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“Take the left hand channel at the next fork,” the processor block clipped to his belt told him.
“Yes,” he mumbled obediently.
And this was the greatest, most hurtful joke of all: him, the aspirant anarchist poet, pathetically grateful to Rubra, the super-capitalist dictator, for helping him.
Ten metres on two gurgling streams merged together. He turned left without hesitation, the foaming water splashing his knees. Fleeing from the starscraper, it was as though an insane montage of all the combat stories he’d ever been told had come scampering up out of his subconscious to torment him. Horror and laughter pursued him down every corridor, even the disused ones he thought only he walked. Only Rubra, a calm voice reeling off directions, had offered any hope.
Water made his black trousers heavy. He was cold, partly from the fright, partly cold turkey.
There had been no sign of pursuit for three hours now, though Rubra said they were still tracking him.
The narrow creek began to widen, its banks lowering. Tolton walked out into a tarn fifteen metres across with a crescent cliff cupping the rear half. Fat xenoc fish lumbered out of his way, apparently rolling along the bottom. There was no other exit, no feed stream.
“Now what?” he asked plaintively.
“There’s an inlet at the far end,” Rubra told him. “I’ve shut down the flow so you’ll be able to swim through. It’s only about five metres long, it bends, and there’s no light; but it leads to a cave where you’ll be safe.”
“A cave? I thought caves were worn into natural rock over centuries.”
“Actually, it’s a surge chamber. I just didn’t want to get technical on you, not with your artistic background.”
Tolton thought the voice sounded tetchy. “Thank you,” he said, and started to wade forwards towards the cliff. A couple more directions, and he dived under the surface. The inlet was easy to find, a nightmare-black hole barely a metre and a half wide. Knowing he would never be able to turn around or even back out, he forced himself to glide into the entrance, bubbles streaming behind him.
It couldn’t have been five metres long, more like twenty or thirty. The curves were sharp, one taking him down, the other up. He broke surface with a frantic gasping cry. The cave was a dome shape, twenty metres across, every surface was coated in a film of water, thin ripples were still running down the walls. He had emerged in the pool at the centre. When he looked up there was a large hole at the apex, droplets splattered on his upturned face. A high ring of electrophorescent cells cast a weak pink-white glow into every cranny.
He paddled over to the side of the pool and pushed himself out onto the slippery floor. A bout of shivering claimed his limbs; he wasn’t sure if it was from the cold water or the nagging feeling of claustrophobia. The surge chamber was horribly confined, and the fact that it was usually full of water didn’t help.
“I’ll have one of the housechimps bring you some dry clothes and food,” Rubra said.
“Thank you.”
“You should be safe here for a while.”
“I . . .” He looked around apprehensively. Everyone always said Rubra could see everything. “I don’t think I can stay very long. It’s a bit . . . closed in.”
“I know. Don’t worry, I’ll keep you moving, keep you ahead of them.”
“Can I join up with anyone else? I need to be around people.”
“There aren’t that many of you left free, I’m afraid. And meeting up with them isn’t a good idea, that would just make you easier to locate. I haven’t quite worked out how they track the non-possessed yet; I suspect they’ve got some kind of ESP ability. Hell, why not? They’ve got every other kind of magic.”
“How many of us are there?” he asked, suddenly panicky.
Rubra considered giving him the truth, but Tolton wasn’t the strongest of characters. “A couple of thousand,” he lied. There were three hundred and seventy-one people left free within the habitat, and assisting all of them simultaneously was pure hell.
Even as he was reassuring Tolton he perceived Bonney Lewin stalking Gilbert Van-Riytell. The tough little woman had taken to dressing in nineteenth-century African safari gear, a khaki uniform with two crossed bandoleer straps holding polished brass cartridges in black leather hoops. A shiny Enfield .303 rifle was slung over her shoulder.
Gilbert was Magellanic Itg’s old comptroller, and had never really stood a chance. Rubra had been trying to steer him along some service tunnels below a tube station, but Bonney and her co-hunters were boxing him in.
“There’s an inspection hatch three metres ahead,” Rubra datavised to Van-Riytell. “I want you to—”
Shadows lifted themselves off the service tunnel wall and grabbed the old man. Rubra hadn’t even noticed them. His perception routines had been expertly circumvented.
Once again, he purged and reformatted local sub-routines. By the time he regained some observation ability Van-Riytell’s legs and arms were being tied around a long pole, ready to be carried away like a prize trophy. He wasn’t even struggling anymore. Bonney was supervising the procedure happily.
One of her hunting team was standing back, watching aloofly; a tall young man in a simple white suit.
Rubra knew then. It had to be him.
Dariat!
The young man’s head jerked up. For an instant the illusion flickered. Long enough for Rubra. Under the outline of the handsome youth lurked Horgan. Horgan with a shocked expression wrenching his thin face. Incontrovertible proof.
I knew it would be you,rubra said. in a way the knowledge came almost as a relief.
Much good it will do you,dariat answered. Your awareness of anything is going to come to an end real soon now. And you won’t even make it to the freedom of the beyond, I won’t allow you that escape.
You’re amazing, Dariat. I mean that as a compliment. You still want me, don’t you? You want revenge. It’s all you’ve ever wanted, all that kept you alive these last thirty years. You still blame me for poor old Anastasia Rigel, even after all this time.
You got another suspect? If you hadn’t driven me away, she and I would still be alive.
The pair of you would be dodging good old Bonney here, you mean.
Maybe so. But then maybe if I’d been happy I might have made something of my life. Ever think of that? I might have risen through the company hierarchy just like you always wanted. I could have made Magellanic Itg supreme; I could have turned Valisk into the kind of nation that would have had Tranquillity’s plutocrats flocking to us in droves. There wouldn’t be any of these misfits and losers who rally around your banner. King Alastair would have come here asking me for tips on how to run his Kingdom. Do you really think a shipload of fucking zombies could have walked in here past passport, customs, and immigration without anyone even noticing if that kind of regime had been in place? Don’t you dare try and avoid facing up to what you’ve done.
