge at the end of the airlock tube: a short man with the flat
features of his Pacific-island ancestry, but the pale skin and ash-blond hair
which one of those same ancestors had bought as he geneered his family for
free-fall endurance. His light complexion made his anger highly conspicuous.
“I only agreed to fifteen,” he said
as Beth and Jed drifted through the hatch. “You’ll have to send some back;
three at least.”
Jed tried to push his shoes onto a
stikpad. He didn’t like free fall, which made his stomach wobble, his face
swell, and clogged his sinuses. Nor was he much good at manoeuvring himself by
hanging on to a grab hoop and using his wrists to angle his body. Inertia
fought every move, making his tendons burn. When he did manage to touch his
sole to the pad there was little adhesion. Like everything else in the
inter-orbit ship, it was worn down and out-of-date.
“Nobody is going back,” he said.
Gari was clinging to his side, the mass of her floating body trying hard to
twist him away from the stikpad. He didn’t let go of the grab hoop.
“Then we don’t leave,” Knox said
simply.
Jed saw Gerald Skibbow at the back
of the lounge; as usual he was in switch-off, staring at the bulkhead with
glazed eyes. Jed was beginning to wonder if he had a serious habit. “Gerald.” He
waved urgently. “Gerald!”
Knox muttered under his breath as
Gerald came awake in slow stages, his body twitching.
“How many passengers are you
licensed for?” Beth asked.
Knox ignored her.
“What is it?” Gerald asked. He was
blinking as if the light were too bright.
“Too many people,” Knox said.
“You’ve gotta chuck some off.”
“I have to go,” Gerald said
quietly.
“No one is saying you don’t,
Gerald,” Beth said. “It’s your money.”
“But my ship,” Knox said. “And I’m
not carrying this many.”
“Fine,” Beth said. “We’ll just ask
the CAB office how many people you’re licensed to carry.”
“Don’t be stupid.”
“If you won’t carry us, then return
the fee and we’ll find another ship.”
Knox gave Gerald a desperate
glance, but he looked equally bewildered.
“Just three, did you say?” Beth
asked.
Sensing things were finally flowing
in his favour, Knox smiled. “Yes, just three. I’ll be happy to fly a second
charter for your friends later.”
Which was rubbish, Beth knew. He
was only worried about his own precious skin. A ship operating this close to
the margin really would be hard put to sustain nineteen Deadnights plus the
crew. It was the first time Knox had shown the slightest concern about the
flight. The only interest he’d shown in them before was their ability to pay.
Which Gerald had done, and well over the odds, too. They didn’t deserve to be
pushed around like this.
But Gerald was totally out of the
argument, back in one of his semi-comatose depressions again. And Jed . . . Jed
these days was focused on one thing only. Beth still hadn’t made up her mind if
she was annoyed about that or not.
“Put three of us in the lifeboat,
then,” she said.
“What?” Knox asked.
“You do have a lifeboat?”
“Of course.”
Which is where he and his precious
family would shelter if anything did go wrong, she knew. “We’ll put the three
youngest in there. They’d be the first in anyway, wouldn’t they?”
Knox glared at her. Ultimately,
though, money won the argument. Skibbow had paid double the price of an
ordinary charter, even at the inflated rates flights to and from Koblat were
currently worth.
“Very well,” Knox said gracelessly.
He datavised the flight computer to close the airlock hatch. Koblat’s flight
control was already signalling him to leave the docking bay. His filed flight
plan gave a departure time of five minutes ago, and another ship was waiting.
“Give him the coordinate,” Beth
told Jed. She took Gerald by the arm and gently began to tug him to his couch.
Jed handed the flek over to Knox,
wondering how come Beth was suddenly in charge.
The Leonora Cephei rose
quickly out of the docking bay; a standard drum-shaped life-support capsule
separated from her fusion drive by a thirty-metre spine. Four thermo dump
panels unfolded from her rear equipment bay, looking like the cruciform fins of
some atmospheric plane. Ion thrusters flared around her base and nose. Without
any cargo to carry, manoeuvring was a lot faster and easier than normal. She
rotated through ninety degrees, then the secondary drive came on, pushing her
out past the rim of the spaceport.
Before Leonora Cephei had
travelled five kilometres, the Villeneuve’s Revenge settled onto the
waiting cradle of bay WJR-99. Captain Duchamp datavised a request to the
spaceport service company for a full load of deuterium and He3. His
fuel levels were down to twenty per cent, he said, and he had a long voyage
ahead.
The clouds over Chainbridge formed
a tight stationary knot of dark carmine amid the ruby streamers which ebbed and
swirled across the rest of the sky. Standing behind Moyo as he drove the bus
towards the town, Stephanie could sense the equally darkened minds clustered
among the buildings. There were far more than there should have been;
Chain-bridge was barely more than an ambitious village.
Moyo’s concern matched hers. His
foot eased off the accelerator. “What do you want to do?”
“We don’t have a lot of choice.
That’s where the bridge is. And the vehicles need recharging.”
“Go through?”
“Go through. I can’t believe anyone
will hurt the children now.”
Chainbridge’s streets were clogged
with parked vehicles. They were either military jeeps and scout rangers or
lightly armoured infantry carriers. Possessed lounged indolently among them.
They reminded Moyo of ancient revolutionary guerillas, with their bold-print
camouflage fatigues, heavy lace-up boots, and shoulder-slung rifles.
“Uh oh,” Moyo said. They had
reached the town square, a pleasant cobbled district bounded by tall aboriginal
leghorn trees. Two light-tracked tanks were drawn up across the road. The
machines were impossibly archaic with their iron slab bodywork and chuntering
engines coughing up diesel smoke. But that same primitive solidity gave them a
unique and unarguable menace.
The Karmic Crusader had already
stopped, its cheap effervescent colours quite absurd against the tank’s stolid
armour. Moyo braked behind it.
“You stay in here,” Stephanie said,
squeezing his shoulder. “The children need someone. This is frightening for
them.”
“This is frightening for me,” he
groused.
Stephanie stepped down onto the
cobbles. Sunglasses spread out from her nose in the same fashion as a butterfly
opening its wings.
Cochrane was already arguing with a
couple of soldiers who were standing in front of the tanks. Stephanie came up
behind him and smiled pleasantly at them. “I’d like to talk to Annette Ekelund,
please. Would you tell her we’re here.”
One of them glanced at the Karmic
Crusader and the inquisitive children pressed against its windscreen. He
nodded, and slipped away past the tanks.
Annette Ekelund emerged from the
town hall a couple of minutes later. She was wearing a smart grey uniform, its
leather jacket lined in scarlet silk.
“Oh, wow,” Cochrane said as she
approached. “It’s Mrs Hitler herself.”
Stephanie growled at him.
“We heard you were coming,” Annette
Ekelund said in a tired voice.
“So why have you blocked the road?”
Stephanie asked.
“Because I can, of course. Don’t
you understand anything?”
“All right, you’ve demonstrated
you’re in charge. I accept that. None of us has the slightest intention of
challenging you. Can we go past now, please?”
Annette Ekelund shook her head in
bemused wonder. “I just had to see you for myself. What do you think you’re
doing with these kids? Do you think you’re saving them?”
“Frankly, yes. I’m sorry if that’s
too simple for you, but they’re really all I’m interested in.”
“If you genuinely cared, you would
have left them alone. It would have been kinder in the long run.”
“They’re children. They’re alone
now, and they’re frightened now. Abstract issues don’t mean very much compared
to that. And you’re scaring them.”
“Not intentionally.”
“So what is all this martial
jingoism for? Keeping us under control?”
“You don’t show a lot of gratitude,
do you? I risked everything to bring lost souls back to this world, including
yours.”
“And so you think that gives you a
shot at being our empress. You didn’t risk anything, you were compelled, just
like all of us. You were simply the first, nothing more.”
“I was the first to see what needed
to be done. The first to organize. The first to fight. The first to claim victory.
The first to stake out our land.” She swept an arm out towards a squad of
troops who had taken over a pavement café on the other side of the square.
“That’s why they follow me. Because I’m right, because I know what needs to be
done.”
“What these people need is some
kind of purpose. Mortonridge is falling apart. There’s no food left, no
electricity, nobody knows what to do. With authority comes responsibility.
Unless you’re just a bandit queen, of course. If you’re a real leader, you
should apply your leadership skills where they’ll do the most good. You made a
start, you kept the communications net working, you gave most towns a council
of sorts. You should have built on that.”
Annette Ekelund grinned. “What
exactly were you before? They told me you were just a housewife.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Stephanie
said, impatient with the whole charade. “Will you let us through?”
“If I didn’t, you’d only find
another way. Of course you can go through. We even have a few children scooting
around the town that you can take with you. See? I’m not a complete monster.”
“The buses need recharging first.”
“Naturally.” Ekelund sighed. She
beckoned to one of the tank guards. “Dane will show you where a working power
point is. Please don’t ask us for any food, I haven’t got enough to spare. I’m
having trouble supplying my own troops as it is.”
Stephanie looked at the tanks; if
she concentrated hard she could make out the fantasm shapes of the farm tractor
mechanoids behind the armour. “What are you and your army doing here?”
“I would have thought that was
obvious. I’ve taken that responsibility you prize so highly. I’m protecting
Mortonridge for you. We’re only thirty kilometres from the firebreak they
slashed across the top of the ridge; and on the other side, the Saldana Princess
is preparing. They’re not going to leave us alone, Stephanie Ash. They hate us
and they fear us. It’s a nasty combination. So while you go gallivanting around
doing your good deeds, just remember who’s holding back the barbarians.” She
started back for the tanks, then paused. “You know, one day you’re really going
to have to decide where your loyalties lie. You said you’d fight to stop them
throwing you back; well if you do, it’ll be at my side.”
“Ho wow, one iron-assed lady,”
Cochrane muttered.
“Definitely,” Stephanie agreed.
Dane climbed into the Karmic
Crusader with Cochrane and showed them the way to a line of warehouses which
served the wharf. Their long roofs were all made from solar collector panels.
When the buses were plugged in, Stephanie called her people together and told
them what Ekelund had said.
“If any of you want to wait here
while the buses go to the firebreak, I’ll understand,” she said. “The Kingdom
military might get nervous about four large vehicles heading towards them.”
“They won’t shoot us out of hand,”
McPhee said. “Not as long as we don’t cross the line. They’ll be curious.”
“Do you think so?” Tina said
anxiously. A large lace hankie was pressed to her lips.
“I’ve been there,” Dane said. “It
was a scout mission. I watched them watching me. They won’t start any trouble.
Like your friend said, they’ll be curious.”
“We’re almost there.” Stephanie’s
fixed smile betrayed her nerves. “Just a few more hours, that’s all.” She
glanced back at the buses, putting on a cheerful expression as she waved at the
children pressed up against the windows. They had all picked up on the gloomy
aura of the darkened clouds overhead. “McPhee, Franklin; give me a hand with
them will you. We’ll let them stretch their legs here and use a toilet.”
“Sure.”
Stephanie let Moyo hold her for a
moment. He planted a kiss on her forehead. “Don’t give up now.”
She smiled shyly. “I won’t. Can you
take a look in the warehouses for me, see if you can find some working toilets.
If not, we’ll have to make do with tissues and the river.”
“I’ll go check.”
The big sliding doors of the
closest warehouse were open. It was used to store tubing, row after row of
floor-to-ceiling stacks. All its lights were off, but there was enough
pink-tinged sunlight coming through the doors for him to see by. He started
checking around for an office.
Silent forklift mechanoids were
standing in the aisles, holding up bundles of tubing that had been destined for
urgent delivery. It wouldn’t take much effort to start them up again, he
thought. But what would be the point? Did a society of possessed need factories
and farms? Some infrastructure was necessary, yes, but how much and of what
kind? Something simple and efficient, and extremely long-lasting. He was
quietly glad that kind of decision wasn’t his.
A pyramid of tubing shielded the
man from Moyo’s perception. So he convinced himself later. Whatever the reason,
he didn’t notice him until he had rounded a corner and was barely five metres
away. And he wasn’t a possessed. Moyo knew his own kind, the internal glimmer
of cells excited by the energistic overspill. This man’s biolectric currents
were almost black, while his thoughts were fast and quiet. He was excessively
ordinary in appearance; wearing pale green trousers, a check shirt, and a sleeveless
jacket with DataAxis printed on its left breast pocket.
Moyo was chilled by a rush of
panic. Any non-possessed creeping around here had to be a spy, which meant he’d
be armed, most likely with something potent enough to terminate a possessed
with minimum fuss.
White fire punched out of Moyo’s
palm, an instinctive response.
The seething streamer splashed
against the man’s face and flowed around him to strike the tubing behind him.
Moyo grunted in disbelief. The man simply stood there as if it were water
pouring over him.
The white fire dimmed, its remnants
retreating into Moyo’s hand. He whimpered, expecting the worst. I’m going to be
blown back into the beyond. They’ve found a way of neutralizing our energistic
power. We’ve lost. There’s only the beyond now. For always.
He closed his eyes. Thinking with
fond longing: Stephanie.
Nothing happened. He opened his
eyes again. The man was looking at him with a mildly embarrassed expression.
Behind him, molten metal was dribbling down the side of the stacked tubing.
“Who are you?” Moyo asked hoarsely.
“My name’s Hugh Rosler. I used to
live in Exnall.”
“Did you follow us here?”
“No. Although I did watch your bus
leave Exnall. It’s just coincidence I’m here now.”
“Right,” Moyo said carefully.
“You’re not a spy then?”
The question was one which Rosler
apparently found quite amusing. “Not for the Kulu Kingdom, no.”
“So how come the white fire didn’t
affect you?”
“I have a built-in resistance. It
was thought we should have some protection when this time came around. And the
reality dysfunction ability has proved inordinately useful over the years. I’ve
been in a few tight corners in my time; completely inadvertently I might add.
I’m not supposed to be obtrusive.”
“Then you are an agent. Who do you
work for?”
“Agent implies an active role. I
only observe, I’m not part of any faction.”
“Faction?”
“The Kingdom. The Confederation.
Adamists. Edenists. The possessed. Factions.”
“Uh huh. Are you going to shoot me,
then, or something?”
“Good heavens no. I told you, I’m
here purely on observation duty.”
What was being said, apparently in
all sincerity, wasn’t helping to calm Moyo at all. “For which faction?”
“Ah. That’s classified, I’m afraid.
Technically, I shouldn’t even be telling you this much. But circumstances have
changed since my mission began. These things aren’t quite so important today.
I’m just trying to put you at ease.”
“It’s not working.”
“You really do have nothing to fear
from me.”
“You’re not human, are you?”
“I’m ninety-nine per cent human.
That’s good enough to qualify, surely?”
Moyo thought he would have
preferred it if Hugh Rosler had launched into an indignant denial. “What’s the
one per cent?”
“Sorry. Classified.”
“Xenoc? Is that it? Some unknown
race? We always had rumours of pre-technology contact, men being taken away to
breed.”
Hugh Rosler chuckled. “Oh, yes,
good old Roswell. You know I’d almost forgotten about that; the papers were
full of it for decades afterwards. But I don’t think it ever really happened.
At least, I never detected any UFOs when I was on Earth, and I was there quite
a while.”
“You were . . . ? But . . .”
“I’d better be going. Your friends
are starting to wonder where you’ve got to. There’s a toilet in the next
warehouse which the children can use. The tank is gravity fed, so it’s still
working.”
“Wait! What are you observing us
for?”
“To see what happens, of course.”
“Happens? You mean when the Kingdom
attacks?”
“No, that’s not really important. I
want to see what the outcome is for your entire race now that the beyond has
been revealed to you. I must say, I’m becoming quite excited by the prospect.
After all, I have been waiting for this for a very long time. It’s my
designated goal function.”
Moyo simply stared at him,
astonishment and indignation taking the place of fear. “How long?” was all he
managed to whisper.
“Eighteen centuries.” Rosler raised
an arm in a cheery wave and walked away into the shadows at the back of the
warehouse. They seemed to lap him up.
“What’s the matter with you?”
Stephanie asked when Moyo shambled slowly out into the gloomy light of the
rumbling clouds.
“Don’t laugh, but I think I’ve just
met Methuselah’s younger brother.”
Louise heard the lounge hatch slide
open, and guessed who it was. His duty watch had finished fifteen minutes ago.
Just long enough to show he wasn’t in any sort of rush to see her.
The trouble with the Jamrana,
Louise thought, was its layout. Its cabin fittings were just as good as those
in the Far Realm, but instead of the pyramid of four life-support
capsules, the inter-orbit cargo craft had a single cylindrical life-support
section riding above the cargo truss. The decks were stacked one on top of the
other like the layers of a wedding cake. To find someone, all you had to do was
start at the top, and climb down the central ladder. There was no escape.
“Hello, Louise.”
She reached for a polite smile.
“Hello, Pieri.”
Pieri Bushay had just reached
twenty, the second oldest of three brothers. Like most inter-orbit ships, Jamrana
was run as a family concern; all seven crew members were Bushays. The
strangeness of the extended family, the looseness of its internal
relationships, was one which Louise found troubling; it was more company than
any family she understood. Pieri’s elder brother was away serving a commission
in the Govcentral navy, which left his father, twin mothers, brother, and two
cousins to run the ship.
Small wonder that a young female
passenger would be such an attraction to him. He was shy, and uncertain, which
was endearing; nothing like the misplaced assurance of William Elphinstone.
“How are you feeling?”
His usual opening line.
“Fine.” Louise tapped the little
nanonic package behind her ear. “The wonders of Confederation technology.”
“We’ll be flipping over in another
twenty hours. Halfway there. Then we’ll be flying ass . . . er, I mean, bottom
backwards to Earth.”
She was impatient with the fact it
was going to take longer to fly seventy million kilometres between planets than
it had to fly between stars. But at least the fusion drive was scheduled to be
on for a third of the trip. The medical packages didn’t have to work quite so
hard to negate her sickness. “That’s good.”
“Are you sure you don’t want me to
datavise the O’Neill Halo to see if there’s a ship heading for Tranquillity?”
“No.” That had been too sharp.
“Thank you, Pieri, but if a ship is going, then it’s going, if not, there’s
nothing I can do. Fate, you see.”
“Oh, sure. I understand.” He smiled
tentatively. “Louise, if you have to stay in the Halo till you find a starship,
I’d like to show you around. I’ve visited hundreds of the rocks. I know what’s
hot out there, what to see, what to miss. It would be fun.”
“Hundreds?”
“Fifty, at least. And all the major
ones, including Nova Kong.”
“I’m sorry, Pieri, that doesn’t
mean much to me. I’ve never heard of Nova Kong.”
“Really? Not even on Norfolk?”
“No. The only one I know is High
York, and that’s only because we’re heading to it.”
“But Nova Kong is famous; one of
the first to be flown into Earth orbit and be made habitable. Nova Kong
physicists invented the ZTT drive. And Richard Saldana was the asteroid’s
chairman once; he used it as his headquarters to plan the Kulu colonization.”
“How fabulous. I can’t really
imagine a time when the Kingdom didn’t exist, it seems so . . . substantial. In
fact all of Earth’s prestarflight history reads like a fable to me. So, have
you ever visited High York before?”
“Yes, it’s where the Jamrana is
registered.”
“That’s your home, then?”
“We mostly dock there, but the
ship’s my real home. I wouldn’t swap it for anything.”
“Just like Joshua. You space types
are all the same. You’ve got wild blood.”
“I suppose so.” His face tightened
at the mention of Joshua; the guardian angel fiancé Louise managed to mention
in every conversation.
“Is High York very well organized?”
He seemed puzzled by the question.
“Yes. Of course. It has to be. Asteroids are nothing like planets, Louise. If
the environment isn’t maintained properly you’d have a catastrophe on your
hands. They can’t afford not to be well organized.”
“I know that. What I meant was, the
government. Does it have very strong law enforcement policies? Phobos seemed
fairly easygoing.”
“That’s the devout Communists for
you; they’re very trusting, Dad says they always give people the benefit of the
doubt.”
It confirmed her worries. When the
four of them had arrived at the Jamrana a couple of hours before its
departure, Endron had handed over their passport fleks to the single
Immigration Officer on duty. He had known the woman, and they’d spoken
cheerfully. She’d been laughing when she slotted the fleks into her processor
block, barely glancing at the images they stored. Three transient offworlders
with official documentation, who were friends of Endron . . . She even allowed
Endron to accompany them on board.
That was when he’d taken Louise
aside. “You won’t make it, you know that, don’t you?” he asked.
“We’ve got this far,” she said
shakily. Though she’d had her doubts. There had been so many people as they
made their tortuous way to the spaceport with the cargo mechanoid concealing
Faurax’s unconscious body. But they’d got the forger on board the Far Realm and
into a zero-tau pod without incident.
“So far you’ve had a lot of luck,
and no genuine obstacle. That’s going to end as soon as the Jamrana enters
Govcentral-controlled space. You don’t understand what it’s going to be like,
Louise. There’s no way you’ll ever get inside High York. Look, the only reason
you ever got inside Phobos was because we smuggled you in, and no one bothered
to inspect the Far Realm. You got out, because no one is bothered about
departing ships. And now you’re heading straight at Earth, which has the
largest single population in the Confederation, and runs the greatest military
force ever assembled—a military force which along with the leadership is very
paranoid right now. Three forged passports are not going to get you in. They
are going to run every test they can think of, Louise, and believe me, Fletcher
is not going to get through High York’s spaceport.” He was almost pleading with
her. “Come with me, tell our government what’s happened. They won’t hurt him,
I’ll testify that he’s not a danger. Then after that we can find you a ship to
Tranquillity, all above board.”
“No. You don’t understand, they’ll
send him back to the beyond. I saw it on the news; if you put a possessed in
zero-tau it compels them out of the body they’re using. I can’t turn Fletcher
in, not if they’re going to force him back there. He’s suffered for seven
centuries. Isn’t that enough?”
“And what about the person whose
body he’s possessing?”
“I don’t know!” she cried. “I
didn’t want any of this. My whole planet’s been possessed.”
“All right. I’m sorry. But I had to
say it. You’re doing a damn sight worse than playing with fire, Louise.”
“Yes.” She held on to his shoulder
with one hand to steady herself and brushed her lips to his cheek. “Thank you.
I’m sure you could have blown the whistle on us if you really wanted to.”
His reddening cheeks were
confirmation enough. “Yeah, well. Maybe I learned from you that nothing is
quite black and white. Besides, that Fletcher, he’s so . . .”
“Decent.”
Louise gave Pieri the kind of look
that told him she was immensely interested in every word he spoke. “So what
will happen when we arrive at High York, then? I want to know everything.”
Pieri started to access all his
neural nanonic-filed memories of High York spaceport. With luck, and a surfeit
of details, he could make this last for a good hour.
The Magistrature Council was the
Confederation’s ultimate court. Twenty-five judges sat on the Council,
appointed by the Assembly to deal with the most serious violations of
Confederation law. The majority of cases were the ones brought against starship
crews captured by navy ships, those accused of piracy or owning antimatter.
Less common were the war crimes trials, inevitably resulting from asteroid
independence struggles. There were only two possible sentences for anyone found
guilty by the Magistrature: death, or deportation to a penal colony.
The full Magistrature Council also
had the power to sit in judgement of sovereign governments. The last such
sitting had determined, in absentia, Omuta to be guilty of genocide, and
ordered the execution of its cabinet and military high command.
The Council’s final mandate was the
authority to declare a person, government, or entire people to be an Enemy of
Humanity. Laton had been awarded such a condemnation, as had members of the
black syndicates producing antimatter, and various terrorists and defeated
warlords. Such a proclamation was essentially a death warrant which empowered a
Confederation official to pursue the renegade across all national boundaries
and required all local governments to cooperate.
That was the pronouncement the
Provost General was now aiming to have applied against the possessed. With that
in the bag, the CNIS would be free to do whatever they wanted to Jacqueline
Couteur and the other prisoners in the demon trap. But first her current status
had to be legally established, if she was a hostile prisoner under the terms of
the state of emergency, or a hapless victim. In either case, she was still
entitled to a legal representative.
The courtroom in Trafalgar chosen
for the preliminary hearing was maximum security court three. It had none of
the trimmings of the public courts, retaining only the very basic layout of
docks, desks for the prosecution and defence counsels, the judge’s bench, and a
small observer gallery. There was no permitted or designated place for the
media or the public.
Maynard Khanna arrived five minutes
before the hearing was scheduled to begin, and sat at the front of the small
gallery. As someone used to the order of military life, he had an intense
distrust and dislike of the legal profession. Lawyers had abolished the simple
concept of right and wrong, turning it into degrees of guilt. And in doing so
they cut themselves in for fees which came only in large multiples of a navy
captain’s salary.
The accused were entitled to a
defence, Maynard conceded, but he still never understood how their lawyers
avoided feeling equally guilty when they got them off.
Lieutenant Murphy Hewlett sat down
behind Maynard, pulling unhappily at the jacket of his dress uniform. He leaned
forward and murmured: “I can’t believe this is happening.”
“Me neither,” Maynard grumbled
back. “But the Provost General says it should be a formality. No court in the
galaxy is going to let Jacqueline Couteur walk out of the door.”
“For God’s sake, Maynard, she
shouldn’t even be let out of the demon trap. You know that.”
“This is a secure court; and we
can’t give her defence lawyer an opportunity to mount an appeal on procedural
grounds.”
“Bloody lawyers!”
“Too right. What are you doing
here, anyway?”
“Provost General’s witness. I’m
supposed to tell the judge how we were in a war situation on Lalonde, which
makes Couteur’s capture legitimate under the Assembly’s rules of engagement.
It’s in case her lawyer goes for a wrongful jurisdiction plea.”
“You know, this is the first time
I’ve ever disagreed with the First Admiral. I said we should just keep her in
the demon trap, and screw all this legal crap. Gilmore is losing days of
research time over this.”
Murphy hissed in disgust and sat
back. For the eighth time that morning, his hand ran over his holster. It
contained a nine-millimetre semi-automatic pistol, loaded with dumdum bullets.
He loosened the cover, allowing his fingers to rest on the grip. Yesterday
evening he had spent two hours at the range in the officers’ mess, shooting the
weapon without any aid from neural nanonics programs. Just in case.
An eight-strong marine squad and
their sergeant, each of them armed with a machine gun, marched the four
prisoners into the court. Jacqueline Couteur was the first in line, dressed in
a neat grey suit. If it hadn’t been for the carbotanium manacles she would have
been a picture of middle-class respectability. A slim sensor bracelet had been
placed around her right wrist, monitoring the flow of energy through her body.
She looked around, noting the marine guards at each of the three doors. Then
she saw Murphy Hewlett scowling, and grinned generously at him.
“Bitch,” he grunted under his
breath.
The marine squad sat Jacqueline in
the dock and fastened her manacles to a loop of chain. The other three
possessed—Randall, Lennart, and Nena—were made to sit on the bench beside her.
Once their manacles were secured, the marines took up position behind them. The
sergeant datavised his processor block to check that the sensor bracelets were
working, then gave the clerk of the court a brief nod.
The four defence lawyers were
ushered in. Jacqueline manoeuvred a polite welcoming smile into place. This was
the third time she’d seen Udo DiMarco. The lawyer wasn’t entirely happy to be
appointed her counsel, he’d admitted that much to her, but then went on to say
he’d do his best.
“Good morning, Jacqueline,” he
said, doing his nervous best to ignore the marines behind her.
“Hello, Udo. Did you manage to
obtain the recordings?”
“I filed a release request with the
court, yes. It may take some time; the navy claims their Intelligence Service
research is classified and exempt from the access act of 2503. I’ll challenge
that, of course, but as I said this is all going to take some time.”
“They tortured me, Udo. The judge
has to see those recordings. I’ll walk free in seconds if the truth is ever
known.”
“Jacqueline, this is only a
preliminary hearing to establish that all the required arrest procedures were
followed, and clarify your legal custody status.”
“I wasn’t arrested, I was
abducted.”
Udo DiMarco sighed and plunged on.
“The Provost General’s team is going to argue that as a possessor you have
committed a kidnap, and are therefore a felon. That will give them a basis for
holding you in custody. They’re also arguing that your energistic power
constitutes a new and dangerous weapons technology, which will validate the
Intelligence Service’s investigation. Please don’t expect to walk out of court
this morning.”
“Well I’m sure you’ll do your
best.” She gave him an encouraging smile.
Udo DiMarco flexed his shoulders
uncomfortably and withdrew to the defence counsel’s bench. His sole comfort was
the fact that the media weren’t allowed in; no one would know he was defending
a possessed. He datavised his processor block, reviewing the files he’d
assembled. Ironically, he could put up quite a good case for Couteur’s release,
but he’d made the decision five minutes after having the case dumped on him
that he was only going to make a show of defending her. Jacqueline could never
know, but Udo DiMarco had a lot of family on New California.
The clerk of the court rose to his
feet and announced: “Please stand for Judge Roxanne Taynor. This Magistrature
Council court is now in session.”
Judge Taynor appeared at the door
behind the bench. Everyone stood, including the four possessed. Their movement
meant the marine guards had to alter the angle they were pointing their machine
guns. For a moment their concentration was less than absolute. Everybody’s
neural nanonics crashed. The lighting panels became incandescent. Four balls of
white fire exploded around the machine guns, smashing them into a shower of
molten fragments.
Murphy Hewlett bellowed a wordless
curse, yanking his pistol up, thumb flicking at the safety catch. Like most
people he was caught halfway to his feet, an awkward position. A brutally white
light was making him squeeze his eyelids closed; retinal implants were taking a
long time to filter out the excess photons. The sound of the detonating machine
guns was audible above the startled cries. He swung the pistol around to line
up on Couteur. Marines were screaming as their hands and lower arms were
shredded along with their weapons. The lights went out.
From dazzling brilliance to total
blackness was too much for his eyes. He couldn’t see a thing. A machine gun
fired. Muzzle blasts sent out a flickering orange light.
The possessed were all moving.
Fast. The gunfire turned their motions into speedy flickers. They’d run
straight through the dock, smashing the tough composite apart. Fragments
tumbled through the air.
Two lightning streaks of white fire
lashed out, striking a couple of marines. The lawyers were scrambling for the
closest door. Roxanne Taynor was already through the door to her chambers. One
of the marines was standing in front of it, sweeping her machine gun in a fast
arc as she tried to line it up on a possessed.
“Close the doors!” Murphy yelled.
“Seal this place.”
A machine gun was firing again as
the light from the white fire shrank away. People screamed as they dived and
stumbled for cover. Ricochets hummed lethally through the blackness.
Murphy caught sight of Couteur in
the segments of illumination thrown out by another burst of gunfire. He twisted
his pistol around and fired five shots, anticipating her direction for the last
two. Dumdum bullets impacted with penetrating booms. Murphy dropped to his knees
and rolled quickly. A pulse of white fire ripped through the air where he’d
been standing. “Shit!” Missed her.
He could hear a siren wailing
outside. Sensor modules on the walls were starting to burn, jetting out long
tongues of turquoise flame which dissolved into a fountain of sparks. Three
more bolts of white fire zipped over the gallery seats. There were heavy thuds
of bodies hitting the floor.
When he risked a quick glance above
the seat backs he could see Nena and Randall crouched low and zigzagging
towards the door behind him. Eyeblink image of the door to one side of the
smashed dock: three marines standing in defensive formation around it, almost
flinging a lawyer out into the corridor beyond. But the door behind him was
still open. It was trying to slide shut, but the body of a dead marine was
preventing it from closing.
Murphy didn’t have an option. They
couldn’t be allowed out into Trafalgar, it was inconceivable. He vaulted over
the seats just as an odd rosette of white fire spun upwards from behind the
judge’s bench. It hit the ceiling and bounced, expanding rapidly into a crown
made up from writhing flames which coiled around and around each other. The
three marines guarding the door fired at it as it swooped down at them, bullets
tearing out violet bubbles which erupted into twinkling starbursts. Murphy
started firing his pistol at Randall as he sprinted for the door, trigger
finger pumping frantically. Seeing the dumdum rounds rip ragged chunks out of
the possessed’s chest. Shifting his aim slightly. Half of Randall’s neck blew
away in a twister of blood and bone chippings. A screaming Nena cartwheeled
backwards in panic, limbs thrashing out of control.
The crown of agitated white fire
dropped around one of the marines like an incendiary lasso. It contracted with
vicious snapping sounds, slicing clean through his pelvis. His machine gun was
still firing as his torso tumbled down, spraying the whole courtroom with
bullets. He tried to say something as he fell, but shock had jammed his entire
nervous system. All that came out was a coughed grunt as his head hit the
ground. Dulled eyes stared at his legs which were still standing above him,
twitching spastically as they slowly buckled.
The other two marines froze in
terror. Then one vomited.
“Close it!” Murphy gagged. “For Christ’s sake, get out and
close it.” His eyes were hot and sticky with fluid, some of it red. His foot
hit something, and he half tripped flinging himself at the gap. He landed flat
on the dead marine and rolled forwards. Figures were running around at the far
end of the corridor, confused movements blurring together. White fire enveloped
his ankle.
“Does it hurt? We can help.”
“No, fuck you!” He flopped onto an
elbow and aimed the pistol back through the door, firing wildly. Pain from his
ankle was making his hand shake violently. Noxious smoke sizzled up in front of
him.
Then hands were gripping his
shoulders, pulling him back along the floor. Bullish shouts all around him. The
distinctive thud of a Bradfield slammed against his ears, louder than thunder
in the close confines of the corridor. A marine in full combat armour was
standing above him, firing the heavy-calibre weapon into the courtroom. Another
suited marine was pulling the corpse clear of the door.
Murphy’s neural nanonics started to
come back on-line. Medical programs established axon blocks. The courtroom door
slid shut, locks engaging with a clunk. A fire extinguisher squirted
thick white gas against Murphy’s smouldering dress uniform trousers. He flopped
down onto the corridor floor, too stunned to say anything for a while. When he
looked around he could see three people he recognized from the court, all of
them ashen-faced and stupefied, slumped against the walls. The marines were
tending to two of them. That was when Murphy realized the corridor floor was
smeared with blood. Spent cartridge cases from his pistol rolled around.
He was dragged further away from
the courtroom door, allowing the marine squad to set up two tripod-mounted
Bradfields, pointing right at the grey reinforced silicon.
“Hold still,” a woman in a doctor’s
field uniform told him. She began to cut his trousers away; a male nurse was
holding a medical nanonic package ready.
“Did any of them get out?” Murphy
asked weakly. People were tramping up and down the corridor, paying no
attention to him.
“I don’t know,” the doctor said.
“Fuck it, find out!”
She gave him a calculating look.
“Please?”
One of the marines was called over.
“The other doors are all closed,” he told Murphy. “We got a few people out, but
the possessed are safely locked up in there. Every exit is sealed tight. The
captain is waiting for a CNIS team to advise him what to do next.”
“A few people?” Murphy asked. “A
few people got out?”
“Yeah. Some of the lawyers, the
judge, court staff, five marines. We’re proud of the fight you put up, sir, you
and the others. It could have been a lot worse.”
“And the rest?”
The marine turned his blank shell
helmet towards the door. “Sorry, sir.”
The roar of the machine gun ended,
leaving only the screams and whimpers to fester through the darkened courtroom.
Maynard Khanna could hear his own feeble groans contributing to the morass of
distress. There was little he could do to prevent it, the tiniest movement sent
sickening spires of pain leaping into his skull. A gout of white fire had
struck him seconds into the conflict, wrapping around his leg like a blazing
serpent, felling him immediately. His temple had struck one of the seats,
dazing him badly. After that, all the noise and flaring light swarmed around
him, somehow managing to leave him isolated from the fray.
Now the white fire had gone,
leaving him alone with its terrible legacy. The flesh from his leg had melted
off. But his bones had remained intact, perfectly white. He could see his
skeletal foot twitching next to his real one, its tiny bones fitting together
like a medical text.
The splintered remnants of the dock
were burning with unnatural brightness, throwing capering shadows on the wall.
Maynard turned his head, crying out as red stars gave way to an ominous
darkness. When he flushed the involuntary tears from his eyes he could see the
heavy door at the back of the court was shut.
They hadn’t got out!
He took a few breaths, momentarily
puzzled by what he was doing in the dark, the waves of pain seemed to prevent
his thoughts from flowing. The screams had died, along with every other sound
except for the sharp crackling of the flames. Footsteps crunched through the
debris. Three dark figures loomed above him; humanoid perhaps, but any lingering
facet of humanity had been bred out generations ago.
The whispers began, slithering up
from a bottomless pit to comfort him with the sincerity of a two-timing lover.
Then came the real pain.
Dr Gilmore studied the datavised
image he was receiving direct from Marine Captain Rhodri Peyton’s eyes. He was
standing in the middle of a marine squad which was strung out along one of the
corridors leading to maximum security court three. Their machine guns and
Bradfields were deployed to cover the engineering officers who were gingerly
applying sensor pads to the door.
When Dr Gilmore attempted to access
the officers’ processor blocks there was no response. The units were too close
to the possessed inside the courtroom. “Have they made any attempt to break
out?” he asked.
“No, sir,” Rhodri Peyton datavised.
His eyes flicked to brown scorch lines on the walls just outside the door.
“Those marks were caused when Lieutenant Hewlett was engaging them. There’s
been nothing since then. We’ve got them trapped, all right.”
Gilmore accessed Trafalgar’s
central computer and requested a blueprint of the courtroom. There were no
service tunnels nearby, and the air-ducts weren’t large enough for anyone to
crawl down. It was a maximum security court after all. Unfortunately it wasn’t
the kind of security designed with the possessed in mind. He knew it would only
be a matter of time before they got out. Then there really would be hell to
pay.
“Have you confirmed the number of
people in the courtroom?”
“We’re missing twelve people, sir.
But we know at least four of those are dead, and the others sustained some
injuries. And Hewlett claims he terminated one of the possessed, Randall.”
“I see. That means we now have a
minimum of eleven possessed to contend with. That much energistic potential is
extremely dangerous.”
“This whole area is sealed, sir,
and I’ve got a squad covering each door.”
“I’m sure you have, Captain. One
moment.” He datavised the First Admiral and gave him a brief summary. “I have
to advise we don’t send the marines in. Given the size of the courtroom and the
number of possessed, I’d estimate marine casualties of at least fifty per
cent.”
“Agreed,” the First Admiral
datavised back. “The marines don’t go in. But are you certain everyone in there
is now possessed?”
“I think it’s an inevitable
conclusion, sir. This whole legal business was quite obviously just a ploy by
Couteur to gain a foothold here. That many possessed represent a significant
threat. My guess is that they may simply try to tunnel their way out; I expect
they’ll be able to dissolve the rock around them. They must be neutralized as
swiftly as possible. We can always acquire further individuals to continue my
team’s research.”
“Dr Gilmore, I’d remind you that my
staff captain is in there, along with a number of civilians. We must make at
least one attempt to subdue them. You’ve had weeks to research this energistic
ability, you must be able to suggest something.”
“There is one possibility, sir. I
accessed Thakrar’s report; he used decompression against the possessed when
they tried to storm the Villeneuve’s Revenge.”
“To kill them.”
“Yes. But it does indicate a
weakness. I was going to recommend that we vent the courtroom’s atmosphere.
That way we wouldn’t have to risk opening one of the doors to fire any sort of
weapon in there. However, we could try gas against them first. They can force
matter into new shapes, but I think altering a molecular structure would
probably be beyond them. It needn’t even be a chemical weapon, we could simply
increase the nitrogen ratio until they black out. Once they’ve been
immobilized, they could be placed into zero-tau.”
“How would you know if a gas
assault worked? They destroyed the sensors, we can’t see in.”
“There are a number of electronic
systems remaining in the courtroom; if the possessed do succumb to the gas
those systems should come back on line. But whatever we do, Admiral, we will
have to open the door at some stage to confirm their condition.”
“Very well, try the gas first. We
owe Maynard and the others that much.”
“We’re not going to have much time
to get out,” Jacqueline Couteur said.
Perez, who had come into Maynard
Khanna’s body a few minutes earlier, was struggling to keep his thoughts
flowing lucidly under a torrent of pain firing in from every part of his new
frame. He managed to focus on some of the most badly damaged zones, seeing the
blood dry up and torn discoloured flesh return to a more healthy aspect. “Mama,
what did you do to this guy?”
“Taught him not to be so stubborn,”
Jacqueline said emotionlessly.
He winced as he raised himself up
onto his elbows. Despite his most ardent wishes, his damaged leg felt as if
fireworms were burrowing through it. He could imagine it whole and
perfect, and even see the image forming around reality, but that wasn’t quite
enough to make it so. “Okay, so now what?” He glanced around. It was not the
most auspicious of environments to welcome him back. Bodies were straddling the
court’s wrecked fittings, small orange fires gnawed hungrily at various jagged
chunks of composite, and hatred was beaming through each of the doors like an
emotive X ray.
“Not much,” she admitted. “But we
have to look for some kind of advantage. We’re at the very centre of the
Confederation’s resistance to us. There must be something we can do to help
Capone and the others. I had hoped we could locate their nuclear weapons. The
destruction of this base would be a significant blow to the Confederation.”
“Forget that; those marines were
good,” Lennart said grudgingly. He was standing in front of the judge’s bench,
one hand pulling on his chin as he gazed intently at the floor. “You know,
there’s some kind of room or corridor about twenty metres straight down.” The
tiling started to flow away from his feet in fast ripples, exposing the naked
rock below. “It won’t take long if we break this rock together.”
“Maybe,” Jacqueline said. “But
they’ll know we’re doing it. Gilmore will have surrounded us with sensors by
now.”
“What then?” asked one of the
others they’d brought back. “For Christ’s sake, we can’t stay in here and wait
for the Confederation Marines to bust down the door. I’ve only just returned.
I’m not giving this body up after only ten minutes. I couldn’t stand that.”
“Christ?” Jacqueline queried
bitingly.
“You might have to anyway,” Perez
said. “We all might wind up back there in the beyond.”
“Oh, why?” Jacqueline asked.
“This Khanna knows of an ambush the
Confederation Navy is planning against Capone. He is confident they will
destroy the Organization fleet. Without Capone to crack new star systems open,
we’re going to be stalled. Khanna is convinced the quarantine will prevent
possession from spreading to any new worlds.”
“Then we must tell Capone,”
Jacqueline said. “All of us together must shout this news into the beyond.”
“Fine,” Nena said. “Do that. But
what about us? How are we going to get out of here?”
“That is a secondary concern for us
now.”
“Not for me it bloody well isn’t.”
When Jacqueline scowled at her, she
saw beads of sweat pricking the woman’s brow. Nena was swaying slightly, too.
Some of the others looked as if they were exhausted, their eyes glazing over.
Even Jacqueline was aware her body had grown heavier than before. She sniffed
the air suspiciously, finding it contaminated with the slightly clammy ozone
taint of air-conditioning.
“What exactly is the navy planning
to do to Capone?” she asked.
“They know he’s going to attack
Toi-Hoi. They’re going to hide a fleet at Tranquillity, and intercept him when
they know he’s on the way.”
“We must remember that,” Jacqueline
said firmly, fixing each of them in turn with a compelling stare. “Capone must
be told. Get through to him.” She ignored everything else but the wish that the
air in the courtroom was pure and fresh, blown down straight from some virgin
mountain range. She could smell a weak scent of pine.
One of the possessed sat down
heavily. The others were all panting.
“What’s happening?” someone asked.
“Radiation, I expect,” Jacqueline
said. “They’re probably bombarding us with gamma rays so they don’t have to
come in to deal with us.”
“Blast a door open,” Lennart said.
“Charge them. A few of us might get through.”
“Good idea,” Jacqueline said.
He pointed a finger at the door
behind the judge’s bench, its tip wavering about drunkenly. A weak crackle of
white fire licked out. It managed to stain the door with a splatter of soot,
but nothing more. “Help me. Come on, together!”
Jacqueline closed her eyes,
imagining all the clean air in the courtroom gathering around her and her
alone. A light breeze ruffled her suit.
“I don’t want to go back,” Perez
wailed. “Not there!”
“You must,” Jacqueline said. Her
breathing was easier now. “Capone will find you a body. He’ll welcome you. I
envy you for that.”
Two more of the possessed toppled
over. Lennart sagged to his knees, hands clutching at his throat.
“The navy must never know what we
discovered,” Jacqueline said thickly.
Perez looked up at her, too weak to
plead. It wouldn’t have been any use, he realized, not against that mind tone.
The shaped electron explosive
charge sliced clean through the courtroom door with a lightning-bolt flash.
There was very little blowback against the marine squad crouched fifteen metres
away down the corridor. Captain Peyton yelled “Go!” at the same time as the
charge was triggered. His armour suit’s communications block was switched to
audio, just in case the possessed were still active.
Ten sense-overload ordnance rounds
were fired through the opening as the wrecked door spun around like a dropped
coin. A ferocious blast of light and sound surged back along the corridor. The
squad rushed forward into the deluge.
It was a synchronized assault. All
three doors into the courtroom were blown at the same time. Three sets of
sense-overload ordnance punched in. Three marine squads.
Dr Gilmore was still hooked into
Peyton’s neural nanonics, receiving the image direct from the captain’s shell
helmet sensors. The scene which greeted him took a while to interpret. Dimming
flares were sinking slowly through the air as tight beams of light from each
suit formed a crazy jumping crisscross pattern above the wrecked fittings.
Bodies lay everywhere. Some were victims of the earlier fight. Ten of them had
been executed. There was no other explanation. Each of the ten had been killed
by a bolt of white fire through the brain.
Peyton was pushing his way through
a ring of nearly twenty marines that had formed in the middle of the courtroom.
Jacqueline Couteur stood at the centre, her shape blurred by a grey twister
that had formed around her. It looked as if she’d been cocooned by solid strands
of air. The twister was making a high-pitched whining sound as it undulated
gently from side to side.
Jacqueline Couteur’s hands were in
the air. She gazed at the guns levelled against her with an almost sublime
composure. “Okay,” she said. “You win. And I think I may need my lawyer again.”
Chapter 10
There were nearly three thousand
people in the crowd which assembled outside the starscraper lobby. Most of them
looked fairly pissed at being summoned, but nobody actually argued with
Bonney’s deputies when they came calling. They wanted a quiet life. On a planet
they could have just walked away into the wilderness; here that option did not
exist.
Part of the lobby’s gently arching
roof had crumpled, a remnant of an early battle during their takeover of the
habitat. Bonney started to walk up the pile of rubble. She held a processor
block in one hand, turning it so she could see the screen.
“Last chance, Rubra,” she said.
“Tell me where the boyo is, or I start getting serious.” The block’s screen
remained blank. “You overheard what Patricia said. I know you did, because
you’re a sneaky little shit. You’ve been manipulating me for a while now. I’m
always told where he is, and he’s always gone when I get there. You’re helping
him as much as you’re helping me, aren’t you? Probably trying to frighten him
into cooperating with you. Was that it? Well, not anymore, Rubra, because
Patricia has changed everything; we’re playing big boys’ rules now. I don’t
have to be careful, I don’t have to respect your precious, delicate structure.
It was fun going one on one against all those little bastards you stashed
around the place. I enjoyed myself. But you were cheating the whole time.
Funny, that’s what Dariat warned us about right from the start.” She reached
the roof, and walked to the edge above the crowd. “You going to tell me?”
The screen printed: THOSE LITTLE
DEADNIGHT GIRLS THAT COME HERE, YOU REALLY ENJOY WHAT YOU DO WITH THEM, DON’T
YOU, DYKE?
Bonney dropped the processor block
as if it were a piece of used toilet paper. “Game over, Rubra. You lose; I’m
going to use nukes to crack you in half.”
Dariat, I think you’d better
listen to this.
What now?
Bonney, as usual. But things
have just acquired an unpleasant edge. I don’t think Kiera should have left her
unsupervised.
Dariat hooked into the observation
routines in time to see Bonney raise her hands for silence. The crowd gazed up
at her expectantly.
“We’ve got the power of genies,”
she said. “You can grant yourself every wish you want. And we still have to
live like dogs out in these shantytowns, grabbing what food we can, whipped
into line, told where we can and can’t go. Rubra’s done that to us. We have
starships for fuck’s sake. We can travel to another star system in less time
than it takes your heart to beat once. But if you want to go from here to the
endcap, you have to walk. Why? Because that shit Rubra won’t let us use the
tubes. And up until now, we’ve let him get away with it. Well, not anymore.”
Passionate lady, Dariat said uncomfortably.
Psycho lady, more like. They’re
not going to disobey her, they wouldn’t dare. She’s going to marshal them
together and send them after you. I can’t keep you ahead of an entire habitat
of possessed hunting you. For once, boy, I’m not lying.
Yeah. I can see that. Dariat went over to the fire at the back of the
cave. It had almost burnt out, leaving a pyramid of coals cloaked in a powder
of fine grey ash. He stood looking at it, feeling the slumbering heat contained
within the pink fragments.
I have to decide. I can’t beat
Rubra. And Rubra will be destroyed by Kiera when she returns. For thirty years
I would have welcomed that. Thirty fucking years. My entire life.
But he’s willing to sacrifice his
mental integrity, to join my thoughts to his. He’s going to abandon two
centuries of his belief that he can go it alone.
Tatiana stirred on the blanket and
sat up, bracelets chinking noisily. Sleepy confusion drained from her face.
“That was a strange dream.” She gave him a shrewd glance. “But then this is a
strange time, isn’t it?”
“What was your dream?”
“I was in a universe which was half
light, half darkness. And I was falling out of the light. Then Anastasia caught
me, and we started to fly back up again.”
“Sounds like your salvation.”
“What’s the matter?”
“Things are changing. That means I
have to decide what to do. And I don’t want to, Tatiana. I’ve spent thirty
years not deciding. Thirty years telling myself this was the time I was waiting
for. I’ve been a kid for thirty years.”
Tatiana rose and stood beside him.
He refused to meet her gaze, so she put an arm lightly on his shoulder. “What
do you have to decide?”
“If I should help Rubra; if I
should join him in the neural strata and turn this into a possessed habitat.”
“He wants that?”
“I don’t think so. But he’s like
me, there’s not much else either of us can do. The game’s over, and we’re
running out of extra time.”
She stroked him absently. “Whatever
you decide, I don’t want you to take me into account. There are too many issues
at stake, big issues. Individuals don’t matter so much; and I had a good run
against that Bonney. We annoyed her a lot, eh? That felt nice.”
“But individuals do matter.
Especially you. It’s odd, I feel like I’ve come full circle. Anastasia always
told me how precious a single life was. Now I have to decide your fate. And I
can’t let you suffer, which is what’s going to happen if Rubra and I take on
the possessed together. I’m responsible for her death, I can’t have yours on my
hands as well. How could I ever face her with that weighing on my heart? I have
to be true to her. You know I do.” He tilted his head back, his voice raised in
anger. “Do you think you’ve won?”
