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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.
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.