Oh, really? Tell me: by misfits, and all the other trash you’d fling out of the airlocks, do you include the kind of girl you fell in love with?
“Bastard!” Dariat screamed. Everyone in the hunting party stared at him, even Van-Riytell. “I’ll find you. I’ll get you. I’ll crush your soul to death.” Rage distended his face. He flung both arms out horizontally from his body, a magus Samson thrusting against the temple pillars. White fire exploded from his hands to chew into the tunnel walls. Polyp flaked and cracked, black chips spinning away through the air.
Temper temper,rubra mocked. I see that hasn’t improved much over the years.
“Pack it in, you maniac!” Bonney yelled at him.
“Help me!” Dariat shouted back. The energistic hurricane roaring through his body was turning his brain to white-hot magma, wanting to burst clean out of his skull. “I’m going to kill him. Help me, for Chi-ri’s sake.” White fire hammered at the crumbling tunnel, desperate to reach the neural strata, to reach the very substance of the mind, and burn and burn and burn . . .
“Stop it, right now.” Bonney aimed her Enfield at him, one eyebrow cocked.
Dariat slowly allowed the white fire to sink back into the passive energistic currents stirring the cells of his possessed body. His shoulders hunched in as smoke from the scorched polyp spun around him. He reverted to Horgan, even down to the unwashed shirt and creased trousers. Hands were pressed to his face as he resisted the onrush of tears. “I’ll get him,” Horgan’s quavering, high-pitched voice proclaimed. “I’ll fucking have him. I’ll roast him inside his shell like he was some kind of lobster. You’ll see. Thirty years I’ve waited. Thirty! Thole owes me my justice. He owes me.”
“Sure he does,” Bonney said. “But just so you and I are clear on this: pull another stunt like that, and you’ll need a new body to work out of.” She jerked her head to the team trussing up Van-Riytell. They lifted the old comptroller off the ground and started off down the tunnel.
The hunter woman glanced back at Dariat’s hunched figure, opened her mouth to say something, then thought better of it. She followed the rest of the hunters along the tunnel.
You frightened me so bad I’m trembling,rubra sneered. Can you feel the quakes? I expect the sea is about to flood the parkland. How’s about that for wetting yourself?
Laugh away,dariat said shakily. Go right ahead. But I’m going to come for you one day. I’ll crack your safeguards. They won’t last forever, you know that. And forever is what I’ve got on my side now. Then when I’ve busted you, I’m going to come into that neural strata with you, I’m going to crawl into your mind like a maggot, Rubra. And like a maggot I’m going to gnaw away at you.
I always was right about you. You were the best. Who else could still burn so hot after thirty years? Damn, why did you ever have to meet her? Together we could have rebuilt the company into a galaxy challenger.
Such flattery. I’m honoured.
Don’t be. Help me.
What?You have got to be fucking joking.
No. Together we could beat Kiera, purge the habitat of her cronies. You can rule Valisk yet.
The Edenists were right, you are insane.
The Edenists are frightened by my determination. You should know, you inherited that gene, it seems.
Yeah. So you know you can’t deflect me. Don’t even try.
Dariat, you’re not one of them, boy, not one of the possessed. Not really. What can they possibly give you afterwards, huh? Ever thought of that? What sort of culture are they going to build? This is just an aberration of nature, a nonsense, and a transient one at that. Life has to have a purpose, and they’re not alive. This energistic ability, the way you can create out of nothing, how can you square that with human behaviour? It’s not possible, the two are not compatible, never will be. Look at yourself. If you want Anastasia back, bring her back. Find her in the beyond, get her back here. You can have everything now, remember? Kiera said so, did she not? Are you a part of that, Dariat? You have to decide, boy. Someday. If you don’t, they’ll do it for you.
“I can’t bring her back,” he whispered.
What’s that?
I can’t. You understand nothing.
Try me.
You, a confessor father? Never.
I always have been. I am the confessor for everyone inside me, you know that. I am the repository of everyone’s secrets. Including those of Anastasia Rigel.
I know everything about Anastasia. We had no secrets. We were in love.
Really? She had a life before you met her, you know. Seventeen long years. And afterwards, too.
Dariat glanced around with cold anger, his appearance sliding back to the white-suited ascetic. There was no afterwards. She died! Because of you.
If you knew of her past, you would understand what I meant.
What secrets?he demanded.
Help me, and I’ll show you.
You shit! I’m going to cremate you, I’ll dance on your fragments—
Rubra’s principal routine watched Dariat’s rage run its course. He thought at one point that the man would revert to flailing at the tunnel walls with white fire again. But Dariat managed to hang on to that last shred of control—barely.
Rubra stayed silent. He knew it was too early to play his ace, the one final secret he had kept safe for the last thirty years. The doubt he had planted deep in Dariat’s mind would have to be teased further, tormented into full-blown paranoia before the revelation was exposed.
Lady Macbeth ’s event horizon vanished, allowing her mushroom-shaped star trackers to rise out of their jump recesses and scan around. Fifteen seconds later the flight computer confirmed the starship had emerged fifty thousand kilometres above Tranquillity’s non-rotational spaceport. By the time her electronic warfare sensors registered, eight of the habitat’s Strategic Defence platforms had locked on to the hull, despite the fact their coordinate was smack in the centre of a designated emergence zone.
“Jesus,” Joshua muttered sourly. “Welcome home, people, nice to see you again.” He looked over to Gaura, who was lying on Warlow’s acceleration couch. “Update Tranquillity on our situation, fast, please. It seems a little trigger-happy today.” Combat sensors had located four blackhawks on interception trajectories, accelerating towards them at six gees.