I never even knew we were
fighting until this possession happened, Rubra said sadly. You know what hopes I had for you in the old days,
even though you never shared them. You know I never wanted anything to spoil my
dreams for you. You were the golden prince, the chosen one. Fate stopped you
from achieving your inheritance. That’s what Anastasia was, for you and for me.
Fate. You would call it an act of Thoale.
You believe all this was
destined to be?
I don’t know. All I know is that
our union is the last chance either of us has to salvage something from all
this shit. So now you have to ask yourself, do the living have a right to live,
or do the dead rule the universe?
That’s so like you, a loaded
question.
I am what I am.
Not for very much longer.
You’ll do it?
Yes.
Come in then, I’ll accept you
into the neural strata.
Not yet. I want to get Tatiana
out first.
Why?
We may be virtually omnipotent
after I come into the neural strata, but Bonney and the hellhawks still have
the potential to damage the habitat shell very badly. I doubt we can quell them
instantaneously, yet they will know the second I come into the neural strata.
We are going to have a fight on our hands, I don’t want Tatiana hurt.
Very well, I will ask the
Kohistan Consensus for a voidhawk to take her off.
You have a method?
I have a possible method. I make
no promises. You’d better get yourselves along to the counter-rotating
spaceport before Bonney starts her hunt.
It wasn’t merely a hunting party
Bonney was organizing. She was keenly aware that Dariat could always flee her
in the tube carriages, while she was reduced to chasing after him in one of the
rentcop force’s open-top trucks. If Dariat was to be caught, then she would
first have to cripple his mobility.
The crowd she had assembled was
split into teams, given specific instructions, and dispatched to carry them
out. Each major team had one of her deputies to ensure they didn’t waver.
Every powered vehicle in the
habitat set out from the starscraper lobby, driving along the tracks through
the overgrown grass. Most of them travelled directly to the other camps ringing
starscraper lobbies, coercing their occupants into Bonney’s scheme. It was a
domino effect, spreading rapidly around Valisk’s midsection.
Kiera had wanted the tubes left
alone so that when they moved Valisk out of the universe the transport system
could be brought back on-line to serve them. Bonney had no such inhibitions.
The possessed made their reluctant way into the starscraper lobbies, and down
into the first-floor stations. There they combined their energistic power and
started to systematically smash the tube tunnels. Huge chunks of polyp were
torn out of the walls and roof to crash down on the magnetic guide rail. Power
cables were ripped up and shorted out. Carriages were fired, adding to the
blockages and sending thick plumes of black smoke billowing deep into the
tunnels. Management processor blocks were blasted to cinders, exposing their
interface with Valisk’s nerve fibres. Wave after wave of static discharges were
pumped at the raw ends, sending what they hoped were pulses of pure pain down
into the neural strata.
Bolstered by their successful
vandalism, and Rubra’s apparent inability to retaliate, the possessed began to
move en mass down into the starscrapers. They sent waves of energistic power
surging ahead of them, annihilating any mechanical or electrical system,
wrecking artefacts and fittings. Every room, every corridor, every stairwell,
were searched for non-possessed. Floor by floor they descended, recapturing the
heady excitement and spirit of the original takeover. Unity infected them with
strength. Individuals began to shapeshift into fantastic monsters and Earthly
heroes. They weren’t just going to flush out the traitor enemy, they were going
to do it with malevolent finesse.
Hellhawks fluttered up from the
docking ledges and began to spiral around the tubular starscrapers: an infernal
flock peering into the bright oval windows with their potent senses, assisting
their comrades inside.
Together they would flush him out.
It was only a matter of time now.
Dariat sat opposite Tatiana in the
tube carriage they took from the southern endcap. “We’re going to put you in
one of the spaceport’s emergency escape pods,” he told her. “It’s going to be
tough to start with, they launch at about twelve gees to get away fast. But it
only lasts for eight seconds. You can take that. There’s a voidhawk squadron
from Kohistan standing by to pick you up as soon as you’re clear.”
“What about the possessed?” she
asked. “Won’t they try and stop me, shoot at me or something?”
“They won’t know what the hell’s
going on. Rubra is going to fire all two hundred pods at once. The voidhawks
will swallow in and snatch your pod before the hellhawks even know you’re out
there.”
A smirk of good-humoured dubiety
stroked Tatiana’s face. “If you say so. I’m proud of you, Dariat. You’ve come
through when it really counts, shown your true self. And it’s a good self.
Anastasia would be proud of you, too.”
“Why, thank you.”
“You should enjoy your victory,
take heart from it. Lady Chi-ri will be smiling on you tonight. Bask in that
warmth.”
“We haven’t won yet.”
“You have. Don’t you see? After all
those years of struggle you’ve finally beaten Anstid. He hasn’t dictated what
you’re doing now. This act is not motivated by hatred and revenge.”
Dariat grinned. “Not hatred. But
I’m certainly enjoying putting one over on that witch queen Bonney.”
Tatiana laughed. “Me too!”
Dariat had to grab at his seat as
the carriage braked sharply. Tatiana gasped as she clung to one of the vertical
poles, hanging on frantically as the lights began to dim.
“What’s happening?” she asked.
The carriage juddered to a halt.
The lights went out, then slowly returned as the vehicle’s backup electron
matrix came on line.
Rubra?
Little bastards are smashing up
the station you were heading for. They’ve cut the power to the magnetic rail, I
haven’t even got the reserve circuits.
Dariat hooked into the neural
strata’s observation routines to survey the damage. The starscraper station was
a scene of violent devastation. Smouldering lumps of polyp were chiselled out
of the tunnel by invisible surges of energy; the guidance rail writhed and flexed,
screaming shrilly as its movements yanked its own fixing pins out of the floor;
severed electrical cables swung from broken conduits overhead, spitting sparks.
Laughter and catcalls rang out over the noise of the violence.
A rapid flick through other
stations showed him how widespread the destruction was.
Bloody hell.
Damn right, Rubra said. She’s overdosing on the fury
routine, but she’s playing smart with it.
A schematic of the tube network
appeared in Dariat’s mind. Look, there are plenty of alternative routes left
up to the spindle.
Yes, right now there are. But
you’ll have to go back two stations before I can switch you to another tunnel.
I can’t restore power to the rail in your tunnel, they’ve fucked the relays.
The carriage will have to make it there on its own power reserve. You’d almost
be quicker walking. And by the time you get there, the possessed will have
wrecked a whole lot more stations. Bonney’s thought this out well; the way
she’s isolating each stretch of tunnel will break up the entire network in
another forty minutes.
So how the hell do we get to the
spindle now?
Forwards. Go up to the station
and walk though it. I can bring another carriage to the tunnel on the other
side; that’ll get you directly up to the endcap.
Walk through? You’re kidding.
There’s only a couple of
possessed left to guard each station after they’ve had their rampage. Two won’t
be a problem.
All right, do it.
The lights dipped again as the
carriage slid forwards slowly.
“Well?” Tatiana asked.
Dariat began to explain.
Starscrapers formed the major nodes
in the habitat’s tube network; each of them had seven stations ringing the
lobby, enabling the carriages to reach any part of the interior. Individual
stations were identical; chambers with a double-arch ceiling and a central
platform twenty metres long which served two tubes. The polyp walls were a
light powder-blue, with strips of electrophorescent cells running the entire
length above the rails. There were stairs at each end of the platform, one set
leading up to the starscraper lobby, the other an emergency exit to the
parkland.
In the station ahead of Dariat, the
possessed finished their wrecking spree and went off up the stairs to start
searching the starscraper. As Rubra predicted, they left two of their number
behind to watch over the four tunnel entrances. Smoke from the attack was
layering the air. Flames were still licking around the big piles of ragged
polyp slabs blocking the end of each tunnel. Several hologram adverts flashed
on and off overhead; an already damaged projector suffering from the proximity
of the possessed turned the images to a nonsense splash of colours.
Given that the fire was dying away
naturally, the two possessed were somewhat bemused when, seven minutes after
everyone else left, the station’s sprinklers suddenly came on.
Dariat was three hundred metres
down the tube tunnel, helping Tatiana out of the carriage’s front emergency
hatch. The tunnel had only the faintest illumination, a weak blue glow coming
from a couple of narrow electrophorescent strips on the walls. It curved away
gently ahead of him, putting enough solid polyp between him and the station to
prevent the two possessed from perceiving him.
Tatiana jumped down the last half
metre and steadied herself.
“Ready?” Dariat asked. He was
already using the habitat’s sensitive cells to study the pile of polyp they
would have to climb over to get into the station. It didn’t look too difficult,
there was an easy metre and a half gap at the top.
“Ready.”
Let’s go, Dariat said.
The two possessed guards had given
up any attempt to shield themselves from the torrent of water falling from the
sprinklers. They were retreating back to the shelter of the stairs. Their
clothes had turned to sturdy anoraks, streaked with glistening runnels. Every
surface was slick with water now: walls, platform, floor, the piles of polyp.
Rubra overrode the circuit breakers
governing the cables which powered the tube, then shunted thirteen thousand
volts back into the induction rail. It was the absolute limit for the habitat’s
integral organic conductors, and three times the amount the carriages used. The
broken guide rail jumped about as it had while it was being tormented by the
possessed. Blinding white light leapt out of the magnetic couplings as it split
open. It was as though someone had fired a fusion drive into the station. Water
droplets spraying out of the overhead nozzles fluoresced violet, and vaporized.
Metal surfaces erupted into wailing jets of sparks.
At the heart of the glaring bedlam,
two bodies ignited, flaring even brighter than the seething air.
It wasn’t just the one station,
that would have drawn Bonney’s attention like a combat wasp’s targeting sensor.
Rubra launched dozens of attacks simultaneously. Most of them were electrical,
but there were also mass charges of servitor animals, as well as mechanoids
switched back on, slashing around indiscriminately with laser welders and
fission blades as energistic interference crashed their processors.
Reports of the tumult poured into
the starscraper lobby where Bonney had set up her field headquarters. Her
deputies shouted warnings into the powerful walkie-talkies they used to keep in
contact with each other.
As soon as the blaze of white light
shone down the tunnel, Dariat started to run towards it. He kept hold of
Tatiana’s hand, pulling her onwards. A loud caterwaul reverberated along the
tunnel.
“What’s Rubra doing to them?” she
shouted above the din.
“What he had to.”
The abusive light died and the
sound faded away. Dariat could see the pile of polyp now, eighty metres ahead.
A crescent-shaped sliver of light straddled it, seeping in from the station
beyond.
Their feet began to splash through
rivulets of water flowing down the tunnel. Tatiana grimaced as they reached the
foot of the blockage, and hitched her skirt up.
Bonney listened to the frantic
shouting all around her, counting up the incidents, the number of casualties.
They’d got off lightly. And she knew that was wrong.
“Quiet,” she bellowed. “How many
stations attacked? Total?”
“Thirty-two,” one of the deputies
said.
“And over fifty attacks altogether.
But we’ve only lost about seventy to eighty people in the stations. Rubra’s
just getting rid of the sentries we posted. If he wanted to seriously harm us
he’d do it when the wrecking crews were down there.”
“A diversion? Dariat’s somewhere
else?”
“No,” she said. “Not quite. We know
he uses the tubes to get around. I’ll bet the little shit’s in one right now.
He must be. Only we’ve already blocked him. Rubra is clearing the sentries out
of the way so Dariat can sneak through. That’s why he spread the attacks
around, so we’d think it was a blanket assault.” She whirled around to face a
naked polyp pillar and grinned with malicious triumph. “That’s it, isn’t it,
boyo? That’s what you’re doing. But which way is he going, huh? The
starscrapers are dead centre.” She shook her head in annoyance. “All right you
people, get sharp. I want someone down in each and every station Rubra
attacked. And I want them down there now. Tell them to make sure they don’t
step in the water, and be on the lookout for servitors. But get them down
there.”
The image of her yelling orders at
her deputies boiled into Dariat’s mind like a particularly vigorous hangover.
He had just reached the top of the polyp pile and squeezed under the ceiling.
The station was filled with thick white mist, reducing visibility to less than
five metres. Condensation had penetrated everywhere, making this side of the
polyp mound dangerously unstable.
Smart bitch, Rubra said. I didn’t expect that.
Can you delay them?
Not in this station, I can’t. I
haven’t got any servitors nearby, and the cables have all burnt out. You’ll
have to run.
Image relay of a deputy with a
walkie-talkie pressed to his ear hurrying across the lobby above. “I’m on it,
I’m on it,” he was yelling into the mike.
“Tatiana, move it!” Dariat shouted.
Tatiana was still wriggling along
on her belly as she slithered over the top of the pile. “What’s the matter?”
“Someone’s coming.”
She gave one final squirm and freed
her legs. Together they scooted down the side of the pile, bringing a minor
avalanche of slushy gravel with them.
“This way.” Dariat pointed into the
mist. His perception filled in glass-grey outlines of the station walls through
the swirls of cold vapour, enabling him to see the tunnel entrance. Valisk’s
sensitive cells showed him the carriage waiting a hundred and fifty metres
further on. They also showed him the deputy reaching the top of the stairs.
“Wait here,” he told Tatiana, and
vaulted up onto the platform. His appearance changed drastically, the simple
one-piece thickening to an elaborate purple uniform, complete with gold braid.
The most imposing figure to dominate his youth: Colonel Chaucer. A weekly AV
show of a renegade Confederation officer, a super vigilante.
Rubra was laughing softly in his
head.
The deputy was halfway down the
stairs when he started to slow up. He raised the walkie-talkie. “Somebody’s
down here.”
Dariat reached the bottom of the
stairs. “Only me,” he called up cheerfully.
“Who the hell are you?”
“You first. This is my station.”
The deputy’s mind revealed his
confusion as Dariat started up towards him with powerful, confident strides.
This was not the action of someone trying to hide.
Dariat opened his mouth wide and
spat a ball of white fire directly at the deputy’s head. Two souls bawled in
terror as they vanished into the beyond. The body tumbled past Dariat.
“What’s happening?” The
walkie-talkie was reverting back to a standard communications block as it
clattered down the stairs. “What’s happening? Report. Report.”
There’s four more on their way
up from the first floor, Rubra
said. Bonney ordered them to the station as soon as the deputy said he
sensed someone.
Shit! We’ll never make it to the
carriage. They can outrun Tatiana no problem.
Call her up. I’ll hide you in
the starscraper.
What?
Just move!
“Tatiana! Up here, now!” He was
aware of all the lift doors in the lobby sliding open. The four possessed had
reached the bottom of the first-floor stairs. Tatiana jogged along the
platform. She gave the corpse a quick, appalled glance.
“Come on.” Dariat caught her hand
and tugged hard. Her expression was resentful, but the rising anxiety in his
voice spurred her. They raced up the stairs together.
Daylight shone through the circular
lobby’s glass walls. It had suffered very little damage; scorch marks on the
polyp pillars and cracked glass were the only evidence that the possessed had
arrived to search the tower.
Dariat could hear multiple
footsteps pounding up one of the stairwells on the other side of the lobby,
hidden by the central bank of lifts. His perception was just starting to
register their minds emerging from behind the shield of polyp. Which meant
they’d also be able to sense him.
He scooped Tatiana up, ignoring her
startled holler, and sprinted for the lifts. Huge muscles pumped his legs in an
effortless rhythm. She weighed nothing at all.
The phenomenal speed he was
travelling at meant there was no chance at all of slowing once he passed the
lift doors; he would have needed ten metres to come to a halt. They slammed
straight into the rear wall. Tatiana shrieked as her shoulder, ribs, and leg
hit flat on, with Dariat’s prodigious inertia driving into her. Then his face
smacked into silvery metal, and there was no energistic solution to the blast
of pain jabbing into his brain. Blood squirted out of his nose, smearing the
wall. As he fell he was dimly aware of the lift doors sliding shut. The light
outside was growing inordinately bright.
Dariat reeled around feebly,
clutching at his head as if the pressure from his fingers alone could squeeze
the bruises back down out of existence. Slowly the pain subsided, which allowed
him to concentrate on vanquishing the remainder. “Ho fuck.” He slumped back
against a wall and let his breathing calm. Tatiana was lying on the lift floor
in front of him, hands pressed against her side, cold sweat on her brow.
“Anything broken?” he asked.
“I don’t think so. It just hurts.”
He went onto his hands and knees
and crawled over to her. “Show me where.”
She pointed, and he laid his hand
on. With his mind he could see the smooth glowing pattern of living flesh
distorted and broken below his fingers, the fissures extending deep inside her.
He willed the pattern to return to its unblemished state.
Tatiana hissed in relief. “I don’t
know what you did, but it’s better than a medical nanonic.”
The lift stopped at the fiftieth
floor.
Now what? Dariat asked.
Rubra showed him.
You are one evil bastard.
Why, thank you, boy.
Stanyon was leading the possessed
down through the starscraper in pursuit of Dariat. He’d started off with
thirty-five under his command, and that number was rapidly swelling as Bonney
directed more and more from neighbouring starscrapers to assist him. She’d
announced she was on her way herself. Stanyon was going balls-out to find
Dariat before she arrived. He got hot just thinking about the praise (and other
things) Kiera would direct at the champion who erased her bête noire from the
habitat.
Eight different teams of possessed
were searching, assigned a floor each. They were working their way steadily
downwards, demolishing every mechanical and electrical device as they went.
He strode out of the stairwell onto
the thirty-eighth-floor vestibule. For whatever reason, Rubra was no longer
putting up any resistance. Muscle-membrane doors opened obediently, the
lighting remained on, there wasn’t a servitor in sight. He looked around, happy
with what he found. The floor’s mechanical utilities office had been broken
open, and the machinery inside reduced to slag, preventing the sprinklers from
being used. Doors into the apartments and bars and commercial offices were
smashed apart, furniture and fittings inside were blazing with unnatural
ferocity. Big circles of polyp flooring were cracking under the intense heat,
grainy white marble surface blackening. Wisps of dirty steam fizzed up from the
crannies.
“Die,” Stanyon snarled. “Die a
little bit at a time. Die hurting big.”
He was walking towards the
stairwell door when his walkie-talkie squawked: “We got him! He’s down here.”
Stanyon snatched the unit from his
belt. “Where? Who is this? Which floor are you on?”
“This is Talthorn the Greenfoot;
I’m on floor forty-nine. He’s just below us. We can all sense him.”
“Everybody hear that?” Stanyon
yelled gleefully. “Fiftieth floor. Get your arses down there.” He sprinted for
the stairwell.
“They’re coming,” Dariat said.
Tatiana flashed him a
worried-but-brave grin, and finished tying the last cord around her pillow.
They were in a long-disused residential apartment; its polyp furniture of
horseshoe tables and oversized scoop armchairs dominating the living room. The
chairs had been turned into cushion nests to add a dash of comfort. The foam
used to fill the cushions was a lightweight plastic that was ninety-five per cent
nitrogen bubbles.
They were, Rubra swore, perfect
buoyancy aids.
Dariat tried on his harness one
last time. The cords which he’d torn from the gaudy cushion fabric held a
pillow to his chest and another against his back. Seldom had he felt so
ridiculous.
His doubt must have leaked onto his
face.
If it works, don’t try to fix
it, Rubra said.
Ripe, from someone who’s devoted
his existence to meddling.
Game set and match, I won’t even
appeal. Would you like to get ready?
Dariat used the starscraper’s
observation routines to check on the possessed. There were twelve of them on
the floor above. A rock-skinned troll was leading the pack; followed by a pair
of cyber-ninjas in black flak jackets; a xenoc humanoid that was all shiny
amber exoskeleton and looked like it could rip metal apart with its talons; a
faerie prince wearing his forest hunting tunic and carrying a longbow in one
hand, a walkie-talkie in the other; three or four excessively hairy
Neanderthals; and regular soldiers in the uniforms of assorted eras.
“The loonies are on the warpath
tonight,” Dariat muttered under his breath. “Finished?” he asked Tatiana.
She shifted her front pillow around
and tightened the last strap to hold it in place. “I’m ready.”
The bathroom’s muscle-membrane door
parted silently. Inside was an emerald-green suite: a circular bath, vaguely
Egyptian in design, matched by the basin, bidet, and toilet. They were still
all in perfect condition. It was the plumbing which had degraded. Water was
dripping from the brass shower head above the bath; over the years it had
produced a big orange stain on the bottom. Slimy blue-green algae was growing
out of the plug. The sink was piled high with bars of soap; so old and dry now
that they’d started to crumble, snowing flecks over the rim.
Dariat stood in the doorway, with
Tatiana pressed against him, looking eagerly over his shoulder. “What’s
supposed to be happening?” she asked.
“Watch.”
A bass crunching sound was coming
from the toilet. Cracks appeared around its base, expanding rapidly outwards.
Then the whole bowl lurched upwards, spinning around precariously before
toppling over. A two-metre circle of floor around it was rising up like a
miniature volcanic eruption. Polyp splintered with a continual brassy
crackling. A fine jet of water sprayed out of the fractured flush pipe.
“Lord Tarrug, what are you doing?”
Tatiana asked.
“That’s not Tarrug, that’s Rubra,”
Dariat told her. “No dark arts involved.”
Affinity with the local
sub-routines allowed him to feel the toilet’s sphincter muscle straining as it
contorted in directions it was never intended, rupturing the thin shell of
polyp floor. It halted, fully expended. The cone which it had produced quivered
slightly, then stilled. Dariat hurried over. There was a crater at the centre,
leading down to an impenetrable darkness. The muscle tissue which made up the
sides was a tough dark red flesh, now badly lacerated. Pale yellow fluid was
oozing out of the splits, running down to disappear in the unseen space below.
“Our escape route,” Dariat said,
echoing Rubra’s pride.
“A toilet?” she asked
incredulously.
“Sure. Don’t go squeamish on me
now, please.” He sat on the edge of the sphincter and swung his legs over the
crater. It was a three-metre slither down into the sewer tubule below. When his
feet touched the bottom he knelt down and held a hand out. His skin began to
glow with a strong pink light. It revealed the tubule stretching on ahead of
him, a circular shaft just over a metre in diameter, and angled slightly
downwards.
“Throw the pillows down,” he said.
Tatiana dropped them, peering over
the edge of the crater with a highly dubious expression. Dariat shoved the two
harnesses into the tubule, and started to worm his way in after them. “When I’m
in, you follow me, okay?” He didn’t give her the chance to answer. It was
awkward going, pushing the pillows ahead of him as he crawled along. The grey
polyp was slippery with water and fecal sludge. Dariat could hear Tatiana
grunting and muttering behind him as she discovered the residue smearing the sides.
There were ridges encircling the
tubule every four metres, peristaltic muscle bands that assisted the usual
water flow. Despite Rubra expanding them wide, they formed awkward
constrictions which Dariat had to pull himself through. He had just squeezed
past the third when Rubra said: They’ve reached the fiftieth floor. Can you
sense them?
Not a chance. So in theory they
won’t be able to find me.
They know the general direction,
and they’re heading towards the apartment.
Dariat was too intent on inching
himself along to review the images. What about the rest?
On their way down. The
stairwells are absolutely packed. It’s like a freak-show stampede out there.
He elbowed his way through another
muscle band. The light from his hand showed the tubule walls ending two metres
ahead. A thick ring of muscle membrane surrounded the rim. Beyond that was a
clear empty space. He could hear a steady patter of rain in the darkness.
“We made it,” he shouted.
His only answer was another
outbreak of grunted curses.
Dariat pushed the filthy pillows
and their tangled cords over the edge, hearing them splash into the water. Then
he was sliding himself over.
The main ingestion tract into which
the sewer tubule emptied ran vertically up the entire height of the
starscraper. It collected the human waste, discarded organic matter, and dirty
water from every floor and carried it down to the large purification organs at
the base of the starscraper. They filtered out organic compounds which were
pumped back to the principal nutrient organs inside the southern endcap via
their own web of specialist tubules. Poisons and toxins were disposed of
directly into space. Fresh water was recirculated up to the habitat’s storage
reservoirs and parkland rivers.
Normally the main ingestion tract
was a continual waterfall. Now, though, Rubra had closed the inlet channels and
reversed the flow from the purification organs, allowing the water level to
rise up the tract until it was level with the fiftieth floor.
The cold surface closed over
Dariat’s head, and he felt his feet clear the tubule. A couple of swift kicks
and he surfaced, puffing a spray of droplets from his mouth. Thankfully this
water was clean—relatively.
He held an arm up in the air, a
sharp blue flame flickering up from his fingertips. Its light showed the true
extent of the tract: twenty metres in diameter, with walls of neutral grey
polyp that had the same crinkly surface texture as granite. Sewer tubule
outlets formed black portals all around, their muscle-membrane rims flexing
like fish mouths. The pillows were bobbing about a few metres away.
Tatiana had pushed her shoulders
past the tubule’s muscle membrane, and was craning her head back to look
around. The tract’s height defeated the illumination thrown out by Dariat’s
small flame, revealing barely fifteen metres of the walls above the water
level. A heavy shower was falling out of the darkness which roofed them,
chopping up the water’s surface with small ripples.
“Come on, out you come,” Dariat
said. He swam back to her and helped ease her through the opening. She gasped
at the water’s chilly grip, arms thrashing about for a moment.
Dariat retrieved the two sets of
pillows and strapped himself into the harness. He had to tie Tatiana’s cords
for her, the cold had numbed her fingers. When he was finished, the sewer
tubules all started to close silently.
“Where are we going now?” Tatiana
asked nervously.
“Straight up.” He grinned. “Rubra
will pump fresh water back into the base of the tract. It should take about
twenty minutes to reach the top. But expect an interruption.”
“Yeah?”
“Oh, yeah.”
Stanyon arrived at the fiftieth
floor to find it in turmoil. The vestibule was packed with excitable possessed.
None of them seemed to know what was going on.
“Anybody seen him?” Stanyon
shouted. Nobody had.
“Search around, there must be some
trace. I want the teams that were searching floors thirty-eight and thirty-nine
to go down to fifty-one and check it out.”
“What’s happening?” Bonney’s voice
asked from the walkie-talkie; there was a lot of crackling interference.
Stanyon held the unit to his face,
pulling out more aerial. “He’s dodged us again. But we know he’s here. We’ll
have him any minute now.”
“Make sure you stick with
procedure. Remember it’s not just Dariat we’re up against.”
“You’re not the only council member
left. I know what I’m doing.”
“I’m a minute away from the lobby.
I’ll join you as fast as I can.”
He gave the walkie-talkie a
disgusted look and switched it off. “Terrific.”
“Stanyon,” someone called from the
other end of the vestibule. “Stanyon, we’ve found something.”
It was the troll, the faerie
prince, and both of the cyber-ninjas who had broken into the apartment. They
were hanging around the bathroom door when Stanyon arrived. He pushed his way
past them impatiently.
The sides of the ruptured toilet
sphincter had sagged, squeezing more of the yellow fluid out. It was running
down the outside of the cone to smear the surrounding dune of polyp chippings.
Water from the fractured pipe was sloshing over the floor.
Stanyon edged forwards, and peered
cautiously over the crater’s lip. There was nothing to see, nothing to sense.
He pointed at the smaller of the two cyber-ninjas. “You, go see where it leads
to.”
The cyber-ninja looked at him. Red
LEDs on his visor flashed slowly, an indolent blinking to mirror the thoughts
they fronted.
“Go on,” Stanyon said impatiently.
After a brief rebellious moment,
the cyber-ninja dematerialized his flak jacket and lowered himself down into
the sewer tubule.
Dariat had been worried about the
undercurrents. Needlessly, as it turned out. They were rising fast up the giant
tract with only the occasional swirl of bubbles twisting around them. It was
still raining heavily, but the whole process was eerily silent.
He maintained the small flame
burning coldly from his fingers, mainly for Tatiana’s benefit. There was
nothing to see above them, only the empty blackness. They slid smoothly past
the intermittent circlets of closed tubules with monotonous regularity, their
only real measure of progress.
Dariat was warm enough, circulating
heat through his skin to hold the water’s numbing encroachment at bay. But he
did worry about Tatiana. She’d stopped talking, and her chittering teeth were
clearly audible. That left him alone with his own thoughts of what was to come.
And the whispers of the damned, they were always there.
Rubra, have you ever heard of
someone called Alkad Mzu? he
asked.
No. Why?
Capone is very interested in
finding her. I think she’s some kind of weapons expert.
How the hell do you know what
Capone wants?
I can hear it. The souls in the
beyond are calling for her. They’re quite desperate to find her for the
Organization.
Affinity suddenly gave him a sense
of space opening around him. Then an astonishingly resolute presence emerged
from the new distance. Dariat was at once fearful and amazed by its belief in
itself, a contentment which was almost the opposite of hubris; it knew and
accepted itself too well for arrogance. There was a nobility about it which he
had never experienced, certainly not during the life he had led. Yet he knew
exactly what it was.
Hello, Dariat, it said.
The Kohistan Consensus. I’m
flattered.
It is intriguing for us to
communicate with you. It is a rare opportunity to talk to any non-Edenist, and
you are a possessor as well.
Make the most of it, I won’t be
around for much longer.
The action you and Rubra are
undertaking is an honourable one, we applaud your courage. It cannot have been
easy for either of you.
It was realistic.
His answer was accompanied by
Rubra’s emission of irony.
We would like to ask a question,
Consensus said. Several, in
fact.
On the nature of possession, I
assume. Fair enough.
Your current viewpoint is
unique, and extremely valuable to us.
It’s going to have to wait a
minute, Rubra said. They’ve
found the toilet.
The cyber-ninja had squeezed down
into the sewer tubule and was squirming along on his belly. His mind tone was
one of complete disgust. Pale violet light illuminated the lenses on his
low-light enhancement goggles, casting a faint glow across the polyp directly
in front of him. “They were in here,” he yelled back over his shoulder. “This
shit’s all been smeared around.”
“Yes!” Stanyon banged a fist
against the muscle-membrane door. “Get down there,” he told the second
cyber-ninja. “Help him.”
The cyber-ninja did as he was told,
sitting on the edge of the crater and slinging his legs over.
“Anyone know where these pipes
lead?” Stanyon asked.
“I’ve never been in one myself,”
the faerie prince said airily. “But it’ll empty into the lower floor eventually.
You could try searching down there. Unless, of course, he’s simply popped up
inside someone else’s john and walked out.”
Stanyon gave the slack cone an
irritated look. The prospect of Dariat simply walking through the habitat’s
pipes to escape in the throng was intolerable. But with everyone wearing their
illusionary form it would be appallingly easy. Why can we never organize ourselves
properly?
With extreme reluctance he switched
the walkie-talkie back on. “Bonney, come in please.”
Rubra opened the sphincter muscle
below every single toilet on the forty-ninth, fiftieth, and fifty-first floor.
It was an action which nobody noticed. There were over a hundred and eighty
possessed milling around on those three levels, with more still arriving. Some
were obediently searching through the rooms; most were now there simply for a
piece of the action. As there was no organized plan, none of them were
suspicious when all the remaining apartment doors slid open. At the same time,
emergency fire-control doors quietly closed off the lift shafts.
Dariat pulled Tatiana to his chest
and held her tight, locking his fingers together behind her back. “Stay with
it,” he said. The surface of the water was just rising over the sewer tubules
of the twenty-first floor.
Bonney reached the twelfth floor
well ahead of the five deputies accompanying her. She could hear them clumping
down the stairwell above her. They competed against her heart hammering away
inside her ribs. So far she didn’t feel any fatigue, but she knew she’d have to
slow down soon. It was going to take a good twenty minutes to reach the
fiftieth floor.
“Bonney,” her walkie-talkie said.
“Come in please.”
She started down the stairs to the
thirteenth floor and raised the walkie-talkie to her face. “Yes, Stanyon.”
“He’s vanished into the pipes. I’ve
sent some of my people after him; but I don’t know where they all lead to. It’s
possible he might have doubled back on us. It might be an idea to leave some
guards in the lobby.”
“Fuckhead.” Bonney slowed to a halt
as mystification overshadowed her initial anger. “What pipes?”
“The waste pipes. There’s
kilometres of them under the floors. We found one of the toilets all smashed
up. That’s how he got in there.”
“You mean sewer pipes?”
“Yeah.”
Bonney stared at the wall. She
could sense the thought routines gliding through the neural strata a metre or
so behind the naked polyp. In his own fashion, Rubra was staring right back at
her. He was content.
She didn’t know anything about the
sewer pipes, except how obvious they were in hindsight. And Rubra had absolute
control over every single environmental aspect of the habitat. Dariat had been
spotted for a few brief seconds, which had sent everyone chasing after him.
Then he’d vanished. If the sewers could hide him so thoroughly, he should never
have been found in the first place.
“Out!” she yelled at the
walkie-talkie. “Get out of there! Stanyon, for fuck’s sake, move!”
Rubra opened the muscle-membrane
rims of the sewer tubules which served the forty-ninth, fiftieth, and fifty-first
floors. The pressure exerted by a thirty-storey-high column of water filling
the ingestion tract was a genuinely irresistible force.
Stanyon saw the cyber-ninja bullet
out of the cone of ruined muscle to smash against the ceiling. The gust of air
which blew him there gave way to a massive fist of water which howled upwards
to strike the spread-eagled man full on. Its roar was pitched at roughly the
level of a sense-overload sonic. Stanyon’s skin blistered scarlet as his
capillaries ruptured. Before he could even scream the bathroom was filled with
high-velocity rain which knocked him to his feet as if he were being hammered
by a fusillade of rubber bullets. He crashed back into the bath where a slim
laser-straight pillar of water had burst out of the plug hole. It might just as
well have been a chain saw.
Throughout the three condemned
floors, every bathroom, every kitchen, and every public toilet were host to the
same lethal eruption of water. The lights had gone out, and into this tormented
night came the water itself, icy foaming waves that rushed through rooms and
vestibules like a horizontal guillotine.
Tatiana cried out fearfully as the
water began to drop. The two of them began to circulate around the edge of the
ingestion tract; slowly to start with, then picking up speed. Small waves
rippled back and forth, slapping against each other to produce wobbling spires.
A loud gurgling sound rose as the water fell faster.
Dariat watched in dismay as the
surface tilted. At the centre of the tract it was discernibly lower than it was
at the walls. They began to spiral in towards it. The gurgling grew louder
still.
Rubra!
Don’t worry. Another thirty
seconds, that’s all.
Bonney was helpless against the
torrent of anguish rushing around her; the flock of souls arising from those
trapped below to depart the universe, their sobs of bitterness and fright
striking her harder than any physical blow. They were too near, too strong, to
avoid; raw emotion amplified to insufferable levels.
She fell to her knees, muscles knotted.
Tears dripped steadily from her eyes. Her own soul was in danger of being
pulled along with them, a migration which commanded attendance. She fisted her
hands and punched the polyp step. The pain was no more than a gentle tweak
against the compulsion to join the damned once more. So she punched again,
harder. Again.
Finally the carnage was over, the
three floors filled to capacity with water. Narrow fan-sprays of water squirted
out from the rim seals on several of the lift fire-control doors, filling the
empty shafts with a fine drizzle, but the doors themselves held against the
pressure. As did the stairwell muscle-membrane doors on the fifty-second floor,
preventing the lower half of the starscraper from flooding. Pulverised bodies
that had pressed against the ceiling were sinking slowly as pockets of air
leaked out of their wounds, trailing ribbons of blood as they went.
The starscraper’s ingestion tract
did strange things to the gurgling sound produced by the frothing water,
channelling it into an organlike harmonic that rattled Tatiana’s bones. She was
inordinately glad when it began to subside. Dariat was moaning feebly in her
embrace as if he were in great pain. The flame he’d produced had snuffed out,
leaving them in absolute blackness. Although she couldn’t see anything, she
knew the water was slowing, its surface levelling out. The cold was giving her
a pounding headache.
Dariat started coughing. “Bloody
hell.”
“Are you okay?” she asked.
“I’ll survive.”
“What happened?”
“We’re not being chased anymore,”
he said flatly.
“So what’s next?”
“Rubra is going to start pumping
water back into the tract. We should reach the top in about fifteen minutes.”
He held up his hand and rekindled the little blue flame. “Think you can last
that long?”
“I can last.”
Bonney walked slowly out of the
starscraper lobby, still shivering despite the balmy parkland air ruffling her
khaki jacket. Nearly a dozen possessed were loitering outside on the grass.
They were gathered together in small clusters, talking quietly in worried
tones. When she appeared, all conversation ended. They stared at her, thoughts
dominated by resentment, their expressions hard, unforgiving. It was the germ
of the revolution.
She gazed back at them, coldly
defiant. But she knew they would never take orders from her again. The
authority of Kiera’s council had drowned back there in the starscraper. If she
wanted to go up against Dariat and Rubra now, it would be on her own. One on
one, the best kind of hunt there was. She brought a hand up to her face,
licking the bloody grazes which scarred each knuckle. Her smile made those
possessed closest to her back away.
There were several trucks parked
beside the lobby. She chose the nearest and twisted the accelerator hard.
Spinning tyres tore up long scars of grass as she tugged the steering wheel
around. Then the truck was speeding away from the lobby, heading for the
northern endcap.
Her walkie-talkie gave a bleep.
“Now what?” Rubra asked. “Come on, it was a grand hunt, but you lost. Drive
over to a decent bar, have a drink. My treat.”
“I haven’t lost yet,” she said.
“He’s still out there. That means I can win.”
“You’ve lost everything. Your
so-called colleagues are evacuating the starscrapers. Your council is busted.
There’s going to be nothing left of Kiera’s little empire with this lot running
around out of control.”
“That’s right, there’s nothing
left. Nothing except me and the boyo. I’m going to catch him before he can
escape. I worked that one out already. You’re helping him reach the spaceport.
Lord knows why, but I can still spoil your game, just as you did mine. That’s
justice. It’s also fun.”
One wacko lady, Dariat commented.
She’s genuine trouble, though.
Always has been, Rubra said.
And continues to be so by the
look of it. Especially if she gets to the spindle before me. Which is a good
possibility. The water was now
up to the second floor. Dariat could see the top of the ingestion tract now,
the black tube puncturing a bubble of hazy pink light.
Another ninety seconds brought him
level with the floor of the cistern chamber. He had emerged into the centre of
a big hemispherical cavern whose walls were pierced by six huge water pipe
outlets. Ribbons of water were still trickling across the sloping floor to the
lip of the tract.
He struck out for the edge with a
strong sidestroke, towing Tatiana along. She was almost unconscious; the cold
had penetrated her body to the core. Even with his energistic strength, hauling
her out of the water was tough going. Once she was clear he flopped down beside
her, wishing himself warm and dry. Steam began to pour out of their clothes.
Tatiana tossed her head about,
moaning as if she were caught in a nightmare. She sat up with a spasm of
muscle, her few remaining bangles chiming loudly. Vapour was still effervescing
out of her dress and dreadlocks. She blinked at it in amazement. “I’m warm,”
she said in astonishment. “I didn’t think I would ever be warm again.”
“The least I could do.”
“Is it over now?”
The wishful childlike tone made him
press his lips together in regret. “Not quite. We still have to get up to the
spaceport; there’s a route through these water pipes which will eventually take
us to a tube tunnel, we don’t have to go up to the surface. But Bonney
survived. She’ll try to stop us.”
Tatiana rested her chin in her
hands. “Lord Thoale is testing us more than most. I’m sure he has his reasons.”
“I’m not.” Dariat lumbered to his
feet and untied the pillow harness. “I’m sorry, but we have to get going.”
She nodded miserably. “I’m coming.”
The search teams which Bonney and
her deputies had organized were wending their way out of Valisk’s starscrapers.
Shock from the flooding was evident in their shuffling footsteps and tragic
eyes. They emerged from the lobbies, consoling each other as best they could.
It shouldn’t have happened, was the
thought which rang among them like an Edenist Consensus. They’d made it back to
the salvation of reality. They were the chosen ones, the lucky ones, the
blessed. Eternal life, and the precious congruent gift of sensation, had been
within their grasp. Now Rubra had shown them how tenuous that claim was.
He was able to do that because they
remained in a universe where his power was a match to theirs. It shouldn’t be
like that. Whole planets had escaped from open skies and Confederation
retribution, while they stayed to entrap new bodies. Kiera’s idea—and it had
been a good one, bold and vigorous. Eternity spent within the confines of a
single habitat would be a difficult prospect, and she had seen a way forwards.
That was why they’d acquiesced to
her rule and that of the council, because she’d been right. At the start. Now
though, they had increased their numbers, Kiera had flown off to negotiate
their admission to a dangerous war, and Bonney committed them against Rubra to
satisfy her personal vendettas.
No more. No more risks. No more
foolhardy adventures. No more sick savagery of hunting. The time had come to
leave it all behind.
The truck raced along the hardened
track which countless wheels had compacted across the semi-arid plain
surrounding Valisk’s northern endcap. Bonney had the throttle at maximum, the
axial motors complemented by her energistic power. Small flattened stones and
cracked ridges which lay along the track sent the vehicle flying through the
air in long shallow hops.
Bonney didn’t even notice the
jouncing, which would have caused whiplash injuries to any non-possessed riding
beside her. Her mind was focused entirely on the endcap whose base was five
kilometres in front of her. She imagined her beefy old vehicle beating the
sleek tube capsule slicing along its magnetic rail in the tunnel below her. The
one she knew he would be riding.
Up ahead she could just make out
the dark line of the switchback road which wound up to the small plateau two
kilometres above the plain. If she could only reach the passageway entrance
before Dariat got out of the sewer tunnels and into a tube carriage she might
conceivably reach the axis chamber before him.
A feeling of contentment began to
seep into her mind. An insidious infiltration which called on her to respond,
to generate her own dreamy satisfaction, to pledge it to the whole.
“Bastards!” She slapped furiously
at the steering wheel, anger insulating her from the loving embrace which was
rising up all around her. They had begun it, the gathering of power, the
sharing, linking their wills. They’d submitted, capitulated, to their
craven fear. Valisk would soon sail calmly out of this universe, sheltering
them from any conceivable threat, committing them to a life of eternal boredom.
Well not for her. One of the
hellhawks could take her off, away where there was struggle and excitement.
Only after she’d dealt with Dariat, though. There would be time. There had to
be.
The truck’s speed began to pick up.
Her stubborn insistence was diverting a fraction of the prodigious reality
dysfunction which was coalescing around the habitat. The utterly implausible
was becoming hard fact.
Bonney laughed gleefully as the
truck shot along the track, ripping up a churning cloud of thick ochre dust behind
it. While all around her, the tiny clumps of scrub grass, cacti, and lichen
sprawls were sprouting big adventitious flower buds. The bland desert was
quietly and miraculously transforming itself into a rich colour-riot garden as
Valisk’s new masters prepared to enact their vision of paradise.
The Kohistan Consensus had a
thousand and one questions on the nature of possession and the beyond. Dariat
sat quietly in the tube carriage taking him to the axis chamber and tried to
supply answers for as many as he could. He even let them hear the terrible
cries of the lost souls that infested his every thought. So that they’d know,
so they’d understand the dreadful compulsion driving each possessor.
I feel strange, Rubra announced. It’s like being drunk, or
light-headed. I think they’re starting to penetrate my thought routines.
No, Dariat said. He was aware of it himself now,
the reality dysfunction starting to pervade the polyp of the shell. In the
distance, a chorus of minds were singing a joyous hymn of ascension. They’re
getting ready to leave the universe. We don’t have much time.
We can confirm that, the Consensus said. Our voidhawks on
observation duty are reporting large squalls of red light appearing on your
shell, Rubra. The hellhawks appear most agitated. They are leaving their
docking pedestals.
Don’t let it happen, boy, Rubra said. Come into me, please, transfer
over now. We can win, we can stop them taking Valisk to their bloody haven. We
can screw them yet.
Not with Tatiana here. I won’t
condemn her to that. We’ve still got time.
Bonney’s almost at the plateau.
And we’re almost at the base of
the endcap. This carriage can go straight up to the axis chamber. She’s got to
climb three kilometres of stairs. We’ll make it easily.
Blue smoke spouted out of the
truck’s tyres as Bonney skid-braked the vehicle outside the passageway’s dark
entrance. When she jumped down from the driver’s seat her sharp upper teeth
were protruding over her lower lip, producing a permanent feral grin. Her
painfully red-rimmed eyes narrowed to lethargic slits as she gazed up at the
steepening cliff of grey polyp in front of her, as if puzzled by its
appearance. Every movement took on a dullard’s slowness. Breath wheezed heavily
out of her nostrils.
She ignored the passageway and stood
perfectly still, bringing her arms to rest in front of her so her hands crossed
above her crotch. Her head drooped, bowing deeply, the eyes closing completely.
What the hell is she doing now? Dariat asked. She was frantic to get up
there.
It looks like she’s praying.
Somehow, I really doubt that.
The tube carriage reached the base
of the endcap and started to sweep up the slope towards the hub. An urgent
whining sound permeated the inside. Dariat could feel it slowing, then it
accelerated again.
Damn it, I’m getting power
dropouts right across the habitat. That’s in the sections of myself I can still
perceive. I’m shrinking, boy, there are places where my thoughts have ceased.
Help me!
The reality dysfunction is
strengthening. Five minutes. Hang on for five more minutes.
Bonney’s khaki suit was darkening,
at the same time its texture changed to a glossier aspect. She was starting to
hunch up, her legs bowing out and becoming spindly. Pointed ears emerged from a
shortening crop of hair. There was no suit anymore, only a black pelt.
She suddenly raised her rodent head
and emitted an ear-piercing screech through a circular mouth caged by fangs.
Eyes glittered a devilish red. She opened what had been her arms to spread her
new wings wide. The leathery membrane was thin enough to be translucent,
revealing a lacework of minute black veins beneath the dark amber surface.
Oh, fuck, Rubra exclaimed. No bloody way! I don’t care
what she looks like, she weighs too much to fly.
That won’t matter anymore, Dariat said. The reality dysfunction is
powerful enough to sustain her; we’re in the universe of fables, now. If she
wants to fly, she will.
Bonney ran a couple of paces across
the plateau, then her wings gave a fast downwards sweep, and she was airborne.
She beat her wings steadily, rising quickly, her triumphant screeching echoing
over the blank polyp. Her flight curved around sharply as she gained altitude,
evolving into a spiral as the beats became smoother, more insistent.
She’ll catch me, a stricken Dariat said. She’s going to reach
the axis chamber before me. I’ll never get Tatiana out. “Anastasia!” he
cried. “My love, it can’t end like this. Not again. I can’t fail you again.”
Tatiana stared at him in fright,
not understanding.
Do something, he begged.
Like what? Rubra’s mental voice was faint, lacking
interest.
Remember your classics, the Kohistan Consensus said. Before today,
Icarus and Daedalus were the only people ever to fly with their own wings. Only
one survived. Think what happened to Icarus.
Bonney was already three hundred
metres above the plateau, swooping upwards on a tempestuous thermal, when she
noticed the change. The light was altering, which it could never do in a
habitat. She shifted her balance, twisting on a wingtip, howling at the sheer
exhilaration of the wind buffeting her face. The cylindrical landscape
stretched out in front of her, dabbed with curving smears of flushed red cloud.
For the first time, the lively sparkle coming off the circumfluous reservoir
was absent. The entire band of water seemed to be darkened; she could barely
see a single feature on the southern endcap. Yet around her the light was
growing. That should never be. Both endcaps were always maintained in a dappled
shade. The effect was due entirely to the nature of the light tube, a slender
cylindrical mesh of organic conductors which mimicked the shape of the habitat
itself. At each end the mesh narrowed to a near solid bundle of cable which
suspended the main segment between the two hubs. The plasma it contained dwindled
to a mild violet haze eight hundred metres from the hub itself.
She could now see that horn of ions
retreating from the southern hub as Rubra increased the power flowing through
the cables at that end. The magnetic field was expanding to squeeze the plasma
along the tube. At the northern end, he cut the power completely to one
specific section of the mesh. Plasma rushed out of the gap, inflating
flamboyantly as it liberated itself from the constricting flux lines.
From Bonney’s position it was as if
a small fusion bomb had detonated above her, sending its billowing mushroom
cloud hurtling downwards.
“All this,” she cried
disbelievingly, “for me?”
The air caught in the cup of the
endcap was torn asunder by the racing plasma, sending her spinning madly, broken
wings wrapping her body like a velvet cloak. Then the wave front of inflamed
atoms swept across her like the breath of an enraged sungod. It had none of the
fury and strength of a genuine fusion explosion; by the time it reached her the
plasma was nothing more than a tenuous electrically charged fog that was
rapidly losing cohesion. But nevertheless, it was moving five times faster than
any natural tornado, and with a temperature of tens of thousands of degrees.
Her body disintegrated into splinters of vivid copper light which trailed
contrails of black smoke all the way down to the resplendent desert far below.
A siren started to whistle as soon
as Dariat broke the hatch seal; half of the corridor lighting panels turned
red, flashing urgently. He ignored the clamour and floated through the small
metallic airlock chamber.
The escape pod was a simple
one-deck sphere, four metres in diameter, with twelve thickly padded
acceleration couches laid out petal fashion. Dariat emerged from a hatch set at
their centre. There was only one instrument panel, barely more than a series of
power-up switches. He flicked them all on, watching the status schematics turn
green.
Tatiana hauled herself gingerly
through the airlock, looking dangerously queasy. Her dreadlocks swarmed around
her head, their beads making tiny clacking sounds as they knocked
against each other.
“Take any couch,” Dariat
instructed. “We’re coming on line.”
She rotated herself carefully into
one of the couches. Webbing unfurled from its sides to creep over her.
Dariat took the couch opposite to
her, so that they were feet to feet. Are the other pods armed?
Yes. Most of them. Dariat, I
don’t exist on the other side of the starscrapers anymore; I see nothing, I
feel nothing, I don’t even think down there.
A minute more, that’s all. He reached up and pressed the launch sequencer.
The airlock hatch hinged down. “I’m going to leave soon, Tatiana. Horgan will
be back in charge of his own body again. Take care of him, he’s only fifteen.
He’s going to be suffering.”
“Of course I will.”
“I . . . I know Rubra only forced
us together to put pressure on me. But I’m still glad I met you.”
“Me too. It laid a lot of old
demons to rest. You showed me I was wrong.”
“How?”
“I thought she’d made a mistake
with you. She hadn’t. The cure just took a very long time. She’s going to be
proud of you when you finally catch up with her.”
Two-thirds of Valisk’s shell was
now fluorescing a lambent crimson; dazzling dawn-red light shone out of the
starscraper windows. Inside, the possessed were united, they could perceive the
entire habitat now. The flow of its fluids and gases through the plexus of
tubules and pipes and ducts was as intimate to them as the blood pumping around
their own veins and arteries. Rubra’s flashing thought routines, too, were
apparent, snapping through the neural strata like volleys of sheet lightning.
Under their auspices his thoughts were slowing and dimming, retreating down the
length of the cylinder as their will to banish the curse of him from their
lives grew dominant.
They knew now of all the remaining
non-possessed Rubra had hidden throughout the interior. Twenty-eight had
survived Bonney’s pursuit, cowering in obscure niches and alcoves dotted about
the shell structure, frightened and uncertain at the ruby glimmer that was
emerging within the polyp. The possessed didn’t care about them, not anymore.