Gaura acknowledged him with an indolent wrist flick. The Edenist’s eyes were closed; he’d been communicating with the habitat personality more or less from the moment the starship had completed the ZTT jump. Even with affinity it was difficult to convey their situation in a single quick summary; explanations, backed up with full memory exposure, took several minutes. He detected more than one ripple of surprise within the personality’s serene thoughts as the story of Lalonde unfolded in its mentality.
When he’d finished, Ione directed her identity trait at him in the Edenist custom. That’s some yarn you’ve got there,she said. Two days ago I wouldn’t have believed a word of it, but as we’ve had warning fleks arriving from Avon on an almost hourly basis for the last day and a half all I can say is I’ll grant you docking permission.
Thank you, Ione.
However, you will all have to be checked for possession before I’ll admit you into the habitat. I can hardly expose the entire population to the risk of contamination on the word of one man, even though you seem genuine.
Of course.
How’s Joshua?
He is well. A remarkable young man.
Yes.
The flight computer’s display showed the Strategic Defence platforms disengaging their weapons lock. Joshua received a standard acknowledgement from the spaceport’s traffic control centre followed by a datavised approach vector.
“I need a docking bay which can handle casualties,” he datavised back. “And put a pediatric team on alert status, as well as some biophysics specialists. These kids have had a real hard time on Lalonde, and that only finished when they got nuked.”
“I am assembling the requisite medical teams now,” Tranquillity replied. “They will be ready by the time you dock. I am also alerting a spaceport maintenance crew. Judging by the state of your hull, and the vapour leakages I can observe, I believe it would be appropriate.”
“Thank you, Tranquillity. Considerate as ever.” He waited for Ione to come on-line and say something, but the channel switched back to traffic control’s guidance updates.
If that’s the way she wants it . . . Fine by me. His features slumped into a grouch.
He ignited the Lady Mac ’s two functional fusion tubes, aligning the ship on their approach vector. They headed in for Tranquillity at one and a half gees.
“They believe all that spiel about possession?” Sarha asked Gaura, a note of worried scepticism in her voice.
“Yes.” He queried the habitat about the fleks from Avon. “The First Admiral’s precautions have been endorsed by the Assembly. By now ninety per cent of the Confederation should be aware of the situation.”
“Wait a minute,” Dahybi said. “We only just got back here from Lalonde, and we didn’t exactly hang around. How the hell could that navy squadron alert Avon two or three days ago?”
“They didn’t,” Gaura said. “The possessed must have got off Lalonde some time ago. Apparently Laton had to destroy an entire Atlantean island to prevent them from spreading.”
“Shit,” Dahybi grunted. “You mean they’re loose in the Confederation already?”
“I’m afraid so. It looks like Shaun Wallace was telling Kelly the truth after all. I had hoped it was all some subtle propaganda on his part,” the Edenist added sadly.
The news acted as a mood damper right through the starship. Their expected sanctuary wasn’t so secure after all; they’d escaped a battle to find a war brewing. Not even an Edenist psyche could suppress that much gloom. The children from Lalonde (those not squeezed into the zero-tau pods) picked up on it, another emotional ricochet, though admittedly not as large as all the others they’d been through. The happiness Father Horst had promised them waited at the end of their journey was proving elusive. Even the fact the voyage was ending didn’t help much.
The damage Lady Macbeth had suffered in the fight above Lalonde didn’t affect her manoeuvrability, not with Joshua piloting. She closed in on her designated docking bay, CA 5-099, at the very centre of the spaceport disk, precisely aligned along the vector assigned by traffic control. There was no hint that fifteen attitude control thrusters had been disabled, and she was venting steadily from emergency dump valves as well as a couple of fractured cryogenic feed pipes.
By that time almost a quarter of the habitat population was accessing the spaceport’s sensors, watching her dock. The news companies had broken into their schedules to announce that a single ship had made it back from Lalonde. Reporters had been very quick off the mark in discovering the pediatric teams were assembling in the bay. (Kelly’s boss was making frantic datavises to the incoming starship, to no avail.)
The space industry people, industrial station workers, and ships’ crews kicking their heels in the bars because of the quarantine observed the approach with a sense of troubled awe. Yes, Joshua had come through again, but the state of old Lady Mac . . . Charred, flaking nultherm foam exposed sections of her hull which showed innumerable heat-stress ripples (a sure sign of energy beam strikes), melted sensor clusters, only two fusion tubes functional. It must have been one hell of a scrap. They all knew no one else would be returning. Knowledge that every friend, colleague, or vague acquaintance who had accompanied Terrance Smith was either radioactive dust or lost to possession was hard to accept. Those starships were powerful, fast, and well armed.
The disembarkment process was, as expected, a shambles. People kept emerging from the airlock tube as if Lady Mac were the focus of some dimensional twist, her internal space far larger than that which the hull enclosed. Edenists formed a good percentage of the exiles, much to the surprise of the rover reporters. They helped a horde of wondrously senseogenic, scared-looking refugee kids in ragged clothes. Pediatric nurses floated after them in the reception compartment, while reporters dived like airborne sharks to ask the children how they felt/what they’d seen. Tears started to flow.
How the hell did they get in there?ione asked the habitat. Serjeants launched themselves to intercept the reporters.
Jay Hilton hugged her legs to her chest as she drifted across the compartment, shivering unhappily. None of this was what she’d been expecting, not the starship voyage nor their arrival. She tried to catch sight of Father Horst amid the noisy swirl of bodies bouncing around the compartment, knowing that he had others to look out for and probably couldn’t spare much time for her. In fact, she wouldn’t be needed for anything much now there were plentiful adults around to take care of things again. Perhaps if she hunched up really small everyone would ignore her, and she’d be able to have a look at the habitat’s park. Jay had heard stories of Edenist habitats and how beautiful they were; back in the arcology she’d often daydreamed that one day she’d visit Jupiter, despite everything Father Varhoos preached about the evils of bitek.
The opportunity to escape the melee never quite presented itself. A reporter soared past her, noticed she was the oldest kid in the compartment, and used a grab hoop to brake himself abruptly. His mouth split into a super-friendly smile, the kind his neural nanonics program advised was best to interface trustfully with Young Children. “Hi there. Isn’t this atrocious? They should have organized things better.”
“Yes,” Jay said doubtfully.
“My name is Matthias Rems.” The smile broadened further.
“Jay Hilton.”
“Well, hi there, Jay. I’m glad you’ve reached Tranquillity, you’re quite safe here. From what we’ve heard it was nasty for all of you on Lalonde.”
“Yes!”
“Really? What happened?”
“Well, Mummy got possessed the first night. And then—” A hand closed on her shoulder. She glanced around to see Kelly Tirrel giving Matthias Rems an aggressive stare.
“He wants to know what happened,” Jay said brightly. She liked Kelly, admiring her right from the moment she arrived at the savanna homestead to rescue them. On the voyage to Tranquillity she’d secretly decided that she was going to be a tough, Confederation-roaming reporter like Kelly when she grew up.
“What happened is your story, Jay,” Kelly said slowly. “It belongs to you; it’s all you’ve got left. And if he wants to hear it he has to offer you a great deal of money for it.”
“Kelly!” Matthias flashed her a slightly exasperated you-know-the-score grin.
It made no discernible impression on Kelly. “Pick on someone your own size, Matthias. Ripping off traumatized children is low even for you. I’m covering for Jay.”
“Is that right, Jay?” he asked. “Did you thumbprint a contract with Collins?”
“What?” Jay glanced from one to the other, puzzled.
“Serjeant!” Kelly shouted.
Jay squeaked in alarm as a glitter-black hand closed around Matthias Rems’s upper arm. The owner of the hand was a hard-skinned monster worse than any shape a possessed had ever worn.
“It’s all right, Jay.” Kelly grinned for the first time in days. “It’s on our side. This is what Tranquillity uses for its police force.”
“Oh.” Jay swallowed loudly.
“I’d like to complain about an attempted violation of confidentiality copyright,” Kelly told the serjeant. “Also, Matthias is breaking the sense-media ethics charter concerning the approach and enticement of minors in the absence of their parents or guardians.”
“Thank you, Kelly,” the serjeant said. “And welcome home, I offer my congratulations on your endurance through difficult times.”
She grimaced numbly at the bitek servitor.
“Come along now, sir,” the serjeant said to Matthias Rems. It pushed away from the compartment bulkhead with its stocky legs, the pair of them heading for one of the hatchways.
“Don’t ever trust reporters, Jay,” Kelly said. “We’re not nice people. Worse than the possessed really; they only steal bodies, we steal your whole life and make a profit out of it.”
“You don’t,” Jay said, shoving the full child-force of trusting worship behind the words. A belief which was a sheer impossibility for any adult to live up to.
Kelly kissed her forehead, emotions in a muddle. Kids today, so knowing, which only makes them even more vulnerable. She gently pushed Jay towards one of the pediatric nurses, and left them discussing what the little girl had eaten last, and when.
“Kelly, thank Christ!”
The familiar voice made her twitch, a movement which in free fall was like a ripple running from toe to crown. She held on to a grab hoop to steady herself.
Feetfirst, Garfield Lunde slid down into her vision field. Her direct boss, and the man who had authorized her assignment. A big gamble, as he told her at the time, this kind of fieldwork is hardly your forte. Putting her deeper in his debt; everything he did for his workforce was a favour, an against-the-rules kindness. He owed his position entirely to his mastery of office politics; sensevise talent and investigative ability never entered into it.
“Hello, Garfield,” she said in a dull tone.
“You made it back. Great hairstyle, too.”
Kelly had almost forgotten her hair, cut to a fine fuzz to fit her armour suit’s skull helmet. Style, dress sense, cosmetic membranes: concepts which seemed to have dissolved clean out of her universe. “Well done, Garfield; I can see why your observational ability pushed you right the way up the seniority league.”
He wagged a finger, almost catching his ponytail which was snaking around his neck. “Tough lady, at last. Looks like you lost your cherry on this assignment; touched a few corpses, wondered if you should have helped instead of recorded. Don’t feel bad, it happens to us all.”
“Sure.”
“Is anyone else coming back, any other starships?”
“If they’re not here by now, they won’t be coming.”
“Christ, this is getting better by the second. We’ve got us a total exclusive. Did you get down to the planet?”
“Yes.”
“And is it possessed?”
“Yes.”
“Magnificent!” He glanced contentedly around the reception chamber, watching children and Edenists in free-fall flight, their movements reminiscent of geriatric ballerinas. “Hey, where are the mercs you went with?”
“They didn’t make it, Garfield. They sacrificed themselves so the Lady Mac ’s spaceplane could lift the children off.”
“Oh, my God. Wow! Sacrificed themselves for kids?”
“Yes. We were outgunned, but they stood their ground. All of them. I never expected . . .”
“Stunning. You got it, didn’t you? For Christ’s sake, Kelly, tell me you recorded it. The big fight, the last noble stand.”
“I recorded it. What I could. When I wasn’t so scared I couldn’t think straight.”
“Yes! I knew I made the right decision sending you. This is it, babe. Just watch our audience points go galactic. We’re going to put Time Universe and the others out of business. Do you realize what you’ve done here? Shit, Kelly, you’ll probably wind up as my boss, after this. Wonderful!”
Very calmly, Kelly let Ariadne’s free-fall unarmed combat program shift into primary mode. Her sense of balance was immediately magnified, making her aware of every slight movement her body made in the minute air currents churning through the chamber. Her spacial orientation underwent a similar augmentation; distances and relative positions were obvious.