That struggle was over. They even perceived Dariat and Tatiana lying prone on
the escape pod’s acceleration couches as the computer counted down the seconds.
Nobody objected if they wanted to leave.
Profound changes were propagating
outside the habitat. Nanonic-sized interstices flicked open, only to decay
within milliseconds. The incessant foam of fluctuations was creating distortion
waves similar to those generated by voidhawks. But these lacked any sort of
order or focus. Chaos had visited local space-time, weakening the fabric around
the shell.
Furious hellhawks swarmed above the
northern endcap. Harpies and hyperspace starships spun and swooped around each
other at hazardous velocities, their flights dangerously unstable as the
massive distortion effects buffeted them as a tempest treated leaves.
The bodies! they clamoured to these possessed snug inside
who were capable of affinity. Kiera promised us the bodies in zero-tau. If
you leave now we will never have them. You are condemning us to a life in these
constructs.
Sorry, was the only, sheepishly embarrassed reply.
Combat sensors deployed as the
hunger for retribution reverberated across the affinity band. Activation codes
were loaded into combat wasps.
If we are denied eternity in
human form, then you will join us in the same abyss.
The only functional thought
routines Rubra had left were those in the northern endcap. Everything else was
blank to him, his senses amputated. A few mysterious images were still reaching
him from those bitek processors which interfaced him with the electronic
architecture of the counter-rotating spaceport. Wavering sepia pictures of
empty corridors, stationary transit capsules, and barren external grid
sections. With them came the data streams from the spaceport’s communications
network.
And he’d almost lost interest in
it. Dariat, he thought, had left the transfer too late; the boy was too caught
up in his obsession and guilt. The end is here, night is finally eclipsing me
after all these centuries. A shame. A crying shame. But at least they’ll
remember my name with a curse as they vegetate their way through eternity.
He jettisoned every escape pod in
the spaceport.
Now, Dariat sighed.
Twelve gees rammed him down into
the acceleration couch. His vision disappeared into a purple sparkle. And after
thirty years the neural strata no longer resisted him.
Two entities—two egos—collided.
Memories and personality patterns merged at a fundamental level. Hostility,
antipathy, anger, regret, shame, an abundance of it all pouring out from both
sides, and there could be no hiding from it anymore. The neural strata thrummed
from collective moments of outraged pique as secrets long hidden were exposed
to searing scrutiny. But the indignation cooled as the two differing strands of
thought began the process of twining and integrating into a functional whole.
One half brought size to the
mating, the huge neural strata, alive yet quiescent under the spell of the
reality dysfunction; from the other half came the energistic effect, small in a
single human, but with unlimited potential. For the first five seconds of the
transfer, Dariat’s essence was operating within a section of the neural strata
only a few cubic metres in volume. At that level it was sufficient to halt the
reality dysfunction of the possessed from paralysing any more of the neural
strata. As the integration progressed and the thought routines amalgamated and
multiplied it began to expand. More and more of the neural strata awoke to
accommodate it.
The horrified possessed, quite
literally, watched their dreams shatter around them.
Okay, you fuckers, bespoke Valisk’s new personality. PARTY’S
OVER.
As soon as the escape pods
launched, a hundred voidhawks from the Kohistan Consensus swallowed in. Their
appearance ten kilometres from Valisk’s counter-rotating spaceport startled the
already frantic hellhawks. The gulf between the two antagonistic swarms of
bitek starships was slashed by targeting lasers and radar pulses.
Do not engage any targets, the voidhawks ordered. The habitat is to be
left intact, the escape pods must not be harmed.
Two hellhawks immediately launched
a salvo of combat wasps. Solid rockets had barely propelled them clear of their
launch cradles before they were struck by X-ray lasers from the voidhawks. It
was a perfect demonstration of the disadvantage the hellhawks suffered in any
short-range combat situation. The energistic effect downgraded their electronic
systems to a woefully inferior state.
Wormhole interstices sprang open,
and the hellhawks dived down them, eluding any further conflict, abandoning
their erstwhile abode with nothing more dangerous than a backwash of
obscenities and threats.
Over two hundred escape pods were
plunging away from Valisk’s spaceport. Solid fuel rockets burned a glaring
topaz, gifting the drab grey gridiron of the spaceport with an unrivalled dawn.
As the distended skirts of flame and smoke died away, a cluster of five
voidhawks surged forwards to intercept a single pod.
Tatiana knew Dariat had gone; his
body had shrunk somehow, not in size, but certainly in presence. It was as if
the terrible crush of acceleration had left him behind, diminishing the teenage
boy lying on the couch. Horgan began to wail. She released her webbing and
floated over to him. Her own free-fall nausea forgotten in the face of someone
whose suffering was far worse.
“It’s all right,” Tatiana whispered
as she hugged him. “It’s all over now. He’s left you for good.” She even
managed to surprise herself at the note of regret which had crept into her
voice.
The voidhawks rendezvoused with
Tatiana’s pod, claimed its occupants, then swooped away from the habitat at
seven gees. Valisk was now host to a war of light. The original red
fluorescence was besieged by a vigorous purple shimmer sweeping down the shell
from the northern endcap. As the purple area grew in size, so it grew in
intensity.
Ten minutes after the escape pods
were launched, the last glimmer of red was extinguished. The voidhawks were
seven hundred kilometres away when it happened, and still retreating at two
gees. Nobody quite knew what constituted a safe separation distance. Then their
distortion fields detected Valisk’s mass starting to reduce. The last image of
the habitat which their sensor blisters received was of a purple-white
micro-star blazing coldly. At the core of the photonic rupture, space itself
broke down as bizarre energy patterns exerted a catastrophic stress.
When the glare faded and space
regained its equipoise there was no evidence of the habitat’s existence.
However hard the voidhawks probed, they could find no residue of energy, no
particles larger than a mote of dust. Valisk had neither vaporized nor
shattered, it had simply and cleanly departed the universe.
Chapter 11
The Kulu embassy was situated just
outside Harrisburg’s central governmental district; a five-storey building in
the civic tradition, granite block walls and elaborately carved windows.
Slender turrets and retro-modernist sculptures lined the roof in an attempt to
grant the stark facade some degree of interest. To no avail; Harrisburg’s
ubiquitous granite reduced the most ornate architecture to the level of a
neo-Gothic fortress. Even the setting, in one of the wealthier districts laid out
with parks, wide streets, and century-old trees, didn’t help. An office cube
was an office cube, no matter what cosmetics it dabbed on.
Its neighbours comprised rich legal
practices, capital-city headquarters of large companies, and expensive
apartment blocks. Directly opposite, in an office which claimed to be an
aircraft charter broker, Tonala’s security police kept a twenty-four hour watch
on everyone who went in or out. Forty minutes ago they had gone up to alert
condition amber three (foreign covert action imminent) when five large,
screened cars from the diplomatic fleet slid down into the embassy’s
underground car park. None of the officers on duty were sure if that particular
alert status applied in this case; according to their colleagues at the city
spaceport, the cars were full of Edenists.
The arrival of Samuel and his team
had drawn considerable interest from staff inside the embassy, too. Curious,
slightly apprehensive faces peered out of almost every doorway as Adrian Redway
led Monica Foulkes and her new allies through the building. They took a lift
eight stories below ground, to a floor which didn’t exist on any blueprints
logged on the city council’s civil engineering computer.
Adrian Redway stopped at the door
to the ESA station’s operational centre and gave Samuel an awkward look. His
eyes slid over the tall Edenist’s shoulders to the other six Edenists waiting
patiently in the corridor.
“Listen,” he said heavily. “I don’t
mean to be an oaf about this. But we do run and correlate our entire Tonala
asset network from here. Surely, you don’t all need to come in?” His eyebrows
quivered hopefully.
“Of course not,” Samuel said
graciously.
Monica gave a disgruntled sigh. She
knew Samuel well enough now not to need affinity to hear the thought in his
head: strange concept. If one Edenist went inside, then technically all of them
did. Her hand fluttered towards him in a modestly embarrassed gesture. He
winked back.
The operations centre could have
been the office of any medium-sized commercial enterprise. Air-conditioned yet
strangely airless, it had the standard desks with (more sophisticated than
usual) processor blocks, big wall screens, ceiling-mounted AV pillars, and side
offices with heavily tinted glass walls. Eleven ESA staffers were sitting in
big leather chairs, monitoring what they could of the planet’s current military
and politico-strategic situation. Information was becoming a precious resource
as Tonala’s communications net started to suffer glitches; the only certainty
gained from the overall picture was how close the orbital situation was getting
to all-out confrontation.
Tonala’s state of emergency had
been matched by that of the other nations. Then in the last twenty minutes
Tonala’s high command had confirmed it had lost the Spirit of Freedom station
to unknown foreign elements. In response, five warships had been dispatched to
intercept the Urschel, Raimo, and the Pinzola to try to
find out what had happened. Every other government was complaining that their
deployment at this time constituted a deliberately provocative act.
Adrian led Monica and Samuel
through into a conference room on the far side of the operations centre. “My
chief analyst gives us two hours tops before the shooting starts for real,” he
said glumly as he sat at the head of the table.
“I hate to say this, but that
really is secondary to our mission,” Monica said. “We must secure Mzu. She
cannot be killed or captured. It would be a disaster for the Confederation.”
“Yeah, I accessed the report,”
Adrian said glumly. “The Alchemist by itself is bad enough, but in the hands of
the possessed . . .”
“A fact you may not have yet,”
Samuel said. “The frigates Urschel, Raimo, and Pinzola are
all Organization starships. Capone must know Dr Mzu is here; his
representatives will not demonstrate any restraint or subtlety at all. Their
actions could well trigger the war.”
“Jeeze, they sent some spaceplanes
down after they arrived. Nobody knows where the hell to, the planetary sensor
coverage is wiped.”
“What about local air defence coverage
for the city?” Monica asked.
“Reasonably intact. Kulu supplied
the hardware about eleven years ago; hardly top grade but it’s still
functioning. The embassy has an over-the-shoulder feed from the Tonala defence
force headquarters.”
“So if the Organization spaceplanes
approach Harrisburg you’ll be able to warn us.”
“No problem.”
“Good, that ought to give us a
couple of minutes breathing space. Next question, did you find her?”
Adrian pretended offence. “Of
course we found her,” he said, grinning. “We’re the ESA, remember?”
“Right; truth is always worse than
rumour. Where is she?”
Adrian datavised the officer
running the surveillance mission on Mzu. “She booked in at the Mercedes Hotel,
or rather Voi did, as soon as they arrived. They made very little effort to
cover their tracks; Voi used a credit disk registered under an alias, but it’s
still got her biolectric pattern. I mean, how amateur can you get?”
“They’re not even amateurs, they’re
just kids,” Samuel said. “They eluded us on their home ground because we were
rushed. Out here they’re completely defenceless against any professional
agency.”
“Voi did approach a local security
firm,” Adrian said. “But she hasn’t followed it up. Her request for bodyguards
was cancelled. They seem to have linked up with some locals instead. We’re not
sure who they are. There certainly aren’t any Garissa partizan cadres on
Nyvan.”
“How many locals?” Monica asked.
“Three or four, we think. As we
don’t know who they are, it’s hard to be sure.”
“Any interest from other agencies?”
“There have been three probes
launched into the hotel’s computer system. We couldn’t get an origin on any of
them. Whoever it was, their blocker programs are first rate.”
“Is Mzu still at the Mercedes?”
Monica asked.
“Not at this exact moment; but she
is on her way back there from a meeting with the Opia company. Her group is
passing themselves off as representatives from the Dorados defence force, which
gives them a valid reason to buy armaments. I should be receiving a report on
the meeting from our asset in the company any minute.”
“Fine,” Monica said. “We’ll
intercept her at the hotel.”
“Very well.” Adrian gave her an
edgy glance. “The local police won’t appreciate that.”
“Sad, but irrelevant. Can you load
a priority flight clearance authorization into the city’s air defence network?”
“Sure, we supplied it, we have the
ultimate authority codes.”
“Fine, stand by to do it for the
Edenist flyers. We’ll use them to evac as soon as we’ve acquired her.”
“The Kingdom will probably get
expelled from this entire system if you pull a stunt like that,” Adrian said.
“If there’s one thing Nyvan’s nations hate more than each other, it’s outsystem
foreigners.”
“Mzu wanted somewhere that was
dishonest and greedy enough to supply her with weapons on a no-questions-asked
basis. If this planet had built themselves a decent civilization in the first
place, she wouldn’t even be here. They’ve only themselves to blame. I mean,
they’ve had five centuries for God’s sake.”
Samuel groaned chidingly.
Adrian paused, not meeting Monica’s
stare. “Um, my second surveillance team leader is reporting in. I’ve had them
following that Calvert character, as you asked.”
“Yes?” There was a sense of
grudging inevitability in this moment, Monica thought.
“The captain contacted a data security
expert as soon as he landed, a Richard Keaton. It would seem Keaton has done a
good job for him. In fact, he probably origined one of the probes into the
hotel computer. They’re currently in a car which is heading in the general
direction of the Mercedes Hotel. He’ll get there before you can.”
“Shit! That bloody Calvert.”
“Do you want him eliminated?”
“No,” Samuel said. He stopped
Monica’s outburst with a firm stare. “Any action at the hotel now will draw the
police to it before we can get there. Our interception will be difficult enough
as it is.”
“All right,” she grumbled.
“My team could intercept Mzu for
you,” Adrian said.
Monica was tempted—anything to get
this resolved. “How many have you got on her?”
“Three cars, seven personnel.”
“Mzu has at least four people with
her,” Samuel said.
“Agreed,” Monica said regretfully.
“That’s too many, and God knows what they’re carrying, especially these unknown
locals. We have to guarantee first attempt success. Tell your team to continue
their observation, Adrian, we’ll join them as soon as we can.”
“Do you think she’ll resist?”
Adrian asked.
“I would hope not,” Samuel said.
“After all, she is not stupid; she must know Nyvan’s situation is decaying by
the minute. That may well make this easier for us. We should start with an open
approach to fly her outsystem. Once she realizes she has to leave with us,
either willingly or by force, it would be logical for her to capitulate.”
“Easier?” Monica gave him a pitying
look. “This mission?”
“Mother Mary, why?” Voi
demanded as soon as the five of them crowded back into the penthouse lift. “You
can’t sell out now. Think of what you’ve been through—Mary, what we’ve done for
you. You can’t hand it over to Capone!”
Her impassioned outburst stopped
dead as Alkad turned to stare at her. “Do not argue with one of my decisions
ever again.”
Even Gelai and Ngong were daunted
by the tone, but then they could sense the thoughts powering her.
“As Baranovich made quite clear,
the Omuta option is now closed to me,” Alkad said. “Worthless piece of trash
though he is, he happens to be right. You cannot begin to imagine how much I
resent that, because it means the one thing I never allowed myself to think in
thirty years has become real. Our vengeance has become irrelevant.”
“Nonsense,” Voi said. “You can
still hit the Omutans before the possessed do.”
“Please don’t display your
ignorance in public, it’s offensive.”
“Ignorance, you bitch. Mary, you’re
giving the Alchemist to Capone. Giving it! You think I’m going to keep quiet
about that?”
Alkad squared her shoulders; with
an immense effort she spoke in a level voice to the ireful girl. “You are a
simple immature child, with an equally childish fixation. You have never once
thought through the consequences should your wish be granted, the suffering it
will cause. For thirty years I have thought of nothing else. I created the
Alchemist, Mary have mercy on me. I understand the full reality of what it can
do. The responsibility for that machine is mine alone. I have never, nor will
ever, shirk that. To do so would be to divorce myself from what remains of my
humanity. And the consequences of the possessed obtaining it are very bad
indeed. Therefore I will accept Baranovich’s offer to leave this doomed planet.
I will lead Capone’s forces to the Alchemist. And I will then activate it. It
will never be available for anyone to study and duplicate.”
“But—” Voi looked around the others
for support. “If you activate it, surely . . .”
“I will die. Oh, yes. And with me
will die the one man I ever loved. We’ve been separated for thirty years, and I
still love him. That purely human entanglement doesn’t matter. I will even
sacrifice him for this. Now do you understand my commitment and responsibility?
Maybe I will come back as a possessor, or maybe I will stay in the beyond.
Whatever my fate, it will be no different to any other human being. I am afraid
of that, but I don’t reject it. I’m not arrogant enough to think I can cheat
our ultimate destination.
“Gelai and Ngong have shown me that
we do retain our basic personality. That’s good, because if I do come back in
someone else’s body, my resolve will remain intact. I will not build
another Alchemist. Its reason for being is gone, it must go too.”
Voi bent her knees slightly so her
eyes were closer to Alkad’s face, as if that would give her a deeper insight
into the physicist’s mind. “You really will, won’t you? You’ll kill yourself.”
“I think kamikaze is a more
appropriate term. But don’t worry, I’m not going to dragoon you two along. I
don’t even consider this to be your fight, I never did. You’re not Garissans,
not really; you have no reason to dip your hands into blood this deep. Now be
quiet and pray to Mother Mary that we can save something from this pile of
shit, and get the pair of you as well as Lodi out of here. But be assured, I
still consider you expendable to my goal.” She turned to Gelai. “If either of
you have any objection to this, then speak now, please.”
“No, Doctor,” Gelai said. There was
the faintest smile on her lips. “I don’t object. In fact, I’m rather glad it
won’t be used against a planet by you or Capone. But believe me, you don’t want
to kill yourself; once you’ve known the beyond, the pressure Capone can exert
by promising you a body is going to be extraordinary.”
“I know,” Alkad said. “But choice
has never played a large part in my life.”
Tonala’s state of emergency had
drastically reduced the volume of road traffic in the capital. Normally, the
churning wheels of the afternoon gridlock would turn the snow to mush and spray
it over the pedestrians. Now, however, the big flakes were beginning to
accumulate on the roads. Harrisburg’s civic mechanoids were losing their battle
to clear it away.
The transport department considered
the effects such an icy blanket would have on brake response time, and ordered
a general speed reduction to avoid accidents. The proscription was datavised
into the control processor of individual vehicles.
“You want me to neutralize the
order for this car?” Dick Keaton asked. Joshua gave the data security expert an
edgy glance as he tried to decide. The answer was yes, but he said, “No,”
anyway, because speeding when you’re a suspect foreigner in a nation on the
brink of war and being followed by two local police cars is an essentially dumb
thing to do.
Thanks to the general lack of cars,
their tail was a prominent one, keeping a precise fifty metres behind. Its
presence didn’t have much effect on Joshua and his companions. The two
serjeants were as vigilant as mechanoids, while Melvyn stared out at the city
covered in its crisp grey mantle, the opposite of Dahybi who sat hunched up in
his seat, hands clasped and paying no attention to their surroundings, almost
as if he were at prayer. Dick Keaton was enjoying the ride, a pre-teen
excitement which Joshua found annoying. He was trying to balance mission
priorities at the same time as he reviewed what he was going to say to Mzu. A
sincere but insistent invitation to return to Tranquillity, point out the shit
she was in, how he had a starship waiting. It wasn’t that he was bad with
words, but these were just so damn important. Exactly how do you tell the
semi-psychotic owner of a doomsday device to come along quietly and not make
any fuss?
His communications block accepted
Ashly’s secure datavise and relayed it straight into his neural nanonics.
“New development,” Ashly reported.
“The Edenist flyers just activated their ion fields.”
“Are they leaving?”
“No sign of that yet. They’re still
on the ground, but they’re in a rapid response condition. Their agents must be
close to Mzu.”
“Bugger. Any news from orbit?”
“Not a thing. Lady Macbeth isn’t
due above the horizon for another eight minutes, but the spaceplane sensors
haven’t detected any low-orbit weapons activity yet.”
“Okay. Stand by, we’re approaching
the hotel now. I might need you in a hurry.”
“Do my best. But if these flyers
don’t want me to lift off, it could get tricky.”
“Lady Mac is your last
resort. She can take them out. Use her if you have to.”
“Understood.”
Dahybi was leaning forward in his
seat to catch a glimpse of the Mercedes Hotel as the car swept along the last
two hundred metres of road.
“That park would make a handy
landing spot for Ashly,” Melvyn commented.
“Acknowledged,” Joshua said. He
squinted through the windscreen as the car turned onto the loop of road which
led to the hotel’s broad portico. There was a car already parked in front of
the doors.
Joshua datavised a halt order into
their car’s control processor, then directed it to one of the parking slots
outside the portico. Tyres crunched on the virgin snow as they pulled in.
The two police cars stopped on the
road outside.
“What is it?” Dick Keaton asked, he
was almost whispering.
Joshua pointed a forefinger at the
car under the portico. Several people were climbing in.
“That’s Mzu,” one of the serjeants
said.
After so long on the trail, so much
endured, Joshua felt something akin to awe now he could finally see her. Mzu
hadn’t changed much from the visual file stored in his neural nanonics during
their one brief encounter. Features and hair the same, and she was wrapped up
well in a thick navy-blue coat, but the flaky professor act had been dumped.
This woman carried a deadly confidence.
If he’d ever doubted the Alchemist
and Mzu’s connection to it, that ended now.
“What do you want to do?” Dahybi
asked. “We can stop her car. Make our pitch now.”
Joshua held up a hand for silence.
He’d just noticed the last two people getting into the car with Mzu. It wasn’t
a premonition he got from them, more like fear hot-wired direct into his brain.
“Oh, Jesus.”
Melvyn’s electronic warfare blocks
datavised a warning. He accessed the display. “What the hell?”
“I don’t want to alarm you guys,”
Dick Keaton said. “But the people in the next car are giving us a real
unfriendly look.”
“Huh?” Joshua glanced over.
“And they’re aiming a multiband
sensor at us, too,” Melvyn said.
Joshua returned the hostile stare
from the two ESA agents in the car parked beside them. “Oh, fucking wonderful.”
“She’s leaving,” one of the
serjeants called.
“Jesus,” Joshua grumbled. “Melvyn,
are you blocking that sensor?”
“Absolutely.” He gave the agents a
broad toothy smile.
“Okay, we follow her. Let’s just
hope she’s going somewhere I can have a civilized chat.”
The five embassy cars carrying
Monica, Samuel, and a mixed crew of ESA and Edenist operatives disregarded the
city’s new speed limit altogether as they raced for the hotel. All the security
police did was follow and observe; they were anxious to see where this was all
leading.
They were still a kilometre from
the Mercedes Hotel when Adrian Redway datavised Monica to advise her that Mzu
was on the move again. “There’s definitely only four people with her this time.
The observation team launched a skyspy outside the hotel. It looks like there’s
been some sort of fight in the penthouse. Do you want access?”
“Please.”
The image from the small synthetic
bird hovering above the park filled her brain. Its artificial tissue wings were
flapping constantly to hold it steady in the middle of the snowstorm, producing
an awkward juddering. A visual-wavelength optical sensor was scanning across
the penthouse’s broad windows. One of them had a large jagged hole in the
middle.
“I can see a lot of glass on the
carpet,” Monica datavised. “Something came in through that window, not out.”
“But what?” Adrian asked. “That’s
the twenty-fifth floor.”
Monica continued her review. The
living-room doors had been smashed open. Long black scorch marks were chiselled
deep into the one lying on the floor.
Then she switched focus to a
settee. There was a foot dangling over the armrest.
“No wonder Mzu was in a hurry to
leave again,” she said out loud. “The possessed have tracked her down.”
“Her car isn’t heading for the
spaceport,” Samuel said. “Could the two locals with her be possessed?”
“Possible,” Monica agreed
hesitantly. “But the observation team said she seemed to be leading the others.
They didn’t think she was being coerced.”
“Calvert has started following
her,” Adrian datavised.
“Okay. Let’s see where they’re all
so eager to get to.” She datavised the car’s control processor to catch up with
the observation team’s vehicles.
“Someone else has now joined us,”
Ngong said. His voice was split between amusement and surprise. “That makes
over a dozen cars now.”
“And poor old Baranovich said to
come alone,” Alkad said. “Is he in one of them?”
“I don’t know. One car certainly
has some possessed in it.”
“Doesn’t that bother you?” Voi
asked.
Alkad sank down deeper into her
seat, getting herself comfortable. “Not really. This is like old times for me.”
“What if they stop us?”
“Gelai, what are the police
thinking?”
“They’re curious, Doctor. Make that
very curious.”
“That’s okay then; as long as they
aren’t going to stop us we’re all right. I know the agencies, they will want to
know where we’re going first before they make their move.”
“But Baranovich—”
“They’re his problem, not ours. If
he doesn’t want me followed then it’s up to him to do something about it.”
Alkad’s car navigated itself along
Harrisburg’s abandoned streets at a doggedly legal speed. Despite that, they
made good progress, leaving the closely packed buildings of the city centre
behind to venture out into the more industrial suburbs. Thirty minutes into the
journey, the last of the urban clutter was discarded behind them. The slightly
elevated roadway cut straight across a flat alluvial plain that was open all
the way to the sea eighty kilometres away. It was a vast expanse of huge fallow
fields from which tractor mechanoids and tailored bugs had eradicated any
unauthorized vegetation. Trees were stunted and bent by the wind that blew in
from the shore, standing hunched along the line of the drainage canals which
had been dug to tame the rich black soil.
Nothing moved off the road, no
animals or vehicles. They were driving across a snow desert. Large, stiff
flakes were hurled horizontally against the car by the wind, taxing the
guarantee of the lofriction windshield to stay clear. Even so, that didn’t
prevent them from seeing the fifteen cars which were now following them, a
convoy that made no attempt to hide itself.
Adrian Redway had settled himself
into one of the chairs in the ESA’s operation centre and datavised his desktop
processor for a filter program to access the station’s incoming information
streams. Even with the filter he was almost overwhelmed by the quantity of data
available. Neural nanonics assigned priority gradings. Sub-routines took over
from his mind’s natural cross-indexing ability, leaving his consciousness free
to absorb relevant details.
He focused on Mzu, principally
through the observation team, then defined a peripheral activity key to alert
him of any incoming factors which would affect her situation. The rate at which
external events were developing on Nyvan made it unlikely he would be able to
secure Monica much advance warning, but as a veteran of twenty-eight years ESA
service he knew even seconds could change the entire outcome of a field
operation.
“It has to be the ironberg foundry
yard,” he datavised to Monica after they had been driving over the farmland for
twenty uneventful minutes.
“We think so, too,” Monica replied.
“Are the foundry’s landing pads equipped with beacon guidance? If she’s looking
for a spaceplane pickup, they’ll need a controlled approach in this weather.”
“Unless they have military-grade
sensors. But yes, the foundry’s pads have beacons. I wouldn’t like to vouch for
their reliability, mind. I doubt they’ve been serviced since the day they were
installed.”
“Okay, can you run a data sweep of
the foundry? And if you can access it, a security sensor review would be helpful.
I’d like to know if there’s anyone there waiting for her.”
“I don’t think you quite understand
what you’re asking for, that foundry is big. But I’ll put a couple of my
analysts on it. Just don’t expect too much.”
“Thanks.” She gave Samuel a forlorn
look. “Something wrong?”
The Edenist had been accessing
their exchange via his bitek processor block. “I am reminded of the time she
left Tranquillity. We were all following after her rather like this, and look
what happened that time. Possibly we should be the ones taking the initiative.
If the foundry is her intended destination, she may well have a method of
eluding us already in place.”
“Could be. But the only way of
stopping her now is to shoot the car. That would bring the police storming in.”
Samuel accessed the ESA operations
centre computer and reviewed the security police deployment status. “We are a
long way from their designated reinforcements; and we can have the flyers here
in minutes. Hurting the feelings of the Tonala government is an irrelevance
compared to securing the Alchemist. Mzu has done us a favour by coming to such
a remote place.”
“Yeah. Well, if you’re willing to
bring your flyers in to evac us, I’m certainly prepared to commit our people.
We’ve got enough firepower to stomp on the police if—” She broke off as Adrian
datavised again.
“The city air defence network has
just located those missing Organization spaceplanes,” he told her. “They’re
heading right at you, Monica; three of them coming in over the sea at Mach
five. Looks like you were right about the foundry being a pickup zone.”
“My God, she is selling out to
Capone. What a bitch.”
“Looks that way.”
“Can you direct the city network to
shoot the spaceplanes?”
“Yes, if they get closer, but at
the moment they’re out of range.”
“Will they be in range at the
foundry?” Samuel asked.
“No. The network doesn’t have any
missiles, it’s all beam weapons. Tonala relies on its SD platforms to kill any
threat approaching from outside its boundaries.”
“The flyers,” Monica asked Samuel.
“Can they intercept?”
“Yes.” Launch please, he
instructed the pilots.
Monica datavised her armour suit
management processor to run a readiness diagnostic, then pulled her shell
helmet on and sealed it. The other agents began checking their own weapons.
“Joshua, the flyers are all
leaving,” Ashly datavised.
“I was wondering about that,”
Joshua replied. “We’re only about ten kilometres from the ironberg foundry now.
Mzu must have arranged some kind of rendezvous there. Dick’s been running some
checks for us; he says that sections of the foundry electronics are glitched.
There could be some possessed up ahead.”
“Do you need an evac?”
Joshua glanced around the car.
Melvyn and Dahybi weren’t giving anything away, while Dick Keaton was merely
curious. “We’re not in any danger yet,” one of the serjeants said.
“No. But if it happens, it’s going
to happen fast; and we’re not in the strongest position.”
“You can’t pull out now. We’re too
close.”
“You’re telling me,” he muttered.
“All right, we’ll keep on her for now. If we can get close enough to make our
offer, well and good. But if the agencies start getting aggressive, then we
back off. Understood, Ione?”
“Understood.”
“I may be able to offer some
assistance,” Dick Keaton said.
“Oh?”
“The cars in this convoy are all
local models. I have some program commands which could cause trouble in their
control processors. It might help us get closer to your target.”
“If we start doing that to the
agencies, they’ll use their own electronic warfare capability on us,” Melvyn
said. “That’s if they don’t just use a TIP carbine. Everybody knows what’s at
stake.”
“They won’t know it’s us,” Dick
Keaton said.
“You hope,” Melvyn said. “They’re
good, Joshua. No offence to Dick, but the agencies have entire departments of
computer science professors writing black software for them.”
Joshua enjoyed the idea of screwing
up the other cars, but the way they were driving further and further into
isolation was a big mitigating factor. Normal agency rules of minimum
visibility wouldn’t apply out here. If he upset the status quo, Melvyn was
probably right about the reaction he’d get. What he really wanted was Lady
Mac above the horizon to give them some fire support, although even her
sensors would struggle to resolve anything through this snowstorm, and she wasn’t
due up for another forty minutes. “Dick, see what you can do to strengthen our
car processors against agency software. I’ll use your idea if it looks like
she’s getting away from us.”
“Sure thing.”
“Ashly, can you launch without
causing undue attention?”
“I think so. There has to be
someone observing me, but I’m not picking up any active sensor activity.”
“Okay, launch and fly a
low-visibility holding pattern ten kilometres from the yard. We’ll shout for
you.”
The four Edenist flyers picked up
velocity as they curved around the outskirts of Harrisburg, hitting Mach two
thirty kilometres from the coast. Their smoothly rounded noses lined up on the
ironberg foundry. Snowflakes flowing through their coherent magnetic fields
sparkled a vivid blue around the forward fuselages, then vaporised to
fluorescent purple streamers. To anyone under their path, it appeared as though
four sunburst comets were rumbling through the atmosphere.
It was the one failing of Kulu’s
ion field technology that it could never be successfully hidden from sensors.
The three Organization spaceplanes streaking in from the sea spotted them as
soon as they lifted from the spaceport. Electronic warfare arrays were
activated, seeking to blind the flyers with a full-spectrum barrage. Air-to-air
missiles dropped out of their wing recesses and shot ahead at Mach ten.
The Edenist flyers saw them coming
through the electronic hash. They peeled away from each other, arcing through
the sky in complex evasion manoeuvres. Chaff and signature decoys spewed out of
the flyers. Masers locked on and fired continuous pulses at the incoming
drones.
Explosions thundered unseen above
the farmland. Some of the missiles succumbed to the masers, while others
followed their programs to detonate in preloaded patterns. Clouds of kinetic
shrapnel threw up lethal blockades along the trajectories they predicted the
flyers would use. But there were too few missiles left to create an effective
kill zone.
The flyers stormed through.
It should have ended then, a duel
between energy beam weapons and fuselage shielding, the two opponents so far
away that in all probability they would never even see each other. But the snow
forbade that; absorbing maser and thermal induction energy, cutting the
effective strike range of both sides to less than five hundred metres. Flyers
and spaceplanes had to get close to each other, spiralling around and around,
looping, twisting, diving, climbing. Aggressors desperate to keep their beams
on one point of their target’s fuselage; targets frantic to keep moving,
spinning to disperse the energy input. A genuine dogfight developed. Pilots
blinded by the snow and clouds, dependent on sensors harassed by unremitting
electronic warfare impulses. Given that both the flyers and the spaceplanes
were multi-role craft, the manoeuvres lacked any real acrobatic innovation.
Predication programs were the true knights of the sky, allowing pilots to keep
a steady lock on their opponents. The flyers’ superior agility began to pay
dividends. The spaceplanes were limited by the ancient laws of aerodynamic lift
and stability, restricting their tactics to classical aerial manoeuvres. While
the flyers could move in any direction they wanted to providing their fusion
generators had enough power.
The Organization was always going
to lose.
One by one, the crippled
spaceplanes tumbled out of the sky. Two of them smashed into the frozen soil
outside the foundry yard, the third into the sea.
Overhead, the flyers closed
formation and began to circle the vast foundry yard in anticipation of claiming
their prize.
Urschel and Pinzola slid up over the horizon.
Warned by the screams of souls torn back into the beyond, they knew what to
look for. X-ray lasers stabbed down four times, their power unchecked by gravid
clouds or swirling ice crystals.
The docking cradle rose out of the
spaceport bay, exposing the fuselage of the Mount’s Delta to a blaze of
sunlight. At this juncture of a normal departure, a starship would spread its
thermo-dump panels before it disengaged. Quinn told Dwyer to switch their heat
exchange circuits to an internal store. Umbilical feeds withdrew from their
couplings in the lower hull, then the hold-down latches retracted.
“Fly us fifty kilometres along
Jesup’s spin axis,” Quinn said. “Then hold us there.”
Dwyer flicked a throat mike down
from his headset and muttered instructions to the flight computer. Ion
thrusters lifted the clipper-class ship clear of the bay, then the secondary
drive came on. Mount’s Delta accelerated away at a fifteenth of a gee,
following a clean arc above the surface of the counter-rotating spaceport.
Quinn used the holoscreens
surrounding his acceleration couch to display images from the external sensor
suite. Nothing else moved around the gigantic asteroid. The surrounding
industrial stations had been shut down for days and were now drifting out of
alignment. An inert fleet of personnel commuters, MSVs, inter-orbit cargo
craft, and tankers were all docked to Jesup’s counter-rotating spaceport,
filling nearly every bay.
As soon as the starship rose away
from the apex of the spaceport, Quinn switched the optical sensors to track the
other asteroids. Dwyer watched the screens in silence as the three deserted
asteroids appeared. This time there was movement visible, tiny stars were
closing on the dark rocks at high velocity.
“Looks like we’re just in time,”
Quinn said. “The nations are getting upset about losing their ships.” He spoke
briefly into his mike, instructing the flight computer.
Four secure military-grade laser
communicators deployed from the starship’s fuselage. One pointed back at Jesup,
while the other three acquired a lock on the abandoned asteroids. Each one
fired an ultraviolet beam at their target, its encrypted code requesting a
response. In answer, four similar ultraviolet beams transfixed the Mount’s
Delta. Impossible to intercept or interfere, they linked Quinn into the
equipment his teams had been setting up.
Diagrams flashed up on the bridge
screens as modulated information flooded back along the beams. Quinn entered a series
of codes and watched in satisfaction as the equipment acknowledged his command
authority.
“Ninety-seven nukes on-line,” he
said. “By the look of it, they’re rigging another five as we speak. Dumb
arseholes.”
“Is that enough?” Dwyer asked
anxiously. Loyalty would probably not be any defence if things weren’t going
precisely to plan. He just wished he knew what that plan was.
Quinn’s grin was playful. “Let’s
find out, shall we?”
“No survivors,” Samuel said.
“None.” His dignified face betrayed a profound sorrow, one hardened by the grey
light of the snow-veiled landscape.
For Monica the loss was heightened
by the terrible remoteness of the event. A few swift diffuse flashes of light
lost among the occluded sky above the convoy, as if sheet lightning were
flaring amid the snowstorm. They had seen and heard nothing of the decimated
flyers crashing on the eastern edge of the foundry yard.
We have the pilots safe, the Hoya told Samuel and the other
Edenists. Fortunately the flyers’ shielding held out long enough for the
transfer to complete.
Thank you, that’s excellent
news, Samuel said. “But not
their souls,” he whispered under his breath.
Monica heard him, and met his gaze.
Their minds were a unison of grief, less than affinity but certainly sharing
awareness.
“Practicalities,” he said
forlornly.
“Yes.”
The car gave a fast unexpected
lurch as the brakes suddenly engaged, then cut out. Everyone inside was flung
forwards against their seat straps.
“Electronic warfare,” shouted the
ESA electronics expert who was riding with them. “They’re glitching our
processor.”
“Is it the possessed?” Monica
asked.
“No. Definitely coming through the
net.”
The car braked again. This time the
wheels locked for several seconds, starting to skid across the slushy road
before an emergency program released them.
“Go to manual,” Monica instructed.
She could see other cars in the convoy twisting and slithering across the dual
roadway. One of the police vehicles hit the safety barrier and shot down the
embankment into a frozen ditch, spraying snow as it went. Another of the big
embassy cars thumped into the rear of Monica’s car, crunching some of the
bodywork. The impact spun them around. Monica’s armour suit stiffened as she
was shaken from side to side.
“It’s not affecting Mzu,” Samuel
said. “She’s pulling away from us.”
“Disable the police cars,” Monica
told the electronics expert. “And that bloody Calvert, too.” She felt a
sincerely unprofessional glee as she ordered that, but it was perfectly
legitimate. By separating herself and Mzu from the police and Calvert she was
reducing the opportunity for interference in the mission goal.
Their driver finally seemed to
master the intricacies of the car’s manual controls, and they shot forwards,
weaving around the other disorientated cars. “Adrian?” Monica datavised.
“With you. Nobody here can origin
that electronic warfare outbreak.”
“Doesn’t matter, we’re on top of
it.”
“Calvert’s in front of us,” the
driver said. “He’s right on Mzu’s tail, this hasn’t affected him at all.”
“Shit!” Monica directed her shell
helmet sensors to switch to infrared, and just caught the pink blob of
Calvert’s car hidden by snow a hundred and twenty metres ahead of them. Behind
her, two embassy cars were already pulling away from the stalled police
vehicles, while another one was creeping along the verge, trying to get around.
“Adrian, we’re going to need an
evac. Fast.”
“Not easy.”
“What do you fucking mean? Where
are the embassy’s Royal Marine utility planes? They should be on backup, for
God’s sake!”
“They’re both liaising with the
local defence force. It would have been suspicious if I’d called them back.”
“Do it now!”
“I’m on it. You should have one
there in about twenty minutes.”
Monica thumped an armoured fist
into the seat, splitting some of the fabric. The car was racing on through the
snow, surprisingly stable for one under manual control. Four sets of headlights
were visible behind them. A fast datavised review informed Monica they were all
embassy cars, which gave her some satisfaction.
She put her machine gun down and
picked up a maser carbine, then undid her seat belt.
“Now what?” Samuel asked as she
leaned forward to get a better view through the windscreen.
“Joshua Calvert, your time is up.”
“Uh oh,” said the electronics
expert. He looked up in reflex.
Ashly approached the ironberg
foundry yard from the west, following five minutes behind the Edenist flyers.
The spaceplane’s forward passive sensor suite revealed the basics of the
missile launch and dogfight. Then the X-ray lasers had fired from orbit. He held
his breath as the sensors reported a microwave radar beam sweep across the
fuselage. It came from the starships seven hundred kilometres above.
Now is not a good time to die.
Especially as I know what’s in store if I do. Kelly was right: screw fate and
destiny, just spend the rest of time in zero-tau. I think I might try that if I
get out of this.
Nothing happened.
Ashly let out a shudder of breath,
finding his palms sweating. “Thank you whoever thought up low-visibility
profiling,” he said out loud. With its top-grade stealth systems active, the
spaceplane was probably invisible to any sensor on, or orbiting, Nyvan. His
only worry had been an infrared signature, but the thick snow eradicated that.
He ordered the spaceplane’s
computer to open a secure channel to Tonala’s net, hoping no one with heavy
weaponry would detect the tiny signal. “Joshua?” he datavised.
“Jesus, Ashly, we thought you’d
been hit.”
“Not in this machine.”
“Where are you?”
“Thirty kilometres from the foundry
yard. I’m about to go into a holding pattern. What’s happening down there?”
“Some idiot used electronic warfare
on the cars. We’re okay; Dick hardened our programs. But the police are out of
it for the moment. We’re still on Mzu’s tail. I think a couple of embassy cars
are behind us, maybe more.”
“Is Mzu still heading for the
foundry yard?”
“Looks like it.”
“Well unless the cavalry comes up
over the hill, we’re the only pickup she’s got left. There’s nothing flying
within my sensor range.”
“Unless they’re stealthed, too.”
“You’ve always got to look on the
bleak side, haven’t you?”
“Just being cautious.”
“Well if they’re stealthed, I . .
.” Ashly broke off as the flight computer warned him of another radar sweep
emanating from the starships. The beam was configured differently this time, a
ground scan profile. “Joshua, they’re hunting you. Get out! Get out of the
car!”
Every electronic warfare block in
the embassy car was datavising frantic alerts.
We are being targeted by the
Organization frigates, Samuel
told Hoya and Niveu. There was little he could do to conceal his rising
panic. Once, the knowledge that his memories would be held safely in the Hoya
would have been enough for him. Now he wasn’t so sure that was all that
mattered. You must stop them. If they kill Mzu, it’s all over.
The snow-lashed sky behind the car
flashed purple.
After tens of kilometres of
entirely passive pursuit across the tundralike farmland, the Tonala security
police had been caught out badly by the sudden electronic warfare attack. Of
all the cars, theirs came off worst, leaving them scattered across both
roadways as their surveillance suspects, quite infuriatingly, dodged around
them as if they were nothing more than inconvenient roadcones. It took time for
them to rally; processors had to be disengaged to allow the manual controls to
be activated, officers from cars that had gone over the embankment or smashed
into the barrier sprinted for cars that were still functional, swiping huge
gobs of crash cushion foam from their suits. Once they had reorganized they
began to drive fast after their quarry.
It meant that their cars were still
bunched together, supplying the Organization starships with the biggest target.
Oscar Kearn, uncertain which one contained Mzu, decided to start there and
eliminate the other cars one at a time until her soul was claimed by the
beyond. With that, they would have won. Bringing her back, one way or another,
was all that mattered. Now the spaceplanes had been destroyed, she would have
to die. Fortunately, as an ex-military man himself, he had prepared his
fallback options. So far Mzu had proved amazingly elusive, or just plain lucky.
He was determined to put an end to that.
The ironberg foundry yard pickup
had been planned in some detail with Baranovich, its location and timing quite
critical. Although Oscar Kearn hadn’t actually mentioned how critical to
the newly allied Cossack, nor why. But he was satisfied that if things went bad
for the Organization on the ground, Mzu would never survive.
Firstly, the frigates would be
overhead, able to initiate a ground strike. And if she somehow escaped that . .
.
While the Organization starships
were docked with the Spirit of Freedom they had gained command access to
the tugs delivering Tonala’s ironbergs for splashdown. A small alteration had
been made to the trajectory of one tug.
Far above Nyvan’s ocean, to the
west of Tonala, an ironberg was already slipping through the ionosphere. This
time, no recovery fleet would be needed. No ships would be employed to tow it
on a week-long voyage to the foundry yard.
It was taking the direct route.
The first X-ray laser blast struck
the police car which was lying down the embankment, hood embedded in the ditch.
It vaporized in a violent shock wave, sending droplets of molten metal, roasted
earth, and superheated steam churning into the air. All the snow within a
two-hundred-metre radius was ripped from the ground before the heat turned it
back into water. The other car abandoned on the road was somersaulted over and
over, smashing its windows and sending wheels spinning through the air.
The first explosion made Alkad
wince. She glanced out of the rear window, seeing an orange corona slowly
shrinking back down into the road.
“What the hell did that?” Voi
asked.
“Not us,” Gelai said. “Not one of
the possessed, not even a dozen. We don’t have that much power.”
A second explosion sounded,
rattling the car badly.
“It’s me,” Alkad said. “They want
me.”
Another explosion lit up the sky.
This time the pressure wave pushed at their car, sending it skidding sideways
before the control processor could compensate.
“They’re getting closer,” Eriba
cried. “Mother Mary, help us.”
“There’s not much She can do for us
now,” Alkad said. “It’s up to the agencies.”
The four voidhawks were in a
standard five-hundred-kilometre equatorial parking orbit above Nyvan when Hoya
received Samuel’s frantic call. Their position allowed them to shadow the
Organization frigates which were strung out along a high-inclination orbit. At
the time, only the Urschel and the Pinzola were above the
ironberg foundry yard’s horizon. Raimo was trailing them by two thousand
kilometres.
Although it was four thousand
kilometres from the Urschel and Pinzola, Hoya’s sensors
could just detect the brilliant purple discharge in the clouds below the
Organization frigates as they fired on a fourth car. The voidhawk began to
accelerate at seven gees, followed by its three cousins. All four went to full
combat alert status. A salvo of fifteen combat wasps slid out of Hoya’s
lower hull cradles, each one charging away in a different direction at thirty
gees, leaving the voidhawk at the centre of an expanding and dimming nimbus of
exhaust plasma. After five seconds, the drones curved around to align
themselves on the Organization frigates.
Urschel and Pinzola had no choice but to defend
themselves. Their reaction time was hardly optimum, but twenty-five combat
wasps flew out of each frigate to counter the attackers, antimatter propulsion
quickly pushing them up to forty gees. The frigates broke off their attack on the
cars, realigning their X-ray lasers ready for the inevitable swarm of
submunitions.
Raimo launched its own salvo of combat wasps in
support of its confederates, opening up a new angle of attack against the
voidhawks. Two of them responded with defensive salvos.
Over a hundred combat wasps
launched in less than twenty seconds. The glare from their drives shimmered off
the nighttime clouds below, a radiance far exceeding any natural moonlight.
Despite the continuing electronic
warfare emission from the SD platforms, none of the orbiting network sensors
could miss such a deadly spectacle. Threat analysis programs controlling each
network initiated what they estimated was an appropriate level of response.
Officially, Tonala’s ironberg
foundry yard sprawled for over eighteen kilometres along the coast, extending
back inland between eight and ten kilometres according to the lie of the land.
That, anyway, was the area which the government had originally set aside for
the project in 2407, with an optimism which matched the one prevalent during
Floreso’s arrival into Nyvan orbit three years earlier. Apart from the
asteroid’s biosphere cavern, the foundry became Tonala’s largest ever civil
engineering development.
It started off in a promising
enough fashion. First came a small coastal port to berth the tugs which
recovered the ironbergs from their mid-ocean splashdown. With that construction
under way, the engineers started excavating a huge seawater canal running
parallel to the coastline. A hundred and twenty metres wide and thirty deep, it
was designed to accommodate the ironbergs, allowing them to be towed into the
Disassembly Sheds which were to be the centrepiece of the yard. The main canal
branched twenty times, sprouting kilometre-long channels which would each end
at a shed.
After the first seven Disassembly
Sheds were completed, an audit by the Tonalan Treasury revealed the nation
didn’t require the metal production capacity already built. Funds for the
remaining Disassembly Sheds were suspended until the economy expanded to
warrant them. That was in 2458. Since then, the thirteen unused branch canals
gradually choked up with weeds and silt until they eventually became nothing
more than large, perfectly rectangular saltwater marshes. In 2580, Harrisburg
University’s biology department successfully had them declared part of the
national nature park reserve.
Those Disassembly Sheds which did
get built were massive cuboid structures, two hundred metres a side, and very
basic. An immense skeletal framework was thrown up, bridging the end of the
branch canal, then cloaked in flat composite panels. A vertical petal door
above the canal allowed the ironberg egress. Inside, powerful fission blades on
the end of gantry arms performed a preprogrammed dissection, slicing the
ironberg into thousand-tonne segments like some gigantic metal fruit.
A second network of smaller canals
connected the Disassembly Sheds with the actual foundry buildings, allowing the
bulky, awkwardly shaped segments of spongesteel to be floated directly to the
smelter intakes. The desolate land between the Disassembly Sheds, foundry
buildings, and canals was crisscrossed by a maze of roads, some no more than
dirt tracks, while others were broad decaying roadways built to carry heavy
plant during the heady early days of construction. None of them had modern
guidance tracking cables; foundry crews didn’t care, they knew the layout and
drove manually. It meant that any visitors venturing deep into the yard
invariably took wrong turnings. Not that they could ever get lost, the
gargantuan Disassembly Sheds were visible for tens of kilometres, rising up out
of the featureless alluvial plain like the blocks some local god had forgotten
to sculpt mountains out of during Nyvan’s creation. They made perfect navigational
reference aides. Under normal conditions.
The road was over eighty years old;
coastal winters had washed soil away from under it and frozen the surface,
flexing it up and down until it snapped. There wasn’t a single flat stretch
anywhere, a fact disguised by fancifully windsculpted drifts of snow. Alkad’s
car lumbered along at barely more than walking pace as the suspension rocked
the body from side to side.
They’d driven into the yard at a
dangerously high speed along the roadway. A fifth car had been wiped out behind
them, then the blasts of energy from space seemed to stop. Alkad datavised the
car’s control processor to turn off at the first junction. According to the map
she had loaded into her neural nanonics memory cell, the Disassembly Sheds were
strung out across the yard’s northern quadrant.
But as she was rapidly discovering:
the map is not the territory.
“I can’t see a bloody thing,” Voi
said. “I don’t even know if we’re on a road anymore.”
Eriba peered forwards, his nose
almost touching the windshield. “The Sheds have to be out there somewhere.
They’re huge.”
“The guidance processor says we’re
heading north,” Alkad said. “Keep looking.” She glanced out of the back window
to see the car following her bouncing about heavily, its headlight beams
slashing about through the snow. “Can you sense Baranovich?” she asked Gelai.
“Faintly, yes.” Her hand waved
ahead and slightly to the left. “He’s out there; and he’s got a lot of friends
with him.”
“How many?”
“About twenty, maybe more. It’s
difficult at this distance, and they’re moving about.”
Voi sucked her breath in fiercely.
“Too many.”
“Is Lodi with them?”
“Possibly.”
A massive chunk of machinery lay
along the side of the road, some metallic fossil from the age of greater
ambitions. Once they’d passed it, a strong red-gold radiance flooded over the
car. A faint roar made the windows tremble.