“Wonderful?” she hissed.
Garfield grinned proudly. “You bet.”
Kelly launched herself at him, rotating around her centre of gravity as she did so. Her feet came around, seeking out his head, legs kicking straight.
Two of the serjeants had to pull her off. Luckily the pediatric team had some medical nanonic packages with them; they were able to save Garfield’s eye; it would take a week before his broken nose knitted back into its proper shape, though.
All the passenger refugees had left Lady Mac . Overstressed environmental systems were calming. The docking bay’s umbilicals sent a cool wind washing through the bridge, taking with it the air of the voyage; ugly air with its smell of human bodies, humidity, and heavy carbon dioxide. To Joshua’s mind even the fans behind the grilles weren’t whining so much. Perhaps it was his imagination.
Now there was only the crew left to soak up the luxuriously plentiful oxygen. The crew minus one. There hadn’t been much time for Joshua to dwell on Warlow during the flight. Racing between jump coordinates, worrying about the energy patterning nodes holding out, the leakages, the damaged systems, children he had suddenly become responsible for, the desperate need to succeed.
Well, now he’d won, beaten the odds the universe had thrown at him. And it made him feel good, even though there was no happiness to accompany it. Self-satisfaction was a curious state, in this case roughly equivalent to fatigue-induced nirvana, he thought.
Ashly Hanson came up through the decking hatch and took a swift glance around the lethargic forms still encased by their acceleration couch webbing. “Flight’s over, you know,” he said.
“Yeah.” Joshua datavised an instruction into the flight computer. Harlequin schematics of the starship’s principal systems vanished from his mind, and the webbing peeled back.
“I think the cleaning up can wait until tomorrow,” Dahybi said.
“Message received,” Joshua said. “Shore leave is now granted, and compulsory.”
Sarha glided over from her couch and gave Joshua a tiny kiss. “You were magnificent. After all this is over, we’re going back to Aethra so we can tell him we escaped and got the children off.”
“If he’s there.”
“He’s there. You know he is.”
“She’s right, Joshua,” Melvyn Ducharme said as he cancelled the neurographic visualization of Lady Mac ’s power circuits. “He’s there. And even if the transfer didn’t work, his soul is going to be watching us right now.”
“Jesus.” Joshua shivered. “I don’t even want to think about that.”
“We don’t have a lot of choice in the subject anymore.”
“But not today,” Ashly put in heavily. He held out an arm to Sarha. “Come along, we’ll leave these morbids to moan among themselves. I don’t know about you, but I’m having one very stiff drink in Harkey’s first, then it’s bed for a week.”
“Sounds good.” She twisted her feet off the stikpad by Joshua’s couch and followed the old time-hopper pilot through the hatch.
A vaguely nonplussed expression appeared on Joshua’s face as they left together. None of your business, he told himself. Besides, there was Kelly to consider, though she’d been almost unrecognizable since returning from Lalonde. And then there was Louise. Ione, too.
“I think I’ll skip the drink and go straight to bed,” he announced to the other two.
They went out of the bridge hatch one at a time. It was only when they got to the airlock that they encountered the service company’s systems specialist coming the other way. She wanted the captain’s authority to begin assessing the ship so she could assemble a maintenance schedule. Joshua stayed behind to discuss priorities, datavising over the files on systems which had taken punishment above Lalonde.
There was nobody about when he finally left the starship. The circus in the reception chamber had ended. The reporters had packed up. There wasn’t even a serjeant left to check him over for possession. Sloppy, he thought, not like Tranquillity at all.
A commuter lift took him along the spindle which connected the spaceport disk to the centre of the habitat’s northern endcap. It deposited him in one of the ten tube stations which served the hub; deserted but for a single occupant.
Ione stood outside the waiting tube carriage, dressed in a sea-blue sarong and matching blouse. He smiled ruefully at the memory that evoked.
“I remember you,” she said.
“Funny, I thought you’d forgotten.”
“No. Not you, no matter what.”
He stood in front of her, looking down at a face which owned far too much wisdom for such delicate features. “I was stupid,” he confessed.
“I think you and I can withstand one argument, don’t you?”
“I was stupid more than once.”
“Tranquillity’s been reviewing the memories of the Edenists you saved. I’m very proud of what you achieved on that flight, Joshua, and I don’t just mean all that fancy flying. Very proud indeed.”
All he could do was nod ineffectually. For a long time he’d dreamed about a reunion like this; going off after they’d had a fight had left too many things open-ended, too much unsaid. Now it was actually happening, his mind was slipping to Louise, who had also been left behind. It was all Warlow’s fault, him and that damn promise to be a little less selfish with his girls.
“You look tired,” Ione said, and held out her hand. “Let’s go home.”
Joshua looked down at her open hand, small and perfect. He twined his fingers through hers, rediscovering how warm her skin was.
Parker Higgens thought it must have been about twenty years since he last left Tranquillity, a short trip on an Adamist starship to a university on Nanjing so he could deliver a paper and assess some candidates for the Laymil project. He hadn’t enjoyed the experience; free-fall nausea seemed capable of penetrating whatever defences his neural nanonics erected across his nerve pathways.
This time it was pleasantly different. The gravity in the blackhawk’s life-support capsule never fluctuated, he had a comfortable cabin to himself, the crew were friendly, and his navy escort officer was a cultured lady who made an excellent travelling companion.
At the end of the flight he even accessed the blackhawk’s electronic sensors to watch their approach to Trafalgar. Dozens of navy starships swarmed around its two large spaceport globes. Avon provided a sumptuous backdrop; the warm blues, whites, greens, and browns of a terracompatible planet were so much kinder than the abrasive storm bands of Mirchusko, he realized. Parker Higgens almost laughed at the stereotype image he presented as he gawped like some stupefied tourist: the dusty old professor finally discovers there is life outside the research centre.
Pity he didn’t have time to enjoy it. The navy officer had been datavising Trafalgar constantly since their wormhole terminus closed behind them, outlining their brief and authenticating it with a series of codes. They’d been given a priority approach vector, allowing them to curve around one of the spaceports at an exhilarating speed before sliding into the huge crater which served as a docking ledge for bitek starships (they were the only blackhawk using it).
After that he’d had a couple of meetings with the First Admiral’s staff officers, an exchange of information which chilled both sides. Parker found out about possession, they were given the data on the Laymil home planet, Unimeron. They decided there wasn’t any room for doubt.
When he was shown into Samual Aleksandrovich’s big circular office the first thing Parker Higgens felt was an obscure burst of jealousy. The First Admiral had a view out over Trafalgar’s biosphere which was more impressive than the one in his own office back on the Laymil project campus. A true dedicated bureaucrat’s reaction, he chided himself; prestige is everything.
The First Admiral came around from behind his big teak desk to greet Parker with a firm handshake. “Thank you for coming, Mr Director; and I’d also like to convey my gratitude to the Lord of Ruin as well for acting so promptly in this matter. It would appear she is a strong supporter of the Confederation; I just wish other heads of state followed her example.”
“I’ll be sure to tell her,” Parker said.
The First Admiral introduced the others sitting around his desk: Admiral Lalwani, Captain Maynard Khanna, Dr Gilmore, and Mae Ortlieb, the President’s science office liaison aide.
“Well the Kiint did warn us, I suppose,” Admiral Lalwani said. “All races eventually face the truth about death. It would appear the Laymil lost their confrontation.”
“They never said anything before,” Parker said bitterly. “We have six Kiint assisting the project back at Tranquillity; I’ve worked with them for decades; they’re helpful, cooperative, I even considered them as friends . . . And never once did they drop the slightest hint. Damn them! They knew all along why the Laymil killed themselves and their habitats.”
“Ambassador Roulor did say it was something which we must come to terms with on our own.”
“Very helpful,” Dr Gilmore grunted. “I have to say it’s a typical attitude to take given their psychology inclines towards the mystic.”
“I think any race which has uncovered the secret of death and survived the impact is inevitably going to take a highly spiritual approach to life,” the First Admiral said. “Don’t begrudge them that, Doctor. Now then, Mr Director, it would appear that our possession and the Laymil reality dysfunction are one and the same thing, correct?”
“Yes, Admiral. In fact, in the light of what we know now, the Laymil shipmaster’s reference to the Galheith clan’s death essence makes perfect sense. Possession was spreading across Unimeron as he left orbit.”
“I think I can confirm that,” Admiral Lalwani said. She glanced at the First Admiral for permission. He inclined his head. “A voidhawk messenger has just returned from Ombey. Several possessed got loose there; fortunately the authorities were remarkably successful in hunting them down. However, despite that success, they’ve had to cede some ground to them. We have a recording of the phenomena.”
Parker accessed the flek of images compiled by Ombey’s Strategic Defence sensor satellites, seeing the remarkably smooth red cloud slowly sheathing Mortonridge. Time-lapse coverage showed the planet’s terminator cruise in across the ocean. At night the peninsula’s covering glowed a hostile cerise, its edges flexing in agitation over the crinkled coastline.
“Oh, dear,” he said after he cancelled the visualization.
“They match,” Dr Gilmore said. “Absolutely, the same event.”
“Admittedly Laton was in a hurry and under a great deal of stress,” Lalwani said. “But if we understand him correctly, once that red cloud envelops a world completely, the possessed can take it right out of the universe.”
“Not outside, exactly,” Dr Gilmore said. “If you can manipulate space-time to the extent they apparently can, then you should be able to format a favourable micro-continuum around a world. The surface simply won’t be accessible through ordinary space-time. A wormhole might reach them, if we knew the correct quantum signature for its terminus.”
“The Laymil homeworld wasn’t destroyed,” Parker said slowly. “Of that we are sure. We speculated that it could have been moved, but naturally we considered only physical movement through this universe.”
“Then the possessed Laymil must have worked this vanishing trick,” Lalwani said. “It really is possible.”
“Dear God,” the First Admiral murmured. “As if it wasn’t enough trying to find a method of reversing possession, we now have to to consider how to bring back entire planets from some demented version of Heaven.”
“And the Laymil in the spaceholms committed suicide rather than submit,” Lalwani said bleakly. “The parallel between the Ruin Ring and Pernik island is one I find most disturbing. The possessed confront us with a single choice; surrender or die. And if we do die, we enhance their own numbers. Yet Laton chose death; indeed he seemed almost happy at the prospect. Right at the end he told Oxley he would begin what he named the great journey, though he never elaborated. But the intimation that he would not suffer in the beyond was a strong one.”
“Unfortunately it’s hardly something you can turn into a firm policy,” Mae Ortlieb observed. “Nor one to reassure people with even if you did.”
“I am aware of that,” Lalwani told the woman coolly. “What this information can do is point us towards areas which should be investigated. From the result of those investigations, policies can then be formulated.”
“Enough,” the First Admiral said. “We are here to try and decide which is the most fruitful line of scientific inquiry. Given we now have a basic understanding of the problem confronting us I’d like some suggestions. Dr Gilmore?”
“We’re continuing to examine Jacqueline Couteur to try and determine the nature of the energy which the possessing soul utilizes. So far we’ve had very little success. Our instruments either cannot read it, or suffer glitches produced by it. Either way, we cannot define its nature.” He gave the First Admiral a timorous glance. “I’d like your permission to move on to reactive tests.”
Parker couldn’t help the disapproving snort which escaped from his lips. Again reinforcing the persona of crusty old academic; but he deplored Gilmore’s wholehearted right-wing militarism.