“One of the smelters,” Ngong said.
“Which means the Disassembly Sheds
are on this side.” Voi pointed confidently.
The road became smoother, and the
car picked up speed. Its tyres began to squelch through slush that had melted
in the radiance of the smelter. They could see the silhouette of the furnace
building now, a long black rectangle with hangarlike doors fully open to show
eight streams of radiant molten metal pouring out of the hulking smelter into
narrow channels which wound away deeper into the building. Thick jets of steam
were shooting out of vents in the roof. Snowflakes reverted to sour rain as
they fell through them.
Alkad yelled in fright, and datavised
an emergency stop order to the car’s control processor. They juddered to a halt
two metres short of the canal. A segment of ironberg was sliding along sedately
just in front of them, a tarnished silver banana shape with its skin pocked by
millions of tiny black craters.
The sky above turned a brilliant
silver, stamping a black and white image of the canal and the ironberg segment
on the back of Alkad’s retina. “Holy Mother Mary,” she breathed.
The awesome light faded.
“My processor block’s crashed,” Eriba
said. He was twisting his head around, trying to find the source of the light.
“What was that?”
“They’re shooting at the cars
again,” Voi said.
Alkad datavised the car’s control
processor, not surprised when she couldn’t get a response. It confirmed the
cause: emp. “I wish it was only that,” she told them, marvelling sadly at their
innocence. Even now they didn’t grasp the enormity of what was involved, the
length to which others would go. She reached under the dashboard and twisted
the release for the manual steering column. Thankfully, it swung up in front of
a startled Eriba. “Drive,” she instructed. “There’ll be a bridge or something
in a minute. But just drive.”
“Oh, bloody hell,” Sarha grumbled.
“Here we go again.”
Lady Mac’s combat sensor clusters were relaying an
all-too-clear image of space above Nyvan into her neural nanonics. Ten seconds
ago all had been clear and calm. The various SD platforms were still conducting
their pointless electronic war unabated. Ships were moving towards the three abandoned
asteroids, two squadrons of frigates from different nations were closing on
Jesup; while Tonala’s low-orbit squadron was moving to intercept the
Organization ships. This orbital chess game between the nations could have gone
on for hours yet, allowing Joshua and the others plenty of time to get back up
to the ship, and for all of them to jump the hell away from this deranged
planet.
Then the Organization frigates had
started shooting. The voidhawks accelerated out of parking orbit. And space was
full of combat wasps.
“Velocity confirmed,” Beaulieu
barked. “Forty gees, plus. Antimatter propulsion.”
“Christ,” Liol said. “Now what do
we do?”
“Nothing,” Sarha snapped. So far,
the conflict was ahead of them and at a slightly higher altitude. “Standby for emp.”
She datavised a procedural stand-by order into the flight computer. “Damn, I
wish Joshua were here, he could fly us out of this in his sleep.”
Liol gave her a hurt look.
Four swarms of combat wasps were in
flight, etching dazzling strands of light across the darkened continents and
oceans. They began to jettison their submunitions, and everything became far
too complicated for the human mind to follow. Symbols erupted across the
display Sarha’s neural nanonics provided as she asked the tactical analysis
program for simplified interpretations.
Nyvan’s nightside had ceased to
become dark, enlivened by hundreds of incandescent exhausts blurring together
as they engaged each other. It was the fusion bombs which went off first, then
an antimatter charge detonated.
Space ahead of Lady Mac went
into blazeout. No sensor was capable of penetrating that stupendous energy
release.
Tactically, it wasn’t the best
action. The blast destroyed every combat wasp submunitions friend or foe within
a hundred kilometres, while its emp disabled an even larger number.
“Damage report?” Sarha asked.
“Some sensor damage,” Beaulieu
said. “Backups coming on-line. No fuselage energy penetration.”
“Liol!”
“Uh? Oh. Yeah. Flight systems
intact, generators on-line. Attitude stable.”
“The SD platforms are launching,”
Beaulieu warned. “They’re really letting loose. Saturation assault!”
“I can get us out of here,” Liol
said. “Two minutes to jump altitude.”
“No,” Sarha said. “If we move,
they’ll target us. Right now we stay low and inert. We don’t launch, we don’t
emit. If anything does lock on, we kill it with the masers and countermeasure
its launch origin. Then you shift our inclination three degrees either way, not
our altitude. Got that?”
“Got it.” His voice was hot and
high.
“Relax, Liol, everyone’s forgotten
about us. We just stay intact to pick Joshua up, that’s our mission, that’s all
we do. I want you cool for a smooth response when it comes. And it will. Use a
stim program if you have to.”
“No. I’m all right now.”
Another antimatter explosion
obliterated a vast section of the universe. Broken submunitions came spinning
out of the epicentre.
“Lock on,” Beaulieu reported.
“Three submunitions. One kinetic, two nukes. I think; catalogue match is sixty
per cent. Twenty gees only, real geriatrics.”
“Okay,” Sarha said, proud to find
how calm she was. “Kick-ass time.”
A deluge of light from the second
antimatter explosion revealed the Disassembly Sheds to all the cars speeding
across the foundry yard. A row of blank two-dimensional squares receding to the
horizon.
“Go for it!” Alkad urged.
Eriba thumbed the throttle
forwards. The snow was abating now, revealing more of the ground ahead, giving
him confidence. Furnaces glowed in the distance, coronas of slumbering dragons
smeared by flurries of grey flakes. The battered road took them past
long-forsaken fields of carbon concrete where ranks of sun-bleached gantries
stood as memorials to machinery and buildings aborted by financial reality.
Pipes wide enough to swallow the car angled up out of the stony soil like
metallized worms; their ends capped by rusting grilles which issued strange
heavy vapours. Lonely wolf-analogues prowled among the destitute technological
carcasses, skulking in the shadows whenever the car’s headlights ventured
close.
Seeing the other cars falling
behind, Eriba aimed for a swing bridge over the next small canal. The car
wheels left the floor as it charged over the apex of the two segments. Alkad
was flung forwards as it banged down on the other side.
“That’s Shed Six,” Voi said,
eagerly looking out of a side window. “One more canal to go.”
“We’re going to make it,” Eriba
shouted back. He was completely absorbed by the race, adrenaline rush giving
his world a provocative edge.
“That’s good,” Alkad said. Anything
else would have sounded churlish.
The snow clouds above the yard were
slowly tearing open, showing ragged tracts of evening sky. It was alight with
plasma fire; drive exhausts and explosions merging and expanding into a single
blanket of iridescence that was alive with choppy internal tides.
Joshua kinked his neck back at a
difficult angle to watch it. The car jounced about, determined to deny him an
uninterrupted view. Since the first antimatter bomb’s emp had wrecked their
car’s electronics Dahybi had been driving them manually. It was a bumpy ride.
Another antimatter explosion turned
the remaining clouds transparent. Joshua’s retinal implants prevented any
lasting damage to his eyes, but he still had to blink furiously to clear the
brilliant purple afterimage away.
“Jesus, I hope they’re all right up
there.”
“Sarha knows what she’s doing,”
Melvyn said. “Besides, we’ve got another twenty minutes before they’re above
the horizon, and that blast was almost directly overhead.”
“Sure, right.”
“Hang on,” Dahybi called.
The car shot over a swing bridge,
taking flight at the top. They thumped down, skittling sideways until the rear
bumper smacked into the road’s side barrier. A wicked grinding sound told them
they’d lost more bodywork until Dahybi managed to straighten out again.
“She’s pulling ahead,” Melvyn
pointed out calmly.
“Can you do any fucking better?”
Dahybi yelled back.
Joshua couldn’t remember the
composed node specialist ever getting so aggrieved before. He heard another crunch
behind them as the first embassy car cleared the bridge.
“Just keep on her,” Joshua said.
“You’re doing fine.”
“Where the hell is she going?”
Melvyn wondered out loud.
“More to the point, why doesn’t she
care that this circus procession is following her?” Joshua replied. “She has to
be pretty confident about whoever she’s meeting.”
“Who or what.” Melvyn sucked in a
breath. “You don’t think the Alchemist is hidden around here, do you? I mean,
look at this place, you could lose a squadron of starships out here.”
“Don’t let’s imagine things worse
than they are,” Joshua said. “My main concern is those two possessed with her.”
“I should be able to deal with
them,” a serjeant said. It touched one of the weapons clipped to its belt.
Joshua managed a twitched smile. It
was becoming harder for him to associate these increasingly combat-adept
serjeants with the old sweet, sexy Ione.
“What’s the Alchemist?” Dick Keaton
asked.
When Joshua turned back to their
passenger, he was startled by the flood of curiosity emanating from the man. It
was what he imagined Edenist affinity must be like. The emotion dominated. “Need
to know only, sorry.”
Dick Keaton seemed to have some
trouble returning to his usual blasé cockiness.
It bothered Joshua quite badly for
some reason. The first glimpse of something hidden behind the mask. Something
very wrong, and very deeply hidden.
“They’re changing direction,”
Dahybi warned.
Mzu’s car had left the narrow road
which ran between the swing bridges, turning onto a more substantial road which
led towards Disassembly Shed Four. Dahybi tugged the steering column over as
far as it would go, almost missing the junction as they careered around after
her.
After standing up against two
centuries of saltwater corrosion, cheap slipshod maintenance, bird excrement,
algae, and in one memorable instance a small aircraft crash, the walls and roof
of Disassembly Shed Four were in a sorry state. Despite that, the structure’s
scale was still impressive to the point of intimidating. Joshua had seen far
bigger buildings, but not in isolation like this.
“Joshua, look at the last car,” a
serjeant said.
Five other cars were still part of
the chase. Four of them were big towncars from the Kulu embassy; all smooth
dark bodies with opaque windows and powerful fanbeam headlights. The fifth had
started out an ordinary car with dark green bodywork; now it was some primitive
monstrosity with bright scarlet paint that was covered in brash stickers. Six
round headlights were affixed to a lattice of metal struts which covered the
front grille. Primitive it might have been, but it was closing up fast on the
last embassy car, its broad tyres giving it excellent traction on the slush.
“Jesus, they’re in front and
behind.”
“This might be a good time for us
to retire gracefully,” Melvyn said.
Joshua glanced ahead. They were
already in the shadow thrown by Disassembly Shed Four. Mzu’s car was almost at
the base of the colossal wall, and braking to a halt.
It was very tempting. And he was in
an agony of denial not knowing what had happened to Lady Mac.
“Trouble,” Dick Keaton said. He was
holding up a processor block, swinging it around to try to locate something.
“Some kind of electronic distortion is focusing on us. Don’t know what kind,
it’s more powerful than the emp though.”
Joshua ordered his neural nanonics
to run a diagnostic. The program never completed. “Possessed!” intuition was
screaming at him. “Out, everybody out. Go for cover.”
Dahybi slammed the brakes on. The
doors were opening before they stopped. Mzu’s car was fifteen metres in front
of them, stationary and empty.
Joshua threw himself out of the
car, taking a couple of fast steps before flinging himself flat onto the slush.
One of the serjeants hit the road beside him.
A tremendous jet of white fire
squirted down from the shed. It swamped the top of the car, sending ravenous
tentacles curling down through the open doors. Glass blew out, and the interior
combusted instantly, burning with eerie fury.
Ione knew exactly what she had to
do, one consciousness puppeting two bodies. As soon as the first wave of heat swelled
overhead she was rising, adopting a crouch position. Four hands were bringing
four different guns to bear. As there was one serjeant on either side of the
car, she could triangulate the source of the energistic attack perfectly: a
line of dirt-greyed windows thirty metres up the shed wall. Two of them had
swung open.
She opened fire. First priority was
to suppress the possessed, give them so much to worry about they’d be unable to
continue their own assault. Two of the guns she held were rapid-fire machine
pistols, capable of firing over a hundred bullets a second. She used them in
half-second bursts, swinging them in fast arcs. The windows, surrounding
panels, stress rods, and secondary structural girders disintegrated into an
avalanche of scything chips as the bullets savaged them. The heavy-calibre
rifles followed, explosive-tipped shells chewing ferociously at the edges of
the initial devastation. Then she began slamming rounds into the panelling
where she estimated the walkway the possessed were using was situated.
“Go!” she bellowed from both
throats. “Get inside, there’s cover there.”
Joshua rolled over fast and started
sprinting. Melvyn was right behind him. There was nothing to hear above the
bone-jarring vibration of the rifles, no pounding footsteps or shouts of alarm.
He just kept running.
A streamer of white fire churned
through the air above him. It was hard to distinguish in the light fluxing down
from the orbital battle. The foundry yard was soaked in a brightness twice as
great as the noonday sun, a glare made all the worse by the snow.
Ione saw the fire coming right at
her down one half of her vision and pointed the rifle and machine gun along the
angle of approach. She held the triggers down on both of them, bullets flaring
indigo as if they were tracer rounds. The white fire struck, and she cancelled
the serjeant’s tactile nerves, banishing pain. Her machine-gun magazine was
exhausted, but she kept on firing the rifle, holding it steady even though the
fire burned away her eyes along with her leathery skin.
Then her consciousness was in only
one of the bitek constructs; she could see the flaming outline of the other
fall to the ground. And shadows were flittering in the dusk behind the yawning
hole she’d blasted in the wall. She slapped a new magazine in the machine gun
and raised both barrels.
Joshua had just passed Mzu’s car
when the explosive round went crack mere centimetres from his skull. He
flinched, throwing his arms up defensively. A small door in the shed wall just
in front of him disintegrated. It took a tremendous act of trust, but he kept
on going. Ione had opened the way. There had to be some kind of sanctuary in
there.
Alkad Mzu didn’t regard the
interior of Disassembly Shed Four as sanctuary, exactly, but she was grateful
to reach it nonetheless. The cars were still pursuing her, berserk high-speed
skids and swerves across the road showing just how intent their occupants were.
At least inside the shed she could choose her opponents.
Just as Ngong closed the small door
she caught a glimpse of the surviving police cars leaping the swing bridge,
their blue and red strobes flashing. The snow was hot with irradiated light
from the battle above, and growing ever brighter. Ngong clanged the door shut
and slammed the bolts across.
Alkad stood waiting for her retinal
implants to adjust to the sombre darkness. It took them longer than it should;
and her neural nanonics were totally off-line. Baranovich was close.
They made their way forwards
through a forest of metal pillars. The shed’s framework structure extended some
distance from the panel wall it was supporting, uncountable trusses and struts
melding together in asymmetric junctions. Looking straight up, it was
impossible to see the roof, only the labyrinthine intertexture of black metal
forming an impenetrable barrier. Each tube and I-beam was slick with water,
beads of condensation tickled by gravity until they dropped. With the shed’s
conditioning turned off, the inside was a permanent drizzle.
Alkad led the others forwards, out
from under the artless pillars. There was no ironberg in the huge basin at the
middle of the shed, so the water was slopping quietly against the rim. The
cranes, the gantry arms with their huge fission blades, the mobile inspection
platforms, all of them hung still and silent around the sides of the central
high bay. Sounds didn’t echo here, they were absorbed by the prickly fur of
metal inside the walls. Scraps of light escaped through lacunas in the roof
buttresses, producing a crisscross of white beams that always seemed to fade
away before they reached the ground. Big seabirds scurried about through the
air, endlessly swapping perches as if they were searching for the perfect
vantage point.
“Up here, Dr Mzu,” a voice called
out.
She turned around, head tilted
back, hand held in a salute to shield her face from the gentle rain. Baranovich
was standing on a walkway forty metres above the ground, leaning casually
against the safety railing. His colourful Cossack costume shone splendidly amid
the gloom. Several people stood in the shadows behind him.
“All right,” she said. “I’m here.
Where’s my transport off-planet? From what I can see, there’s some difficulty
in orbit right now.”
“Don’t get smart with me, Doctor.
The Organization isn’t going to be wiped out by one small war between SD
platforms.”
“Lodi is up there,” Gelai said
quietly. “The other possessed are becoming agitated by the approaching cars.”
“I don’t suppose it will,” Alkad
shouted back. “So our arrangement still stands. You let Lodi go, and I’ll come
with you.”
“The arrangement, Doctor, was that
you come alone. But I’m a reasonable man. I’ll see to it that you reach the
Organization. Oh, and here’s Lodi.”
He was flung over the safety
barrier just as Ione’s guns started to demolish the windows and panelling. His
screams were lost amid the roar of the explosive rounds. Arms windmilled in
pathetic desperation, their motion caught by the strobe effect of the
explosions. He hit the carbon concrete with a dreadful wet thud.
“See, Doctor? I let him go.”
Alkad stared at the lad’s body,
desperate to reject what she’d seen. It was, she realized in some shock, the
first time she’d actually witnessed somebody being killed. Murdered.
“Mother Mary, he was just a boy.”
Voi whimpered behind her.
Baranovich was laughing. Those on
the walkway with him joined hands. A plume of white fire speared down towards
Alkad.
Both Gelai and Ngong grabbed hold
of her arms. When the white fire hit, it was like a sluice of dazzling warm
water. She swayed backwards under the impact, crying out from surprise rather
than pain. The strike abated, leaving her itching all over.
“Step aside,” Baranovich shouted
angrily. “She belongs to us.”
Gelai grinned evilly and raised a
hand as if to wave. The walkway under Baranovich’s feet split with a loud
brassy creak. He gave a dismayed yell and made a grab for the safety rail.
“Run!” Gelai urged.
Alkad hesitated for an instant,
looking back at Lodi’s body for any conceivable sign of life. There was too
much blood for that. Together with the others, she pelted back to the relative
safety of the metal support pillars.
“I can’t die yet,” she said
frantically. “I have to get to the Alchemist first. I have to, it’s the only
way.”
A figure stepped out in front of
her. “Dr Mzu, I presume,” said Joshua. “Remember me?”
She gaped at him, too incredulous
to speak. Three other men were standing behind him; two of them were nervously
pointing machine guns at Gelai and Ngong.
“Who is this?” a very
confused Voi asked.
Alkad gave a little laugh that was
close to hysteria. “Captain Calvert, from Tranquillity.”
Joshua clicked his heels and did a
little bow. “On the button, Doc. I’m flattered. And Lady Mac’s in orbit
here ready to take you back home. The Lord of Ruin is pretty pissed at you for
disappearing, but she says she’ll forgive you providing your nasty little
secret stays secret forever.”
“You work for Ione Saldana?”
“Yeah. She’ll be here in the
sort-of flesh in a minute to confirm the offer. But right now, my priority is
to get you and your friends out of here.” He gave Gelai and Ngong the eye.
“Some of your friends. I don’t know what the story with these two is, but I’m
not having—” The cold, unmistakable shape of a pistol muzzle was pressed firmly
into the back of his neck.
“Thank you, Captain Calvert,”
Monica’s voice purred with triumph. “But us professionals will take it from
here.”
The air on board the Urschel was
clotted by rank gases and far too much humidity. Those conditioning filters
still functioning emitted an alarmingly loud buzzing as fan motors spun towards
overload. Innumerable light panels had failed, hatch actuators were unreliable
at best, discarded food wrappers fluttered about everywhere.
Cherri Barnes hated the sloppiness
and disorder. Efficiency on a starship was more than just habit, it was an
essential survival requirement. A crew was utterly dependent on its equipment.
But two of the possessed (her
fellow possessed, she tried to tell herself) were from the late
nineteenth–early twentieth century. Arrogant oafs who didn’t or wouldn’t understand
the basic preconditions of shipboard routine. And their so-called commander,
Oscar Kearn, didn’t seem too bothered, either. He just assumed that the
non-possessed crew would go around scooping up the shit. They didn’t.
Cherri had given up advising and
demanding. She was actually quite surprised that they’d survived the orbital
battle for so long—although antimatter-powered combat wasps did load the odds
in their favour. And for once the non-possessed were understandably performing
their duties with a high level of proficiency. There was little for the
possessed to do except wait. Oscar Kearn occupied himself by studying the
hologram screen displays, and muttering the odd comment to his non-possessed
subordinate. In reality he was contributing little, other than continually
urging their combat wasps be directed at the voidhawks. The concept of keeping
a reserve for their own defence seemed elusive.
When the explosions and energy
cascades outside the hull were reaching an appalling crescendo, Cherri slipped
quietly out of the bridge. Under ordinary combat conditions the companionways
linking the frigate’s four life-support capsules should have been sealed tight.
Now, she glided past open hatches as she made her way along to B capsule’s
maintenance engineering deck. As soon as she was inside she closed the ceiling
hatch and engaged the manual lock.
She pulled herself over to one of
the three processor consoles and tapped the power stud. Not being able to
datavise the frigate’s flight computer was a big hindrance; she wasn’t used to
voice response programs. Eventually, though, she established an auxiliary
command circuit, cutting the bridge officers out of the loop. The systems and
displays she wanted slowly came on-line.
Combat wasps and their submunitions
still flocked through space above Nyvan, though not quite as many as before.
And the blanket electronic warfare interference had ended; quite simply, there
were no SD platforms left intact to wage that aspect of the conflict.
One of the ten phased array antennae
positioned around the Urschel’s hull focused on the Lady Macbeth.
Cherri pulled herself closer to the console’s mike.
“Is anyone receiving this? Sarha,
Warlow, can you hear me? If you can, use a five-millimetre aperture signal
maser for a direct com return. Do not, repeat not lock on to Urschel’s
main antenna.”
“Signal acknowledged,” a
synthesised voice replied. “Who the hell is this?”
“Warlow, is that you?”
“No, Warlow isn’t with us anymore.
This is Sarha Mitcham, acting first officer. Who am I speaking with?”
“Sarha, I’m sorry, I didn’t know
about Warlow. It’s Cherri Barnes, Sarha.”
“God, Cherri, what the hell are you
doing on an Organization frigate?”
Cherri stared at the console,
trying to get a grip on her raging emotions. “I . . . I belong here, Sarha. I
think. I don’t know anymore. You just don’t know what it’s like in the beyond.”
“Oh, fuck, you’re a possessor.”
“Guess so. Not by choice.”
“Yeah. I know. What happened to Udat,
Cherri? What happened to you?”
“It was Mzu. She killed us. We were
a complication to her. And Meyer . . . she had a grudge. Be careful of her,
Sarha, be very careful.”
“Christ, Cherri, is this on the
level?”
“Oh, yes, I’m on the level.”
“Acknowledged. And . . . thanks.”
“I haven’t finished. Joshua’s down
on Nyvan chasing after Mzu, we know that much.”
“Okay, he’s down there. Cherri,
please don’t ask me why. I can’t discuss it.”
“That’s okay. I understand. It
doesn’t matter; we know about the Alchemist, and you know we know. But you have
to tell Joshua to back off, he must get away from Mzu. Right away. We know we
can’t get her offplanet now our spaceplanes are gone. That means the
Organization has only one option. If she’s dead, she’ll have to join us.”
“Is that why Urschel and Pinzola
were shooting at the ground?”
“Yes. But that’s not all—”
The timid, halting voice echoed
around Lady Macbeth’s bridge. It sent something like cold electricity
racing down Liol’s nerves. He turned his head to look at Sarha, who seemed
equally stupefied.
“Is she for real?” he asked,
praying the answer would be no. Events seemed to be pushing them towards an
inevitable active response. Despite his outward bravado back on the station, he
had distinctly mixed feelings about piloting Lady Mac under conditions
any more adverse than their current ones—though a rogue part of his mind was
determined that Sarha would never know that. Egotism was obviously the opposite
trait of his intuition, the Calvert family’s Achilles heel.
“I knew her,” was all Sarha would
say, and that reluctantly. “Beaulieu, can you confirm that ironberg’s
trajectory?”
“I will have to use active sensor
analysis to obtain its precise flight path.”
“Do it.”
“We’re thirty minutes from Joshua’s
horizon,” Liol said. Alternative orbital trajectories were flashing through his
mind as he datavised the flight computer for possible vectors.
“Nothing I can do about that,”
Sarha said. “We can try calling him through the Tonala communications net.”
“The net: bollocks. You know there
isn’t a working processor left on that planet after all this emp activity. I
can drop us down; if we skim the atmosphere we can be above his horizon in
eight minutes.”
“No! If we start changing our orbit
we’ll be targeted.”
“There’s nothing left out there to
target us. Access the sensors, damn you. The combat wasps are all spent.”
“They’ve deployed all their
submunitions, you mean.”
“He’s my brother!”
“He’s my captain, and we can’t risk
it.”
“Lady Mac can beat any poxy
submunitions. Take fire control, I can pilot this manoeuvre.”
“Ironberg trajectory confirmed,”
Beaulieu said. “Barnes was telling the truth. It’s heading straight at them.”
“Altitude?” Sarha asked. “Can we
nuke it?”
“Ninety kilometres. That’s too deep
into the ionosphere for the combat wasps. They can’t operate in that kind of
pressure.”
“Shit!” Sarha groaned.
“Get positive, Sarha,” Liol
demanded. “We have to get over Joshua’s horizon.”
“I’ve got lock-on,” Beaulieu said
calmly. “Two nukes, active seeker heads. They acquired our radar emission.”
Sarha initiated the maser cannon
targeting program without conscious thought. Her brain was churning with too
much worry and indecision to actually think. Bright violet triangles zeroed the
approaching submunitions.
“Would Josh leave one of us down
there?” Liol asked.
“You piece of shit!” The masers
fired, triggered by the heatlash in her mind. Both submunitions broke apart,
their fusion drives dying.
“We can beat them,” Beaulieu said.
The imperturbability of the
cosmonik’s synthetic voice chided Sarha. “Okay. I’ll handle fire control.
Beaulieu, switch to active sensors, full suite; I want long-range warning of
any incoming hostiles. Liol, take us down.”
They were hammering on the
maintenance engineering deck’s hatch. Its edges had started to shine
cherry-red, paint was blistering.
Cherri gave the circle of metal a
jaded look. “All right, all right,” she mumbled. “I’ll make it easy all around.
Besides, what would you lot ever know about fraternity?”
After the hatch’s locking mechanism
melted away, an equally hot Oscar Kearn dived through the smouldering rim. Any
hope of retribution died instantly as he saw the figure curled up and sobbing
dejectedly in front of the console. The soul of Cherri Barnes had already
vacated the flesh, retreating to the one place where he was never going to
chase after her.
Monica finally felt as though she
was regaining control of the mission. There were twelve operatives with her in
the Disassembly Shed providing overwhelming firepower, and their evac craft was
on the way. None of their processor blocks were working, nor their neural
nanonics. Everyone had taken off their shell helmets so they could see; the
sensors were glitched, too. The lack of protection made her nervous, but she
could live with that. I’ve got Mzu!
She applied some pressure to the
pistol barrel at the side of Calvert’s neck, and he moved aside obediently. One
of the Edenists claimed his machine gun. He didn’t protest when he was made to
stand with his three compatriots, all of them with their hands in the air and
covered by a couple of operatives.
“Doctor, please take your hand away
from that backpack,” Monica said. “And don’t try to datavise any activation
codes.”
Alkad shrugged and held her hands
up. “I can’t datavise anything anyway,” she said. “There are too many possessed
in here.”
Monica signalled one of the
operatives to retrieve Mzu’s backpack.
“You were in Tranquillity,” Alkad
said. “And the Dorados too, if I’m not mistaken. Which agency?”
“ESA.”
“Ah. Yet some of your friends are
obviously Edenists. How odd.”
“We both consider your removal from
this planet to be of paramount importance, Doctor,” Samuel said. “However, you
have my assurance you will not be harmed.”
“Of course,” Alkad told them
equitably. “If I am, we all know who I’ll end up with.”
“Exactly.”
Gelai looked up. “They’re coming,
Doctor.”
Monica frowned. “Who?”
“The possessed from the
Organization,” Alkad told her. “They’re up in the shed’s framework somewhere.”
The operatives responded smoothly,
scanning the metal lattice above them for any sign of movement. Monica stepped
smartly over to Alkad’s side and grabbed her arm. “Okay, Doctor, we’ll take
care of them, now let’s move.”
“Damn,” Samuel said. “The police
are here.”
Monica glanced back to the hole
blown into the wall where they’d entered. Two Edenists had been left to cover
their retreat back to the cars. “We can deal with them.”
Samuel gave a resigned grimace. The
operatives formed a protective cordon around Monica and Mzu and started to walk
back towards the wall.
Monica realized that Joshua and the
others were hurrying after them. “Not you,” she said.
“I’m not staying in here,” Joshua
said indignantly.
“We can’t—” Samuel began.
A portcullis slammed down out of
the tangle of girders above. It struck two of the operatives, punching them to
the ground. The valency generators in their armour suits were glitched,
preventing the fabric from stiffening into protective exoskeletons as they
should have done. Long iron spikes along the bottom of the portcullis punctured
the suit fabric, skewering their bodies to the wet carbon concrete.
Four of the operatives opened fire
with their machine guns, shooting straight up. Bullets ricocheted madly,
grazing sprays of sparks off the metal.
Training compelled Monica to look
around and locate the follow up. It was coming at her from the left, a huge
pendulum blade swinging straight at Mzu. If her neural nanonics had been on
line and running threat response programs she might have made it. As it was,
boosted muscles slewed her weight around to pirouette Mzu out of the blade’s
arc. They went tumbling onto the floor together. The blade caught Monica’s left
leg a glancing blow. Her armoured boot saved her foot from being severed, but
her ankle and lower shinbone were shattered by the impact. Shock dulled the
initial pain. She sat up, groaning in dismay, and clutched at the ruined bones.
Bile was rising in her throat, and it was very difficult to breathe.
Something extraordinarily heavy hit
her shoulder, sending her sprawling. Joshua landed on the ground right beside
her, rolling neatly to absorb the impact. A burst of hatred banished Monica’s
pain. Then the blade sliced through the air where she had been a second before,
a tiny whisper the only sound of its passing. Pendulum, she thought dazedly, it
comes back.
One of the embassy operatives raced
over to Monica. He was holding a square medical nanonic package and cursing
heavily. “It’s glitched, too, I can’t get a response.”
Joshua glanced at the package glove
covering his hand. Ever since he’d come into the shed, it had been stinging
like crazy. “Tell me about it,” he grumbled.
Gelai joined them, squatting down,
her face full of concern. She put her hand over Monica’s ankle.
The original intensity of the pain
had frightened Monica, but this was plain horrifying. She could feel the
fragments of bone shifting around inside her skin, she could even see the
suit’s trouser fabric ripple around Gelai’s hand—her glowing hand. Yet
it didn’t hurt.
“I think that’s it,” the bashful
girl said. “Try standing.”
“Oh, my God. You’re a . . .”
“Didn’t you professionals know?”
Joshua said evilly.
Samuel dodged around the pendulum
and crouched beside them, alert, his machine gun pointing high. “I thought
you’d been hit,” he said as Monica gingerly applied some weight to her left
foot.
“I was. She cured me.”
He gave Gelai a fast appraisal.
“Oh.”
“We’d better get going,” Monica
said.
“They’ll hit us again if we move.”
“They’ll hit us if we stay.”
“I wish I could see them,” he
moaned, blinking away the drizzle. “There’s no target for us. Shooting wild is
pointless, there’s too much metal.”
“They’re up there,” Gelai said.
“Three of them are just above the pendulum hinge. They’re the ones giving it
substance.”
Samuel jerked his head about.
“Where?”
“Above it.”
“Damn it.” If he could have just
switched his retinal implants to infrared there might have been something other
than mangled blackness. He fired his machine gun anyway, sluicing the bullets
over the area he imagined Gelai was talking about. The magazine was spent in
less than a second. He ejected it and slapped in a fresh one—mindful of how
many were left clipped to his belt. When he looked up again, the pendulum had
vanished. Instead, a length of thick black cabling was swaying to and fro.
“That’s it? Did I get them?”
“You hurt two,” Gelai told him.
“They’re backing off.”
“Hurt? Great.”
“Come on,” Monica said. “We can get
to the cars.” She raised her voice. “Random suppression fire, vertical. I want
those bastards fleeing us. Okay, move.”
Eight machine guns opened fire into
the overhead lattice as everyone rushed towards the hole in the wall.
High above them, and safe in his
web of metal cables, Baranovich looked out of a filthy window at the three
Tonalan police cars drawn up outside. There were long skid marks in the snow
behind each of them, evidence of their hard braking. One other surviving police
car was chasing after the twenty-first-century rally car, siren blaring and
lights flashing as they both tore along the bottom of the shed wall. Dark-clad
officers were advancing towards the embassy cars.
“Let’s liven things up a little,”
he said above the fractious roar of the machine guns and whining ricochets. He
joined hands with the three possessed beside him. Together they launched a huge
fireball and sent it curving down on one of the stationary police cars.
The response was immediate and
overwhelming. After having their car processors glitched, then crashing, being
shot at by starship X-ray lasers, losing their suspects, and now having to
verify whether the embassy cars were occupied by armed ESA operatives, the
Tonalan security police were by now understandably a little tense. Every weapon
they had was abruptly trained on Disassembly Shed Four.
Monica was twenty metres from the
smashed door when the ancient, brittle panels were bombarded by hollow-case
bullets, TI pulses, maser beams, and small EE rounds. Blinding light ruptured
the gloom ahead of her. She hit the floor hard as white-hot fragments slashed
through the air. Smoking particles rained down around her, sizzling on the
moist concrete. Several landed on her head, singeing through her hair to sting
her scalp.
“THIS IS THE POLICE. ABANDON YOUR
WEAPONS. COME OUT ONE AT A TIME WITH YOUR BLOCKS AND IMPLANTS DEACTIVATED. YOU
WILL NOT BE TOLD AGAIN.”
“Holy fuck,” Monica grunted. She
raised her head. A huge strip of the wall had vanished; maleficent shifting
light from the orbital battle shone in. It illuminated a multitude of broken
girders whose fractured ends dripped glowing droplets. The framework structure
emitted a distressed groan; weakened junctions were snapping under the stress
of the new loading, starting a chain reaction. She could see whole levels of
metal bending then dropping in juddery motions.
“Move!” she shouted. “It’s going to
land on us.”
A flare of white fire billowed down
out of the darkness, pummelling an operative to her knees. Her screams vanished
beneath the plangent crackling of her armour suit and skin igniting.
Four machine guns opened up in
response.
“No,” Monica said. That was exactly
what they wanted. It was a near-perfect snare manoeuvre, she admitted angrily
as she flung her arms over her head again. And we blundered right into it.
The security police heard the
machine guns and opened fire once more.
Baranovich hadn’t been expecting
quite such an emphatic rejoinder from the forces of law and order—these modern
weapons were so fearsomely powerful. Twice now the weakened framework had
shifted around him, forcing him to snatch at the girders and reinforce their
solidity with his energistic power. That was dangerous. The metal was grounding
out the EE rounds, and while he was some distance away from their impact zone,
those kind of voltages were lethal to a possessed and it only took one wild
shot.
When the second round of shooting
started he jumped down onto the nearest walkway and sprinted away. His
impressive costume’s shiny leather boots changed to yankee-style trainers with
inch-thick soles; a fervent hope in his mind that imagined rubber would be as
effective an insulator as the real stuff. He could sense others of his group on
the move, shaken by the ferocity of the attack.
Joshua looked up to see the last
frayed streamers of electrons writhing down the metal pillars. The whole of the
smashed-up framework above and around him was grinding loudly. It was going to
collapse any second. Self-preservation kicked in strong—fuck Mzu, I’m going to
die if I stay here. He scrambled to his feet and slapped Melvyn, who still had
his hands over his head, face jammed against the floor.
“Shift it, both of you, now!” He
started running, out from under the framework, and angling away from the gigantic
hole the police had blown in the wall. There were a lot of footsteps splashing
through the puddles behind him. He scanned around quickly. It wasn’t just
Melvyn, Dahybi, and Keaton who were following him; all the agency operatives
and Mzu’s wacko entourage were coming too. Everybody racing across the
Disassembly Shed’s high bay floor in pursuit as if he were showing them the way
to salvation. “Jesus wept!” He didn’t want this! Just having Melvyn and Dahybi
coming with him across an open space would have proved tempting for the
possessed, but Mzu too . . .
Unlike the Baranovich group who had
set up the meeting, the ESA and the Edenists who had unlimited access to the
Kulu embassy’s memory files, and the security police who knew their home
territory, Joshua didn’t quite appreciate the layout of the Disassembly Sheds.
Even their madcap drive through the foundry yard hadn’t conclusively
demonstrated to him that the canals ran straight through the centre of every
shed. So he certainly didn’t know that the only way over the water was a bridge
which ran along the door above the smaller canal.
What he did know was that there was
a perilously dark and wide gulf in the floor ahead of him, and getting closer
very fast. Only now did he hear the gentle slopping of the water, and realize
what it was. He nearly went sprawling headlong as he came to a confounded halt
a metre from the edge, arms flapping eccentrically for balance. He turned to
see everyone rushing en masse towards him, because they’d thought he knew what
he was doing, and there hadn’t been time to ask questions. Behind them,
Baranovich’s possessed were mustering on the walkway, garish costumes agleam in
the rainy dusk.
Alkad was running with her head
ducked down, forcing her game leg along. Gelai and Ngong were on either side of
her, holding her tight. A bubble of air around the three of them swirled with
tiny glimmers of silver light.
Baranovich’s laughter poured out
into the vast enclosed space of the central high bay. He pointed, and Joshua
could do nothing but stare dumbly as the bolt of white fire streaked across the
intervening space straight at him.
Dick Keaton was leading the pack of
desperadoes on the floor of the high bay, running hard. He was less than four
metres from an aghast Joshua when Baranovich’s fire bolt hit the data security
expert clean between his shoulder blades. It burst open in a spectacular cloud
of dancing twisters that drained away into the drizzle. And Dick Keaton was
completely unharmed.
“Close one,” he jeered happily. His
arms wrapped around Joshua, momentum carrying the pair of them over the edge of
the central basin just as the mutilated framework collapsed. Fractured girders
were tossed out of the crumpling wreckage in all directions, clanging loudly as
they hit the floor. A huge split tore up the wall like a lightning bolt in
reverse. It was a hundred and seventy metres high when it finally stopped. The
framework structure settled into an uneasy silence.
The black water in the ironberg
basin was freezing. Joshua yelled out as it closed around him, seeing bubbles
bumble past his face. The cold shock was intense enough to make his heart
jump—frightening him badly. Salt water rushed into his open mouth. And—Jesus, thank
you—his neural nanonics came back on-line.
Nerve impulse overrides squeezed
his throat muscles tight, preventing any water flooding his lungs. Analysis of
his spinning inner ears revealed his exact orientation. His thrashing became
purposeful, shunting him straight up.
He broke surface to draw down a
huge desperate gulp of air. People in flexible armour suits were flying through
the air above him; human lemmings landing in the basin with a tremendous
splash. He saw Mzu, her small figure unmistakable in its prim business suit.
Keaton shook his head dog-fashion,
blowing his cheeks out. “Hell, it’s cold.”
“Who the fuck are you?” Joshua
demanded. “They hit you dead on, and it never even blistered you.”
“Right question, sir, but
unfortunately the wrong pronoun. As I once said to Oscar Wilde. Stumped him
completely; he wasn’t quite as hot on the riposte as legend says.”
All Joshua could do was cough. The
cold was crippling. His neural nanonics were battling hard to prevent his
muscles from cramping. And they were going to lose.
White fire smashed against the
basin rim five metres above him. Radiant dribbles of magma ran down the basin
wall.
“What in God’s name did you bring
us here for?” Monica shouted.
“I didn’t fucking bring you!”
Her hand grabbed the front of his
ship-suit. “How do we get out?”
“Jesus, I don’t know.”
She let go, her arm shaking badly.
Another strike of white fire lashed above them. The rim was outlined like a
dawn horizon from orbit.
“They can’t hit us here,” Samuel
said, his long face was dreadfully strained.
“God, so what,” Monica answered.
“They’ve only got to walk over here and we’ll be dead.”
“We won’t last that long.
Hypothermia will get us before then.”
Monica glared at Joshua. “Can
anyone see some steps?”
“Dick,” Joshua said. “Are your
neural nanonics working?”
“Yes.”
“Access the shed’s management computer.
Find us a way out. Now!”
This is a last-ditch madness, I
know, Samuel called to the Hoya.
But is there anything you can do?
Nothing. I am so sorry. You’re
too far away, we cannot provide fire support.
We’re retreating, Niveu told him, his tone full of savage regret.
It’s this diabolical antimatter. We’ve fired every combat wasp in defence,
and they’re still coming through. The nations have gone insane, every SD
platform went offensive. Ferrea was damaged by a gamma ray pulser, and Sinensis
had to swallow out to avoid a direct impact. There’s only the two of us
left now. We can’t last much longer. Do you wish to transfer? We can delay a
few seconds more.
No. Go, warn the Consensus.
But your situation—
Doesn’t matter. Go!
“Half the shed’s processors are
glitched,” Dick Keaton said. “The rest are in standby mode. It’s been
mothballed.”
“What?” Joshua had to shout to make
his mouth work. His kicks to tread water were difficult now.
“Mothballed. That’s why there’s no
ironberg in here. The small canal leaks. They drained it for repairs.”
“Drained it? Let me have the file.”
Keaton datavised it over, and
Joshua assigned it to a memory cell. Analysis programs went primary, tearing
into the information. What he wanted was a way to drain the basin, or at the
very least a ladder. Which wasn’t quite what he found when the schematics
display rose into his mind. “Ione!” he shouted. “Ione.” His voice was
pathetically weak. He worked his elbows, swivelling around to face Samuel.
“Call her.”
“Who?” the bewildered Edenist
asked.
“Ione Saldana, the Lord of Ruin.
Call her with affinity.”
“But—”
“Do it or we’re going to die in
here.”
The gee force on Lady Macbeth’s
bridge began to abate, sliding down from a tyrannical eight to an unpleasant
three.
He certainly flies the same way as
Joshua, Sarha thought. The few seconds she’d spared from fire control to
monitor their vector had shown her a starship which was keeping pretty close to
the course which the navigation program had produced. Not bad for a daydreamer
novice.
“The Urschel is
accelerating,” Beaulieu said. “Seven gees, they’re going for altitude. Must be
a jump.”
“Good,” Sarha said firmly. “That
means no more of those bloody antimatter combat wasps.”
All three of them had cheered when
the Pinzola was struck by a fusion blast. The resulting explosion as all
the frigate’s antimatter confinement chambers were destroyed had blown half of Lady
Mac’s sensors, and Pinzola had been eleven thousand kilometres away,
almost below the horizon.
The orbital conflict had been
played out hard and fast over the last eleven minutes. Several starships had
been hit, but over fifteen had risen to a jump altitude and escaped. There were
no more SD platforms left in low orbit, although plenty of combat wasps were
still prowling. But they were all a long way from Lady Mac. That was
Sarha’s prime concern. As Beaulieu had said, the old girl could cope with
Nyvan’s geriatric weapons. They had a couple of new scars on the hull from
kinetic debris, and three radioactive hot spots from pulser shots. But the
worst of it was over now.
“Gravitonic distortion,” Beaulieu
said. “Another voidhawk has left.”
“Sensible ship,” Sarha muttered.
“Liol, how long until we’re over Joshua’s horizon?”
“Ninety seconds—mark.”
She datavised an order into the
starship’s communications system. The main dish slid out of its recess and
swung around, pointing at the horizon ahead.
Ione eased herself around the metal
pillar to take another look into the shed’s high bay. The possessed up on the
walkway were squirting a continual stream of white fire at the rim of the
basin. That must mean Joshua and the others were still alive.
Now appeared to be the optimum time
to enter the fray. She had hung back ever since she’d sprinted into the shed
ahead of the agency operatives. This whole situation was so fluid, the outcome
could well be decided by who had the greatest tactical reserve. She wasn’t
quite sure where that decision had come from; some tactics file her ‘original’
self and Tranquillity had loaded into the serjeant, or internal logic. How much
inventiveness she owned in this aspect she wasn’t sure of. But wherever it had
come from, it had been proved right.
She had watched the events play out
from the cover of the framework, hovering on the brink of intervention. Then
the police had arrived and fouled up everything. And Joshua had fled across the
high bay to the basin.
She couldn’t work that one out. It
was seawater in the basin, which must be close to the freezing point. Now he
was pinned down.
If she could get a clear shot at
the walkway the possessed were using, she might be able to bring them all
crashing down. But she wasn’t sure how effective even the heavy-calibre rifle
would be against such a concentration of energistic power.
Ione. Ione Saldana?
Cold accompanied the affinity call,
she knew exactly what it was like to be immersed in the basin. Agent Samuel,
she acknowledged.
I have a message.
He widened his mind still further.
She looked out at anguished heads bobbing in the water. Joshua was right in
front of her, hair plastered down over his forehead. His throat laboured hard
to force the words out.
“Ione—shoot—out—the—small—canal—lock—gate—blow—that—fucker—away—good—and—be—quick—we—can’t—last
—long.”
She was already running towards the
end of the shed. There was a rectangular gap in the framework structure over
the small canal. It framed the door which slid up to allow the ironberg
segments through. The bottom of the door closed to within a metre of the water
itself. Below that, she could see the two lock gates which held back the water
while the canal outside was being repaired. They were solid metal, tarnished by
age, and thick with fronds of sapphire-coloured seaweed.
She squatted down beside the edge
of the canal and fired the heavy-calibre rifle. Trying to puncture the gates
themselves would be hopeless, they weren’t made from any modern laced-molecule
alloy, but their thickness made them completely impenetrable. Instead, the
explosive-tipped shells pounded into the canal’s old carbon-concrete walls,
demolishing the hinges and their mountings.
The gates moved slightly as water
squirted around the crumbling concrete. Their top hinges were almost wrecked,
making them gradually pivot downwards, a motion which prised them further
apart. A V-shaped gap appeared between them, with water gushing out
horizontally. Ione fired again and again, concentrating on one wall now,
mauling it to smithereens. One of the hinges gave way.
Look out, Samuel warned. They have stopped attacking
us. That must mean—
Ione saw the shadows shifting
behind her, knowing what it meant. Then the shadows were fading away as the
light grew brighter. She switched her aim to the stubborn gate itself, using
the explosions to punch it down, adding their weight to that of the water.
White fire engulfed her.
The gates were wrenched apart, and
the water plummeted into the empty canal beyond.
“Go with it,” Joshua datavised as
the first stirrings of a current stroked his faltering legs. “Stay afloat.”
A waterfall roar reverberated
around the shed’s high bay, and he was pulled along the basin wall. The others
were twirling around him. Quiet, unseen currents sucked them towards the end of
the basin where it narrowed like a funnel into the small canal. They started to
pick up speed as they drew closer to the mouth. Then the basin was behind them.
Water was surging along the canal.
“Joshua, please acknowledge. This
is Sarha, acknowledge please, Joshua.” His neural nanonics told him the signal
was being routed to his communication block via the spaceplane. Everyone, it
seemed, had survived the orbital battle.
“I’m here, Sarha,” he datavised.
The canal water was boiling tempestuously as it flowed under the door, dipping
down sharply; and he was racing towards it at a hazardous rate. It was becoming
very hard to keep afloat, even here where the level was sinking. He tried a few
feeble side-strokes to get away from the wall where the churning was at its
worst.
“Joshua, you’re entering into an
emergency situation.”
Two curling vortex waves recoiled
off the canal walls to converge above him as he passed under the shed door. “No
shit!” The waves closed over his head. Neural nanonics triggered a massive
adrenaline secretion, enabling him to fight his way back to the surface with
recalcitrant limbs. Distorted daylight and iron-hard foam crashed around him as
he floundered back into the air.
“I’m serious, Joshua. The
Organization has tampered with one of the ironbergs. They altered its aerobrake
trajectory so that it will land on the foundry yard. If they can’t get Mzu
offplanet with them, they want her dead so she’ll have to join the Organization
that way. It’s timed to crash after the spaceplane pickup was scheduled, so
that if anything went wrong they’d still win.”
The canal opened up ahead of
Joshua, a rigid gully stretching away to the foundry building three kilometres
distant. Water rampaged along it, a thundering white-water torrent which
propelled him along helplessly. He wasn’t alone. Voi came close enough for him
to touch if the pounding water hadn’t been so strong, snatching her away again
immediately.
“Jesus, Sarha, this is after
the spaceplanes were scheduled.”
“I know. We’re tracking the
ironberg, it’s going to hit you in seven minutes.”
“What? Nuke the bastard, now,
Sarha.”
The leading edge of the water
reached the first section of scaffolding, a lattice of heavy walkways, cage
lifts, and machinery platforms. It swept the lower members away, toppling the
rest of the structure. The stronger segments held together for a few seconds as
the spume rolled them along, then after a few revolutions they began to break
apart, metal poles sinking to the bottom.
“We can’t, Joshua. It’s already in
the lower atmosphere. The combat wasps can’t reach it.”
The water reached the second
stretch of scaffolding. This was larger than the first, supporting big
construction mechanoids and concrete hoppers. Their weight lent a degree of
stability to the edifice as the water seethed around it; several members broke
free, but it managed to remain relatively intact against the initial onrush.
“Don’t worry, Joshua,” Ashly
datavised. “I’m on my way. Fifty seconds and I’ll be there. We’ll be airborne
long before the ironberg crashes. I can see the sheds already.”
“No, Ashly, stay back, there are
possessed here; a lot of them. They’ll hit the spaceplane if they see you.”
“Target them for me; I’ve got the
masers.”
“Impossible.” He saw the
scaffolding up ahead and knew this was his one chance. The physiological
monitor program had been issuing cautions for some time: the cold was killing
him. His muscles were already badly debilitated, slow to respond. He had to get
out of the water while he had some strength left. “Everybody,” he datavised,
“grab the scaffolding or just crash into it if that’s all you can manage. But
make sure you don’t go past. We have to get out.”
The first rusty poles were coming
up very fast. He reached out a hand. None of his fingers worked inside the
medical package glove, not even when his neural nanonics commanded them. “Mzu?”
he datavised. “Get to the scaffolding.”
“Acknowledged.”
It wasn’t much practical use to
him, but the relief that she was still alive kept that small core flame of hope
flickering. The mission wasn’t an utter disaster, he still had purpose.
Surprisingly important right now.
Dahybi had already reached the
scaffolding, hugging a post as the water stormed past. Then Joshua was there,
trying to hook his arm around a V-junction and shift his head out of the way at
the same time to avoid a crack on the temple. The metal banged against his
chest, and he never even felt it.
“You okay?” Dahybi datavised.
“Fucking wonderful.”
Voi was flashing past, just
succeeding in jamming an arm on a pole.
Joshua inched himself further into
the shaking structure. There was a ladder two metres away, and he flopped
against it. The water wasn’t quite so strong now, but it was rising fast.
Mzu came thumping into the end of
the scaffolding. “Mother Mary, my ribs,” she datavised. Samuel landed beside
her, and wrapped a protective arm around her.
Joshua clambered up the ladder,
thankful it was at a low angle. Dahybi followed him. Two more operatives caught
the scaffolding, then Monica snagged herself. Gelai and Ngong swam quite
normally across the canal, the cold having no effect on them at all. They
grabbed the scaffolding and started shoving the numb survivors up out of the
water.
“Melvyn?” Joshua datavised. “Where
are you, Melvyn?” He’d been one of the first to reach the canal after Ione blew
the lock gate. “Melvyn?” There wasn’t even a carrier band from the fusion
specialist’s neural nanonics.
“What’s happening?” Ashly
datavised. “I can’t acquire any of you on the sensors.”
“Stay back, that’s an order,”
Joshua replied. “Melvyn?”
One of the ESA operatives floated
past, facedown.
“Melvyn?”
“I’m sorry, Captain Calvert,” Dick
Keaton datavised. “He went under.”
“Where are you?”
“End of the scaffolding.”
Joshua looked over his shoulder,
seeing the limp figure suspended in the crisscross of poles thirty metres away.
He was alone.
Jesus no. Another friend condemned
to the beyond. Looking back at reality and begging to return.
“That’s all of us, now,” Monica
datavised.
Altogether six of the operatives
from the combined Edenist/ESA team had survived along with her and Samuel.
Eriba’s corpse was swirling past amid a scum of brown foam. Fifteen people, out
of the twenty-three who had entered Disassembly Shed Four, more if you counted
the two serjeants.
“What now?” Dahybi asked.
“Climb,” Joshua told him. “We’ve
got to get up to the top of the scaffolding. Our spaceplane is on its way.”
“So is a bloody ironberg.”
“Gelai, where are the possessed?”
Joshua croaked.
“Coming,” she said. “Baranovich is
already out of the shed. He won’t let the spaceplane land.”
“I don’t have a weapon,” Monica
said. “There’s only two machine guns left between all of us. We can’t hold them
back.” Her body was trembling violently as she crawled along a narrow conveyer
belt connected to one of the concrete hoppers.
Joshua went up another three rungs
on the ladder, then sagged from the effort.
“Captain Calvert,” Mzu datavised.
“I won’t give anybody the Alchemist no matter what. I want you to know that.
And thank you for your efforts.”
She’d given up, sitting huddled
limply in a junction. Ngong was holding her, concentrating hard. Steam began to
spout out of her suit. Joshua looked around at the rest of them, defeated and
tortured by the cold. If he was going to do anything to salvage this, it would
have to be extreme.
“Sarha, give me fire support,” he
datavised.
“Our sensor returns are being
corrupted,” she replied. “I can’t resolve the foundry yard properly. It’s the
same effect we encountered on Lalonde.”
“Jesus. Okay, target me.”
“Joshua!”
“Don’t argue. Activate the
designator laser and target my communications block. Do it. Ashly, stand by.
The rest of you: come on, move, we have to be ready.” He took another couple of
steps up the ladder.
Lady Macbeth’s designator laser pierced the wispy residue
of snow clouds. A slim shaft of emerald light congested with hazy sparkles as
gusting snowflakes evaporated inside it. It was aligned on a road three hundred
metres away.
“Is that on you?” Sarha asked.
“No, track north-east, two-fifty
metres.”
The beam shifted fast enough to
produce a blurred sheet of green light across the sky.
“East eighty metres,” Joshua
instructed. “North twenty-five.”
His retinal implants had to bring
their strongest filters on line as the scaffolding was swamped by brilliant
green light.
“Lock coordinate—mark. Preclude
one-five-zero metres. Switch to ground-strike cannon. Spiral one kilometre.
Scorch it, Sarha.”
The beam moved away, its colour
blooming through the spectrum until it was a deep ruby-red. Then its intensity
grew; snowflakes drifting into it no longer evaporated, they burst apart. Thick
brown fumes and smoking pumice gravel jetted up from the disintegrating carbon
concrete at its base. It changed direction, curving around to gouge a
half-metre groove in the ground. A perfect circle three hundred metres in
diameter was etched out in polluted flame, with the canal scaffolding at the
centre. Then the beam began to speed up, creating a hollow cylinder of vivid
red light which expanded inexorably. The ground underneath it ignited,
vaporizing the cloak of snow into a rolling cloud which broiled the land ahead
of the beam.
It slashed across the corner of
Disassembly Shed Four. Cherry-red embers flew out of the panels up the entire
height of the wall. A thin sliver of composite and metal began to peel away
from the bulk of the shed. Then the laser struck it again. It cut a deeper
chunk this time, which started to pitch over in pursuit of the first. Both of
them were surrounded by a cascade of embers. The beam continued around on its
spiral.
Disassembly Shed Four died badly,
chopped into thin curving slices by the relentless laser. The individual wedges
collapsed and crumpled against each other, softened and sagging from the
immense thermal input to descend in slippery serpentine riots. When almost a
fifth of it had gone, the remaining framework could no longer sustain itself.
The walls and roof buckled groggily, twisting and imploding. Its final
convulsions were illuminated by the laser, which continued to chop the falling
wreckage into ribbons of slag. Steam geysers roared upwards as pyrexic debris
slithered into the basin, flattening out to obscure the bubbling ruin in a
virgin-white funeral shroud.
Nothing could survive the ground
strike. The security police raced for their cars as soon as it began, only to
be overtaken by the outwards spiral. Baranovich and his fellow possessed took
refuge back in the Disassembly Shed under the assumption that anything that
massive was bound to be safe. When that folly was revealed, some of them dived
into the canal, only to be parboiled. A couple of hapless foundry yard staff on
their way to investigate the noises and light coming from the mothballed shed
were caught and reduced to a fog of granular ash.
The laser beam vanished.
Secure at the vestal centre of the
remorseless sterilization he had unleashed, Joshua datavised the all-clear to
Ashly. The spaceplane streaked out of the roiling sky to land beside the canal.
Joshua and the others waited at the top of the scaffolding, hunched up as the
warm wind created by the laser’s passage blew against them.
“Hanson evac service,” Ashly
datavised as the airstairs slid out from the airlock. “Close shaves a speciality.
Shift your arses, we’ve only got two minutes till it hits.”
Alkad Mzu was first up the
airstairs, followed by Voi.
“I won’t take you as you are,”
Joshua told Gelai and Ngong. “I can’t, you know that.” Monica and Samuel were
standing behind the two ex-Garissans, machine guns cradled ready.
“We know,” Gelai said. “But do you
know you will be in our position one day?”
“Please,” Joshua said. “We don’t
have time for this. None of us are going to jeopardize Mzu now, not after what
we’ve been through to get her. Not even me. They’ll shoot you, and I won’t try
to stop them.”
Gelai nodded morosely. Her black
skin faded to a pasty white as the possessing soul relinquished control,
ruffled ginger hair tumbled down over her shoulders. The girl sank to her
knees, jaw open to wail silently.
Joshua put his arms under her
shoulders to carry her into the spaceplane. Samuel was doing the same for the
old man who had been possessed by Ngong.
“Dick, give me a hand,” Joshua
grunted as he reached the bottom of the airstairs.
“Sorry, Captain,” Dick Keaton said.
“But this is where necessity dictates we part company. I have to say, though,
it’s been quite an experience. Wouldn’t have missed it for anything.”
“Jesus, there’s an ironberg falling
on us!”
“Don’t worry. I’ll be perfectly
safe. And I can hardly come with you now my cover’s been blown, now can I?”
“What the fuck are you?”
“Closer, Captain.” He grinned.
“Much closer, this time. Goodbye, and good luck.”
Joshua glared at the man—if that’s
what he really was—and hauled the semi-conscious girl up the airstairs.
Keaton stood back as the spaceplane
took off, its compressor efflux whipping his ice-speckled hair about. He waved
solemnly as it pitched up and accelerated away over the ruined smoking land.
High in the western sky, a red dot
glimmered malevolently, growing larger by the second.
The spaceplane cabin canted up
sharply, slinging Joshua back into a chair. Acceleration was two gees and
rising fast. “What’s our status, Ashly?”
“Good. We’ve got an easy twenty
seconds left. Not even a real race against the clock. Did I tell you about the
time when I was flying covert landings for the Marseilles Militia?”
“You told me. Pump the cabin
temperature up, please, we’re freezing back here.” He accessed the spaceplane’s
sensor suite. They were already two kilometres high, well out over the
lacklustre grey sea. The ironberg was level with them, and sinking rapidly.
Joshua, who had grown up in a bitek
habitat and captained a faster-than-light starship for a living, regarded it in
dismayed awe. Something that big simply did not belong in the air. It was
falling at barely subsonic velocity, spinning with slow elegance to maintain
its trajectory. A thick braided vapour trail streaked away from its rounded
tip, creating a perfectly straight line through the sky before rupturing two
hundred metres higher up when the massive horizontal shock waves created by its
turbulence crashed back together. Aerobrake friction made its scalloped base
shine a baleful topaz at the centre, grading down to bright coral pink at the
rim.
For the doomed staff left in the
yard the strangest aspect of its drop was the silence. It was unreal, looking
up at the devil’s fist as it descended upon you, and hearing nothing but the
lazy squawking of seabirds.
The energy burst from seventy-five
thousand tonnes of steel striking the ground at three hundred metres per second
was cataclysmic. The blast wave razed the remaining Disassembly Sheds, sending
hundreds of thousands of shattered composite panels ripping through the air. They
were instantly ignited by the accompanying thermal release, crowning the
maelstrom with a raging halo of flame. Last came the ground shock, a mini-quake
which rippled out for several kilometres through the boggy soil, plucking the
huge smelters from the skeletal remains of their furnace buildings and flinging
them across the marshy wasteland at the rear of the yard. The sea retreated
hastily from the catastrophe, deserting the shoreline in a series of huge
breakers which fought against the incoming tide for several minutes. But in the
end, the tremors ceased, and the water came rushing back to obliterate any last
sign that the yard had ever existed.
“Ho, man, that is just orgasmic,”
Quinn said. The bridge’s holoscreens were pumping out a blaze of white light as
the first of the antimatter explosions blossomed above Nyvan. So much
destruction excited him; he could see hundreds of combat wasps in flight above
the nightside continents. “God’s Brother is helping us, Dwyer. This is His
signal to start. Just look at those mothers go at it. There won’t be a single
nuke left on the planet to fight off the fall of Night.”
“Quinn, the other nations are
firing combat wasps at Jesup. We’re naked out here, we’ve got to jump.”
“How long till they arrive?”
“Three, four minutes.”
“Plenty of time,” Quinn said
smoothly. He checked the communications displays to ensure the starship’s
secure lasers were still linked with Jesup and the three abandoned asteroids.
“An occasion like this, I ought to say something, but fuck it, I’m not in the
dignity business.” He typed in the arming code and watched as the display
symbology turned a beautiful dangerous red. His finger went straight to the
execute command key and tapped it eagerly.
Ninety-seven fusion bombs
detonated; the majority of them one-hundred-megaton blasts.
The sensors which were protruding
above the fuselage of Mount’s Delta observed Jesup wobble. Quinn had
ordered his trusted disciples to place the bombs in a line below the biosphere
cavern where the rock was thinnest. Huge flakes of rock fell away from the
asteroid’s crinkled outer surface, allowing jets of raw plasma to stab out. It
was a precision application of force, splitting the rock clean open. The
biosphere cavern was ruined instantly as nuclear volcanoes erupted out of the
floor to exterminate all the life it sustained. Shock waves hurtled through the
rock, opening up immense fracture patterns and shattering vast sections already
weakened from centuries of mining.
Centrifugal force took over from
the bombs to complete the destruction, applying intolerable torque stresses on
the remaining sections of rock. Hill-sized chunks of regolith crumbled away,
rotation flinging them clear. Tornadoes of hot, radioactive air poured into
space, forming a thin cyclone around the fragmenting asteroid.
Quinn slammed a fist into his
console. “Fucked!” he yelled victoriously. “Totally fucking fucked. I did it.
Now they’ll know His might is for real. The Night is going to fall, Dwyer, sure
as shit floats to the top.”
Sensors aligned on the three
abandoned asteroids revealed similar scenes of devastation.
“But—Why? Why, Quinn?”
Quinn laughed joyfully. “Back on
Earth we learned everything there was to know about climate, all those
doomsdays waiting to bite our arses if we aren’t good obedient little
Govcentral mechanoids. Don’t violate the environmental laws else you’ll wind up
drowning in your own crap. Garbage like that. Everybody knows the entire
flekload, the whole arcology from the tower nerds to the subtown kids. I heard
about nuclear winters and dinosaur killers before I could walk.” He banged a
finger on the holoscreen’s surface. “And this is it. Earth’s nightmare out of
the box. Those rocks are going to pulverize Nyvan. Doesn’t matter if they smash
down on land or water; they’re going to blast gigatonnes of shit up into the
atmosphere. I’m not talking some crappy little smog layer up in the sky, it’s
going to be the fucking sky. Wet black soot stretching from the ground
to the stratosphere, so thick it’ll give you cancer just breathing it for five
minutes. They’ll never see sunlight again, never. And when the possessed take
over the whole fucking ball game down there, it still ain’t going to help them.
They can shunt Nyvan out of the universe, but they haven’t got the power to
clean the air. Only He can do that. God’s Brother will bring them light.” Quinn
hugged Dwyer energetically. “They’ll pray to Him to come and liberate them.
They can’t do anything else. He is their only salvation now. And I did it for
Him. Me! I’ve brought Him a whole fucking planet to join His legions. Now I
know it works, I’m going to do it to every planet in the Confederation. Every
single one, that’s my crusade now. Starting with Earth.”
Secure communications lasers slid
back down inside the fuselage, along with the sensors; and the Mount’s Delta
vanished inside an event horizon. Behind it, the low-orbit battle ran its
course, the protagonists unaware of the true holocaust growing above them. The
four tremendous clouds of rocky detritus were expanding at a constant rate,
watched by the horrified surviving asteroids. Seventy per cent of the mass
would miss the planet. But that still left thousands of fragments which would
rain down through the atmosphere over the next two days. Each one would have a
destructive potential hundreds of times greater than the ironberg. And with
their planet’s electronics reduced to trash, its spaceships smashed, its SD
platforms vaporized, and its astroengineering stations in ruins, there was
absolutely nothing Nyvan’s population could do to prevent the onrush. Only
pray.
Just as Quinn prophesied.
Chapter 12
The Leonora Cephei’s radar
was switched to long-range scanning mode, searching for any sign of another
ship. After five hours gliding inertly along its orbital path, there hadn’t
been a single contact.
“How much longer do you expect me
to muck in with this charade of yours?” Captain Knox asked scathingly. He
indicated the holoscreen which was displaying the ship’s radar return. “I’ve
seen Pommy cricket teams with more life in them than this bugger.”
Jed looked at the console; its
symbology meant nothing to him, for all he knew the flight computer could be
displaying schematics for Leonora Cephei’s waste cycling equipment. He
felt shamed by his own technological ignorance. He only ever came into the
compartment when he was summoned by Knox; and the only summonses he got was
when the captain found something new to complain about. He now made damn sure
he brought Beth and Skibbow with him each time; it made the whole experience a
little less like being humiliated by Digger.
“If this is the coordinate, they’ll
be here,” Jed insisted. This was the right time for the rendezvous. So where
was the starship? He didn’t want to look at Beth again. She didn’t appear
entirely sympathetic to his plight.
“Another hour,” Knox said. “That’s
what I’ll give you, then we head for Tanami. There are some cargoes for me
there. Real ones.”
“We’ll wait a damn sight more than
one hour, matey,” Beth said.
“You get what you paid for.”
“In that case we’ll be here for six
months; that’s how much cash we bloody well shelled out.”
“One hour.” Knox’s pale skin was
reddening again; he wasn’t used to his command decisions being questioned on
his own bridge.
“Balls. We’re here for as long as
it takes, pal. Right, Jed?”
“Er. Yes. We should wait a bit
longer.” Beth’s silent contempt made him want to cringe.
Knox gestured broadly in
mock-reasonableness. “Long enough for the oxygen to run out, or can we head for
port before that?”
“You regenerate the atmosphere,”
Beth said. “Stop being such a pain. We wait until our transport turns up.
That’s final.”
“You flaming kids, you’re all
crazy. You don’t see my children becoming Deadnights. Deadheads more like. What
do you think is going to happen to you if you ever reach Valisk? That Kiera is bullshitting
you.”
“No she’s not!” Jed said heatedly.
Knox was surprised at his
resentment. “Okay, kid. I understand, I used to let my balls think for me when
I was your age.” He winked at Beth.
She glowered back at him.
“We wait as long at it takes,” Gerald
said quietly. “We are going to Valisk. All of us. That’s what I paid you for,
Captain.” It was hard for him to be silent when people talked about Marie,
especially the way they talked about her, as if she were some kind of communal
girlfriend. Since the voyage started he had managed to hold his tongue. He
found life a lot easier on board the small ship; the simple daily routine in
which everything was laid out for him in advance was quite a comfort. So what
they said about Marie, their idolization of the demon who controlled her,
didn’t snarl him up with anguish. They spoke from ignorance. He was wise to
that. Loren would be proud of him for exercising such control.
“All right, we’ll wait awhile,”
Knox said. “It’s your charter.” It always embarrassed him when Skibbow spoke.
The man had episodes, you never knew how he was going to behave. So far
there had been no anger or violence. So far.
Fifteen minutes later, Captain
Knox’s little quandaries and problems were banished as the radar detected a
small object three kilometres away which hadn’t been there a millisecond
before. There was the usual weird peripheral fuzz indicating a wormhole
terminus, and the object was expanding rapidly. He accessed the Leonora
Cephei’s sensors to watch the bitek starship emerging.
“Oh, sweet Christ Almighty,” he
groaned. “You crazy bastards. We’re dead meat now. Bloody dead!”
Mindor slipped out of the wormhole terminus and
stretched its wings wide. Its head swung around so that one eye could fix the Leonora
Cephei with a daunting stare.
Jed looked into one of the bridge’s
AV pillars, seeing the huge hellhawk flap its wings in slow sweeps, closing the
distance with deceptive speed. Disquiet gave way to a kind of reverence. He
whooped enthusiastically and hugged Beth. She grinned indulgently back at him.
“That’s something, huh?”
“Sure is.”
“We did it, we bloody did it.”
A terrified Captain Knox ignored
the babbling, insane kids and ordered the main communications dish to point at
Pinjarra so he could call the Trojan cluster capital for help. Not, he guessed,
that it would do the slightest good.
Rocio Condra was ready for it.
After several dozen clandestine pickups he knew exactly how the captains
reacted to his appearance. Out of the eight short-range defence lasers secured
to his hull, only three were still functioning, and that was only because they
utilized bitek processor control circuitry. The rest had succumbed to the
vagaries of his energistic power, which he could never quite contain. He
targeted the dish as it started to track around, and sent a half-second pulse
into its central transmission module.
“Do not attempt to contact anyone,”
he broadcast.
“I understand,” a shaken Knox
datavised.
“Good. Are you carrying Deadnights
for transfer?”
“Yes.”
“Stand by for rendezvous and docking.
Tell them to be ready.”
The monster bird folded its wings
as it manoeuvred closer to the spindly inter-orbit craft. Its outline began to
waver as it rolled around its long axis; feathers giving way to dull green
polyp, avian shape reverting to the earlier compressed-cone hull. There were
changes, though: the scattered purple rings were now long ovals, mimicking its
feather pattern. Of the three rear fins, the central one had shrunk, while the
two outer ones had elongated and flattened back.
With the roll manoeuvre complete, Mindor’s
life-support module lay parallel to the Leonora Cephei. Rocio Condra
extended the airlock tube. Now, he could sense the minds inside the inter-orbit
ship’s life-support capsule. It contained the usual split between trepidatious
crew and ridiculously exuberant Deadnights. This time there was an addition, a
strange mind, dulled yet happy, with thoughts moving in erratic rhythms.
He watched with idle curiosity
through the internal optical sensors as the Deadnights came aboard. The
interior of the life-support module had come to resemble a nineteenth-century
steamship, with a profusion of polished rosewood surfaces and brass fittings.
According to the pair of possessed, Choi-Ho and Maxim Payne, who served as
maintenance crew, there was also a fairly realistic smell of salt water. Rocio
was pleased with the realism, which was far more detailed and solid than the
possessed usually achieved. That was due to the nature of the hellhawk’s neuron
cell structure which contained hundreds of subnodes arranged in processorlike
lattices. They were intended to act as semi-autonomic regulators for his
technological modules. Once he had conjured up the image he wanted and loaded
it into a subnode it was maintained without conscious thought, and with an
energistic strength unavailable to an ordinary human brain.
The last few weeks had been a
revelation to Rocio Condra. After the initial bitter resentment, he had
discovered that life as a hellhawk was about as rich as it was possible to
have, although he did miss sex. And he’d been talking to some of the others
about that; theoretically they could simply grow the appropriate genitalia
(those that didn’t insist on imagining themselves as techno starships). If they
accomplished that, there was no real reason to go back into human bodies. Which
of course would make them independent of Kiera. For an entity that lived
forever, the variety which would come from trying out a new creature’s body and
life cycle every few millennia might just be the final answer to terminal
ennui.
Accompanying the revelation was a
growing resentment at the way Kiera was using them—to which the prospect of
fighting for Capone was a worrying development. Even if he was offered a human
body now, Rocio was doubtful he wanted to go with the habitat. He wasn’t
frightened of space like the rest of the returned souls, not anymore, not
possessing this magnificent creature. Space and all its emptiness was to be
loved for its freedom.
Gravity returned slowly as Gerald
drifted through the airlock tube, his shoulder bag in tow. The airlock
compartment he landed in was almost identical to the one he had left behind.
But it was larger, its technology more discreet, and outside the hatch Choi-Ho
and Maxim Payne greeted him with smiles and comforting words where behind Knox
and his eldest son had stood guard over their hatch with TIP carbines and
scowls.
“There are several cabins
available,” Choi-Ho said. “Not enough for everyone, so you’ll probably have to
double up.”
Gerald smiled blankly, which came
over more as a frightened grimace.
“Pick any one,” she told him
kindly.
“When will we get there?” Gerald
asked.
“We have a rendezvous in the Kabwe
system in eight hours, after that we’ll be going back to Valisk. It should be
about twenty hours.”
“Twenty? Is that all?”
“Yes.”
“Twenty.” It was said with
deference. “Are you sure?”
“Yes, quite sure.” People were
starting to bunch up in the airlock behind him; all of them curiously reluctant
to push past. “A cabin,” she suggested hopefully.
“Come on, Gerald, mate,” Beth said
breezily. She took his arm and pulled gently. He walked obediently down the
corridor with her. He only stopped once, and that was to look over his shoulder
and say an earnest, “Thank you,” to an oddly intrigued Choi-Ho.
Beth kept going right to the end of
the U-shaped corridor. She thought it would be best to get Gerald a cabin away
from the rest of the Deadnights. “Can you believe this place?” she said. She
was walking on a deep red carpet past portholes that shone brilliant beams of sunlight
into the corridor (although she couldn’t see out through them). The doors were
all golden wood. In her usual sweatshirt, two jackets, and baggy jeans she felt
uncomfortably out of place.
She peered around a door and found
an empty cabin. There were two bunk beds clipped to a wall, and a small sliding
door to the bathroom. The plumbing was similar to the toilet in the Leonora
Cephei, except this was all heavy brass with small white glazed ceramic
buttons.
“This ought to do you,” she said
confidently. A quiet pule made her turn around. Gerald was standing just inside
the door, his knuckles pressed into his mouth.
“What’s the matter, Gerald?”
“Twenty hours.”
“I know. But that’s good, isn’t
it?”
“I’m not sure. I want to be there,
to see her again. But she’s not her anymore, not my Marie.”
He was quaking. Beth put an arm
around his shoulders and eased him down onto the bottom bunk. “Easy there,
Gerald. Once we’re at Valisk, all this is going to seem like a bad dream;
honestly, mate.”
“It doesn’t end there, it starts
there. And I don’t know what to do, I don’t know how to save her. I can’t put
her in zero-tau by myself. They’re so strong, and evil.”
“Who, Gerald? Who are you talking
about? Who’s Marie?”
“My baby.”
He was crying now, his head pressed
into her shoulder. She patted the back of his neck instinctively.
“I don’t know what to do,” he
gasped out. “She’s not here to help me.”
“Marie’s not here?”
“No. Loren. She’s the only one that
can help me. She’s the only one who can help any of us.”
“It’s all right, Gerald, really,
you’ll see.”
The reaction wasn’t what she
expected at all. Gerald started a hysterical laugh which was half screams. Beth
wanted to let go and get out of the cabin fast. He’d flipped, totally flipped
now. The only reason she kept hold of him was because she didn’t know what
would happen if she didn’t. He might get worse.
“Please, Gerald,” she begged.
“You’re frightening me.”
He grabbed both of her shoulders,
squeezing hard enough to make her flinch. “Good!” His face had reddened with
anger. “You should be frightened, you stupid, stupid little girl. Don’t you
understand where we’re going?”
“We’re going to Valisk,” Beth
whispered.
“Yes, Valisk. That doesn’t frighten
me, I’m bloody terrified. They’re going to torture us, hurt you so bad you’ll
beg a soul to possess you and stop them. I know they will. That’s all they ever
do. They did it to me before, and then Dr Dobbs made me go through it again,
and again and again just so he could know what it was like.” The anger drained
out of him, and he sagged forwards into her awkward embrace. “I’ll kill myself.
Yes. Maybe that’s it. I can help Marie that way. I’m sure I can. Anything’s
better than possession again.”
Beth started rocking him as best
she could, soothing him as she would any five-year-old who’d woken from a
nightmare. The things he was saying plagued her badly. After all, they only had
Kiera’s word that she was building a fresh society for them. One recording that
promised she was different from the rest. “Gerald?” she asked after a while. “Who’s
this Marie you want to help?”
“My daughter.”
“Oh. I see. Well how do you know
she’s at Valisk?”
“Because she’s the one Kiera’s
possessing.”
Rocio Condra parted his beak in
what passed for a smile. The sensor in Skibbow’s cabin wasn’t the best, and his
affinity link with its bitek processor suffered annoying dropouts. But what had
been said was plain enough.
He wasn’t entirely sure how he
could use the knowledge, but it was the first sign of any possible chink in
Kiera’s armour. That was a start.
Stephanie could finally see the end
of the red cloud cover. The heavy ceiling had been dropping closer to the
ground for some time now as the convoy drove unimpeded along the M6. Individual
clumps and streamers churned against each other in a motion reminiscent of
waves crashing on rocks, bright slivers of pink and gold rippled among the
distorted underbelly. They acted like a conductor for a current of pure
agitation. The will of the possessed was being thwarted, their shield against
the sky arrested by the Kingdom’s firebreak.
The cliff of white light sleeting
down along the boisterous edge appeared almost solid. Certainly it took her
eyes a while to acclimatize, slowly resolving the grainy shadows which crouched
at the end of the road.
“I think it might be a good idea to
slow down now,” Moyo said in her ear.
She applied the brakes, reducing
their speed to a crawl. The other three buses behind matched her caution. Two
hundred metres from the flexing curtain of sunlight she stopped altogether. The
cloud base was only four or five hundred metres high here, hammering on the
invisible boundary in perpetual ferment.
Two sets of bright orange barriers
had been erected across the road. The first was under the edge of the cloud,
sometimes bathed in red light, sometimes in white; the second was three hundred
metres north, guarded by a squad of Royal Marines. Behind them, several dozen
military vehicles were drawn up on the hard shoulder, armoured troop
transports, ground tanks, general communications vehicles, lorries, a canteen,
and several field headquarters caravans.
Stephanie opened the bus doors and
stepped down onto the road. The thunder was an aggressive growl here, warning
outsiders to keep back.
“What did they do to the grass?”
Moyo shouted. Just inside the line of sunlight, the grass was dead, its blades
blackened and desiccated. Already it was crumbling into dust. The dead zone lay
parallel to the border of the red cloud as far as the eye could see, forming a
rigid stripe that cut cleanly across every contour.
Stephanie looked along the broad
swath of destruction, trees and bushes had been burned to charcoal stumps.
“Some kind of no-man’s-land, I suppose.”
“That’s a bit extreme, isn’t it?”
She laughed, and pointed up at the
glowing cloud.
“Okay, you got a point. What do you
want to do next?”
“I’m not sure.” She resented her
indecision immediately. This was the culmination of enormous emotional
investment. For all that, the practicalities of the moment had been ignored. I
almost wish we were still travelling, it gave me such a sense of satisfaction.
What have we got after this?
Cochrane, McPhee, and Rana joined
them.
“Some terminally unfriendly looking
dudes we have here,” Cochrane yelled above the thunder. The marines lining the
barrier were motionless, while more were hurrying from the cluster of vehicles
to reinforce them.
“I’d better go and talk to them,”
Stephanie said.
“Not alone?” Moyo protested.
“I’ll look a lot less threatening
than a delegation.” A white handkerchief sprouted from Stephanie’s hand; she
held it up high and clambered over the first set of barriers.
Lieutenant Anver watched her coming
and gave his squad their deployment assignments, sending half of them out to
flank the road and watch for any other possessed trying to sneak over, not that
they’d ever get past the satellites. His helmet sensors zoomed in for a
close-up on the woman’s face. She was squinting uncomfortably at the light as
she emerged from under the dappled shadow of the red cloud. A pair of
sunglasses materialized on her face.
“Definitely possessed, sir,” he
datavised to Colonel Palmer.
“We see that, thank you, Anver,”
the colonel replied. “Be advised, the security committee is accessing your
datavise now.”
“Sir.”
“There’s no other activity along
the firebreak,” Admiral Farquar datavised. “We don’t think she’s a diversion.”
“Go see what she wants, Anver,”
Colonel Palmer ordered. “And be very careful.”
“Yes, sir.”
Two of his squad slid a section of
the barrier aside, and he stepped forwards. For all that it was only a
hundred-metre walk, it lasted half of his life. He spent the time trying to
think what to say to her, but when they stopped a few paces from each other,
all he said was: “What do you want?”
She lowered her hand with the
handkerchief and gave him a cautious smile. “We brought some children out.
They’re in the buses back there. I, um . . . wanted to tell you so you wouldn’t
. . . you know.” The smile became one of embarrassment. “We weren’t sure how
you’d react.”
“Children?”
“Yes. About seventy. I don’t know
the exact number, I never actually counted.”
“Does she mean non-possessed?”
Admiral Farquar datavised.
“Are these children possessed?”
“Of course not,” Stephanie said
indignantly. “What do you think we are?”
“Lieutenant Anver, this is Princess
Kirsten.”
Anver stiffened noticeably. “Yes,
ma’am.”
“Ask her what she wants, what the
deal is.”
“What do you want for them?”
Stephanie’s lips tightened in
anger. “I don’t want anything. Not in return, they’re just children.
What I’d like is an assurance that you military types aren’t going to shoot
them when we send them over.”
“Oh, dear,” Princess Kirsten
datavised. “Apologize to her, Lieutenant, on my behalf, please. And tell her
that we’re very grateful to her and those with her for bringing the children
back to us.”
Anver cleared his throat, this
wasn’t quite what he expected when he started his lonely walk out here. “I’m
very sorry, ma’am. The Princess sends her apologies for assuming the worst.
We’re very grateful to you for what you’ve done.”
“I understand. This isn’t easy for
me, either. Now, how do you want to handle this?”
Twelve Royal Marines came back to
the buses with her; volunteers, without their armour suits and weapons. The bus
doors were opened, and the children came down. There were a lot of tears and
running around in confusion. Most of them wanted a last kiss and a hug from the
adults who had rescued them (Cochrane was especially popular), much to the
amazement of the marines.
Stephanie found herself almost in
tears as the last batch started off down the broad road, clustering around the
big marine; one of them was even being given a piggyback. Moyo’s arm was around
her shoulders to hold her tight.
Lieutenant Anver came over to stand
in front of her and saluted perfectly (to which Cochrane managed a quite
obscene parody). He looked badly troubled. “Thank you again, all of you,” he
said. “That’s me saying it, I can’t datavise under the cloud.”
“Oh, do take care of the little
darlings,” Tina said, sniffing hard. “Poor Analeese has the most dreadful cold,
none of us could cure her. And Ryder hates nuts; I think he’s got an allergy,
and—” She fell silent as Rana squeezed her forearm.
“We’ll take care of them,”
Lieutenant Anver said gravely. “And you, you take care of yourselves.” He
glanced pointedly out to the firebreak where a procession of vehicles was
massing around the barrier to greet the children. “You might want to do that
away from here.” A crisp nod at Stephanie, and he was walking back towards the
barrier.
“What did he mean?” Tina asked
querulously.
“Wowee.” Cochrane let out a long
breath. “We like did it, man, we showed the forces of bad vibes not to
mess with us.”
Moyo kissed Stephanie. “I’m very
proud of you.”
“Ugh,” Cochrane exclaimed. “Don’t
you two cats ever stop?”
A smiling Stephanie leaned forwards
and kissed him on his forehead, getting hair caught on her lips. “Thank you,
too.”
“Will somebody tell me what he
meant,” Tina said. “Please.”
“Nothing good,” McPhee said.
“That’s a fact.”
“So now what do we do?” Rana asked.
“Go round up another group of kids? Or split up? Or settle that farm we talked
about? What?”
“Oh, stay together, definitely,”
Tina said. “After everything we’ve done I couldn’t bear losing any of you,
you’re my family now.”
“Family. That’s cosmic, sister. So
like what’s your position on incest?”
“I don’t know what we’ll decide,”
Stephanie said. “But I think we should take the lieutenant’s advice, and do it
a long way away from here.”
The spaceplane rose out of Nyvan’s
stratosphere on twin plumes of plasma flame, arching up towards its orbital injection
coordinate a thousand kilometres ahead. Submunitions were still peppering space
with explosions and decoy flares, while electronic warfare drones blasted
gigawatt pulses at any emission they could detect. Now its reaction drive
rockets were on, the spaceplane was no longer invisible to the residuals of the
combat wasp battle.
Lady Macbeth flew cover a hundred kilometres above it,
sensors and maser cannon deployed to strike any missile which acquired lock-on.
The starship had to make continual adjustments to its flight vector to keep the
spaceplane within its protective radius. Joshua watched its drive flaring,
reducing velocity, accelerating, switching altitude. Five times its masers
fired to destroy incoming submunitions.
By the time the spaceplane had
reached orbit and was manoeuvring to dock, the sky above Nyvan had calmed
considerably. Only three other starships were visible to Lady Mac’s
sensors, all of them were frigates belonging to local defence forces. None of
them seemed interested in Lady Mac, or even each other. Beaulieu began a
thorough sensor sweep, alert for the inevitable chaotic showers of
post-explosion debris which would make low orbit hazardous for some time to
come. Some of the returns were odd, making her redefine the sweep’s parameters.
Lady Mac’s sensors shifted their focus away from the planet itself.
Joshua slid cleanly through the
hatchway into the bridge. His clothes had dried out in the hot air of the
spaceplane’s cabin, but the dirt and stains remained. Dahybi’s ship-suit was in
a similar state.
Sarha gave him an apprehensive
glance. “Melvyn?” she asked quietly.
“Not a chance. Sorry.”
“Bugger.”
“You two did a good job up here,”
Joshua said. “Well done, that was some fine piloting to stay above the
spaceplane.”
“Thanks, Josh.”
Joshua looked from Liol, who was
anchored to a stikpad by the captain’s acceleration couch, to Sarha, whose
expression was utterly unrepentant.
“Oh, Jesus, you gave him the access
codes.”
“Yes, I did. My command decision.
There was a war up here, Joshua.”
It wasn’t, he decided, worth making
an issue out of, not in view of everything else that was happening. “That’s why
I left you in charge,” he said. “I had confidence in you, Sarha.”
She frowned suspiciously. He sounded
sincere. “So you got Mzu, then. I hope it was worth it.”
“For the Confederation I suppose it
is. For individuals . . . you’d have to ask them. But then individuals have
been dying because of her for some time now.”
“Captain, please access our sensor
suite,” Beaulieu said.
“Right.” He rolled in midair, and
landed on his acceleration couch. The images from the external sensor clusters
expanded into his mind. Wrong. They had to be wrong. “Jesus wept!” His brain
was already acting in conjunction with the flight computer’s astrogration
program to plot a vector before he’d fully admitted the reality of the tide of
rock descending on the planet. “Prepare for acceleration, thirty seconds—mark.
We have to leave.” A fast internal sensor check showed him his new passengers
hurrying towards couches; images superimposed with purple and yellow trajectory
plots that wriggled frantically as he refined their projected trajectory.
“Who did that?” he asked.
“No idea,” Sarha said. “It happened
during the battle, we didn’t even know until afterwards. But it sure as hell
wasn’t random combat wasp strikes.”
“I’ll monitor the drive tubes,”
Joshua said. “Sarha, take systems coverage, please. Liol, you’ve got fire
control.”
“Aye, Captain,” Liol said.
It was a strictly neutral tone.
Joshua was satisfied with that. He triggered Lady Mac’s fusion drives,
bringing them up to a three-gee acceleration.
“Where are we going?” Liol asked.
“Bloody good question,” Joshua
said. “For now I just want us out of here. After that, it rather depends on
what Ione and the agents decide, I expect.”
There must be someone who knows.
One of you.
We know it is real. We know it is
hidden.
Two bodies await. A male and a
female. Youthful, splendid. Do you hear them? Do you taste them? Pleading for
one of you to enter them. You can. All the riches and pleasures of reality can
be yours again. If you have the admission price, one tiny piece of information.
That’s all.
She didn’t hide it by herself. She
had help from somebody. Probably many. Were you one?
Ah. Yes. You. You are being
truthful. You know.
Come then. Come forwards, come
through. We reward you with—
He cried out in wonder and misery
as he struggled his way into the victim’s agonized nervous system. There was
pain, and shame, and humiliation to cope with; tragic, terrible pleas from the
body’s true soul. One by one, he faced them down, mending the broken flesh,
suppressing and ignoring the protest, until there was only his own shame left.
Not so easily abandoned.
“Welcome to the Organization,” said
Oscar Kearn. “So, you were part of Mzu’s mission?”
“Yes. I was with her.”
“Good. She’s a clever woman, that
Mzu. I’m afraid she’s eluded us once again, thanks to that traitor bitch
Barnes. Even so, only the amazingly resourceful can duck an ironberg when it’s
falling on their heads. I didn’t realize what I was dealing with before. I
don’t suppose she would have helped us even if we had caught her. She’s like
that, tough and determined. But now her luck’s run out. You can tell me, can’t
you? You know where the Alchemist is.”
“Yes,” Ikela said. “I know where it
is.”
Alkad Mzu floated into the bridge,
accompanied by Monica and Samuel. She acknowledged Joshua with a small twitch
of her lips, then blinked when she saw Liol. “I didn’t know there were two of
you.”
Liol grinned broadly.
“Before we all start arguing over
what to do with you, Doctor,” a serjeant said. “I’d like you to confirm the
Alchemist does or did exist.”
Alkad tapped her toe on a stikpad
beside the captain’s couch, preventing herself from drifting about. “Yes, it
exists. And I built it. I wish to Mary I hadn’t, now, but the past is past. My
only concern now is that it doesn’t fall into anybody’s hands, not yours, and
certainly not the possessed.”
“Very noble,” Sarha said, “from
someone who was going to use it to kill an entire planet.”
“They wouldn’t have been killed,”
Alkad said wearily. “It was intended to extinguish Omuta’s star, not turn it
nova. I’m not an Omutan barbarian; they’re the ones who kill entire worlds.”
“Extinguish a star?” Samuel mused
in puzzlement.
“Please don’t ask for details.”
“I propose Dr Mzu is taken back to
Tranquillity,” the serjeant said. “We can formalize the observation to insure
she doesn’t pass the information on. I don’t think you will anyway, Doctor, but
intelligence agencies are highly suspicious entities.”
Monica consulted Samuel. “I can
live with that,” she said. “Tranquillity is neutral territory. It isn’t all
that different to our original agreement.”
“It isn’t,” Samuel agreed. “But,
Doctor, you do realize you cannot be allowed to die. Certainly not until the
problem of possession has been resolved.”
“Fine by me,” Alkad said.
“What I mean, Doctor, is that when
you are very old, you must be placed in zero-tau to prevent your soul from
entering the beyond.”
“I will not give anyone the
Alchemist technology, no matter what the circumstances.”
“I’m sure that is your intention at
the moment. But how will you feel after a hundred years trapped in the beyond?
A thousand? And to be indelicate, the choice is not yours to make. It is ours.
You lost the right to self-determination when you built the Alchemist. If you
give yourself enough power to make a galaxy fear you and what you can achieve,
you abrogate that right to those whom your actions affect.”
“I agree,” the serjeant said. “You
will be placed in zero-tau before you die.”
“Why not just put me in now?” Alkad
said crustily.
“Don’t tempt me,” Monica said. “I
know the kind of contempt you moron intellectuals hold the government services
in. Well listen good, Doctor, we exist to protect the majority so they can run
around living their lives as decently and as best they can. We protect them
from shits like you, who never fucking stop to think what you’re doing.”
“You didn’t protect my bloody
planet, did you!” Alkad yelled back. “And don’t you dare lecture me on responsibility.
I’m prepared to die to stop the Alchemist being used by anybody else,
especially your imperialist Kingdom. I know my responsibilities.”
“You do now. Now you realize
what a mistake you made, now people are dying just to keep your precious arse
safe.”
“Okay, that’s it,” Joshua said
loudly. “We’re all agreed where the doc is going, end of discussion. Nobody is
going to start shouting about moral philosophy on my bridge. We’re all tired,
we’re all emotional. Pack it in, the pair of you. I’m going to plot a course to
Tranquillity, you go to your cabins and cool off. We’ll be home inside of two
days.”
“Understood,” Monica said through
clenched teeth. “And . . . thank you for getting us off. It was—”
“Professional?”
She almost snapped back at him, but
that grin . . . “Professional.”
Alkad cleared her throat. “I’m
sorry,” she said apologetically. “But there is a problem. We can’t go straight
back to Tranquillity.”
Joshua massaged his temple and
asked: “Why not?” if only to stop Monica from flying at Mzu’s throat.
“The Alchemist itself.”
“What about it?” Samuel asked.
“We have to collect it.”
“All right,” Joshua said in a
far-from-reasonable tone. “Why?”
“Because it isn’t secure where it
is.”
“It’s managed to stay secure for
thirty years. Jesus, just take the secret of its location to zero-tau with you.
If the agencies haven’t found it by now, they never will.”
“They won’t have to look anymore,
nor will the possessed, especially if our current situation continues for more
than a few years.”
“Go on, we may as well hear it
all.”
“There were three ships on our
strike mission against Omuta,” Alkad said. “The Beezling, the Chengho,
and the Gombari. Beezling was the Alchemist’s deployment vessel,
I was on board; the other two were our escort frigates. We were intercepted by
blackhawks before we could deploy the Alchemist. They destroyed the Gombari,
and hit us and the Chengho pretty badly. We were left for dead in
interstellar space. Neither of us could jump, and the nearest inhabited star
was seven light-years away.
“After the attack, we spent a
couple of days repairing our internal systems, then we rendezvoused. It was
Ikela and Captain Prager who came up with the eventual solution. Chengho was
smaller than Beezling, it didn’t need as many energy patterning nodes to
perform a ZTT jump. So the crew removed some of the Beezling’s intact
nodes and installed them in the Chengho. We didn’t have the proper tools
for that kind of job; and then the nodes had different power ratings and
performance factors, they had to be completely reprogrammed. It took us three
and a half weeks, but we did it. We rebuilt ourselves a ship that could make a
ZTT jump—not very well, and not very far, but it was functional. That was when
things started to get difficult. The Chengho was too small to take both
crews, even for just a small jump. There was only one life-support capsule, and
it could hold eight of us at a push. We knew we couldn’t risk a flight back to
Garissa, the nodes would never last that long, and we guessed that Omuta would
have launched some kind of big attack by then. After all, that’s why we’d been
dispatched in the first place, to stop them. So we jumped to the nearest
inhabited star system, Crotone. The idea was that we’d charter a ship and get
back to Garissa that way. Of course, when we arrived at Crotone, we heard about
the genocide.
“Ikela and Prager had even
formulated a worst case option. Just in case, they said. We’d brought some
antimatter with us on the Chengho; if we sold that together with the
frigate it would fetch millions. Assuming the Garissan government no longer
existed, we would have all the money we needed to operate independently for
decades.”
“The Stromboli Separatist Council,”
Samuel said suddenly.
“Right,” Alkad acknowledged.
“That’s who we sold it to.”
“Ah, we never did find out how they
got their antimatter. They blew up two of Crotone’s low-orbit port stations
with the stuff.”
“After we left, yes,” Alkad said.
“So Ikela took the money and
founded T’Opingtu.”
“Correct; once we found out that
the Confederation Assembly granted the Dorados to the survivors of the
genocide, all seven navy officers were given an equal share. The plan was for
them to invest the money in various companies, the profits from which would be
used to help fund the partizans. We needed committed nationalists to crew the
ship that they were supposed to prepare for me. After that, they would buy or
charter a combat-capable starship to complete the Alchemist mission. As you
know, Ikela didn’t fulfill the last part of the plan. I don’t know about the
others.”
“Why wait thirty years?” Joshua
asked. “Why didn’t you just hire a combat-capable starship as soon as you had
the money from the sale of the frigate, and go straight back to the Beezling?”
“Because we couldn’t be sure
exactly where it was. You see, we didn’t just repair the Chengho. There
were thirty people and the Alchemist left behind on the Beezling.
Suppose the Chengho didn’t make it, or suppose we were caught and
interrogated by the CNIS or some other agency? There was even the possibility
the blackhawks might return. We had to plan for all those factors as well, the
remaining crew had to be given their chance, too.”
“They went into zero-tau,” Joshua
said. “How does that prevent you from knowing the exact coordinate?”
“Yes, obviously they went into
zero-tau, but that’s not all. We also repaired their reaction drive. They flew
a vector to an uninhabited star which was only two and a half light-years
away.”
“Jesus, a sub-lightspeed journey
through interstellar space? You’ve got to be kidding. That’s impossible, it
would take—”
“Twenty-eight years, we estimated.”
“Ah!” Realization came to Joshua
like the silent detonation of Norfolk Tears after it hit the stomach. He felt a
surge of admiration for those lost desperate crews of thirty years ago. Not
caring what the odds were, just going for it. “They used antimatter
propulsion.”
“Yes. We transferred every gram
from our remaining combat wasps into the Beezling’s confinement
chambers. It was enough to accelerate them up to about nine per cent
lightspeed. So now tell me, Captain, how difficult would it be to locate a ship
that is moving away from its last known coordinate at eight or nine per cent
lightspeed? And if you did find it, how would you rendezvous?”
“Not possible. Okay, you have to wait
until the Beezling decelerated and arrived at that uninhabited star. How
come you didn’t make a dash for them two years ago?”
“Because we weren’t sure just how
efficient the drive would be over such a long period of use. Two years gave us
an adequate safety margin; and of course as it turned out, the sanctions would
be over. There was always a remote chance the Confederation Navy blockade
squadron would detect us, after all it’s their job to be looking for
sanction-buster starships emerging in odd places around Omuta. So after we sold
the Chengho we decided on thirty years.”
“You mean the Beezling is
just orbiting that star waiting for you to make contact?” Liol asked.
“Yes. Providing everything worked
as it was supposed to. They are supposed to wait for another five years; the
time is irrelevant in zero-tau, but the support systems cannot last
indefinitely. If they hadn’t been contacted by then, either by myself and the Chengho
crew, or the Garissan government, they were to destroy the Alchemist and
start signalling for help. Uninhabited star systems within the Confederation
boundaries are inspected on a regular basis by navy patrol ships to make sure
they aren’t being used by antimatter production stations. They would have been
rescued eventually.”
Joshua glanced around to the
serjeant, wishing the construct had some way of displaying emotion; he’d like
to know what Ione made of the story. “Makes sense,” he said. “What do you want
to do?”
“We have to see if the Beezling completed
its journey,” the serjeant said.
“And if it has?” Samuel asked.
“Then the Alchemist must be
destroyed. After that, any surviving crew will be taken back to Tranquillity.”
“Question, Doc,” Joshua said. “If
anybody sees the Alchemist, will that give them a clue to its nature?”
“No. You have no worries on that
score, Captain. There is however someone among the crew who could tell you how
to build another. His name is Peter Adul, he will have to remain in
Tranquillity with me. After that, you will be safe again.”
“Okay, what’s the star’s
coordinate?”
It was a long time before Alkad
said: “Mother Mary, this is not what was meant to be.”
“Nothing ever is, Doc. I learned
that long ago.”
“Ha! You’re too young.”
“Depends how you fill the years,
doesn’t it?”
Alkad Mzu datavised the coordinate over.
A wormhole terminus is opening, Tranquillity announced.
At the time, Ione was standing knee
deep in the warm water of the cove, rubbing Haile’s flank with a big yellow
bath sponge. She straightened her back and began wringing out the sponge. Her
real attention was focused on a point in space a hundred and twenty thousand
kilometres away from the habitat where the vacuum’s gravity density was
building rapidly. Three SD platforms orbiting the emergence zone locked their
X-ray lasers on to the terminus as it expanded. Five patrol blackhawks
accelerated in at four gees.
A large voidhawk slipped out of the
two-dimensional rent. Oenone, Confederation Navy ship SLV-66150,
requesting approach and docking permission, it said. Our official flight
authentication code follows.
Granted, Tranquillity replied after it verified the
code. The SD platforms were switched back to alert status. Three of the
blackhawks resumed their patrol, while the remaining two curved around to form
an escort as Oenone accelerated in towards the habitat.
“I’m going to have to leave you,”
Ione said.
Jay Hilton’s vexed face peeped over
the top of Haile’s gleaming white back. “What is it this time?” she asked
petulantly.
“Affairs of state.” Ione started
wading towards the shore. She scooped some water up and tried to flush the sand
out of her bikini top.
“You always say that.”
Ione gave the disgruntled girl a
forlorn smile. “Because it always is, these days.” Sorry, she added.
Haile formshifted the tip of an arm
into a human hand and waved. Goodbye, Ione Saldana. I have much sorrow you
are leaving, my endlegs itch like hell.
Haile!
I form a communication
wrongness? I have shame.
Not wrong, exactly.
Gladness. That was a Joshua
Calvert expression. Much favoured.
Ione snapped her teeth together. That
bloody Calvert! Anger gave way to something more confusing, a sort of
resentment . . . possibly. Hundreds of light-years away, and he still intrudes.
It would be. Please don’t use it around Jay.
Understanding is me. I have a
great many human emphasis phrases conveyed by Joshua Calvert.
I’ll bet you have.
I want properness in my
communication. I ask your assistance in reviewing my word collection. You may
edit me.
Yes, all right.
Much gladness!
Ione took another pace, then
laughed. Reviewing everything Joshua had said to the young Kiint would take
hours. Hours she hadn’t been spending on the beach of late. Haile was becoming
very crafty.