No one would think of it to look at him now, but Parker Higgens had done his stint for radicalism and its various causes during his student days. He wondered if that was on the file Lalwani must invariably keep on him, aging bytes in an obsolete program language detailing his protests over military development work carried out on the university campus. Had she accessed that before he’d been allowed in here, the heart of the greatest military force the human race had ever assembled? Perhaps she judged him safe these days. Perhaps she was even right in doing so. But people like Gilmore reopened all the old contemptuous thoughts. Reactive tests, indeed.
“You have a problem with that, Mr Director?” Dr Gilmore asked with formal neutrality.
Parker let his gaze wander around the office’s big holoscreens, watching the starships shoaling over Avon. Readying themselves for combat. For conflict. “I agree with the First Admiral,” he said sorrowfully. “We must attempt to locate a scientific solution.”
“Which is only going to happen if my research can proceed unhindered. I know what you’re thinking, Mr Director, and I regret the fact that we’re dealing with a live human here. But unless you can offer me a valid alternative we must use her to add to our knowledge base.”
“I am aware of the argument about relative levels of suffering, Doctor. I just find it depressing that after seven centuries of adhering to the scientific method we haven’t come up with a more humane principle. I find the prospect of experimenting on people to be abhorrent.”
“You should review the file Lieutenant Hewlett made when his marine squad were sent on their capture mission to obtain Jacqueline Couteur. You’d see exactly who really practises abhorrent behaviour.”
“Excellent argument. They do it to us, so we’re fully justified doing it to them. We are all people.”
“I’m sorry,” the First Admiral interjected. “But we really don’t have time for the pair of you to discuss ethics and morality. The Confederation is now officially in a state of emergency, Mr Director. If that turns us into what you regard as savages in order to defend ourselves, then so be it. We did not initiate this crisis, we are simply reacting to it the only way I know how. And I am going to use you as much as Dr Gilmore will use the Couteur woman.”
Parker straightened his spine, sitting up to stare at the First Admiral. Somehow arguing with him as he had with the navy scientist wasn’t even an option. Lalwani was right, he acknowledged sorely. Student politics didn’t stand much chance against his adult survival instinct. We are what our genes made us. “I don’t think I would be much use to your endeavour, Admiral. I’ve made my contribution.”
“Yes,” he mumbled obediently.
And this was the greatest, most hurtful joke of all: him, the aspirant anarchist poet, pathetically grateful to Rubra, the super-capitalist dictator, for helping him.
Ten metres on two gurgling streams merged together. He turned left without hesitation, the foaming water splashing his knees. Fleeing from the starscraper, it was as though an insane montage of all the combat stories he’d ever been told had come scampering up out of his subconscious to torment him. Horror and laughter pursued him down every corridor, even the disused ones he thought only he walked. Only Rubra, a calm voice reeling off directions, had offered any hope.
Water made his black trousers heavy. He was cold, partly from the fright, partly cold turkey.
There had been no sign of pursuit for three hours now, though Rubra said they were still tracking him.
The narrow creek began to widen, its banks lowering. Tolton walked out into a tarn fifteen metres across with a crescent cliff cupping the rear half. Fat xenoc fish lumbered out of his way, apparently rolling along the bottom. There was no other exit, no feed stream.
“Now what?” he asked plaintively.
“There’s an inlet at the far end,” Rubra told him. “I’ve shut down the flow so you’ll be able to swim through. It’s only about five metres long, it bends, and there’s no light; but it leads to a cave where you’ll be safe.”
“A cave? I thought caves were worn into natural rock over centuries.”
“Actually, it’s a surge chamber. I just didn’t want to get technical on you, not with your artistic background.”
Tolton thought the voice sounded tetchy. “Thank you,” he said, and started to wade forwards towards the cliff. A couple more directions, and he dived under the surface. The inlet was easy to find, a nightmare-black hole barely a metre and a half wide. Knowing he would never be able to turn around or even back out, he forced himself to glide into the entrance, bubbles streaming behind him.
It couldn’t have been five metres long, more like twenty or thirty. The curves were sharp, one taking him down, the other up. He broke surface with a frantic gasping cry. The cave was a dome shape, twenty metres across, every surface was coated in a film of water, thin ripples were still running down the walls. He had emerged in the pool at the centre. When he looked up there was a large hole at the apex, droplets splattered on his upturned face. A high ring of electrophorescent cells cast a weak pink-white glow into every cranny.
He paddled over to the side of the pool and pushed himself out onto the slippery floor. A bout of shivering claimed his limbs; he wasn’t sure if it was from the cold water or the nagging feeling of claustrophobia. The surge chamber was horribly confined, and the fact that it was usually full of water didn’t help.
“I’ll have one of the housechimps bring you some dry clothes and food,” Rubra said.
“Thank you.”
“You should be safe here for a while.”
“I . . .” He looked around apprehensively. Everyone always said Rubra could see everything. “I don’t think I can stay very long. It’s a bit . . . closed in.”
“I know. Don’t worry, I’ll keep you moving, keep you ahead of them.”
“Can I join up with anyone else? I need to be around people.”
“There aren’t that many of you left free, I’m afraid. And meeting up with them isn’t a good idea, that would just make you easier to locate. I haven’t quite worked out how they track the non-possessed yet; I suspect they’ve got some kind of ESP ability. Hell, why not? They’ve got every other kind of magic.”
“How many of us are there?” he asked, suddenly panicky.
Rubra considered giving him the truth, but Tolton wasn’t the strongest of characters. “A couple of thousand,” he lied. There were three hundred and seventy-one people left free within the habitat, and assisting all of them simultaneously was pure hell.
Even as he was reassuring Tolton he perceived Bonney Lewin stalking Gilbert Van-Riytell. The tough little woman had taken to dressing in nineteenth-century African safari gear, a khaki uniform with two crossed bandoleer straps holding polished brass cartridges in black leather hoops. A shiny Enfield .303 rifle was slung over her shoulder.