Jay leaned against her friend,
watching Ione put her sandals on and start back up the path to the tube
station. There was a slightly distracted expression on the woman’s face, that
Jay knew meant she was busy talking to the habitat personality. She didn’t like
to dwell on the topic. More than likely, it would be the possessed again. That
was all the adults talked about these days, and it was never reassuring talk.
Haile’s arm twined around Jay’s,
the tip stroking her gently.
You taste of sadness.
“I don’t think these horrible
possessed will ever go away.”
They will. Humans are clever.
You will find a way.
“I hope so. I do want Mummy back.”
Shall we build the castles of
sand now?
“Yes!” Jay grinned enthusiastically
and started splashing her way back up to the beach. They’d made the discovery
together that Haile with her tractamorphic arms was the universe’s best ever
builder of sand castles. With Jay directing, they had made some astonishing
towers along the shoreline.
Haile emerged from the water in a
small explosion of spray. Betterness. You have happiness again.
“So do you. Ione promised to come
back for the words.”
It is the best niceness when the
three of us play together. She knows this really.
Jay giggled. “She turned purple
when you said that. Good job you didn’t say fuck to her.”
The Oenone, Ione reflected. Why do I know that name?
Atlantis.
Oh, yes.
And a certain interception in
the Puerto de Santa Maria star system. We received an intelligence update from
the Confederation Navy last year.
Oh, bloody hell, yes.
Captain Syrinx wishes to talk to
you.
Ione sat down in the tube carriage
and began towelling her hair. Of course. The affinity contact broadened,
allowing Syrinx to proffer her identity trait.
Captain, Ione acknowledged.
I apologize for the haste, but
please be advised a Confederation Navy squadron will start arriving in another
nine minutes and thirty seconds—mark.
I see. Is Tranquillity in
danger?
No.
What then?
I am carrying the squadron’s
commander, Admiral Meredith Saldana. He requests an interview at which he can
explain our full strategic situation to you.
Granted. Welcome to
Tranquillity. The captain faded
from the affinity band.
She was curious about you, Tranquillity said. It was quite plain from
her emotional content.
Everybody’s always curious about
me. She borrowed the habitat’s
external senses to observe local space. They were in Mirchusko’s umbra, with
Choisya and Falsia hovering just above the gas giant’s crescent horizon. Apart
from the flotilla of blackhawks on patrol around the habitat’s shell, there was
little spaceship activity. The Oenone was the first starship to arrive
in seventy-six hours. Some MSVs and personnel commuters continued to glide
between the counter-rotating spaceport and Tranquillity’s bracelet of
industrial stations, but they were running a much reduced flight schedule. A
lone dazzle-point of fusion flame was rising up past the drab grey loop of the
Ruin Ring, an He3 tanker en route from the habitat’s cloudscoop to
the spaceport. Program the squadron’s arrival into the SD platforms, she
said. And warn the blackhawks, we don’t want any mistakes.
Naturally.
Meredith Saldana. That’s two
family visits in less than a month.
I don’t think this is a family
visit.
You’re probably right.
It was a suspicion which was proved
unpleasantly correct soon after Syrinx and the admiral were shown into the
audience chamber of De Beauvoir Palace. As she listened to Meredith Saldana
explain the proposed ambush of Capone’s fleet at Toi-Hoi a swarm of ambiguous
feelings lay siege to her mind.
I don’t want to involve us in
front line campaigns, she
confided to Tranquillity.
To be pedantic, we’re in the
campaign, not the front line itself. And the eradication of the Organization
fleet is not a strategic opportunity which can be overlooked.
No choice?
No choice.
I still think we’re too
important for this.
But safe. The safest place in
the Confederation, remember that.
We hope. I’d hate to put that to
the test, right now.
I don’t see how it will. Not
from this action. We will essentially be a supply and rendezvous base.
“Very well,” she told the admiral.
“You have my permission to use Tranquillity for your task force’s port station.
I’ll see that you get all the He3 you need.”
“Thank you, ma’am,” Meredith said.
“I’m slightly concerned by this
flight restriction you wish to place on starships until the ambush, although I
do appreciate the logic behind it. I currently have over twenty blackhawks
deploying sensor satellites around the orbit where the Laymil home planet used
to be. It’s extremely important research work. I’d hate to see it jeopardized.”
“They would only have to be
recalled for three or four days at the most,” Syrinx said. “Our scheduling is
very tight, here. Surely a small delay wouldn’t effect the research too much?”
“I’ll recall them for now. But if
you’re still here after a week, I’ll have to review the policy. As I said, this
is part of the effort to find an overall solution. That is not to be regarded
lightly.”
“Believe me, we don’t, ma’am,”
Meredith said.
She stared at him, trying to work
out what was going on behind his blue eyes. But his answering stare offered no
clue. “I have to say, I find it ironic that Tranquillity has become so
important to the Confederation and the Kingdom after all this time,” she said.
“Ironic or pleasing? Chance has
finally brought you the chance to vindicate your grandfather’s actions.”
There was no humour in his tone,
which surprised her. She’d assumed he would be more sympathetic than Prince
Noton. “You think Grandfather Michael was wrong?”
“I think he was wrong to pursue
such an unorthodox course.”
“Unorthodox to the family, perhaps.
But I assure you it’s not chance which has brought us together. This whole
situation will prove how right he was to act on his foresight.”
“I wish you every success.”
“Thank you. And who knows, one day
I might earn your approval, too.”
For the first time, he produced a
grudging smile. “You don’t like losing arguments, do you, Cousin Ione?”
“I am a Saldana.”
“That much is painfully obvious.”
“As are you. I don’t think every
Confederation admiral would have coped as well as you at Lalonde.”
“I did not cope well. I ensured my
squadron survived; most of it, anyway.”
“A Confederation officer’s first
duty is to follow orders. Second duty is to the crew. So I believe,” she said.
“As your original orders didn’t cover what you encountered, I’d say you did all
right.”
“Lalonde was . . . difficult,” he
said heavily.
“Yes. I know all about Lalonde from
Joshua Calvert.”
Syrinx, who had been looking
considerably ill at ease while the two Saldanas conducted their verbal fencing,
glanced sharply at Ione, her eyebrows raised in interest.
“Oh, yes,” Meredith reflected.
“Lagrange Calvert. Who could forget him?”
“Is he here?” Syrinx asked. “This
is his registered port.”
“He’s away at the moment, I’m
afraid,” Ione told her. “But I’m expecting him back any day now.”
“Good.”
Ione couldn’t quite fathom the Edenist’s
attitude. Why do you think she’s interested in Joshua?
I have no idea. Unless she wants
to punch him on the nose for Puerto de Santa Maria.
I doubt it. She’s an Edenist,
they don’t do things like that. You don’t suppose she and Joshua . . . ?
I doubt it. She’s an Edenist,
they have more taste.
Athene didn’t want him to come to
the house. It would be too upsetting for the children, she explained. Though
they both knew it was she who was discomforted by the whole idea; keeping him
away was a way of establishing a psychological barrier.
Instead, she chose one of the
spaceport reception lounges in the habitat’s endcap. There was nobody else in
the spacious room when she arrived, not that there could be any mistake. The
hulking figure was sitting on a deep settee in front of the long window,
watching service crews bustling around the voidhawks on their pedestals
outside. It was a squadron assigned to assist the Kulu Kingdom in the
Mortonridge Liberation campaign, one of them would soon be transporting him to
Ombey.
I missed this, he said, not turning around, I watched the
voidhawks through the sensitive cells, of course, but I still miss this. The
habitat perception doesn’t provide any sense of urgency. And my emotions were
not suppressed exactly, but less colourful, not so keenly felt. Do you know, I
think I’m actually becoming excited.
She walked over to the settee, an
extraordinary sense of trepidation simmering in her mind. The figure stood,
revealing its true height, several centimetres taller than she. As with all
Tranquillity serjeants, its exoskeleton was a faint ruddy colour, although a
good forty per cent of its body was covered in bright green medical nanonic
packages. It held up both hands, and turned them around, studying them
intently, its eyes just visible at the back of their protective slits.
I must be quite a sight. They
force-cloned all the organs separately, then stitched them together. Serjeants
take fifteen months to grow to full size usually; that would be far too long.
So here we are, Frankenstein’s army, patched together and rushed off the
assembly line. The packages should have done their work before we reach Ombey.
Athene’s shoulders drooped,
mirroring the dismay in her mind. Oh, Sinon, what have you done?
What I had to. The serjeants must
have some controlling consciousness. And seeing as how there were all us
individual personalities already available . . .
Yes, but not you!
Somebody has to volunteer.
I didn’t want you to be one.
I’m just a copy, my darling, and
an edited down one at that. My real personality is still in the neural strata,
suspended for now. When I get back, or if this serjeant is destroyed, I’ll
return to the multiplicity.
This is so wrong. You’ve had
your life. It was a wonderful life, rich and exciting, and full of love.
Transferring into the multiplicity is our reward for living true to our
culture, it should be like being a grandparent forever, a grandparent with the
largest family of relatives in the universe. You carry on loving, and you
become part of something precious to all of us. She looked up at the hard mask that was its
face, her own frail cheeks trembling. You don’t come back. You just don’t.
It’s not right, Sinon, it isn’t. Not for us, not for Edenists.
If we don’t help the Kingdom to
liberate Mortonridge, there may not be any Edenists for very much longer.
No! I won’t accept that. I never
have. I believe Laton if no one else does. I refuse to fear the beyond like
some inadequate Adamist.
It’s not the beyond we have to
worry about, it’s those that have returned from it.
I was one of those who opposed
this Mortonridge absurdity.
I know.
By committing ourselves to it,
we’re no better than animals. Beasts lashing out; it’s filthy. Humans can be so
much more.
But rarely are.
That’s what Edenism was supposed
to be about, to lift us above this primitivism. All of us.
The serjeant put its arm out
towards her, then withdrew it hurriedly. Shame leaked out into the affinity
band. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have asked you to come. I see how much this
hurts you. I just wanted to see you with my own eyes one last time.
They’re not your own eyes; and
you’re not even Sinon, not really. I think that’s what I hate most about this.
It’s not just Adamist religions the beyond undermines, it’s ruined the whole
concept of transference. What’s the point? You are your soul, if you are
anything. The Kiint are right, simulacrum personalities are nothing more than a
sophisticated library of memories.
In our case, the Kiint are
wrong. The habitat personality has a soul. Our individual memories are the
seeds of its consciousness. The more there are of us in the multiplicity, the
richer its existence and heritage becomes. Knowledge of the beyond hasn’t
ruined our culture. Edenism can adapt, it can learn and grow. Surmounting this
time intact will be our triumph. And that’s what I’m fighting for, to give us
that physical chance. I know the Mortonridge Liberation is a fraud, we all do.
But that doesn’t stop it from being valid.
You’re going to kill people.
However careful you are, however well intentioned you are, they will die.
Yes. I didn’t start this, and I
won’t be the one who stops it. But I must play my part. To do nothing would be
to sin by omission. What I and the others do on Mortonridge might buy you
enough time.
Me?
You, Consensus, the Adamist
researchers, maybe even priests. All of you have to keep looking. The Kiint
found a way to face the beyond and survive. It’s here somewhere.
I’ll do what I can, which at my
age is very limited.
Don’t underestimate yourself.
Thank you. You haven’t been
edited down that much, you know.
Some parts of me can’t be
edited, not if I want to keep being me. Bearing that in mind, I have one last
favour to ask of you.
Go on.
I’d like you to explain this to
Syrinx for me. I know my little Sly-minx, she’ll go nova when she hears I
volunteered for this.
I’ll tell her. I don’t know if I
can explain, but . . .
The serjeant bowed as best the
medical packages would allow. Thank you, Athene.
But do please take care.
I can’t give you my blessing.
There was no lavish farewell party
this time. Monterey had a more serious, less triumphant air these days. But Al
chose the Hilton’s ballroom anyway to watch the fleet coming together, and to
hell with any bad feelings and resentment it stirred up in his head. He stood
in front of the window, gazing out at the starships clustered around Monterey.
There were over a hundred and fifty of them, dwindling away until the more
distant ones were nothing more than big stars. Ion thrusters fired microsecond
jets of gauzy blue neon to keep their attitude locked. MSVs and personnel
commuters swam among them, delivering new crew and combat wasps.
The stealthed mines which the
voidhawks from Yosemite had scattered were no more, returning space around New
California to a more peaceful state. Even the voidhawks sent to observe the
Organization were finding it increasingly difficult to maintain their
inspection high above New California’s poles.
As if to emphasise the change in
local strategic fortunes, a hellhawk hurtled past the Hilton tower, twisting
about in complex curves to dodge the stationary Adamist starships. It was one
of the harpies, a red-eyed beast with a hundred-and-eighty-metre wingspan and a
vicious-looking beak.
Al pressed himself up against the
window to watch as it skirred around the asteroid. “Go you beaut,” he yelled
after it. “Go get ’em. Go!”
A small puff of pink dust erupted
from nowhere as a stealthed spyglobe was masered. The hellhawk performed a
victory roll, wingtip feathers standing proud to twist the solar wind.
“Wow!” Al pulled back from the
window, smiling magnanimously. “Ain’t that something else?”
“Glad I can live up to my part of
the bargain,” Kiera said with cool objectivity.
“Lady, after this, you got as many
fresh bodies as you want for Valisk. Al Capone knows how to reward his friends.
And believe me, this is what I call friendly.”
A serene smile ghosted her
beautiful young face. “Thank you, Al.”
The cluster of Organization
lieutenants at the rear of the ballroom kept their expressions stoic, while
their minds palpitated with jealousy. Al liked that; introduce a new favourite
in court, and see how the old-timers bid to prove themselves. He sneaked a look
at Kiera’s profile; she was wearing a loose-fitting purple blouse and
second-skin-tightness trousers, hair tied back with fussy decorum. Her face was
beguiling, with its prim features kept firmly under control. But smouldering
deep behind it was the old familiar illness of powerlust. She had more class
than most, but she wasn’t so different.
“How we doing, Luigi?” Al bellowed.
“Pretty good, Al. The hellhawk
crews say they should have cleared away every mine and spyglobe in another
thirty-two hours. We’re pushing those asshole voidhawks back further and
further, which means they can’t launch any more crap at us. They don’t know
what we’re doing anymore, and they can’t hurt us so bad. It makes one hell of a
difference. The fleet’s shaping up great now. The guys, they’re getting their
morale back, you know.”
“Glad to hear it.” Which was an
understatement. It had been looking bad for a while, what with the voidhawks
launching their unseen weapons and the lieutenants down on the planet abusing
their authority to carve themselves out some territory. Funny how all problems
locked together. Now the hellhawks had arrived the situation in space was
improving by the hour. The crews were no longer living in constant fear of a
strike by a stealthed mine, which improved their efficiency and confidence by
orders of magnitude. People on the ground sensed the fresh tide above them and
wanted to play ball again. The number of beefs was dropping; and the guys Leroy
had working the Treasury electric adding machines said fraud was levelling
out—not falling yet, but shit you couldn’t expect miracles.
“How do you keep the hellhawks in
line?” Al asked.
“I can guarantee them human bodies
when their work’s finished,” Kiera said. “Bodies which they can go straight
into without having to return to the beyond first. They’re very special bodies,
and you don’t have any.”
“Hey.” Al spread his arms wide,
puffing out a huge cloud of cigar smoke. “I wasn’t trying to muscle in on you,
sister. No way. You got a neat operation. I respect that.”
“Good.”
“We need to talk terms about
another squadron. I mean, between you and me, I’m in deep shit over Arnstadt—pardon
my French. The goddamn voidhawks there are wasting a couple of my ships each
day. Something’s gotta be done.”
Kiera gave a noncommittal moue.
“And what about this fleet? Won’t you need a squadron to protect it from
voidhawks at Toi-Hoi?”
Al didn’t need to consult Luigi
over that one, he could sense the hunger in the fleet commander’s mind. “Now
you come to mention it, it might not be a bad idea.”
“I’ll see to it,” Kiera said.
“There should be another group of hellhawks returning to Valisk today. If I dispatch
a messenger now, they should be back here within twenty-four hours.”
“Sounds pretty damn good to me,
lady.”
Kiera raised her walkie-talkie, and
pulled a long length of chrome aerial out of it. “Magahi, would you return to
Monterey’s docking ledge, please.”
“Roger,” a crackling voice said
from the walkie-talkie. “Give me twenty minutes.”
Al was aware of an uncomfortable
amount of satisfaction in Kiera’s mind. She was pretty sure she’d just won
something. “Couldn’t you just tell Magahi to go straight back to the habitat?”
he inquired lightly.
Kiera’s smile widened gracefully.
It was the same welcoming promise which had ended the Deadnight recording. “I
don’t think so. There’s a big security factor if we radio the order; after all
there are still some spyglobes out there. I don’t want the Edenists to know
Magahi is flying escort on a frigate convoy.”
“Escort? What frigates?”
“The frigates carrying the first
batch of my antimatter combat wasps to Valisk. That was your part of the
bargain, Al, wasn’t it?”
Damn the bitch! Al’s cigar had gone
out. Emmet said their stocks of antimatter were nearly exhausted, and the fleet
needed every gram to insure success at Toi-Hoi. He looked at Leroy, then Luigi.
Neither of them could offer him a way out. “Sure thing, Kiera. We’ll get it
organized.”
“Thank you, Al.”
Tough little ironass. Al couldn’t
decide if he respected that or not. He didn’t need any more complications right
now. But he was awful glad that she was lining up on his side.
He took another sidelong look at her
figure. Who knows? We could get to be real close allies. Except Jez would kill
me for real . . .
The ballroom’s huge double doors
swung open to admit Patricia and someone Al had never seen before. A possessed
man, who managed to cringe away from Patricia at the same time as he scampered
along beside her. Judging by the perilously fragile state of his thoughts he
had only just come into his new body.
He saw Al, and made an effort to
compose himself. Then his eyes darted to the huge window. His discipline
crumpled. “Holy cow,” he whispered. “It is true. You are going to invade
Toi-Hoi.”
“Who the fuck is this goofball?” Al
shouted at Patricia.
“His name’s Perez,” she said
calmly. “And you need to listen to him.”
If it had been anyone else who
spoke to him like that, they would’ve been kiboshed. But Patricia was one he
really trusted. “You’re shitting me, right?”
“Think what he just said, Al.”
Al did. “How did you know about
Toi-Hoi?” he asked.
“Khanna! I got it from Khanna. She
told me to tell you. She said one of us must get through. Then she killed me.
She killed all of us. No, not killed, executed, that’s what she did, executed
us. Smash smash smash with the white fire. Straight through my brain. That
bitch! I’d only been back for five minutes. Five goddamn minutes!”
“Who told you, fella? Who’s this
she you got the beef with?”
“Jacqueline Couteur. Back in
Trafalgar. The Confederation Navy got her banged up in the demon trap. I hope
she rots there. Bitch.”
Patricia smiled a superior
I-told-you-so, which Al acknowledged frugally. He put his arm around Perez’s
shaking shoulders, and proffered the man a Havana. “Okay, Perez. You got my
word, the word of Al Capone, which is the toughest currency of all, that nobody
here is gonna send you back into the beyond again. Now, you wanna start at the
beginning for me?”
Chapter 13
Earth.
A planet whose ecology was ruined
beyond repair: the price it paid for elevating itself to be the Confederation’s
supreme industrial and economic superpower. Overpopulated, ancient, decadent,
and utterly formidable. This was the undeniable imperial heart of the human
dominion.
It was also home.
Quinn Dexter admired the images
building up on the bridge’s holoscreens. This time he could savour them with
unhurried joy. Their official Nyvan flight authority code had been accepted by
Govcentral Strategic Defence Command. As far as anyone was concerned, they were
a harmless ship sent by a tiny government to buy defence components.
“Traffic control has given us a
vector,” Dwyer said. “We have permission to dock at the Supra-Brazil tower
station.”
“That’s good. Can you fly it?”
“I think so. It’s tough, we have to
go around the Halo, and they’ve given us a narrow flight path, but I can handle
that.”
Quinn nodded his permission without
saying anything. Dwyer had been a perfect pain in the arse for the whole
voyage, making out how difficult everything was before the flight computer
performed whatever was required with faultless efficiency. An extraordinarily
transparent attempt to show how indispensable he was. But then Quinn knew the
effect he had on people, it was part of the fun.
Dwyer was immediately busy talking
to the flight computer. Icons flurried over the console displays. Eight minutes
later they were under power, accelerating at a third of a gee to curve
southwards around the O’Neill Halo.
“Are we going down to the planet
first?” Dwyer asked. He was growing progressively twitchier in contrast to
Quinn’s deadly calm. “I didn’t know if you wanted to take over an asteroid.”
“Take over?” Quinn asked faintly.
“Yeah. You know, bring them the
gospel of God’s Brother. Like we did for Jesup and the other three.”
“No, I don’t think so. Earth isn’t
so arse backwards as Nyvan, it would never be that simple to convene the Night
here. It must be corrupted from within. The sects will help me do that. Once I
show them what I’ve become they’ll welcome me back. And of course, my friend
Banneth is down there. God’s Brother understands.”
“Sure, Quinn, that’s good. Whatever
you say.” The communications console bleeped for attention, which Dwyer happily
gave it. Script flowed down one of the screens, which only amplified his
distress as he read it. “Hell, Quinn, have you seen this?”
“God’s Brother gave me a great many
gifts, but being psychic isn’t one of them.”
“It’s the clearance procedures we
have to comply with after we dock. Govcentral security wants to ensure no
possessed are on board.”
“Fuck that.”
“Quinn!”
“I do hope, I really fucking do
hope that you’re not questioning me, Dwyer.”
“Shit, no way, Quinn. You’re the
man, you know that.” His voice was verging on hysteria.
“Glad to hear it.”
The Brazilian orbital tower
sprouted from the very heart of the South American continent, extending
fifty-five thousand kilometres out into space. When it was in Earth’s penumbra,
as it was when the Mount’s Delta approached, it was invisible to every
visual sensor. However, in other electromagnetic wavelengths, and particularly
the magnetic spectrum, it gleamed. A slim golden strand of impossible
length, with minute scarlet particles skimming along it at tremendous speed.
There were two asteroids attached
to the tower. Supra-Brazil, the anchor, was in geostationary orbit thirty-six
thousand kilometres above the ground, where it had been mined to extract the
carbon and silicon used in the tower’s construction. The second asteroid sat
right at the tip, acting as a mass counterbalance to ensure the anchor remained
stable, and damp down any dangerous harmonic oscillations in the tower which
built up from running the lift capsules.
Because Supra-Brazil was the only
section of the tower that was actually in orbit, it was the one place where
ships could dock. Unlike every settled asteroid it didn’t rotate, nor were
there any internal biosphere caverns. The three-hundred-metre-diameter tower
ran cleanly through the rock’s centre; its principal structure perfectly black
and perfectly circular. Positioned around the lower segment that stretched down
to Earth were twenty-five magnetic rails along which the lift capsules rode,
delivering tens of thousands of passengers and up to a hundred thousand tonnes
of cargo a day. The other segment, reaching up to the counterbalance, supported
a single rail, which was used barely once a month to ferry inspection and
maintenance mechanoids to the individual section platforms.
The surface of the asteroid was
covered with docking bays and all the usual spaceport support equipment. After
three hundred and eighty-six years of continual operation, and the tower’s
steady capacity expansion, there wasn’t a square metre of rock left visible.
Even with the Confederation
quarantine operating, over six thousand ships a day were still using it, the
majority of them from the Halo. They approached by positioning themselves ahead
of the port, a long ribbon of diverse craft dropping down from a higher orbit.
Navigation strobes and secondary drives produced twinkling cataracts of light
as they split into a complex braid of traffic lanes a kilometre above the
surface to reach their allocated bays. Departing ships formed an equally intricate
helical pattern as they rose away into a higher orbit.
Mount’s Delta slotted into its designated traffic lane,
gliding around the vast stem of the tower to dock in the floor of a valley
formed by pyramids of heat exchangers, tanks, and thermo-dump panels, three
times the size of the Egyptian originals. When the docking cradle had drawn it
down into the bottom of the bay, a necklace of lights around the rim came on,
illuminating every centimetre of the hull. Figures in black space armour were
secured around the bay walls, ready to deal with anyone trying to leave the
ship by irregular means.
“Now what?” Quinn asked.
“We have to give the security
service total access to our flight computer. They’re going to run a complete
diagnostic to make sure there aren’t any unexplained glitches anywhere in the
ship. They’ll also monitor us through the internal sensors at the same time.
Once they’re satisfied there’s no glitch we’re allowed out into the bay. We
have to undergo a whole series of tests, including datavises from our neural
nanonics. Quinn, we haven’t got any bloody neural nanonics, and a
starship’s crew always have them fitted. Always!”
“I told you,” Quinn’s hollow voice
said from deep within his hood, “I will deal with it. What else?”
Dwyer gave the display a wretched
stare. “Once we’ve been cleared, we’re put in a secure holding area while the
ship is searched by an armed security team. After it’s cleared, we will be
allowed out.”
“I’m impressed.”
Dwyer’s communications console was
showing a demand from the port’s security service to access the flight
computer. “What do we do?” he shrieked. “We can’t fly away, we can’t comply.
We’re trapped. They’ll storm us. They’ll have projectile weapons we can’t beat.
Or they’ll rip the capsule bulkhead open and decompress us. Or electrocute us
with—”
“You’re trapped.” It was only a
tiny whisper, but it stopped Dwyer’s rant dead.
“You can’t! Quinn, I did everything
you asked. Everything! I’m loyal. I’ve always been fucking loyal to you.”
Quinn extended an arm, a single white
finger emerging from the end of his black sleeve.
Dwyer threw out both hands. White
fire screamed out of his palms to lash at the black-robed incarnation of Death.
Bridge consoles flickered madly as corkscrews of pale flame bounced off Quinn,
flashing through the air to bury themselves in bulkheads and equipment.
“Finished?” Quinn asked.
Dwyer was sobbing.
“You’re weak. I like that. It means
you’ll serve me well. I will find you again, and use you.”
Dwyer evacuated his stolen body
just before the first burn of pain smashed along his spinal cord.
The security team assigned to the Mount’s
Delta knew something was wrong as soon as the starship docked. Its routine
datavises began to drop out for seconds at a time. When the bay’s management
officer tried to contact the captain there was no reply. A level one alert was
declared.
The docking bay and its immediate
surroundings were sealed up and isolated from the rest of Supra-Brazil. One
squad of combat officers and another of technical experts were rushed to the
docking bay to complement the original team. Communications lines were opened
to an advisory panel made up from senior commanders in the Govcentral Internal
Security Directorate and the Strategic Defence force.
Four minutes after it docked, the
clipper-class starship’s datavises had returned to normal, but there was still
no response from the captain nor any other member of the crew. The security
advisory panel authorized the team to go to the next stage.
A datalink umbilical jacked into a
socket on the starship’s hull. The GISD’s most powerful decryption computers
were brought on line to crack the flight computer’s access codes; it took less
than thirty seconds. The nature of the bridge’s modified processors and
programs were obvious: customized to be run by possessed. Almost
simultaneously, the sensors began relaying their images from the interior of
the small life-support capsule. There was nobody inside. However, there was one
anomaly whose cause wasn’t immediately apparent. A thick red paste was splashed
across almost every surface in the bridge. Then an eyeball drifted past one of
the sensors, and that mystery was solved—leaving a bigger paradox. The blood
hadn’t yet congealed. Some one or thing on board had slaughtered the crew
member only minutes ago. GISD could not permit an unknown threat to remain at
large; if the possessed had developed a fresh method of attack it had to be
investigated.
An airlock tube extended out from
the side of the bay. After arming themselves with chemical explosive fragmentation
grenades and submachine guns, five GISD combat officers advanced through it to
the life-support capsule. Each of them encountered a small squall of cold air
in the tube as they pulled themselves along, barely noticeable through their
armour.
Once inside, they opened every
storage locker and cabinet to try to locate the missing crew members. There was
nobody to be found. Even the flight computer confirmed no atmosphere was being
consumed.
An engineering crew from the port
was sent in to strip down the life-support capsule. It took them six hours to
remove every single fitting, including the decking. The advisory council was
left with an empty sphere seven metres in diameter with severed cables and
hoses poking through sealed inlets. A meticulous examination of the flight
computer records, evaluating power consumption, command interfaces, fuel
expenditure, and utilities usage showed that there must have been two people on
board when the Mount’s Delta docked. But DNA analysis on the blood and
tissue smearing the bridge showed it had all come from one body.
The Mount’s Delta was
powered down, and its cryogenic tanks emptied. Then the entire ship was slowly
and methodically cut up into sections, from the support framework to the fusion
generators, even the energy patterning nodes. No unit or module bigger than a
cubic metre was left intact.
The media, of course, soon
discovered the “ghost flight” from Nyvan; and rover reporters swarmed around
the bay, demanding and bribing information from anyone they could find
connected to the security operation. It wasn’t long before they managed to gain
legal access to a sensor in the bay itself thanks to two judges whose motives
were somewhat financially inclined. Several tens of millions of people in
Earth’s arcologies started accessing the investigation directly, watching the
starship being cut up by mechanoids, and waiting eagerly for a possessed to be
captured.
Quinn saw no reason to stay inside
the dry deprivation of the ghost realm once he had passed unseen through all
the security checks; he rematerialized and sat in a luxurious active contour
leather seat in the lift capsule’s Royale Class lounge. He was near one of the
panoramic windows, which would allow him to watch the dawn rise over South
America as he descended vertically towards it at three thousand kilometres an
hour. With his hawkish, stressed face and expensively conservative blue silk
suit he slotted perfectly into the character of an aristocratic businessman.
For the last quarter of the journey
down the tower he sipped his complimentary Norfolk Tears, which was continually
topped up by a stewardess, and gave the AV projector above the cocktail bar an
occasional glance. Earth’s media companies competed enthusiastically to update
him on the progress of the search through the dissected components of the Mount’s
Delta. If the rest of the lounge wondered at his intermittent guffaws of
contempt, Earth’s obsessive cult of personal privacy forbade them from
enquiring as to the reason.
Jed spent most of the voyage
sitting on the pine floorboards in the Mindor’s lounge, gazing out at
the starfield. There had never been a time in his life when he felt more
content. The stars themselves were beautiful seen like this, and every now and
then the hellhawk would swallow through a wormhole. That was exciting, even
though there wasn’t much to see then, just a kind of dark grey fog swirling
around outside that was never quite in focus. Coupled with the sense of
invulnerability generated by riding in the hellhawk was the anticipation of
Valisk, never stronger than now.
I did it. For the first time in my
life I set myself a solid goal and saw it through. Against some pretty nasty
odds, too. Me and all the other kids from nowhere, we made it to Valisk. And
Kiera.
He had brought his modified
recording of her, although he no longer needed it. Every time he closed his
eyes he could see that smile, thick soft hair falling over her bare shoulders,
perfectly rounded cheeks. She would congratulate him personally when they
arrived. She must, because he was the leader. So they would probably get to
talk, because she’d want to know how difficult it was for them, how they had
struggled. She would be sympathetic, because that was her nature. Then perhaps—
Gari and Navar bounded into the
lounge, laughing happily together. Some kind of truce had been declared since
they came on board. A minor omen, Jed thought; things were steadily getting
better.
“What are you doing?” Gari asked.
He grinned up at her and gestured
to the window with its thick rim of brass. “Just looking. So what are you two
doing?”
“We came to tell you. We just
talked to Choi-Ho. She says this is the last swallow before we get to Valisk.
Another hour, Jed!” Her face rose with elation.
“Yeah, another hour.” He snatched
another glance at the alien greyness outside. Any minute now they’d be back in
real space. Then he realized Beth wasn’t here to witness their triumph. “Back
in a minute,” he told the two girls.
The Mindor was quite crowded
now. The rendezvous in the Kabwe system had brought another twenty-five
Deadnights on board. Everyone was doubling up in the cabins. He walked right to
the end of the main corridor, where the light was slightly darker. “Beth?” He
gave her cabin door a fast knock and turned the handle. “Come on, girl, we’re
almost there. You’ll miss the—”
Both of Beth’s jackets and her
lace-up boots were lying on the floor, looking like they’d just been flung
there. Beth herself was stirring on the bed, a skinny hand clawing lank strands
of hair away from her face as she peered around blearily. Gerald Skibbow was
next to her, sound asleep.
Indignation and pure anger made it
impossible for Jed to move.
“What is it?” Beth grunted.
Jed couldn’t believe it; she didn’t
display the slightest hint of shame. Skibbow was old enough to be her bloody
great-grandfather! He glared at her, then stomped out, slamming the door loudly
behind him.
Beth stared after him, her puzzled
thoughts slowly slotting together. “Oh, Jeeze, you’ve got to be bloody joking,”
she groaned. Not even Jed was that stupid. Surely? She swung her legs out from
under the duvet, taking care not to pull it off Gerald. It had taken her hours
to get him to sleep. Holding him, reassuring him.
Despite her best efforts, she did
dislodge the cover. The fabric seemed to stick to her jeans, and her sweatshirt
was all twisted around, making every movement difficult.
Gerald Skibbow woke with a cry,
looking around fearfully. “Where are we?”
“I don’t know, Gerald,” she said as
calmly as she could. “I’ll go find out, then I’ll bring you back some
breakfast. Okay, mate?”
“Yes. Um, I think so.”
“You go slip into the shower. Leave
everything else to me.” Beth laced her boots up, then retrieved one of her
jackets from the floor. She gave the inside pocket a determined pat to make sure
the nervejam was there before she left the cabin.
Rocio Condra sensed the voidhawks
waiting before he even started to emerge from the wormhole terminus. Seven of
them, spiralling slowly around the point where he expected Valisk to be.
The terminus closed behind him, and
he spread his wings wide, letting the thin streamers of solar ions gust against
the feathers. All he did was glide along his orbital path while he tried to
understand. Confusion was almost total. At first he thought he might even have
emerged above the wrong gas giant, however unlikely that was. But no, this was
Opuntia, its system of moons easily distinguishable. He could even feel the
mass of Valisk’s wrecked industrial stations in their proper coordinate. The
only thing missing was the habitat itself.
What has happened to Valisk? he asked his erstwhile enemies. Did you
destroy it?
Obviously not, one of the voidhawks replied. There is no
debris. Surely you can sense that?
I can sense that. But I don’t
understand.
Rubra and Dariat finally settled
their differences, and merged. The entire neural strata became possessed,
creating an enormously powerful reality dysfunction. Valisk left the universe,
taking everyone inside with it.
No!
I am not lying to you.
My body is inside. Even as he protested, he knew he wasn’t really
bothered. The decision he had been nerving himself up to make had been taken
for him. He allowed energy to flow through his patterning cells, exerting
pressure on a particular point in space.
Wait, the voidhawk called. You have nowhere to go.
We can help, we want to help.
Me, join your culture? I don’t
think so.
You have to ingest nutrients to
sustain yourself. You know that, even the possessed have to eat. Only habitats
can provide you with the correct fluids.
So can most asteroid
settlements.
But how long will the production
machinery function when the settlement becomes possessed? You know they have no
interest in such matters.
One of them does.
Capone? He will send you to
fight to earn your food. How long will you last? Two battles? Three? With us
you will be safe.
There are other tasks I can
perform.
For what purpose? Now Valisk has
gone, you have no human body into which you can return. They cannot reward you,
only threaten.
How do you know that was
promised to us?
From Dariat; he told us
everything. Join us. Your assistance would be invaluable.
Assistance for what?
Finding a solution to this whole
crisis.
I have solved it for myself. Energy flashed through the cells, forcing an
interstice open. The wormhole’s non-length deepened to accept his bulk.
The offer remains, the voidhawk proclaimed. Consider it. Come
back to us at any time.
Rocio Condra closed the interstice
behind his tail. His mind instinctively retrieved the coordinate for New
California from the Mindor’s infallible memory. He would see what Capone
had to offer before making any hasty decisions. And the other hellhawks would
be there; whatever final choice they made, they would make it together.
After he explained what had
happened to Choi-Ho and Maxim Payne, they agreed not to burden the Deadnights
with the knowledge that their false dream had ceased to be.
Jay peeled the gold insulating
wrapper off her chocolate and almond ice cream; it was her fifth that morning.
She lay back happily on her towel and started licking the nuts off the ice
cream’s surface. The beach was such a lovely place, and her new friend made it
just about perfect.
“Sure you don’t want one?” she
asked. There were several more sweets scattered over the warm sand; she had
stuffed her bag full of them when she left the pediatric ward that morning.
No, with many thanks, Haile said. Coldness makes me sneeze. The
chocolate tastes like raw sugar with much additional acid.
Jay giggled. “That’s mad. Everyone
likes chocolate.”
Not I.
She bit off a huge chunk and let it
slither around her tongue. “What do you like?”
Lemon is acceptable. But I am
still milking from my parent.
“Oh, right. I keep forgetting how
young you are. Do you eat solid stuff when you’re older?”
Yes. In many months away.
Jay smiled at the wistfulness
carried by the mental voice. She had often felt the same at her mother’s rules,
restrictions designed purely to stop her enjoying herself. “Do your parents all
go out for fancy meals and things in the evening like we do? Are there Kiint restaurants?”
Not here in the all around. I
know not exactly about our home.
“I’d love to see your home planet.
It must be super, like the arcologies but clean and silver, with huge towers
built right up into the sky. You’re so advanced.”
Some of our worlds have that
form, Haile said with cautious
uncertainty. I believe. Racial history cosmology educationals have not fully
begun yet.
“That’s okay.” Jay finished the
treat. “Gosh, that’s lovely,” she mumbled around the freezing mouthful. “I
didn’t have any ice cream the whole time I was on Lalonde. Can you imagine
that!”
You should ingest properly
balanced dietary substances. Ione Saldana says too much niceness is bad for
you. Query correctness?
“Completely wrong.” Jay sat up and
tossed the ice cream stick into her bag. “Oh, Haile, that’s wonderful!” She
scrambled to her feet and ran over to the baby Kiint. Haile’s tractamorphic
arms were withdrawing from the sand castle like a nest of snakes that had been
routed. She’d built a central tapering tower two and a half metres tall,
surrounded by five smaller matching pinnacles; elaborate arching fairy bridges
linked them all together. There were turrets leaning out of the sides at
cockeyed angles, rings of pink shell windows, and a solid fortress wall with a
deep moat around the outside.
“Best yet.” Jay stroked the Kiint’s
facial ridge just above the breathing vents. Haile shivered in gratitude, big
violet eyes looked directly into Jay.
I like, muchness.
“We should build something from
your history,” Jay said generously.
I have no intricacy to
contribute, only home domes, the
Kiint said sadly. Our full past has not been made available. I must do much
growth before I am ready for acceptance.
Jay put her arms around the Kiint’s
neck, pressing up against her supple white hide. “That’s all right. There are
lots of things Mummy and Father Horst wouldn’t tell me, either.”
Much regret. Little patience.
“That’s a shame. But the castle
looks great now it’s finished. I wish we had some flags to stick on top. I’ll
see what I can find to use for tomorrow.”
Tomorrow the sand will be dry.
The top will crumble in air, and we must start again.
Jay looked along the row of
shapeless mounds that now ran along the shoreline. Each one carried its own
particular memory of joy and satisfaction. “Honestly, Haile, that’s the whole
point. It’s even better when there’s a tide, then you can see how strong you’ve
built.”
So much human activity is
intentionally wasteful. I doubt my ever knowing you.
“We’re simple, really. We always
learn more from our mistakes, that’s what Mummy says. It’s because they’re more
painful.”
Much oddness.
“I’ve got an idea; we’ll try and
build a Tyrathca tower tomorrow. That’s nice and different. I know what they
look like, Kelly showed me.” She put her hands on her hips and considered the
castle warmly. “Pity we can’t build their Sleeping God altar, or whatever it
was, but I don’t think it would balance, not if you make it out of sand.”
Query Sleeping God altar or
whatever?
“It was sort of like a temple that
you couldn’t get inside. The Tyrathca on Lalonde all sat around it and
worshipped with chanting and stuff. It was this shape, really elaborate.” Her
hands swept through the air in front of the Kiint, tracing broad curves. “See?”
Lacking perception, I. This is
worship like your ritual to support Jesus the Christ?
“Um, sort of, I suppose. Except
their God isn’t our God. Theirs is sleeping somewhere far away in space; ours
is everywhere. That’s what Father Horst says.”
There are two Gods, query?
“I don’t know,” Jay said, desperately
wishing she hadn’t got on to this topic. “Humans have more than two Gods,
anyway. Religion is funny, especially if you start thinking about it. You’re
just sort of supposed to believe. Until you get old, that is, then it all
becomes theology.”
Query theology?
“Grown-up religion. Look here,
don’t you have a God?”
I will query my parents.
“Good; they’ll explain everything
much better than me. Come on, let’s go and wash this horrid sand off, then we
can go riding together.”
Much welcome.
The Royal Kulu Navy ion field flyer
swept in over Mortonridge’s western seaboard, its glowing nose pointed directly
at the early morning sun. Ten kilometres to the south, the red cloud formed a
solid massif right across the horizon. It was thicker than Ralph Hiltch remembered.
None of the peninsula’s central ridge of mountains had managed to rise above
it; they’d been swallowed whole.
The upper surface was as calm as a
lake during a breathless dawn. Only when it started to dip earthwards along the
firebreak border were the first uneasy stirrings visible—while right on the
edge there appeared to be a full-scale storm whipping up individual streamers.
Ralph had the uncomfortable impression that the cloud was aching to be let
free. Perhaps he was picking up the emotional timbre of the possessed who
created it? In this situation he could never be quite sure that any feeling was
the genuine article.
He thought he could see a loose
knot swirling along the side of the cloud, a twist of vermillion shadow amid
the scarlet, keeping pace with his flyer. But when he ordered the sensor suite
to focus on it, all he could see were random patterns. A trick of the eye,
then, but a strong one.
The pilot began to expand the ion
field, reducing the flyer’s velocity and altitude. Up ahead, the grey line of
the M6 was visible, slicing clean across the virgin countryside. Colonel
Palmer’s advance camp was situated a couple of kilometres outside the black
firebreak line. Several dozen military vehicles were drawn up along the side of
the motorway, while a couple were speeding along the carbon concrete towards
the unnervingly precise band of incinerated vegetation.
Any possessed marching up to the
end of the red cloud would see a predictably standard garrison operation being
mounted with the Kingdom’s usual healthy efficiency. What they couldn’t see was
the new camp coming together twenty-five kilometres further to the north; a
city of programmable silicon laid out in strict formation which was erupting
across the endless green undulations of the peninsula’s landscape. With typical
military literalism it had been named Fort Forward. Over five hundred
programmable silicon buildings had already been activated, two-storey barracks,
warehouses, mess halls, maintenance shops, and various ancillary structures;
though as yet its only residents were the three battalions of Royal Kulu Marine
Engineers whose job it was to assemble the camp. Their mechanoids had ploughed
the ground up around each building, installing water and sewage pipes, power
lines, and datalinks. Huge drums of micro-mesh composite were being unrolled
over the fresh soil to provide roads which wouldn’t turn to instant quagmires.
Five large filter pump houses had been established on the banks of a river
eight kilometres away to feed the expanding districts.
Mechanoids were already busy
digging out vast new utility grids ready for more buildings, giving an
indication of just how big Fort Forward would be when it was completed. Long
convoys of lorries were using the M6 to deliver matériel from the nearest city
spaceport, fifty kilometres away. Though that arrangement would soon be
cancelled as Fort Forward’s own spaceport became operational. Marine engineers
were levelling long strips of land in preparation for three prefabricated
runways. The spaceport’s hangars and control tower had been activated two days
ago so that technical crews could fit and integrate their systems.
When Ralph’s battleship emerged
above Ombey he had seen nine Royal Navy Aquilae-class bulk transport starships
in parking formation around a low-orbit port station along with their escort of
fifteen front-line frigates. There were only twenty-five of the huge
transporters left on active service; capable of carrying seventeen thousand
tonnes of cargo they were the largest starships ever built, and hugely
expensive to fly and maintain. Kulu was gradually phasing them out in favour of
smaller models based on commercial designs.
They were being supported by big
old delta-wing CK500-090 Thunderbird spaceplanes, the only atmospheric craft capable
of handling the four-hundred-tonne cargo pods carried by the Aquilae
transporters. Again, a fleet on the verge of retirement; they had been the
first consignment ferried to Ombey by the transports. Most of the Thunderbirds
had spent the last fifteen years in mothball status at the Royal Navy’s desert
storage facility on Kulu. Now they were being reactivated as fast as the
maintenance crews could fit new components from badly depleted war stocks.
Even more portentous than the
buildup of navy ships were the voidhawks. Nearly eighty had arrived so far,
with new ones swallowing in every hour, their lower hull cargo cradles full of
pods (which could be handled by conventional civil flyers). Never before had so
many of the bitek starships been seen orbiting a Kingdom world.
Ralph had experienced the same kind
of uncomfortable awe he’d known at Azara as he observed them flitting around
the docking stations. He was the one who had started this, creating a momentum
which had engulfed entire star systems. It was unstoppable now. All he could do
was ride it to a conclusion.
The ion field flyer landed at
Colonel Palmer’s camp. The colonel herself was waiting for him at the base of
the airstairs, Dean Folan and Will Danza prominent in the small reception
committee behind her, both grinning broadly.
Colonel Palmer shook his hand,
giving his new uniform a more than casual inspection. “Welcome back, Ralph, or
should I say sir?”
He wasn’t completely used to the
uniform himself yet, a smart dark blue tunic with three ruby pips glinting on
his shoulder. “I don’t know, exactly. I’m a general in the official Liberation
campaign army now, its very first officer. Apart from the King, of course. The
formation was made official three days ago, announced in the court of the Apollo
Palace. I’ve been appointed chief strategic coordination officer.”
“You mean you’re the Liberation’s
numero uno?”
“Yeah,” he said with quiet
surprise. “I guess I am at this end.”
“Rather you than me.” She gestured
northwards. “Talk about coming back with reinforcements.”
“It’s going to get wonderfully
worse. One million bitek serjeants are on their way, and God alone knows how
many human troops to back them up. We’ve even had mercenaries volunteering.”
“You accepted them?”
“I’ve no idea. But I’ll use whatever
I’m given.”
“All right, so what are your
orders, sir?”
He laughed. “Just keep up the good
work. Have any of them tried to break out?”
She turned her head to face the
wall of angry cloud, her expression stern. “No. They stick to their side of the
firebreak. There have been plenty of sightings. We think they’re keeping an eye
on us. But it’s only my patrols who are visible to them.” A thumb jabbed back
over her shoulder. “They don’t know anything about all this.”
“Good. We can’t keep it secret
forever, of course; but the longer the better.”
“Some kids came out last week. It
was the first interesting thing to happen since you left.”
“Kids?”
“A woman called Stephanie Ash bused
seventy-three non-possessed children right up to the firebreak. Gave the
roadblock guard a hell of a fright, I can tell you. Apparently she’d collected
them from all over the peninsula. We evacuated them to a holding camp. I think
your friend Jannike Dermot has got her experts debriefing them on conditions
over there.”
“Now that’s a report I’d like to
access.” He squinted at the red cloud. That elusive knot of shadow seemed to
have returned. It was elliptical this time, hanging over the M6. It didn’t take
much imagination to suspect it of staring at him. “I think I’ll take a closer
look before I set up my command at Fort Forward,” he announced.
Will and Dean rode shotgun on the
Marine Corps runabout which took him up to the orange roadblock. It was good to
talk with them again. They’d been attached to Palmer’s brigade as combat
liaison for the agency, supporting the various technical teams Roche Skark had
dispatched to the firebreak. Both of them wanted to know every detail of his
meetings with the King. They were annoyed he wouldn’t datavise his visual files
of Prince Edward playing at the Apollo Palace, but they were confidential. And
so grows the mystique, Ralph thought, amused that he should be contributing to
it.
The marines at the roadblock
saluted smartly as Ralph and the Colonel arrived. Ralph chatted to them as
cordially as he could manage. They didn’t seem to mind the red cloud; he found
it intimidating in the extreme. It loomed barely three hundred metres above
him, vigorous thrashing streamers packed so close together there was no gap
between them, layer upon layer stacked up to what seemed like the edge of
space. The sonorous reverberations from its internal brawling was diabolically
attuned to the harmonic of human bones. Millions of tonnes of contaminated
water hanging suspended in the air by witchcraft, ready to crash down like the
waterfall at the end of the world. He wondered how little effort on behalf of
the possessed it would take to do just that. Could it be he really had
underestimated their power? It wasn’t the scale of the cloud which perturbed
him so much as the intent.
“Sir,” one of the barrier guards
shouted in alarm. “Visible hostile, on foot, three hundred metres.”
Dean and Will were abruptly
standing in front of Ralph, their gaussguns pointing across the firebreak.
“I think this is enough front-line
inspection for today,” Colonel Palmer said. “Let’s get you back to the
runabout, please, Ralph.”
“Wait.” Ralph looked between the
two G66 troopers to see a single figure walking up the M6. A woman dressed in a
neatly cut leather uniform, her face stained warrior-scarlet by the nimbus of
the seething clouds. He knew exactly who it was, in fact he would almost have
been disappointed if she hadn’t appeared. “She’s not a threat. Not yet,
anyway.”
He slipped between Will and Dean to
stand full square in the middle of the road, facing her down.
Annette Ekelund stopped at the
forwards barrier on her side of the firebreak. She took a slim mobile phone
from her pocket, extended its ten-centimetre aerial, then tapped in a number.
Ralph’s communications block
announced a channel opening. He switched it to audio function.
“Hello, Ralph. I thought you would
come back, you’re the kind that does. And I see you’ve brought some friends
with you.”
“That’s right.”
“Why don’t you bring them on over
and join the party?”
“We’ll pick our own time.”
“I have to say I’m disappointed;
that’s not quite what we agreed to back in Exnall, now is it? And with a
Saldana Princess, too. Dear me, you can’t trust anyone these days.”
“A promise made under duress is not
legally binding. I’m sure you’ll have enough lawyers on your side to confirm
that.”
“I thought I explained all this to
you, Ralph. We can’t lose, not against the living.”
“I don’t believe you. No matter
what the cost, we must defeat you. The human race will end if you are allowed
to win. I believe we deserve to keep on going.”
“You and your ideals, the original
Mr Focused. No wonder you found a profession which allowed you to give loyal
service. It suits you perfectly. Congratulations, Ralph, you have found
yourself, not everyone can say that. In another universe, one that isn’t so
warped as this, I’d envy you.”
“Thank you.”
“There was a nasty little phrase
coined in my era, Ralph; but it’s still appropriate today, because it too came
from a dogmatic soldier in a pointless war. We had to destroy the village in
order to save it. What do you think you’re going to do to Mortonridge and
its people with this crusade of yours?”
“Whatever I have to.”
“But we’ll still be here
afterwards, Ralph, we’ll always be here. The finest minds in the galaxy have
been working on this problem. Scientists and priests scurrying for hard answers
and bland philosophies. Millions—billions of manhours have already been spent
on the quandary of what to do with us poor returned souls. And they’ve come up
with nothing. Nothing! All you can do is mount this pathetic, vindictive
campaign of violence in the hope that some of us will be caught and thrown into
zero-tau.”
“There isn’t an overall solution
yet. But there will be.”
“There can’t be. We outnumber you.
It’s simple arithmetic, Ralph.”
“Laton said it can be done.”
She chuckled. “And you believe
him?”
“The Edenists think he was telling
the truth.”
“Oh, yes, the newest and most
interesting of all your friends. You realize, don’t you, that they could well
survive this while you Adamists fall. It’s in their interest for this monstrous
diversion to work. Adamist planets will topple one by one while your
Confederation is engrossed here.”
“And what about the Kiint?”
There was a slight pause. “What
about them?”
“They survived their encounter with
the beyond. They say there is a solution.”
“Which is?”
He gripped the communications block
tighter. “It doesn’t apply to us. Each race must find its own way. Ours exists,
somewhere. It will be found. I have a lot of faith in human ingenuity.”
“I don’t, Ralph. I have faith in
our sick nature to hate and envy, to be greedy and selfish, to lie. You forget,
for six centuries I couldn’t hide from the naked emotions which drive all of
us. I was condemned to them, Ralph. I know exactly what we are in our true
hearts, and it’s not nice, not nice at all.”
“Tell that to Stephanie Ash. You
don’t speak for all the possessed, not even a majority.”
Her stance changed. She no longer
leaned casually on the barrier but stood up straight, her head thrust forwards
challengingly. “You’ll lose, Ralph, one way or the other. You, personally, will
lose. You cannot fight entropy.”
“I wish your faith wasn’t so
misdirected. Think what you could achieve if you tried to help us instead.”
“Stay away from us, Ralph. That’s
what I really came here to tell you. One simple message: Stay away.”
“You know I can’t.”
Annette Ekelund nodded sharply. She
pushed the phone’s aerial back in and closed the little unit up.
Ralph watched her walk back down
the M6 with a degree of sorrow he hadn’t expected. Shadows cavorted around her,
hoaxing with her silhouette before swallowing her altogether.
“Ye gods,” Colonel Palmer muttered.
“That’s what we’re up against,”
Ralph said.
“Are you sure a million serjeants
is going to be enough?”
Ralph didn’t get to answer. The
discordant bellows of thunder merged together into a continuous roar.
Everyone looked up to see the edge
of the red cloud descending. It was as if the strength of the possessed had
finally waned, allowing the colossal weight of water to crash down. Torrents of
gaudy vapour plunged out of the main bank, hurtling earthwards faster than mere
gravity could account for.
Along with the others, Ralph
sprinted away from the roadblock, neural nanonics compelled a huge energy
release from his muscle tissue, increasing his speed. Animal fear was pounding
on his consciousness to turn and fire his TIP pistol at the virulent cascade.
His neural nanonics received a
plethora of datavises from SD Command on Guyana. Low-orbit observation
satellites were tracking them. Reports from patrols and sensors positioned
along the firebreak: the whole front of cloud was moving.
“SD platforms are now at Ready One
status,” Admiral Farquar datavised. “Do you want us to counterstrike? We can
slice that bastard apart.”
“It’s stopping,” Will yelled.
Ralph risked a glance over his
shoulder. “Wait,” he datavised to the admiral. A hundred and fifty metres
behind him, the base of the cloud had reached the ground, waves rebounding in
all directions to furrow the surface. But the bulk of it was holding steady,
not advancing. Even the thunder was muffled.
“They are not aggressing, repeat,
not aggressing,” Ralph datavised. “It looks like . . . hell, it looks as though
they’ve slammed the door shut. Can you confirm the situation along the rest of
the firebreak?”
When he looked from side to side,
the cloud was clinging to the scorched soil as far as his enhanced retinas
could see. A single, simple barrier that curved back gently until it reached an
apex at about three kilometres high. In a way it was worse than before; without
the gap this was so uncompromisingly final.
“Confirm that,” Admiral Farquar
datavised. “It’s closed up all the way along the firebreak. The coastline edges
are lowering, too.”
“Great,” Colonel Palmer swore. “Now
what?”
“It’s a psychological barrier,
that’s all,” Ralph said quietly. “After all, it’s only water. This changes
nothing.”
Colonel Palmer slowly tilted her
head back, scanning the height of the quivering fluorescent precipice. She
shivered. “Some psychology.”
Ione.
A chaotic moan fluttered out
between her lips. She was sprawled on her bed, sliding quietly into sleep. In
her drowsy state, the pillow she was cuddling could so easily have been Joshua.
Oh, now what, for Heaven’s sake? Can’t I even dream my fantasies anymore?
I am sorry to disturb you, but
there is an interesting situation developing concerning the Kiint.
She sat up slowly, feeling
stubbornly grumpy despite Tranquillity’s best efforts to emphasise its tender
concern. It had been a long day, with Meredith’s squadron to deal with on top
of all her normal duties. And the loneliness was starting to get to her, too. It’s
all right. She scratched irritably at her hair. Being pregnant is making
me feel dreadfully randy. You’re just going to have to put up with me being
like this for another eight months. Then you’ll have postnatal depression to
cope with.
You have many lovers to choose
from. Go to one. I want you to feel better. I do not like it when you are so
troubled.
That’s a very cold solution. If
getting physical was all it took, I’d just swallow an antidote pill instead.
From what I observe, most human
sex is a cold activity. There is an awful lot of selfishness involved.
Ninety per cent of it is. But we
put up with that because we’re always looking for the other ten per cent.
And you believe Joshua is your
ten per cent?
Joshua is floating somewhere
between the ninety and the ten. I just want him right now because my hormones
are completely out of control.
Hormonal production does not
usually peak until the later months of a pregnancy.
I always was an early developer.
A swift thought directed at
the opaqued window allowed a dappled aquamarine light into the bedroom. She
reached lethargically for her robe. All right, self-pity hour over. Let’s
see what our mysterious Kiint are up to. And God help you if it isn’t
important.
Lieria has taken a tube carriage
to the StClément starscraper.
So bloody what?
It is not an action which any
Kiint has performed before. I have to consider it significant, especially at this
time.
Kelly Tirrel hated being
interrupted while she was running her Present Time Reality programs. It was an
activity she was indulging more often these days.
Some of the black programs she had
bought were selective memory blockers, modified from medical trauma erasure
programs, slithering deep into her natural brain tissue to cauterize her
subconscious. They should have been used under supervision, and it certainly
wasn’t healthy to suppress the amount of memory she was targeting, nor for as
long. Others amplified her emotional response to perceptual stimuli, making the
real world slow and mundane in comparison.
One of the pushers she’d met while
she was making a documentary last year had shown her how to interface black
programs with standard commercial sensenvirons to produce PTRs. Such
integrations were supposedly the most addictive stim you could run. Compulsive
because they were the zenith of denial. Escape to an alternative personality
living in an alternative reality, where your past with all its inhibitions had
been completely divorced, allowing only the present to prevail. Living for the
now, yet stretching that now out for hours.
In the realms through which Kelly
moved, possession and the beyond were concepts which did not nor could ever
exist. When she did emerge, to eat, or pee, or sleep, the real world was the
one which seemed unreal; terribly harsh by comparison to the hedonistic
existence she had on the other side of the electronic divide.
This time when she exited the PTR
she couldn’t even recognize the signal her neural nanonics was receiving.
Memories of such things were submerged deep in her brain, rising to conscious
levels with the greatest of reluctance (and taking longer each time). It was a
few moments before she even understood where she was, that this wasn’t Hell but
simply her apartment. The lights off, the window opaqued, the sheet on which
she was lying disgustingly damp, and stinking of urine, the floor littered with
disposable bowls.
Kelly wanted to plunge straight
back into her electronic refuge. She was losing her grip on her old
personality, and didn’t give a fuck. The only thing she did monitor was her own
decay; overriding fear saw to that.
I will not allow myself to
die.
No matter how badly the black
stimulant programs screwed up her neurones, she wouldn’t permit herself to go
completely over the edge, not physically. Before that would be zero-tau. The
wonderful simplicity of eternal oblivion.
And until then, her brain would
live a charmed life, providing pleasure and excitement, and not even knowing it
was artificial. Life was to be enjoyed, was it not? Now she knew the truth
about death, how did it matter how that enjoyment was achieved?
Her brain finally identified the
signal from the apartment’s net processor. Someone was at the door, requesting
admission. Confusion replaced her dazed resentful stupor. Collins hadn’t called
on her to present a show for a week (or possibly longer); not since her
interview with Tranquillity’s bishop when she shouted at him, angry about how
cruel his God was to inflict the beyond upon unsuspecting souls.
The signal repeated. Kelly sat up,
and promptly vomited down the side of the bed. Nausea swirled inside her brain,
shaking her thoughts and memories into a collage which was the exact opposite
of the PTR: Lalonde in all its infernal glory. She coughed as her pale limbs
trembled and the scar along her ribs flamed. There was a glass on the bedside
table, half full of a clear liquid which she fervently hoped was water. Her
shaking hand grabbed at it, spilling a quantity before she managed to jam it to
her lips and swallow. At least she didn’t throw it all back up.
Almost suffocating in misery she
struggled off the bed and pulled a blanket around her shoulders. Her neural
nanonics medical program cautioned her that her blood sugar level was badly
depleted and she was on the verge of dehydration. She cancelled it. The
admission request was repeated again.
“Piss off,” she mumbled. Light
seemed to be shining straight through her eye sockets to scorch her fragile
brain. Sucking down air, she tried to work out why her neural nanonics had
stopped running the PTR program. It shouldn’t happen just because someone
datavised her apartment’s net processor. Perhaps the slender filaments meshed
with her synaptic clefts were getting screwed by her disturbed body chemistry?
“Who is it?” she datavised as she
tottered unsteadily through into the main living room.
“Lieria.”
Kelly didn’t know any Lieria; at
least not without running a memory cell check. She slumped down into one of her
deep recliners, pulled the blanket over her legs, and datavised the door
processor to unlock.
An adult Kiint was standing in the
vestibule. Kelly blinked against the light which poured in around its
snow-white body, gawped, then started laughing. She’d done it, she’d totally
fucked her brain with the PTR.
Lieria lowered herself slightly and
moved into the living room, taking care not to knock any of the furniture. She
had to wriggle to fit the major section of her body through the door, but she
managed it. An intensely curious group of residents peered in behind her.
The door slid shut. Kelly hadn’t
ordered it to do that. Her laughter had stopped, and her shakes were
threatening to return. This was actually happening. She wanted to go back into
the PTR real bad now.
Lieria took up nearly a fifth of
the living room, both tractamorphic arms were withdrawn into large bulbs of
flesh, her triangular head was swinging slightly from side to side as her huge
eyes examined the room. No housechimp had been in for weeks to clean up; dust
was accumulating; the door to the kitchen was open, showing worktops
overflowing with empty food sachets; a loose pile of underwear decorated one
corner; her desk was scattered with fleks and processor blocks. The Kiint
returned her gaze to Kelly, who curled her limbs up tighter in the recliner.
“H-how did you get down here?” was
all Kelly could ask.
“I took the service elevator,”
Lieria datavised back. “It was very cramped.”
Kelly started. “I didn’t know you
could do that.”
“Use an elevator?”
“Datavise.”
“We have some command of
technology.”
“Oh. Yes. It’s just . . . skip it.”
Her reporter’s training began to assert itself. A private visit from a Kiint
was unheard of. “Is this confidential?”
Lieria’s breathing vents whistled
heavily. “You decide, Kelly Tirrel. Do you wish your public to know what has
become of you?”
Kelly stiffened her facial muscles,
whether to combat tears or shame she wasn’t sure. “No.”
“I understand. Knowledge of the
beyond can be disturbing.”
“How did you beat it? Tell me,
please. For pity’s sake. I can’t be trapped there. I couldn’t stand it!”
“I am sorry. I cannot discuss this
with you.”
Kelly’s cough had come back. She
used the back of her hand to wipe her eyes dry. “What do you want, then?”
“I wish to purchase information.
Your sensevises of Lalonde.”
“My . . . why?”
“They are of interest to us.”
“Sure. I’ll sell them. The price is
knowing how to avoid the beyond.”
“Kelly Tirrel, you cannot buy that,
the answer is inside you.”
“Stop being so fucking obtuse!” she
shouted, fury surmounting her consternation of the big xenoc.
“It is the profound wish of my race
that one day you will understand. I had intended that by purchasing the data
directly from you the money would bring or buy you some peace of mind. If I go
directly to the Collins corporation, it will become lost in their accounts. You
see, we do not mean you harm. It is not our way.”
Kelly stared at the xenoc,
depressed by her own incomprehension. Okay, girl, she thought, let’s try and
work this one out logically. She put her medical monitor program into primary
mode, and used the results to bring appropriate suppressor and stimulant
programs on-line to try to stabilize body and brain. There wasn’t a great deal
they could do, but at least she felt calmer and her breathing steadied. “Why do
you want to buy them?”
“We have little data on humans who
are possessed by returned souls. We are interested. Your visit to Lalonde is an
excellent firsthand account.”
Kelly felt the first stirrings of
excitement; reporter’s instinct inciting her interest. “Bullshit. That’s not
what I meant. If all you wanted was information on possessed humans, you could
have recorded my reports directly from Collins as soon as they were released.
God knows, they’ve been repeated often enough.”
“They are not complete. Collins has
edited them to provide a series of highlights. We understand their commercial
reasons for doing so, but this is of no use to us. I require access to the
entire recording.”
“Right,” she said with apparent
gravity, as if she was giving the proposition appropriately weighty thought. An
analysis program had gone primary, refining possible questions in an attempt to
narrow the focus. “I can give you full access to the times I came up against
the possessed, and my observations of Shaun Wallace. That’s no problem at all.”
“We require a full record from the
time you arrived in the Lalonde star system until you departed. All details are
of interest to us.”
“All details? I mean, this is a
human sensevise, I kept the flek recording the whole time. Standard company
procedure. Unfortunately, that includes time when I was visiting the little
girls’ room, if you catch on.”
“Human excretion functions do not
embarrass us.”
“Shall I cut the time in Lady
Macbeth for you?”
“Observations and crew impressions
of the reality dysfunction from orbit are an integral part of the record.”
“So, how much were you thinking of
offering me for this?”
“Please name your price, Kelly
Tirrel.”
“One million fuseodollars.”
“That is expensive.”
“It’s a lot of hours you’re asking
for. But the offer to edit it down still stands.”
“I will pay you the required amount
for a complete recording only.”
Kelly pressed her teeth together in
annoyance; it wasn’t going to work, the Kiint was far too smart for verbal
traps. Don’t push, she told herself, get what you can and work out the why
later on. “Fair enough. Agreed.”
Lieria’s tractamorphic flesh
extended out into an arm, a Jovian Bank credit disk held between white pincers.
Kelly gave it an interested glance,
and rose stiffly from the recliner. Her own credit disk was somewhere on her
desk. She walked over to it, all three paces, then plonked herself down in the
grey office chair a little too quickly.
“I would suggest you eat something
and rest properly before you return to your sensenviron,” Lieria datavised.
“Good idea. I was going to.” She
froze in the act of shoving the fleks and their empty storage cases around. How
the hell had the Kiint known what she’d been running? We have some command
of technology. She gripped the blanket harder with one hand as the other
fished her disk from under a recorder block. “Found it,” she said with forced
lightness.
Lieria shunted the full amount
across. The soft flesh of the pincers engulfed the Jovian Bank disk, then parted
again to reveal a small dark blue processor block. It was like a conjuring
trick which Kelly was in no state to unravel.
“Please insert your fleks in the
block,” Lieria datavised. “It will copy the recordings.”
Kelly did as she was told.
“I thank you, Kelly Tirrel. You
have contributed valuable information to our race’s store of knowledge.”
“Make the most of it,” she said
grumpily. “The way you’re treating us we probably won’t be around to contribute
for much longer.”
The living-room door slid open, scattering
a startled crowd of StClément residents. Lieria backed out with surprising
ease. When the door closed again Kelly was left by herself with the
disconcerting impression that it could all very easily have been a dream. She
picked up her credit disk, looking at it in wonder. One million fuseodollars.
It was the key to permanent
zero-tau. Her lawyer had been negotiating with Collins to transfer her pension
fund into an Edenist trust account, just like Ashly Hanson. Except she wouldn’t
be coming out to take a look around every few centuries. Collins’s accountants
had been reluctant.
Another problem which had sent her
into the sham escape of PTR. Now all she needed to do was get to an Edenist
habitat. Only their culture had a chance of holding her safe through eternity.
Although . . . that stubborn old
part of her mind was asking a thousand questions. What the hell did the Kiint
really want?
“Think,” she ordered herself
fiercely. “Come on, damn it. Think!” Something happened on Lalonde. Something
so important that a Kiint walks into my apartment and pays me a million
fuseodollars for a record of it. Something we didn’t think was important or
interesting, because it wasn’t released by Collins. So if it wasn’t released,
how the hell did the Kiint know about it?
Logically, someone must have told
them—presumably today or very recently. Someone who has reviewed the whole
recording themselves, or at least more of it than Collins released.
Kelly smiled happily, an unfamiliar
expression of late. And someone who must have a lot of contact with the Kiint.
Review every single conversation
which the Kiint were involved in over the last week, Ione said. Anything that anyone mentioned
about Lalonde, anything at all, however trivial. And if you can’t find it,
start going through your earlier memories.
I am already reviewing the
relevant scenes. There may be a problem with going back further than four days.
My short-term memory capacity is only a hundred hours; after that the details
are discarded so I may retain salient information. Without this procedure even
my memory would be unable to cope with events inside me.
I know that! But it has to be
recent for Lieria to go visiting in the middle of the night. I don’t suppose
the Kiint said anything among themselves? Grandfather’s non-intrusion agreement
can hardly apply in this case.
I concur that it cannot be
considered. However, I have never been able to intercept detailed affinity
conversations between the adult Kiint. At best I can sometimes distinguish what
I would define as a murmur.
Damn! If you can’t remember,
we’ll have to haul all the Laymil project staff in and question them
individually.
Not necessary. I have found it.
“Brilliant!” Show me.
The memory burst open around her.
Bright light was shining down on the beach while glassy ripples lapped quietly
against the shoreline. A huge sand castle stood directly in front of her. Oh,
bloody hell.
Jay was woken by a hand shaking her
shoulder with gentle insistence. “Mummy,” she cried fearfully. Wherever she
was, it was dark, and even darker shadows loomed over her.
“Sorry, poppet,” Kelly
stage-whispered. “It’s not your mum, it’s only me.”
Horror fled from the little girl’s
face, and she hitched herself up in the bed, wrapping her arms around her legs.
“Kelly?”
“Yep. And I am really sorry, I
didn’t mean to frighten you like that.”
Jay sniffed the air, highly curious
now. “What’s that smell? And what time is it?”
“It’s very late. Nurse Andrews is
going to kill me if I stay for more than a couple of minutes. She only let me
in because she knows you and I spent all that time together on Lady Mac.”
“You haven’t visited for ages.”
“I know.” Kelly was almost crushed
by the surge of emotion the girl triggered, the accusation in her tone. “I
haven’t been terribly well lately. I didn’t want you to see me the way I was.”
“Are you all right now?”
“Sure. I’m on the way back.”
“Good. You promised you’d show me
around the studios you work in.”
“And I’ll keep it, too. Listen,
Jay, I’ve got some really important questions. They’re about you and Haile.”
“What?” she asked suspiciously.
“I need to know if you told Haile
anything about Lalonde, especially in the last couple of days. It’s vital, Jay,
honest. I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t.”
“I know.” She screwed up her lips,
thinking hard. “There was some stuff about religion this morning. Haile doesn’t
understand it very well, and I’m not very good at explaining it.”
“What about religion, exactly?”
“It was how many gods there are.
I’d told her about the Tyrathca’s Sleeping God temple, you know, the one you
showed me, and she wanted to know if that was the same thing as Jesus.”
“Of course,” Kelly hissed. “It
wasn’t human possession, it was the Tyrathca section, we never released any of
that.” She leaned over and kissed Jay. “Thank you, poppet. You’ve just performed
a miracle.”
“Was that all?”
“Yeah. That was all.”
“Oh.”
“You snuggle down and get some
sleep now. I’ll come visit tomorrow.” She helped pull Jay’s duvet back up and
gave the girl another kiss. Jay sniffed inquisitively again, but didn’t
comment.
“So?” Kelly asked softly as she
walked away from the bed. “You’ve been watching, you know this must be serious.
I want to talk to the Lord of Ruin.”
The pediatric ward’s net processor
opened a channel to Kelly’s neural nanonics. “Ione Saldana will see you now,”
Tranquillity datavised. “Please bring the relevant recordings.”
Despite being on what he considered
excellent terms with the Lord of Ruin, Parker Higgens could still be chilled to
the marrow when she gave him one of her expectant looks.
“But I don’t know anything about
the Tyrathca, ma’am,” he complained. Being dragged out of bed straight into a
highly irregular crisis conference was playing havoc with his thought
processes. Accessing the sensevise recording of Coastuc-RT and seeing the
strange silvery structure which the builder-caste Tyrathca had constructed in
the middle of the village didn’t contribute much to his composure, either.
When he glanced at Kempster
Getchell for support he saw the astronomer’s eyes were closed as he accessed
the recording a second time.
“You’re the only xenoc specialists
I’ve got, Parker.”
“Laymil specialists.”
“Don’t quibble. I need advice, and
I need it fast. How important is this?”
“Well . . . I don’t think we knew
the Tyrathca had a religion before this,” he ventured.
“We didn’t,” Kelly said. “I ran a
full search program through the Collins office encyclopedia. It’s as good as
any university library. There’s no reference to this Sleeping God at all.”
“And neither did the Kiint, so it
would seem,” Parker said. “They actually came and woke you to ask for the
recording?”
“That’s right.”
Parker was somewhat put out by the
reporter’s dishevelled appearance. She sat wedged into one corner of the sofa
in Ione’s private study, a thick cardigan tugged around her shoulders as if it
were midwinter. For the last five minutes she had been snatching up salmon
sandwiches from a large plate balanced on the sofa’s arm, pushing them
forcefully into her mouth.
“Well I have to say, ma’am, that
it’s a relief to find out they don’t know everything.” A housechimp silently
handed him a cup of coffee.
“But is it relevant?” Ione asked.
“Were they just so surprised they didn’t know about the Sleeping God myth that
Lieria simply rushed over to Kelly to confirm it? Or does it have some bearing
on our current situation?”
“It’s not a myth,” Kelly said
around another sandwich. “That’s exactly what I said to Waboto-YAU; and it
nearly set the soldiers on me for that remark. The Tyrathca believe absolutely
in their Sleeping God. Crazy race.”
Parker stirred his coffee
mechanically. “I’ve never known the Kiint to be excited about anything. But
then I’ve never known them to be in a rush either, which they obviously were
tonight. I think we should examine this Sleeping God in context. You are aware,
ma’am, that the Tyrathca do not have fiction? They simply do not lie, and they
have a great deal of trouble understanding human falsehoods. The nearest they
ever come to lying is withholding information.”
“You mean there really is a
Sleeping God?” Kelly asked.
“There has to be a core of truth behind the story,”
Parker said. “They are a highly formalized clan species. Individual families
maintain professions and responsibilities for generations. Sireth-AFL’s family
was obviously entrusted with the knowledge of the Sleeping God. At a guess, I’d
say that Sireth-AFL is a descendant of the family which used to deal with
electronics while they were on their arkship.”
“Then why not just store the memory
electronically?” Kelly asked.
“It probably is stored, somewhere.
But Coastuc-RT is a very primitive settlement, and the Tyrathca only ever use
appropriate technology. There will be Tyrathca families in that village who
know exactly how to build fusion generators and computers, but they don’t
actually need them yet, therefore the information isn’t used. They employ water
wheels and mental arithmetic instead.”
“Weird,” Kelly said.
“No,” Parker corrected. “Merely
logical. The product of a mind that is intelligent without being particularly
imaginative.”
“Yet they were praying,” Ione said.
“They believe in a God. That requires a leap of imagination, or at least
faith.”
“I don’t think so,” Kempster
Getchell said. He grinned around, clearly enjoying himself. “We’re messing
about with semantics here, and an electronic translator, which is never
terribly helpful, it’s too literal. Consider when this God appeared in their
history. Human gods are derived from our pre-science era. There are no new
religions, there haven’t been for thousands of years. Modern society is far too
sceptical to allow for prophets who have personal conversations with God. We
have the answer for everything these days, and if it isn’t recorded on a flek
it’s a lie.
“Yet here we have the Tyrathca, who
not only don’t lie, but encounter a God while they’re in a starship. They have
the same intellectual analytical tools as we do, and they still call it a God.
And they found it. That’s what excites me, that’s what is so important
to this story. It isn’t indegenous to their planet, it isn’t ancient. One of
their arkships encountered something so fearfully powerful that a race with the
technology to travel between the stars calls it a God.”
“That would also mean it isn’t
exclusive to them,” Parker said.
“Yes. Although, whatever it is, it
was benign, or even helpful to the arkship in question. They wouldn’t consider
it to be their Sleeping God otherwise.”
“Powerful enough to defend the
Tyrathca from possessed humans,” Ione said. “That’s what they claimed.”
“Yes indeed. A defence mounted from
several hundred light-years distant, at least.”
“What the fuck could do that?”
Kelly asked.
“Kempster?” Ione prompted as the
old astronomer stared away at the ceiling.
“I have absolutely no idea.
Although ‘sleeping’ does imply an inert status, which can be reversed.”
“By prayer?” Parker said sceptically.
“They thought it would be able to
hear them,” Kempster said. “Stronger than all living things was what that
breeder said. Interesting. And that mirror-spire shape was supposed to be what
it looked like. I’d like to say some kind of celestial event or object, that
would fit in finding it in deep space. Unfortunately, there is no natural
astronomical object which resembles that.”
“Take a guess,” Ione said icily.
“Powerful, and in space.” The
astronomer’s face wrinkled up with effort. “Humm. Trouble is, we have no idea
of the scale. Some kind of small nebula around a binary neutron star; or a
white hole emission jet—which might account for the shape. But none of those
are exactly inert.”
“Nor would they be much use against
the possessed,” Parker said.
“But its existence is enough to
fluster the Kiint,” Ione said. “And they can manufacture moons, plural.”
“Do you think it could help us?”
Kelly asked the astronomer.
“Good point,” Kempster said. “A
highly literal race thinks it can help them against the possessed. QED, it
would be able to do the same thing for us. Although the actual encounter must
have taken place thousands of years ago. Who knows how much the account had
been distorted in that time, even by the Tyrathca? And if it was an event rather
than an object, it would presumably be finished by now. After all,
Confederation astronomers have catalogued our galaxy pretty thoroughly; and
certainly anything odd within ten thousand light-years would be listed. Which
is why I’m inclined to go for the inert object hypothesis. I must say, this is
a delightful puzzle you’ve brought to us, young lady; I’d love to know what
they did actually find.”
Kelly made an impatiently
dismissive gesture and leaned forward. “See?” she said to Ione. “This is
critical, just like I said. I’ve provided you with enough to go on. Haven’t I?”
“Yes,” Ione said with considerable
asperity.
“Do I get my flight authorization?”
“What is this? What flight?” Parker
asked.
“Kelly wishes to visit Jupiter,”
Ione said. “To do that she needs my official authorization.”
“Do I get it?” Kelly was almost
shouting.
Ione’s nose crinkled with distaste.
“Yes. Now please be silent unless you have a cogent point to make.”
Kelly flung herself back into the
sofa, a fearsome grin on her face.
Parker studied her for a moment,
not at all liking what he found, but forwent any comment. “The evidence we have
so far is depressingly small, but to my mind it does seem to indicate that the
Sleeping God is something other than a natural object. Perhaps it is a functional
Von Neumann machine, that would certainly have godlike abilities ascribed to it
by any culture with inferior technology. Or, I regret to say, some kind of
ancient weapon.”
“A manufactured artefact which can
attack the possessed over interstellar space. Now that really is an unpleasant
thought,” Kempster said. “Although the sleeping qualifier would admittedly be
more pertinent in such a case.”
“As you say,” Ione said. “We don’t
have nearly enough information to make anything other than wild guesses at this
time. That must be rectified. Our real problem is that the Tyrathca have
severed all contact with us. And I really don’t think we have any alternative
but to ask them.”
“I would certainly advise we pursue
that avenue, ma’am. The very possibility that the Sleeping God is real, and may
even be able to defeat the possessed on some level, warrants further
investigation. If we could . . .” His voice died away as Ione gripped the arms
of her chair, blue eyes widening to express something Parker had never thought
he would see there: horror.
Meredith Saldana drifted into the Arikara’s
bridge; every one of the acceleration couches in the C&C section of the
bridge was occupied as his staff officers dedicated themselves to scanning and
securing space around Mirchusko.
He slid onto his own acceleration
couch and accessed the tactical situation computer. The flagship was hanging a
thousand kilometres off Tranquillity’s counter-rotating spaceport, with every
sensor cluster and communications system extended. Some spacecraft moved around
the habitat’s spaceport and outlying industrial stations, a couple of
blackhawks were curving around the spindle to land on the outermost docking
ledge, and three He3 cryogenic tankers were rising over the gas
giant’s natural rings en route for the habitat. Apart from that, the only ships
flying were squadron members. The frigates were moving smoothly into their
englobing positions, forming a protective eight thousand kilometre sphere
around Tranquillity, complementing the habitat’s own formidable SD platforms.
His squadron’s nine voidhawks were currently deployed right around the gas
giant in an attempt to probe the rings for any observation system or hidden
ship. An unlikely event, but Meredith was aware of just how much was riding on
the Toi-Hoi ambush. When it came to this duty, he was a firm believer in the
motto: I’m paranoid, but am I paranoid enough?
“Lieutenant Grese, our current
situation, please?” he asked.
“One hundred per cent on-line,
sir,” the squadron intelligence officer reported. “All starship traffic is shut
down. Those blackhawks you can see docking are the last of the flight deploying
sensor satellites looking for an energy displacement signature from the Laymil
home planet. All of them have obeyed the recall order. We’re allowing personnel
commuters and tugs to fly out to the industrial stations providing we’re
informed of their movements in advance. Tranquillity is supplying us with a
direct feed from its SD sensor network, which is extremely comprehensive out to
one million kilometres. Our only problem with that is that it doesn’t appear to
have any gravitonic distortion detectors.”
Meredith frowned. “That’s
ridiculous, how does it detect emerging starships?”
“I’m not sure, sir. We did ask, but
it just said we’re receiving the full datavise from each sensor satellite. My
only explanation is that the Lord of Ruin doesn’t want us to know the habitat’s
full detection capability.”
Which wasn’t something Meredith
believed. Somewhat to his surprise, he’d been quite impressed by his young
cousin; especially as he’d gone in to meet her with a lot of firmly held
preconceptions. He’d been forced to revise most of them under her unyielding
dignity and astute political grasp. One thing he was sure of, if she was
deliberately imposing limits on her cooperation she wouldn’t be duplicitous
about it.
“Can our own sensors compensate?”
he asked.
“Yes, sir. At the moment, the
voidhawks will provide us with an immediate warning of any emergence. But we’ve
launched a full complement of gravitonic distortion detector satellites.
They’ll provide coverage out to quarter of a million kilometres when they’re in
position; that’s in about another twenty minutes, which will free the voidhawks
for their next duty.”
“Good, in that case we won’t make an
issue of this.”
“Sir.”
“Lieutenant Rhoecus, voidhawk
status, please.”
“Yes, Admiral,” the Edenist
replied. “There are definitely no ships inside any of Mirchusko’s rings.
However, we cannot give any guarantees about smaller stealthed spy satellites.
Two hundred and fifty ELINT satellites have been deployed so far, which gives
us a high probability of detecting any transmission should there be a spy
system observing the habitat. The Myoho and the Oenone are
launching further ELINTs into orbit around each of Mirchusko’s moons in case
there’s anything hiding on or under the surface.”
“Excellent. What about covering the
rest of the system?”
“We’ve already worked out a swallow
flight plan for each voidhawk which will allow them to conduct a preliminary
survey in fifteen hours. It will be somewhat cursory, but if there is another
ship within two AUs of Mirchusko they should find it. Clear space provides much
fewer problems than a gas giant environment.”
“Several blackhawk captains offered
to assist us, Admiral,” Commander Kroeber said. “I declined for now, but told
them that Admiral Kolhammer may want them for the next stage.”
Meredith resisted a glance in the
flagship captain’s direction. “I see. Have you ever served with Admiral
Kolhammer, Mircea?”
“No, sir, I haven’t had that
pleasure.”
“Well, for your information, I
consider it unlikely he’d want the blackhawks along.”
“Yes, sir.”
Meredith raised his voice to
address the bridge officers in general. “Well done, ladies and gentlemen. You
seem to have organized this securement most efficiently. My compliments.
Commander, please take the Arikara out to our englobement coordinate, in
your own time.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
Acceleration returned to the
bridge, building to a third of a gee. Meredith studied the tactical situation
display, familiarising himself with the squadron’s formation. He was quietly
content with the way his ships and crews were performing, especially after the
trauma of Lalonde. Unlike some navy officers, Meredith didn’t regard the
blackhawks as universally villainous, he liked to consider himself a more
sophisticated realist than that. If they were going to be betrayed, it was
likely to be by an outside agency such as a stealthed spy satellite. But even
then, a starship would have to collect the information.
“Lieutenant Lowie, would it be
possible to eliminate any spy system hiding in the rings by emp-ing them?”
“Sir, it would require complete
saturation,” the weapons officer said. “If the Organization has hidden a
satellite out there its circuitry will be hardened. The fusion explosion would
have to be inside twenty kilometres to guarantee elimination. We don’t have
that many bombs.”
“I see. Just an idea. Rhoecus, I’d
like to keep a couple of voidhawks in orbit around Mirchusko so they can
monitor starships emerging outside our own sensor range. What effect will that
have on the survey?”
“Approximate increase of six hours,
Admiral.”
“Damn, that’s pushing our time
envelope.” He consulted the tactical situation display again, running analysis
programs to calculate the most effective option.
A red dot flared into existence
barely ten thousand kilometres away, surrounded by symbols: a wormhole terminus
disgorging a ship. And it was nowhere near any of Tranquillity’s designated
emergence zones. Another red dot appeared less than a second later. A third. A
fourth. Three more.
“What the hell?”
“Not voidhawks, sir,” Lieutenant
Rhoecus said. “No affinity broadcasts at all. They’re not responding to
Tranquillity or squadron voidhawks, either.”
“Commander Kroeber, squadron to
combat status. Rhoecus, recall the voidhawks. Can someone get me a visual
identification?”
“Coming, sir,” Lieutenant Grese
datavised. “Two of the intruders are close to an SD sensor satellite.”
More wormhole termini were opening.
Arikara’s thermo-dump panels and long-range sensor clusters sank back
into their fuselage recesses. The warship’s acceleration increased as it sped
out to its englobement coordinate.
“Got it, Admiral. Oh, Lord,
definitely hostile.”
The image relayed into Meredith’s
neural nanonics showed him a charcoal-grey eagle with a wingspan of nearly two
hundred metres; its eyes gleamed yellow above a long chrome-silver beak. His
body tensed in reflex, pushing him deeper into the acceleration couch. That was
one massively evil-looking creature.
“Hellhawk, sir. Must be from
Valisk.”
“Thank you, Grese. Confirm the
other intruder identities, please.”
The tactical situation display
showed him twenty-seven bitek starships had now emerged from their wormholes.
Another fifteen termini were opening. It was only seven seconds since the first
had appeared.
“All of them are hellhawks, sir;
eight bird types, four bogus starships, the rest conform to standard blackhawk
profile.”
“Admiral, the voidhawks have all
swallowed back to Tranquillity,” Rhoecus said. “Moving out to reinforce the
englobement formation.”
Meredith watched their purple
vector lines slice across the tactical situation display, twisting around to
reach the other squadron ships. No use, Meredith thought, no use at all.
Fifty-eight hellhawks were ranged against them now, forming a loose ring around
the habitat. Tactical analysis programs were giving him an extremely small
probability of a successful defensive engagement, even with the squadron backed
up by Tranquillity’s SD platforms. And that was reducing still further as more
hellhawks continued to swallow in.
“Commander Kroeber, get those
blackhawks Tranquillity was using as patrol ships out here as fast as
possible.”
“Aye, sir.”
“Sir!” Grese shouted. “We’re
registering more gravitonic distortions. Adamist ships, this time. Multiple
emergence patterns.”
The tactical situation display
showed Meredith two small constellations of red dots lighting up. The first was
fifteen thousand kilometres ahead of Tranquillity, while the second trailed it
by roughly the same amount. Dear God, and I thought Lalonde was bad.
“Lieutenant Rhoecus.”
“Yes, Admiral?”
“The Ilex and the Myoho are
to disengage. They are ordered to fly to Avon immediately and warn Trafalgar
what has happened here. Under no circumstances is Admiral Kolhammer to bring
his task force to Mirchusko.”
“But, sir . . .”
“That was an order, Lieutenant.”
“Aye, sir.”
“Grese, can you identify the new
intruders?”
“I think so, sir. I think it’s the
Organization fleet. Visual sensors show front-line warships; I’ve got frigates,
some battle cruisers, several destroyers, and plenty of combat-capable
commercial vehicles.”
Large sections of the tactical
situation display dissolved into yellow and purple hash as electronic warfare
pods spun away from the hellhawks, coming on line as soon as they were clear of
the energistic effect. The voidhawks continued to supply information on
emerging starships. There were now seventy hellhawks ringing Tranquillity; with
a hundred and thirty Adamist ships holding station on either side of it.
Arikara’s bridge had fallen completely silent.
“Sir,” Rhoecus said. “Ilex and
Myoho have swallowed out.”
Meredith nodded. “Good.” There
wasn’t a hell of a lot more he could say. “Commander Kroeber, please signal the
enemy fleet. Ask them . . . Ask them what they want.”
“Aye, sir.”
The tactical situation computer
datavised an alarm.
“Combat wasp launch!” Lowie
shouted. “The hellhawks have fired.”
At such close range, there was
nothing the electronic warfare barrage could do to hide the burst of yellow
solid rocket exhausts from Meredith’s squadron. Each of the hellhawks had
launched fifteen combat wasps. Spent solid rocket casings separated as the
dazzling plumes of fusion fire sprang out, and they began to accelerate in
towards the habitat at twenty-five gees. Over a thousand drones forming an
immense noose of light which was swiftly contracting.
Tactical programs went primary in
Meredith’s neural nanonics. In theory, they had the capacity to fight off this
assault, which would leave them with practically zero reserves. And he had to
decide now.
It was a hopeless situation, one
where instinct fought against duty. But Confederation citizens were being
attacked; and to a Saldana duty was instinct.
“Full defensive salvo,” Meredith
ordered. “Fire.”
Combat wasps leapt out of their
launch tubes in every squadron ship. Tranquillity’s SD platforms launched
simultaneously. For a short while, space around the habitat’s shell ceased to
be an absolute vacuum. Hot streams of energized vapour from the exhausts of
four thousand combats wasps sprayed in towards Tranquillity, creating a faint
iridescent nebula beset with giddy squalls of turquoise and amber ions. Jagged
petals of lightning flared out from the tip of every starscraper, ripping away
into the chaotically unstable vortex.
Blackhawks were rising from
Tranquillity’s docking ledges, over fifty of them sliding out under heavy
acceleration to join the fight. Meredith’s tactical analysis program began
revising the odds. Then he saw several swallow away. In his heart he didn’t
blame them.
“Message coming in, Admiral,” the
communications officer reported. “Someone called Luigi Balsmao, he claims he’s
the Organization fleet’s commander. He says: Surrender and join us, or die and
join us.”
“What a melodramatic arsehole,”
Meredith grunted. “Please advise the Lord of Ruin, it’s as much her decision as
it is mine. After all, it’s her people who will suffer.”
“Oh, fuck! Sir! Another
combat wasp launch. It’s the Adamist ships this time.”
Under Luigi’s command, all one
hundred and eighty Organization starships fired a salvo of twenty-five combat
wasps apiece. Their antimatter drives accelerated them in towards Tranquillity
at forty gees.
Chapter 14
The star wasn’t important enough to
have a name. The Confederation Navy’s almanac office simply listed it as
DRL0755-09-BG. It was an average K-type, with a gloomy emission in the lower
end of the orange spectrum. The first scoutship to explore its planets, back in
2396, took less than a fortnight to complete a survey. There were only three
unremarkable inner, solid planets for it to investigate, none of which were
terracompatible. Of the two outer gas giants, the one furthest from the star
had an equatorial diameter of forty-three thousand kilometres, its outer cloud
layer a pale green with none of the usual blustery atmospheric conditions. As
worthless as the solid planets. The innermost gas giant did raise the interest
of the scoutship’s crew for a short while. Its equatorial diameter was a
hundred and fifty-three thousand kilometres, making it larger than Jupiter, and
coloured by a multitude of ferocious storm bands. Eighteen moons orbited around
it, two of which had high-pressure atmospheres of nitrogen and methane. The
complex interaction of their gravity fields prohibited any major ring system
from forming, but all of the larger moons shepherded substantial quantities of
asteroidal rubble.
The scoutship crew thought that
such abundant resources of easily accessible minerals and ores would make it an
ideal location for Edenist habitats. Their line company even managed to sell
the survey’s preliminary results to Jupiter. But once again, DRL0755-09-BG’s
mediocrity acted against it. The gas giant was a good location for habitats,
but not exceptional; without a terracompatible planet the Edenists weren’t
interested. DRL0755-09-BG was ignored for the next two hundred and fifteen
years, apart from intermittent visits from Confederation Navy patrol ships to
check that it wasn’t being used by an antimatter production station.
As the Lady Mac’s sensor
clusters gave him a visual sweep of the penurious star system, Joshua wondered
why the navy wasted its time.
He cancelled the image and looked
around the bridge. Alkad Mzu was lying prone on one of the spare acceleration
couches, her eyes tight shut as she absorbed the external panorama. Monica and
Samuel were hovering in the background, as always. Joshua really didn’t want
them on the bridge, but the agencies weren’t prepared to allow Mzu out of their
sight now.
“Okay, Doc, now what?” he asked.
He’d followed Mzu’s directions so that Lady Mac emerged half a million
kilometres above the inner gas giant’s southern pole, near the undulating
boundaries of the planet’s enormous magnetosphere. It gave them an excellent
viewpoint across the entire moon system.
Alkad stirred on her couch, not
opening her eyes. “Please configure the ship’s antenna to broadcast the
strongest signal it can at the one-hundred-and-twenty-five-thousand-kilometre
equatorial orbital band. I will give you the code to transmit when you’re
ready.”
“That was the Beezling’s
parking orbit?”
“Yes.”
“Okay. Sarha, get the dish ready
for that, please. I think you’d better allow for a twenty-thousand-kilometre
error when you designate the beam. No telling what state they were in when they
got here. If they don’t respond, we’ll have to widen the sweep pattern out to
the furthest moon.”
“Aye, Captain.”
“How many people left on this old
warship of yours, Doc?” Joshua asked.
Alkad broke away from the image
feeding into her neural nanonics. She didn’t want to. This was it, the star
represented by that stupid little alphanumeric she had carried with her like a
talisman for thirty years. Always expecting him to be waiting here for her;
there had been a million first lines rehearsed in those decades, a million
loving looks. But now she’d arrived, seen that pale amber star with her own
eyes, doubt was gripping her like frostbite. Every other aspect of their
desperate plan had fallen to dust thanks to fate and human fallibility. Would
this part of it really be any different? A sublight voyage of two and a half
light-years. What had the young captain called it? Impossible. “Nine,” she said
faintly. “There should be nine of them. Is that a problem?”
“No. Lady Mac can take that
many.”
“Good.”
“Have you thought what you’re going
to tell them?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Jesus, Doc; their home planet has
been wiped out, you can’t use the Alchemist for revenge, the dead are busy
conquering the universe, and they are going to have to spend the rest of their
lives locked up in Tranquillity. You’ve had thirty years to get used to the
genocide, and a couple of weeks to square up to the possessed. To them it’s
still good old 2581, and they’re on a navy combat mission. You think they’re
going to take all this calmly?”
“Oh, Mother Mary.” Another problem,
before she even knew if they’d survived.
“The dish is ready,” Sarha said.
“Thanks,” Joshua said. “Right, Doc,
datavise the code into the flight computer. Then start thinking what you’re
going to say. And think good, because I’m not taking Lady Mac anywhere
near a ship armed with antimatter that isn’t extremely pleased to see me.”
Mzu’s code was beamed out by the Lady
Macbeth in a slim fan of microwave radiation. Sarha monitored the operation
as it tracked slowly around the designated orbital path. There was no immediate
response—she hadn’t been expecting one. She allowed the beam another two
sweeps, then shifted the focus to cover a new circle just outside the first.
It took five hours to get a
response. The tension and expectation which had so dominated the bridge for the
first thirty minutes had expired long ago. Ashly, Monica, and Voi were all in
the galley preparing food sachets when a small artificial green star appeared
in the display which the flight computer was feeding Sarha’s neural nanonics.
Analysis and discrimination programs came on-line, filtering out the gas
giant’s constant radio screech to concentrate on the signal. Two ancillary
booms slid up out of Lady Macbeth’s hull, unfolding wide broad-spectrum
multi-element receiver meshes to complement the main communications dish.
“Somebody’s there, all right,”
Sarha said. “Weak signal, but steady. Standard CAB transponder response code,
but no ship registration number. They’re in an elliptical orbit, ninety-one
thousand kilometres by one hundred and seventy thousand four-degree
inclination. Right now they’re ninety-five thousand kilometres out from the
upper atmosphere.” A strangely muffled gulp made her abandon the flight
computer’s display to check the bridge.
Alkad Mzu was lying flat on her
acceleration couch, with every muscle unnaturally stiff. Neural nanonics were
busy censoring her body language with nerve overrides. But Sarha could see a
film of liquid over her red-rimmed eyes which was growing progressively thicker.
When she blinked, tiny droplets spun away across the compartment.
Joshua whistled. “Impressive, Doc.
Your old crewmates have got balls, I’ll say that for them.”
“They’re alive,” Alkad cried. “Oh,
Mother Mary, they’re really alive.”
“The Beezling made it here,
Doc,” Joshua said, deliberately curt. “Let’s not jump to conclusions without
facts. All we’ve got so far is a transponder beacon. What is supposed to happen
next, does the captain come out of zero-tau?”
“Yes.”
“Okay. Sarha, keep monitoring the Beezling.
Beaulieu, Liol, let’s get back to flight status, please. Dahybi, charge up the
nodes, I want to be ready to jump clear if things turn out bad.” He started
plotting a vector which would take them over to the Beezling.
Lady Mac’s triple fusion drive came on, quickly
building up to three gees. She followed a shallow arc above the gas giant,
sinking towards the penumbra.
“Signal change,” Sarha announced.
“Much stronger now, but it’s still an omnidirectional broadcast, they’re not
focusing on us. Message coming in, AV only.”
“Okay, Doc,” Joshua said. “You’re
on. Be convincing.” They were still four hundred and fifty thousand kilometres
away from the Beezling, which produced an awkward time delay. Pressed
back into her couch, Alkad could only move her eyes to one side, glancing up at
a holoscreen which angled out of the ceiling above her. A magenta haze slowly
cleared to show her the Beezling’s bridge compartment. It looked as
though some kind of salvage team had ransacked the place, consoles had been
broken open to show electronic stacks with their circuit cards missing, wall
panels had been removed exposing chunks of machinery which were half
dismantled. To add to the disorder, every surface was dusted with grubby frost.
Over the years, chunks of packaging, latch pins, small tools, items of
clothing, and other shipboard debris had all stuck where they’d drifted to
rest, giving the impression of inorganic chrysalides frozen in the act of
metamorphosis. Awkward, angular shadows overlapped right around the compartment,
completing the image of gothic anarchy. There was only one source of
illumination, a slender emergency light tube carried by someone in an SII
spacesuit.
“This is Captain Kyle Prager here.
The flight computer reports we’ve picked up our activation trigger code. Alkad,
I want this to be you. Are you receiving this? I’ve got very little left in the
way of working sensors. Hell, I’ve got little in the way of anything that works
anymore.”
“I’m receiving you, Kyle,” Alkad
said. “And it is me, it’s Alkad. I came back for you. I promised I would.”
“Mother Mary, is that really you,
Alkad? I’m getting a poor image here, you look . . . different.”
“I’m old, Kyle. Very very old now.”
“Only thirty years, unless
relativity is weirder than we thought.”
“Kyle, please, is Peter there? Did
he make it?”
“He’s here, he’s fine.”
“Almighty Mary. You’re sure?”
“Yes. I just checked his zero-tau
pod. Six of us made it.”
“Only six? What happened?”
“We lost Tane Ogilie a couple of
years ago after he went outside to work on the drive tube. It had to be
repaired before we could decelerate into this orbit; there was a lot of systems
decay over twenty-eight years. Trouble is, the whole antimatter unit is badly
radioactive now. Not even armour could save him from receiving a lethal dose.”
“Oh, Mother Mary, I’m sorry. What
about the other two?”
“Like I said, we’ve had a lot of
systems decay. Zero-tau can keep you in perfect stasis, but its own components
wear out. They went sometime during the voyage, we only found out when we came
out to start the deceleration. Both of them suicided.”
“I see,” she said shakily.
“What happened, Alkad? You’re not
in any Garissan navy uniform I remember.”
“The Omutans did it, Kyle. Just
like we thought they would. The bastards went ahead and did it.”
“How bad?”
“The worst. Six planet-busters.”
Joshua cancelled his link to the
communications circuit, turning to the more mundane details of the flight. Some
things he just didn’t want to hear: the reaction of a man being told his home
planet has died.
Lady Mac’s sensors were slowly gathering more
information on the Beezling, allowing the flight computer to refine the
warship’s location beyond Sarha’s initial rough estimate. The gas giant’s
violent magnetic and electromagnetic emissions were making it difficult. Even
this far above the outer atmosphere space was a thick ionic soup, congested
with severe energy currents which degraded sensor efficiency.
Joshua altered their flight vector
several times as the new figures came in. Lady Mac was well over the
nightside now, the swirl of particles around her forward fuselage glowing a
faint pink as they were buffeted through the planetary magnetosphere. It played
havoc with the support circuitry.
Beaulieu and Liol would datavise
flurries of instructions to contain the dropouts, returning the systems to
operational status. Joshua monitored Liol’s performance, unable to find fault.
He’d make a good crewman. Maybe I could offer him Melvyn’s slot, except his ego
would never allow him to accept. There has to be a way we can settle this.
He turned his attention back to the
communications link. After the shocks he’d received, Kyle Prager was reacting
badly to Mzu’s news of her deal with the agencies and Ione.
“You know I cannot hand it over to
anybody else,” Prager said. “You should never have brought them here, no matter
what you agreed with them.”
“What, and leave you to rot?” Alkad
replied. “I couldn’t do that. Not with Peter here.”
“Why not? We planned for it. We
would have destroyed the Alchemist and signalled the Confederation Navy for
help. You know that. And as for this fable about the dead being alive . . .”
“Mother Mary. We can barely pick up
your signal now, and I knew where to look. What sort of condition would you be
in five years from now? Besides, there might not be any Confederation left in
another five months, let alone five years.”
“Better that than risk others
learning how to build an Alchemist.”
“Nobody is going to learn from me.”
“Of course not, but there are so
many temptations for governments now the knowledge of its existence has
leaked.”
“It leaked thirty years ago, and
the technology is still safe. This rescue mission is designed to clear up the
last loose end.”
“Alkad, you’re asking too much. I’m
sorry my answer has to be no. If you try to rendezvous I will switch off the
confinement chambers. We still have a quantity of antimatter left.”
“No!” Alkad yelled. “Peter’s on
board.”
“Then stay away.”
“Captain Prager, this is Captain
Calvert. I’d like to offer a simple solution.”
“Please do,” Prager answered.
“Shoot the Alchemist down into the
gas giant. We’ll pick you up after it’s gone. Because I can assure you, I’m not
going to come anywhere near the Beezling with that kind of threat
hanging over me.”
“I’d like to, Captain, but it will
take some time to check over the Alchemist’s carrier vehicle. Then the
antimatter would have to be reloaded. And even if it still works, you might be
able to intercept it.”
“That’s a very unhealthy case of
paranoia you’ve got there, Captain.”
“One that has kept me alive for
thirty years.”
“All right, try this. If we were
possessed or simply wanted to acquire Alchemist technology we wouldn’t even
have come here. We already have the doc. You’re military, you know there are a
great many ways information can be extracted from unwilling donors. And we
certainly wouldn’t have thrown in a crazy story like the possessed to confuse
the issue. But we’re not possessed, or even hostile to you, so we told you the
truth. So I’ll tell you what. If you’re still not convinced that we want to end
the Alchemist threat, then go right ahead and kamikaze.”
“No!” Alkad yelled.
“Quiet, Doc. First though, Captain,
you put this Peter Adul character in a spacesuit, boot him out the airlock, and
let us pick him up. He cannot be allowed to die, not if he knows how to build
an Alchemist. The possessed would have him then. Guarding against that
technology leakage is part of your duty, too, now. Once we have him, I’ll blow
you to shit myself if that’s what it takes.”
“You would, too, wouldn’t you?”
Prager asked.
“Jesus, yes. After what I’ve been
through chasing the doc, it’ll be a pleasure to finish this properly.”
“It may be just the lousy reception
I’m getting, but you look very young, Captain Calvert.”
“Compared to most starship
captains, I probably am. But I’m also the only option you have. You either die,
or you come with me.”
“Kyle,” Alkad pleaded. “For Mary’s
sake!”
“Very well. Captain Calvert, you
can rendezvous with the Beezling and take my crew off. After that the Beezling
will be scuttled with the Alchemist on board.”
Joshua heard someone on the bridge
let out a heavy breath. “Thank you, Captain.”
“Christ, what an ungrateful
bastard,” Liol complained. “Just make sure you invoice him a huge rescue bill,
Josh.”
“Well that finally settles that
question,” Ashly chuckled. “You’re definitely a Calvert, Liol.”
The Beezling was in a sorry
state. That became increasingly apparent on Lady Mac’s final approach
phase, when they were rising up behind it from a slightly lower orbit. Both
ships were deep inside the penumbra now, although the gigantic orange and white
crescent they were fleeing from still cast a glorious coronal glow across them.
It was enough for Lady Mac’s visual sensors to provide a detailed image
while they were still ten kilometres away.
Almost the entire lower quarter of
the warship’s fuselage plates were missing, with only a simple silver petal
pattern left surrounding the drive tubes. The hexagonal stress structure was
clearly visible, fencing in black and tarnished chrome segments of machinery.
Some units were obviously foreign, jutting up through the centre of the
hexagons where they’d been hurriedly inserted to complement or enhance original
components. From the midsection forward, the fuselage was relatively intact.
There was very little protective foam remaining, just a few dabs of blackened
cinderlike flakes. Long silvery scars etched across the dark monobonded silicon
told the story of multiple particle impacts. There were hundreds of small
craters where the fuselage’s molecular-binding generators had suffered
localized overloads. Punctures whose vapour and shrapnel had been absorbed by
whatever module or tank was directly underneath. None of the delicate sensor
clusters had survived. Only two thermo-dump panels were extended, and they were
badly battered; one had a large chunk missing, as if something had taken a bite
out of it.
“I’m registering a strong magnetic
emission,” Beaulieu said as they closed the last kilometre. “But the ship’s
thermal and electrical activity is minimal. Apart from an auxiliary fusion
generator and three confinement chambers the Beezling is basically
inert.”
“No thruster activity, either,”
said Liol. “They’ve picked up a tumble. One rotation every eight minutes
nineteen seconds.”
Joshua checked the radar return,
computing a vector around the crippled old ship so he could reach its airlock.
“I can dock and stabilize you,” he datavised to Captain Prager.
“Not much point,” Prager replied.
“Our airlock chamber was breached by particle impact; and I doubt the latches
will work anyway. If you just hold station we’ll transfer across in suits.”
“Acknowledged.”
“Captain,” Beaulieu said. “Two
fusion drives. They’re on an approach vector.”
“Jesus!” He accessed the sensors.
Half of the image was a ghostly apricot-coloured ocean illuminated by the
planetary-sized aurora borealis storms which floated serenely above it. The
nighttime sky which vaulted it was a perfect orrery dome of stars where the
only movement came from tiny moons racing along their ordained pathways. Red
icons were bracketing two of the brighter stars just outside the ecliptic. When
Joshua keyed in the infrared they became brilliant. Purple vector lines
sprouted out of them, projecting their trajectory in towards him.
“Approximately two hundred thousand
kilometres away,” Beaulieu said, her synthesized voice sounding completely
uncaring. “I think I can confirm the drive signatures; it appears to be our old
friends the Urschel and the Raimo. Both plasma exhausts have very
similar instabilities. If not them, then there are certainly possessed on
board.”
“Who else?” Ashly grunted morosely.
Alkad looked around frantically,
trying to make eye contact with the crew. They were all looking at Joshua as he
lay on his couch, eyes closed, his flat brow producing neat parallel furrows as
he frowned in concentration. “What are you waiting for?” she asked. “Take the
survivors on board and run. Those ships are too far away to threaten us.”
Sarha waved her hand in annoyance.
“They are now,” she said in a low voice. “They won’t be for long. And we’re too
close to the gas giant to jump out. We need to be another hundred and thirty
thousand kilometres away. In other words, up where they are. That means we
can’t boost straight up; we’d fly straight into them.”
“So . . . what then?”
Sarha pointed a finger at Joshua.
“He’ll tell us. If there’s a vector out of here, Joshua will find it.”
Alkad was surprised by the amount
of respect in the normally volatile crew woman. But then all of the crew were
regarding their captain with the kind of hushed expectancy that was usually the
province of holy gurus. It made Alkad very uneasy.
Joshua’s eyes flipped open. “We
have a problem,” he announced grimly. “Their altitude gives them too much
tactical advantage. I can’t find us a vector.” A small regretful dip at the
corner of his mouth. “There isn’t even a convenient Lagrange point this time.
And I wouldn’t like to risk it anyway, not while we’re so close to a gas giant
as big as this one.”
“Fly a slingshot,” Liol said. “Dive
straight at the gas giant and go for a jump on the other side.”
“That’s over three hundred thousand
kilometres away. Lady Mac can probably accelerate harder than the
Organization ships, but they’ve got antimatter combat wasps, remember.
Forty-five-gee acceleration; we’d never make it.”
“Christ.”
“Beaulieu, put a com beam on them,”
Joshua said. “If they respond, ask them what they want. I’m sure we know, but
if nothing else I’d like confirmation.”
“Yes, Captain.”
“Doc, how do we go about firing the
Alchemist at them?”
“You can’t,” she said simply.
“Jesus, Doc, this is no time for
principles. Don’t you understand? We have no other way out. None. That weapon
is the only advantage we’ve got left. If we don’t kill them, they’ll get you,
and Peter.”
“This is not a question of
principle, Captain. It’s not physically possible to deploy the Alchemist
against starships.”
“Jesus.” He couldn’t believe it.
But the doc looked frightened enough. Intuition convinced him she was telling
the truth. The navigation program was still producing flight vectors. Dumb forced-calculation,
trying out every conceivable probability to find one which would let them
escape. The plots flickered in and out of existence at a subliminal speed,
miniature purple lightning bolts crackling around the inside of his head. Throw
in wild card manoeuvres, lunar slingshots, Lagrange points. Pray! It didn’t
make the slightest difference. The Organization frigates had thoroughly
outmanoeuvred him. His one hope had been the Alchemist, a super-doomsday
machine, a nuke to kill a couple of ants.
I have come so far I can actually
see the ship it’s stored in. I can’t lose now, not with these stakes.
“Okay, Doc, I want to know exactly
what your Alchemist does, and how it does it.” He clicked his fingers at Monica
and Samuel. “You two, I’ll stay in Tranquillity if we survive this, but I have
to know.”
“God, Calvert, I’ll stay there with
you if that’s what it takes,” Monica told him. “Just get us out of this.”
“Joshua,” Sarha said. “You can’t.”
“Give me an alternative. It gets
Liol’s vote. He’ll be captain then.”
“I’m crew, Josh. This is your
ship.”
“Now he tells me. Datavise the
file, Doc. Now, please.” Information leapt into his mind as the files came
over. Theory, application, construction, deployment, operational parameters.
All neatly indexed with helpful cross-referencing. The blueprints of how to
slay a star; in fact, build enough and you could slay an entire galaxy; or even
just . . . Joshua flicked instantaneously back to the operational aspects.
Pumped a few figures of his own into Mzu’s coldly simple equations.
“Jesus, Doc, it wasn’t a rumour.
You really are dangerous, aren’t you?”
“Can you do it?” Monica asked. She
wanted to shout the question at him, jolt him out of that infuriating
complacency.
Joshua winked at her. “Absolutely.
Look, we came off badly down in that ironberg yard because that’s not my
territory. This is. In space, we win.”
“Is he serious?” Monica appealed to
the rest of the bridge.
“Oh, yes,” Sarha said. “If anyone
gets hostile with Lady Mac, they just crash straight into his ego.”
High York posed a difficult problem
of interpretation for Louise. The AV pillar in the Jamrana’s lounge
shone its image down her optic nerve throughout the entire approach phase.
There was no colour, space was so black she couldn’t even see the stars. The
asteroid was different to Phobos’s chiselled cylinder, a grizzled irregular
lump which the ship’s sensors seemed incapable of bringing into proper focus.
Mechanical artefacts were shunting out of its puckered surface at all angles,
though she wasn’t quite sure if she had the scale right. If she had, then they
were bigger than the largest ship ever to ply Norfolk’s seas.
Fletcher was in the lounge with
her. From the few comments he made he understood even less of the image than
she did.
Genevieve, of course, was in her
tiny cabin playing games on her processor block. She’d found a soul mate in one
of Pieri’s younger cousins; the pair of them had taken to locking themselves
away for hours at a time to tackle battalions of Trafalgar Greenjackets or skate
through puzzles of five-dimensional topology. Louise wasn’t entirely happy with
her sister’s new hobby, but on the other hand she was grateful she didn’t have
the duty of keeping her amused during the flight.
High York’s disk-shaped spaceport
traversed the AV image, eclipsing the asteroid itself. A high-pitched whine
vibrated out of the lounge walls, and the Jamrana drifted forwards. And
still there was no glimpse of Earth. Louise had really been looking forwards to
that. Pieri would align a sensor on the planet for her if she asked, she was
sure; but right now the whole Bushay family was involved in the docking
procedure.
Louise asked her processor block
for an update on their approach, and studied the display which appeared on its
screen while it accessed the ship’s flight computer. “Four minutes until we
dock,” she said. Assuming she was reading the tables of figures and coloured
lines correctly.
She’d spent a large portion of the
flight working through the block’s tutorial programs until she could manage the
unit’s more basic display and operation modes. She didn’t need to ask anyone’s
help to manage her medical nanonic packages, and she could monitor the baby’s
health continually. It gave her a good feeling. So much of Confederation life
was centred around the casual use of electronics.
“Why so nervous, my lady?” Fletcher
asked. “Our voyage ends. With Our Lord’s mercy we have prevailed once more
against the most inopportune circumstances. We have returned to the good Earth,
the cradle of humanity. Though I fear that which has befallen me, I can do
naught but rejoice at our homecoming.”
“I’m not nervous,” she protested
unconvincingly.
“Come now, lady.”
“All right. Look, it’s not getting
here; I’m really delighted we’ve made it. I suppose it’s silly of me, but
something about being on Earth is very reassuring. It’s old and it’s very
strong, and if people are going to be safe anywhere, then it’ll be here. That’s
the problem. Something Endron said about it keeps bothering me.”
“You know that if I can assist you,
I will.”
“No. It’s nothing you can help
with. That’s the point. Endron told me we wouldn’t get through High York’s
spaceport; that there would be inspections and examinations, awfully strict
ones. It’ll be nothing like arriving at Phobos. And everything I’ve heard from
Pieri just confirms that. I’m sorry, Fletcher, I don’t think we’re going to
make it, I really don’t.”
“And yet we must,” he said softly.
“That fiend Dexter cannot prevail. Should the necessity become apparent, I will
surrender myself and warn Earth’s rulers.”
“Oh, no, Fletcher, you can’t do
that. I don’t want you to be hurt.”
“Yet still you doubt me, Lady
Louise. I see your heart crying in pain. That is a source of grief for me.”
“I don’t doubt you, Fletcher. It’s
just that . . . If we can’t get through, then Quinn Dexter won’t manage it
either. That would mean your whole journey is for nothing. I hate that.”
“Dexter is stronger than I, lady. I
hold that bitter memory quite plainly. He is also more cunning and ruthless. If
there is but a single chink in the armour of Earth’s valiant harbourmasters he
will find it.”
“Heavens, I hope not. Quinn Dexter
loose on Earth is too horrible to think about.”
“Aye, my lady.” His fingers clasped
hers to emphasise his determination. Something he rarely did, shying away from
physical contact with people. It was almost as if he feared contamination.
“That is why you must swear
faithfully to me that should I stumble in my task you must pick up the torch
and carry on. The world must be warned of Quinn Dexter’s devilish intent. And
if possible you must also seek out this Banneth of whom he spoke with such
animosity. Alert her to his presence, emphasise the danger she will face.”
“I’ll try, Fletcher, really I will.
I promise.” Fletcher was prepared to sacrifice his new life and eternal sanity
to save others. Her own goal of reaching Joshua seemed so petty and selfish in
comparison. “Be careful when we disembark,” she urged.
“I place my trust in God, my lady.
And if they catch me—”
“They won’t!”
“Ah, now who has adopted a frail
bravado? As I recall, ’twas you who warned me of what lies crouched beside the
road ahead.”
“I know.”
“Forgive me, lady. I see that once
again my tact is left wanting.”
“Don’t worry about me, Fletcher.
I’m not the one they’ll put into zero-tau.”
“Aye, lady, I confess that prospect
is one I shrink from. I know in my heart I will not last long in such black
confinement.”
“I’ll get you out,” she vowed. “If
they put you in zero-tau I’ll get it switched off, or something. There will be
lawyers I can hire.” She patted her ship-suit’s breast pocket, feeling the
outline of the Jovian Bank credit disk. “I have money.”
“Let us hope it proves sufficient,
my lady.”
She gave him what she hoped was a
bright smile, making out that everything was settled. So that’s that.
The Jamrana trembled,
shaking loose small flocks of jumble. Clangs rumbled down the central ladder
shaft as the spaceport docking latches engaged.
“That’s funny,” Louise said. The
display on the block’s screen was undergoing a drastic change.
“Is something the matter, lady?”
“I don’t think so. It’s just odd,
that’s all. If I’m reading this right, the captain has given the spaceport
total access to the flight computer. They’re running some really comprehensive
diagnostic programs, checking everything on board.”
“Is that bad?”
“I’m not sure.” Louise stiffened,
glancing around self-consciously. She cleared her throat. “They’re also
accessing the internal cameras. Watching us.”
“Ah.”
“Come along, Fletcher. We must get
ready to leave.”
“Yes, ma’am, of course.”
He had dropped right back into the
estate servant role without a blink. Louise hoped the cameras wouldn’t pick up
her furtive smile as she pushed off from the deck.
Genevieve’s cabin was full of four
inch light cubes, each of them a different colour. Little creatures were
imprisoned inside them, as if they were cages made of tinted glass. The
projection froze as Louise activated the door, an orchestral rock track faded
away.
“Gen! You’re supposed to be packed.
We’re here, you know, we’ve arrived.”
Her little sister peered at her
through the transparent lattice, red-eyed and frazzled. “I’ve just disarmed
eight of the counter-program’s Trogolois warriors, you know. I’ve never got
that far before.”
“Bully for you. Now get packed, you
can play it again later. We’re leaving.”
Genevieve’s face darkened in
petulant rebellion. “It’s not fair! We’re always having to leave places the
moment we arrive.”
“Because we’re travelling, silly.
We’ll get to Tranquillity in another couple of weeks, then you can put down roots
and sprout leaves out of your ears for all I care.”
“Why can’t we just stay in the
ship? The possessed can’t get inside if we’re flying about.”
“Because we can’t fly about
forever.”
“I don’t see—”
“Gen, do as you’re told.
Turn this off and get packed. Now!”
“You’re not Mother.”
Louise glared at her. Genevieve’s
stubborn mask collapsed, and she started to sob.
“Oh, Gen.” Louise skimmed across
the narrow space and caught hold of the small girl. She ordered the processor
block off, and the glowing bricks flickered into dewy sparkles before vanishing
altogether.
“I want to go home,” Genevieve
blurted. “Home to Cricklade, not Tranquillity.”
“I’m sorry,” Louise cooed. “I
haven’t being paying you much attention on this flight, have I?”
“You’ve got things to worry about.”
“When did you go to sleep last?”
“Last night.”
“Humm.” Louise put a finger under
her sister’s chin and lifted her face, studying the dark lines under her eyes.
“I can’t sleep much in zero-gee,”
Genevieve confessed. “I keep thinking I’m falling, and my throat all clogs up.
It’s awful.”
“We’ll book into a High York hotel,
one that’s on the biosphere’s ground level. Both of us can have a real sleep in
a proper bed then. How does that sound?”
“All right, I suppose.”
“That’s the way. Just imagine, if Mrs
Charlsworth could see us now. Two unmarried landowner girls, travelling without
chaperones, and about to visit Earth with all its decadent arcologies.”
Genevieve attempted a grin. “She’d
go loopy.”
“Certainly would.”
“Louise, how am I going to take this
block back home? I really don’t want to give it up now.”
Louise turned the slim innocuous
unit around in front of her. “We escaped the possessed, and we’ve flown halfway
across the galaxy. You don’t really think smuggling this back to Cricklade is
going to be a problem for the likes of us, do you?”
“No.” Genevieve perked up.
“Everyone’s going to be dead jealous when we get back. I can’t wait to see Jane
Walker’s face when I tell her we’ve been to Earth. She’s always going on about
how exotic her family holidays on Melton island are.”
Louise kissed her sister’s forehead
and gave her a warm hug. “Get packed. I’ll see you up at the airlock in five
minutes.”
There was only one awkward moment
left. All of the Bushay family had gathered by the airlock at the top of the
life-support section to say goodbye. Pieri was torn between desperation and
having to contain himself in front of his parents and his cluster of extended
siblings. He managed a platonic peck on Louise’s cheek, pressing against her
for longer than required. “Can I still show you around?” he mumbled.
“I hope so.” She smiled back.
“Let’s see how long I’m there for, shall we?”
He nodded, blushing heavily.
Louise led the way along the
airlock tube, her flight bag riding on her back like a haversack. A man was
floating just beyond the hatch at the far end, dressed in a pale emerald tunic
with white lettering on the top of the sleeve. He smiled politely.
“You must be the Kavanagh party?”
“Yes,” Louise said.
“Excellent. I’m Brent Roi, High
York customs. There are a few formalities we have to go through, I’m afraid. We
haven’t had any outsystem visitors since the quarantine started. That means my
staff are all sitting around kicking their heels with nothing to do. A month
ago you could have shot straight through here and we wouldn’t even have noticed
you.” He grinned at Genevieve. “That’s a huge bag you’ve got there. You’re not
smuggling anything in are you?”
“No!”
He winked at her. “Good show. This
way please.” He started off down the corridor, flipping at the grab hoops to
propel himself along.
Louise followed with Genevieve at
her heels. She heard a whirring sound behind. The hatch back to the Jamrana was
closing.
No way back now, she thought. Not
that there ever had been.
At least the customs man appeared
friendly. Perhaps she had been fretting too much about this.
The compartment Brent Roi led her
into was just like a broader section of the corridor, cylindrical, ten metres
long and eight wide. There were no fittings apart from five lines of grab hoops
radiating out from the entrance.
Brent Roi bent his legs and kicked
off hard as soon as he was through the hatch. When Louise went in he had
already joined the others lining the walls. She looked around, her heart
fluttering apprehensively. A dozen people were anchored to stikpads all around
her, she couldn’t see their faces, they all wore helmets with silver visors.
Each of them was holding some sort of boxy gun. The stub muzzles were pointed
at Fletcher the instant he popped out of the hatchway.
“Is this customs?” she asked in a
failing voice.
Genevieve’s small hand curled
around her ankle. “Louise!” She clambered up her big sister’s body like mobile
ivy. The two girls clung to each other fearfully.
“The ladies are not possessed,”
Fletcher said calmly. “I ask you not to endanger them. I shall not resist.”
“Too fucking right you won’t, you
son of a bitch,” Brent Roi snarled.
Ashly fired the MSV’s thrusters:
too hard, too long. He cursed. The drift had been reversed, not halted.
Pressure was wiring him close to overload. Mistakes like this could cost them a
lot more than their lives. He datavised another set of directives into the
craft’s computer, and the thrusters fired again, a shorter, milder burst this
time.
The MSV came to rest three metres
above the launch tube’s hatch. Like the rest of the Beezling’s fuselage
it was badly scarred and mauled. But intact.
“No particle penetration,” he
datavised. “It seems to be undamaged.”
“Good, get it open,” Joshua
answered.
Ashly was already extending three
of the MSV’s waldo arms. He shoved a clamp hand straight into the mounting hole
left by a broken sensor cluster and expanded the segments, securing the MSV in
place. A fission blade came on, burning a lambent saffron at the tip of the
second arm. Ashly used it to slice into the fuselage at the rim of the hatch,
then began to saw around.
Both the Beezling and the
MSV trembled energetically. The computer datavised a series of clamp stress
cautions, their grip on the mounting had shifted slightly. “Joshua, another one
of those and you’re going to shake me loose.”
“Sorry. Won’t happen again, we’re
docked now.”
Ashly accessed the MSV’s small
sensor suite. The Lady Mac had attached herself to the rear of the Beezling,
her aft hold-down latches engaging with the warship’s corresponding locks. A
slim silver piston slid out of her ring of umbilical couplings, weaving around
slowly as it sought out a socket on the Beezling to mate with.
Spacesuited figures wearing
manoeuvring packs were flitting towards the bright circle of light which was Lady
Macbeth’s open airlock. A third of the way around her fuselage one of her
combat wasp launch tubes had opened. The front section of a combat wasp had
risen up out of it, a dark tapering cylinder bristling with sensors and
antennae. Beaulieu was working on it, her glossy body alive with reflected
streaks of salmon-pink light that rippled fluidly with every movement. She had
anchored her feet in the midsection grid which contained the drone’s tanks and
generators. One of the submunitions chamber covers had already been removed;
now she was busy extracting the cluster of electronic warfare pods from inside.
The MSV’s waldo arm finished
cutting around the Beezling’s hatch. Ashly grabbed it with the
heavy-load arm and pulled it free. A strew of dust motes and composite shavings
popped out, quickly dwindling away. The MSV’s external lights swung around, and
he was looking straight down into a smooth white cylinder which nested a sleek
conical missile whose silver surface was polished brighter than any mirror.
“Is this the right one?” he asked,
including his retinal image into the datavise.
“That is the Alchemist carrier,
yes,” Mzu replied.
“There’s no response from any
processors in there. Temperature is a hundred and twenty absolute.”
“It won’t have affected the
Alchemist.”
Ashly said nothing, hoping her
self-confidence was as justified as Joshua’s. He extended one of the MSV’s
manipulator waldos into the launch tube and fastened it around the apex of the
carrier vehicle’s nose cone. Triangular keys found the locking pins, and turned
them. He retracted the arm carefully, bringing the nose cone with it. The base
was studded with junctions for the thermal shunt circuits, which were reluctant
to separate; after thirty years the vacuum and the cold had melded them
together. Ashly increased the tension on the waldo, and they tore free with a
judder which the arm’s inertia absorber could barely cope with.
“That’s it?” Ashly datavised when
the nose cone was lifted clear.
“That’s it,” Mzu confirmed.
The Alchemist was a single globe
one and a half metres in diameter, its seamless surface a neutral grey colour.
It was held in place by five carbotanium spider-leg struts which encased it
neatly, their inner surfaces lined with adjustable pads to maintain a perfect
grip.
“You should be able to detach the
entire restraint mechanism,” Mzu datavised. “Sever the data and power cables if
necessary; they’re not necessary anymore.”
“Okay.” He moved the manipulator
waldo down the side of the Alchemist and used its small sensors to inspect the
machinery he found below it. “This shouldn’t take long, the rivets are
standard. I can cut them.”
“Fast, please, Ashly,” Joshua
datavised. “The Organization ships are only twenty-four minutes away.”
“Gotcha. I’ll have this with
Beaulieu in three minutes.” He moved the first of the manipulator’s tools
forwards. “Doctor?”
“Yes.”
“Why bother with a specialist
carrier vehicle if it can be deployed in an ordinary combat wasp?”
“That carrier vehicle is designed
to shoot the Alchemist into a star. Admittedly that’s a large target, but we
can’t take starships very close to one. The carrier has to be fully insulated
from the star’s heat and radiation, and it also has to be fast enough to avoid
interception from combat wasps in the event we were detected. We built it to
accelerate up to sixty-five gees.”
Ashly would have liked to have
called her bluff. But given their current situation, ignorance and blind faith
made life altogether less stressful.
Monica didn’t leave Alkad alone in
the EVA preparation compartment, but she did permit her a discreet distance.
Two other operatives were with her, ready to inspect the Beezling’s crew
to make sure they brought nothing threatening with them into the Lady
Macbeth.
Alkad didn’t really notice the
agent’s presence, every aspect of her life had been under continual observation
for so long now that intrusion meant nothing. Not even for this most precious
occasion.
She anchored herself to a stikpad
in front of the airlock hatch, waiting with outwards patience. When she sorted
through her feelings she found the rightful edgy anticipation, but perhaps not
so much of it as there should have been. Thirty years. Can you really stay in
love with someone for that long? Or did I just keep the ideal of love alive?
One small illusion of humanity in a personality which deliberately and
methodically set about excluding any other form of emotional weakness.
Well enough, there were memories of
the good times. Memories of shared ideals. And of course memories of affection,
adoration, and intimacy. But shouldn’t real love require the continuing
presence of the loved one in order to sustain itself and constantly renew? Has
Peter really become nothing more than a concept suborned, just another excuse
to retain my commitment?
The doubts tempted her to turn and
flee from the moment. In any case, I’m over sixty and he’s still thirty-five. A
hand started up towards her face, wanting to fork her hair back or tidy it.
Silly. If she was so concerned about her appearance she should have done something
about it long ago. Cosmetic packages, hormone gland implants, gene therapy.
Except Peter would have hated her resorting to such untruthful indignities.
Alkad forced the delinquent hand
down. The LEDs on the airlock’s control processor changed from red to green,
and the circular hatch swung back.
Peter Adul was first out, the
others had allowed him that civility. His SII suit’s silicon film had withdrawn
from his head so she could see all the features she remembered so well. He
stared back at her, a frightened smile on his lips. “White hair,” he said
gently. “I never imagined that. Lots of things, but never that.”
“It’s not so bad. I imagined much
worse happening to you.”
“But it didn’t. And we’re here. And
you came to rescue us. After thirty years, you really came back here for us.”
“Of course I did,” she said,
abruptly indignant.
Peter grinned wickedly. She laughed
back, and launched herself into his arms.
Joshua was accessing the MSV’s
external sensors to monitor Ashly’s and Beaulieu’s efforts to integrate the
Alchemist with their combat wasp. Ashly was using a waldo arm to edge the
device down into the submunitions chamber which the cosmonik had cleared. The
Alchemist would fit, but the restraint arms folded around it were causing
problems. Beaulieu had already sliced a couple of chunks off the carbotanium
struts when they scraped against the chamber walls. This was one incredibly
crude kludge-up from start to finish. But it didn’t need excessive
sophistication to work, just a secure mounting.
Superimposed across the sensor
image were the Lady Mac’s systems schematics, enabling him to keep a
slightly more than cursory eye on their performance. Liol and Sarha were
prepping the ship for high acceleration, shutting down all redundant ancillary
equipment, cycling fluids back out of weight-vulnerable pipes and into their
tanks, bringing the tokamaks up to full capacity so their power would be
available for the molecular-binding force generators. Dahybi was running
diagnostics through all the zero-tau facilities on board.
By rights the expectancy should
have reduced his brain to a small knot of psychoses by now. Instead he had the
oldest excuse of being too busy to worry. That and a wonderful burn of pure
arrogance. It can work. After all, it was only marginally more crazy
than the Lagrange point stunt.
Too bad I’ll never be able to brag
about this one in Harkey’s Bar.
Which was actually more of a
concern than the manoeuvre itself. I can’t stay in Tranquillity for the rest of
my life. I should never have mentioned it to the agents.
He saw Ashly extract the waldo from
the combat wasp, leaving the Alchemist behind. Beaulieu reached forwards to
hold a hose over the top of the submunitions chamber. A frayed jet of treacly
topaz-coloured foam shot out of the nozzle, surging all around the Alchemist.
It was a duopoxy sealant, used by the astronautics industry for quick,
temporary repairs. The cosmonik moved the nozzle in smooth assured motions,
making sure the foam completely encapsulated the Alchemist, cementing it into
the combat wasp.
“Ashly, take the MSV around to the
main airlock and transfer over in your suit,” Joshua datavised.
“What about the MSV?”
“I’m dumping it here. It was never
designed to withstand the kind of acceleration we’ll be undergoing. That makes
it a hazard, especially with all the reaction thruster volatiles it has in its
tanks.”
“You’re the captain. But what about
the spaceplane?”
“I know. You just get back in;
we’ve only got sixteen minutes left before the Organization ships get here.”
“Acknowledged, Captain.”
“Liol.”
“Yes, Captain?”
“Jettison the spaceplane, please.
Beaulieu, how’s it going?”
“Fine, Captain. I’ve got it
covered. The sealant is bonding, should be set in another fifty seconds.”
“Excellent work. Get back inside.”
Joshua datavised the flight computer for a secure channel to the combat wasp.
The drone came on-line, and he started its launch sequence program. Once its
internal processors were operative he loaded in the flight vector he’d
formatted. “Doc, it’s time to find out how good you are.”
“I understand, Captain.”
She accessed the processor
governing the combat wasp’s chamber which the Alchemist was riding in and used
it to datavise a long activation code at the device. It datavised an
acknowledgement back to her. The display in Joshua’s mind opened out rapidly to
accommodate the new iconic representation: parallel sheets of dark information
stacked as high as Heaven. They came alive with interlocking grids of purple
and yellow that shone like channelled starfire. Perspective switch, and the
sheets were concentric spherical shells, coming alight from the core outwards.
Information and energy arranging themselves in a precise, and very specific,
pattern.
“It’s working,” Alkad datavised.
“Jesus Christ.” The neurovirtual
jewel glimmered at the centre of his brain, complex beyond human comprehension.
It was an outrageous irony that something so deliciously intricate and
beautiful should be the harbinger of so much destruction. “Okay, Doc, set it
for neutronium. I’m launching in twenty seconds—mark.”
Lady Mac’s spaceplane had risen up out of her hangar as
thermo-dump panels and sensor cluster booms shrank back the other way. Ashly
caught one last glimpse of it as he swept down into the airlock. The circular
docking ring clamped around its nose cone had just disengaged, allowing it to
drift free, then Beaulieu’s shiny brass silhouette occluded the airlock hatch
behind him, and that was the end of it.
Pity, he thought, it was a lovely
little machine.
As soon as the airlock’s outer
hatch closed the cylindrical chamber was fast-flooded with air. The flight
computer’s datavised display revealed their status. Joshua was already firing
the thrusters to align them on their new flight vector. Combat wasp launch
tubes were opening.
Ashly and Beaulieu dived out of the
airlock, racing for the bridge. There was nobody in any of the decks they
passed through. Several open cabin doors showed them active zero-tau pods.
The combat wasp carrying the
Alchemist completed its fusion drive ignition sequence and launched. A quick
cheer from the bridge echoed through Lady Mac’s empty compartments. Then
ten more combat wasps were firing out of their tubes and chasing after the
first. The whole salvo headed down towards the gas giant at twenty-five gees.
Ashly flew through the bridge’s
floor hatch just behind Beaulieu.
“Stations, please,” Joshua said. He
triggered Lady Mac’s three fusion tubes, giving Ashly barely enough time
to roll onto his acceleration couch before gravity pushed down. Restraint
webbing closed over him.
“Signal from the Organization
ships,” Sarha said. “They know who we are, they’re asking for you by name,
Joshua.”
Joshua accessed the communications
circuit. The image which his neural nanonics provided was shaky and stormed
with static. It showed him a frigate’s bridge, with figures lying flat on
acceleration couches. One of them was dressed in a double-breasted suit of
chocolate-brown worsted with slim silver-grey pinstripes, a wide-brimmed black
fedora was resting on the console beside him. Joshua puzzled that one for a
moment, the frigate was decelerating at seven gees. The fedora should have been
squashed flat.
“Captain Calvert?”
“You got me.”
“I’m Oscar Kearn, and Al put me in
charge around here.”
“Joshua,” Liol datavised. “The
frigates are flipping over again. They’re starting to chase us.”
“Acknowledged.” He increased the Lady
Mac’s acceleration, taking her up to seven gees.
Ashly groaned in chagrin before
activating his acceleration couch’s zero-tau field. Black stasis closed around
him, ending the punishing force. Alkad Mzu and Peter Adul joined him.
“Glad to meet you, Oscar,” Joshua
had to datavise, his jaw was far too heavy to move.
“My people, they tell me you just
fired something down at the big planet. I hope you ain’t been stupid, pal, I
really do. Was it what I think it was?”
“Absolutely. No more Alchemist for
anybody.”
“You dumb asshole. That’s a third
of your options gone. Now you listen good, sonny boy, you switch off your
ship’s engines and you hand over Mzu to me and there ain’t nobody gonna get
hurt. That’s your second option.”
“No shit? Let me guess what the
third is.”
“Don’t be a pumpkinhead, sonny.
Remember, after we waste you and your rinky-dink ship, we’re only interested in
giving the Mzu dame a new body. It’s the beyond for you, pal, for the rest of
time. And take a tip from someone who’s been there, it ain’t worth it. Nothing
is. So you just hand her over nice and smooth, and I don’t say nothing to the
boss about you deep-sixing the Alchemist.”
“Mr Kearn, go screw yourself.”
“You call that Alchemist back,
sonny. I know you got a radio control on the combat wasp. You call it back or I
tell my crews to open fire.”
“If you blow up the Lady Mac you’ll
definitely never get it, will you? Think about it, I’ll give you as much time
as you need.” Joshua closed the communications link.
“How much more of this bloody
acceleration?” Monica datavised.
“Seven gees?” Joshua replied. “None
at all.” He increased the thrust up to a full ten gees.
Monica couldn’t even groan; her
throat was sagging under its own weight. It was ridiculous, her lungs couldn’t
inhale properly, her artificial tissue muscle implants were all in her limbs,
not her chest. If she tried to hang on she’d end up asphyxiating. Keeping Mzu
under observation was no longer an option. She would simply have to trust
Calvert and the other crew members. “Good luck,” she datavised. “See you on the
other side.”
The flight computer informed Joshua
she’d activated her acceleration couch’s zero-tau field. That left him with
only three people who hadn’t sought refuge in stasis: Beaulieu, Dahybi, and of
course Liol.
“Status report, please,” he
datavised to them.
Lady Mac’s systems and structure were both holding up
well. But then Joshua knew she was capable of withstanding this acceleration,
her real test was going to come later.
Seventy thousand kilometres behind
her, the two Organization frigates were accelerating at eight gees, which was
the limit of their afflicted drives. Their crews were hurriedly assembling
situation outlines and summaries for Oscar Kearn, detailing how long it would
be before the Lady Macbeth was outside the interception range of their
combat wasps.
Ahead of all three ships, the salvo
of eleven combat wasps were rushing towards the gas giant. There was no way any
sensor could determine which was carrying the Alchemist, making any
interdiction virtually impossible.
The status quo was held for over
fifteen minutes before Oscar Kearn reluctantly admitted to himself that Calvert
and Mzu weren’t going to hand over the device, nor surrender themselves. He
ordered the Urschel and the Raimo to launch their combat wasps at
Lady Macbeth.
“No good,” Joshua grunted savagely
as Lady Mac’s sensors showed him the sudden upsurge in the frigates’
infrared emission signature. “You can’t dysfunction this chunk of reality,
pal.”
The Alchemist was ninety seconds
away from the gas giant’s upper atmosphere. Its management programs began to
orchestrate the complex energy patterns racing through its nodes into the
sequence Mzu had selected. Once it was primed, activation occurred within two
picoseconds. Visually it could hardly be less spectacular; the Alchemist’s
surface turned infinitely black. The physics behind the change was somewhat
more involved.
“What I did,” Alkad had datavised
to Joshua when he asked her how it functioned, “was to work out how to combine
a zero-tau field and the energy compression technique which a starship jump
node utilizes. In this case, just as the energy density approaches infinite the
effect is frozen. Instead of expelling the patterning node out of the universe,
you get a massive and permanent space-time curvature forming around it.”
“Space-time curvature?”
“Gravity.”
Gravity at its strongest is capable
of bending light itself, pulling at individual photons with the same tenacity
as it once did Newton’s apple. In nature, the only mass dense enough to produce
this kind of gravity is formed at the heart of a stellar implosion. A
singularity whose gravity permits nothing to escape: no matter, no energy.
At its highest setting the
Alchemist would become such a cosmological entity; its surface concealed by an
event horizon into which everything can fall and nothing return. Once inside
the event horizon, electromagnetic energy and atoms alike would be drawn to the
core’s surface and compress to phenomenal densities. The effect is cumulative
and exponential. The more mass which the black hole swallows, the heavier and
stronger it becomes, increasing its surface area and allowing its consumption
rate to rise accordingly.
If the Alchemist was fired into a
star, every gram of matter would eventually plunge below the invincible barrier
which gravity erected. That was Alkad Mzu’s humane solution. Omuta’s sun would
not flare and rupture, would never endanger life on the planet with waves of
heat and radiation. Instead the sun would shrink and collapse into a small
black sphere, with every erg of its fusing nuclei lost to the universe for
ever. Omuta would be left circling a non-radiative husk, its warmth slowly
leaking away into the now permanent night. Ultimately, the air itself would
become cold enough to condense and fall as snow.
But there was the second setting,
the aggressive one. Paradoxically, it actually produced a weaker gravity field.
The Alchemist turned black as
zero-tau claimed it. However, the gravity it generated wasn’t strong enough to
produce a singularity with an event horizon. However, it was easily capable of
overcoming the internal forces which designate an atom’s structure. The combat
wasp immediately flashed into plasma and enfolded it. All electrons and protons
within the envelope were crushed together, producing a massive pulse of gamma
radiation. The emission faded rapidly, leaving the Alchemist cloaked in a
uniform angstrom-deep ocean of superfluid neutrons.
When it struck the outer fringes of
the atmosphere a searing white light flooded out to soak hundreds of square
kilometres of the upper cloud bands. Seconds later the deeper cloud layers were
fluorescing rosy pink while internal shadows surged through torn cyclones like
mountain-sized fish. Then the light vanished altogether.
The Alchemist had reached the
semisolid layers of the gas giant’s interior, and was punching through with
almost no resistance. Matter under tremendous pressure was crushed against the
device, which absorbed it greedily. Every impacting atom was squeezed directly
into a cluster of neutrons that plated themselves around the core. The
Alchemist was swiftly buried under a mantle of pure neutronium, which boasted a
density that exceeded that of atomic nuclei.
As the particles were compressed by
the device’s extraordinary gravity field, they liberated colossal quantities of
energy, a reaction far more potent than mere fusion. The surrounding semisolid
material was heated to temperatures which destroyed every atomic bond. A vast
cavity of nuclear instability inflated around the Alchemist as it soared ever
deeper into the gas giant. Ordinary convection currents were wholly inadequate
to syphon off the heat at the same rate it was being produced, so the energy
abscess simply had to keep on expanding. Something had to give.
Lady Mac’s sensors detected the first upwelling while
the ship was still seven minutes from perigee. A smooth-domed tumour of cloud,
three thousand kilometres in diameter, glowing like gaseous magma as it swelled
up through the storm bands. Unlike the ordinary great spots infesting gas
giants it didn’t spiral, its sole purpose was to elevate planetary masses of
tortuously heated hydrogen up from the interior. Hurricanes and cyclones which
had blasted their way through the upper atmosphere for centuries were thrust
aside to allow the thermal monster its bid for freedom. Its apex distended over
a thousand kilometres above the tropopause, casting a pernicious copper light
over a third of the nightside.
Right at the centre, the glow had
become unbearably bright. A spire of solid white light punctured the top of the
cloud dome, streaking out into space.
“Holy Christ,” Liol datavised. “Was
that it? Did it just detonate?”
“Nothing like,” Joshua replied.
“This is only the start. Things are going to get a little nasty from now on.”
Lady Mac was already far ahead of the fountaining plasma
stream, racing around the gas giant’s curvature for the dawn terminator. Even
so, thermal circuits issued a grade three alarm as the plasma’s radiance washed
over the hull. Emergency cryogenic exchangers vented hundreds of litres of
inflamed fluid to shunt the heat out. Processors were failing at a worrying
rate in the immense emp backlash of the wavering plasma stream; even the
military-grade electronics were suffering. On top of that, electric currents
started to eddy through the fuselage stress structure as the planetary flux
lines trembled.
Dahybi had withdrawn into zero-tau,
leaving Joshua and Liol to datavise instructions into the flight computer,
bringing backups on-line, isolating leakages, stabilizing power surges. They
worked perfectly together, keeping the flight systems on-line; each intuitively
knowing what was required to support the other.
“Something very odd is happening to
the planetary magnetosphere,” Beaulieu reported. “Sensors are registering
extraordinary oscillations within the flux lines.”
“Irrelevant,” Joshua replied.
“Concentrate on keeping our primary systems stable. Four minutes more, that’s
all, we’ll be on the other side of the planet then.”
On board the Urschel, Ikela
watched the lightstorm eruption on one of the bridge screens. “Holy Mary, it
works,” he whispered. “It actually bloody works.” A perverse sense of pride
mingled with fatalistic dismay. If only . . . But then, fruitless wishes
were ever the province of the damned.
He ignored Oscar Kearn’s
semi-hysterical (and totally impossible) orders to turn the ship around and get
them the hell away from this badass planet. Twentieth-century man simply didn’t
understand orbital mechanics. They had been accelerating along their present
course for twenty-two minutes now, their trajectory effectively committed them
to a slingshot flyby. Their best hope was to stay on track, and pray they got past
perigee before another upwell exploded out of the atmosphere. That was what the
Lady Macbeth was attempting. Good tactic, Ikela acknowledged grudgingly.
Somehow, he didn’t think the Urschel
would make it. He didn’t know exactly how the Alchemist worked, but he
doubted one eruption was the end of it.
With a sense of inevitability that
curiously neutralized any regret or gloom, he settled back passively in his
acceleration couch and watched the screens. The original spout of plasma was
dying away, the cloud dome flattening out to dissipate into a thousand new
hypervelocity storms. But underneath the frothing upper atmosphere a fresh
stain of light was spreading, and it was an order of magnitude larger than the
first.
He smiled contentedly at his
god’s-eye view of what promised to be a truly dazzling Armageddon.
The Alchemist was slowing, it had
passed through the semisolid layers into the true core of the planet. Now the
density of surrounding matter was intense enough to affect its flight. That
meant matter was being pressed against it in ever-greater quantities, and with
it the rate of neutronium conversion was accelerating fast. The energy abscess
which it generated stretched out back along its course through the planet’s
interior like a comet’s tail. Sections of it were breaking apart;
ten-thousand-kilometre lengths pinching into elongated bubbles which rose up
through the disrupted tiers of the planet’s internal structure. Each one
greater than the last.
The second upwelling rampaged out
of the upper atmosphere; its tremendous scale making it appear absurdly
ponderous. Vast fonts of ions cascaded from its edges as the centre broke open,
twisting into scarlet arches which fell gracefully back towards the boiling
cloudscape. A coronal fireball spat out of the central funnel, bigger than a
moon, its surface slippery with webs of magnetic energy which condensed the
plasma into deeper purple curlicues. Ghost gases flowered around it,
translucent gold petal wings unfurling to beat with the harmonic of the planetary
flux lines.
Lost somewhere among the rising
glory of light were two tiny sparkles produced by antimatter detonating inside
both Organization frigates.
Lady Mac swept triumphantly across the terminator and
into daylight, surfing at a hundred and fifty kilometres per second over the
hurricane rivers of phosphorescence which flowed through the troposphere. An
arrogant saffron dawn waxed behind her, far outshining the natural one ahead.
“Time to leave,” Joshua datavised.
“You ready?”
“All yours, Josh.”
Joshua datavised his order into the
flight computer. Zero-tau claimed the last three acceleration couches on the
bridge. Lady Mac’s antimatter drive ignited.
The starship accelerated away from
the gas giant at forty-two gees.
Finally, the Alchemist had come to
rest at the centre of the gas giant. Here was a universe of pressure unglimpsed
except through speculative mathematical models. The heart of the gas giant was
only slightly less dense than the neutronium itself. Yet the difference was
there, permitting the inflow of matter to continue. The conversion reaction
burned unabated. Pure alchemy.
Energy blazed outwards from the
Alchemist, unable to escape. The abscess was spherical now, nature’s preferred
geometry. A sphere at the heart of a sphere; dangerously tormented matter
confined by the perfectly symmetrical pressure exerted by the mass of
seventy-five thousand kilometres of hydrogen piled on top of it. This time
there was no escape valve up through the weak, nonsymmetrical, semisolid
layers. This time, all it could do was grow.
For six hundred seconds Lady
Macbeth accelerated away from the mortally wounded gas giant. Behind her,
the Alchemist’s trail of fragmented energy abscesses pumped up out of the
darkside clouds, transient volcanoes of feculent gas rising higher than worlds.
The planet began to develop its own billowing photosphere; a dark burgundy orb
enclosed by a glowing azure halo. Its ebony moons sailed on indomitably through
their new sea of lightning.
The starship’s multiple drive tubes
cut out. Joshua’s zero-tau switched off, depositing him abruptly into free
fall. Sensor images and flight data flashed straight into his brain. The
planet’s death convulsions were as fascinating as they were deadly. It didn’t
matter, they were over a hundred and eighty thousand kilometres from the
disintegrating storm bands. Far enough to jump.
Deep beneath the benighted clouds,
the central energy abscess had swollen to an intolerable size. The pressure it
was exerting against the confining mass of the planet had almost reached
equilibrium. Titanic fissures began to tear open.
An event horizon engulfed Lady
Macbeth’s fuselage.
With a timing that was the ultimate
tribute to the precision of Mzu’s decades-old equations, the gas giant went
nova.
The singularity surged into
existence five hundred and eighty thousand kilometres above Mirchusko’s pale
jade blizzards of ammonia-sulphur cirrus. Its event horizon blinked off to
reveal the Lady Macbeth’s dull silicon fuselage. Omnidirectional
antennae were already broadcasting her CAB identification code. Given the
reception they got on returning from Lalonde, Joshua wasn’t going to take any
chances this time.
Sensor clusters telescoped
outwards, passive elements scanning around, radars pulsing. The flight computer
datavised a class three proximity alert.
“Charge the nodes,” Joshua ordered
automatically. His mistake, he never expected to jump into trouble here. Now
that might cost them badly.
The bridge lights dimmed
fractionally as Dahybi initiated an emergency power up sequence. “Eight
seconds,” he said.
The external sensor image flashed
up in Joshua’s mind. At first he thought they were being targeted by electronic
warfare pods. Space was flecked with small white motes. But the electronic
sensors were the only ones not being taxed, the whole electromagnetic
environment was eerily silent. The flight computer reported its radar
track-while-scan function was approaching capacity overload as it designated
multiple targets. Each of the white motes was being tagged by purple icons to
indicate position and trajectory. Three were flashing red, approaching fast.
It wasn’t interference. Lady Mac
had emerged just outside a massive particle storm unlike anything Joshua
had ever seen before. The motes weren’t ice, nor rock.
“Jesus, what is this stuff?” He
datavised a set of instructions into the flight computer. The standard sensor
booms began to retreat, replaced by the smaller, tougher combat sensors.
Discrimination and analysis programs went primary.
The debris was mostly metallic, melted
and fused scraps no bigger than snowflakes. They were all radioactive.
“There’s been one brute of a fight
here,” Sarha said. “This is all combat wasp wreckage. And there’s a lot of it.
I think the swarm is about forty thousand kilometres in diameter. It’s
dissipating, clearing from the centre.”
“No response to our identification
signal,” Beaulieu said. “Tranquillity’s beacons are off air, I cannot locate a
single artificial electromagnetic transmission. There isn’t even a ship’s
beacon active.”
The centre of the debris storm had
a coordinate Joshua didn’t even have to run a memory check on. Tranquillity’s
orbital vector. Lady Mac’s sensor suite revealed it to be a large empty
zone. “It’s gone,” he said numbly. “They blew it up. Oh, Jesus, no. Ione. My kid.
My kid was in there!”
“No, Joshua,” Sarha said firmly.
“It hasn’t been destroyed. There isn’t nearly enough mass in the swarm to
account for that.”
“Then where is it? Where the hell
did it go?”
“I don’t know. There’s no trace of
it, none at all.”
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