Gilbert was Magellanic Itg’s old comptroller, and had never really stood a chance. Rubra had been trying to steer him along some service tunnels below a tube station, but Bonney and her co-hunters were boxing him in.
“There’s an inspection hatch three metres ahead,” Rubra datavised to Van-Riytell. “I want you to—”
Shadows lifted themselves off the service tunnel wall and grabbed the old man. Rubra hadn’t even noticed them. His perception routines had been expertly circumvented.
Once again, he purged and reformatted local sub-routines. By the time he regained some observation ability Van-Riytell’s legs and arms were being tied around a long pole, ready to be carried away like a prize trophy. He wasn’t even struggling anymore. Bonney was supervising the procedure happily.
One of her hunting team was standing back, watching aloofly; a tall young man in a simple white suit.
Rubra knew then. It had to be him.
Dariat!
The young man’s head jerked up. For an instant the illusion flickered. Long enough for Rubra. Under the outline of the handsome youth lurked Horgan. Horgan with a shocked expression wrenching his thin face. Incontrovertible proof.
I knew it would be you,rubra said. in a way the knowledge came almost as a relief.
Much good it will do you,dariat answered. Your awareness of anything is going to come to an end real soon now. And you won’t even make it to the freedom of the beyond, I won’t allow you that escape.
You’re amazing, Dariat. I mean that as a compliment. You still want me, don’t you? You want revenge. It’s all you’ve ever wanted, all that kept you alive these last thirty years. You still blame me for poor old Anastasia Rigel, even after all this time.
You got another suspect? If you hadn’t driven me away, she and I would still be alive.
The pair of you would be dodging good old Bonney here, you mean.
Maybe so. But then maybe if I’d been happy I might have made something of my life. Ever think of that? I might have risen through the company hierarchy just like you always wanted. I could have made Magellanic Itg supreme; I could have turned Valisk into the kind of nation that would have had Tranquillity’s plutocrats flocking to us in droves. There wouldn’t be any of these misfits and losers who rally around your banner. King Alastair would have come here asking me for tips on how to run his Kingdom. Do you really think a shipload of fucking zombies could have walked in here past passport, customs, and immigration without anyone even noticing if that kind of regime had been in place? Don’t you dare try and avoid facing up to what you’ve done.
Oh, really? Tell me: by misfits, and all the other trash you’d fling out of the airlocks, do you include the kind of girl you fell in love with?
“Bastard!” Dariat screamed. Everyone in the hunting party stared at him, even Van-Riytell. “I’ll find you. I’ll get you. I’ll crush your soul to death.” Rage distended his face. He flung both arms out horizontally from his body, a magus Samson thrusting against the temple pillars. White fire exploded from his hands to chew into the tunnel walls. Polyp flaked and cracked, black chips spinning away through the air.
Temper temper,rubra mocked. I see that hasn’t improved much over the years.
“Pack it in, you maniac!” Bonney yelled at him.
“Help me!” Dariat shouted back. The energistic hurricane roaring through his body was turning his brain to white-hot magma, wanting to burst clean out of his skull. “I’m going to kill him. Help me, for Chi-ri’s sake.” White fire hammered at the crumbling tunnel, desperate to reach the neural strata, to reach the very substance of the mind, and burn and burn and burn . . .
“Stop it, right now.” Bonney aimed her Enfield at him, one eyebrow cocked.
Dariat slowly allowed the white fire to sink back into the passive energistic currents stirring the cells of his possessed body. His shoulders hunched in as smoke from the scorched polyp spun around him. He reverted to Horgan, even down to the unwashed shirt and creased trousers. Hands were pressed to his face as he resisted the onrush of tears. “I’ll get him,” Horgan’s quavering, high-pitched voice proclaimed. “I’ll fucking have him. I’ll roast him inside his shell like he was some kind of lobster. You’ll see. Thirty years I’ve waited. Thirty! Thole owes me my justice. He owes me.”
“Sure he does,” Bonney said. “But just so you and I are clear on this: pull another stunt like that, and you’ll need a new body to work out of.” She jerked her head to the team trussing up Van-Riytell. They lifted the old comptroller off the ground and started off down the tunnel.
The hunter woman glanced back at Dariat’s hunched figure, opened her mouth to say something, then thought better of it. She followed the rest of the hunters along the tunnel.
You frightened me so bad I’m trembling,rubra sneered. Can you feel the quakes? I expect the sea is about to flood the parkland. How’s about that for wetting yourself?
Laugh away,dariat said shakily. Go right ahead. But I’m going to come for you one day. I’ll crack your safeguards. They won’t last forever, you know that. And forever is what I’ve got on my side now. Then when I’ve busted you, I’m going to come into that neural strata with you, I’m going to crawl into your mind like a maggot, Rubra. And like a maggot I’m going to gnaw away at you.
I always was right about you. You were the best. Who else could still burn so hot after thirty years? Damn, why did you ever have to meet her? Together we could have rebuilt the company into a galaxy challenger.
Such flattery. I’m honoured.
Don’t be. Help me.
What?You have got to be fucking joking.
No. Together we could beat Kiera, purge the habitat of her cronies. You can rule Valisk yet.
The Edenists were right, you are insane.
The Edenists are frightened by my determination. You should know, you inherited that gene, it seems.
Yeah. So you know you can’t deflect me. Don’t even try.
Dariat, you’re not one of them, boy, not one of the possessed. Not really. What can they possibly give you afterwards, huh? Ever thought of that? What sort of culture are they going to build? This is just an aberration of nature, a nonsense, and a transient one at that. Life has to have a purpose, and they’re not alive. This energistic ability, the way you can create out of nothing, how can you square that with human behaviour? It’s not possible, the two are not compatible, never will be. Look at yourself. If you want Anastasia back, bring her back. Find her in the beyond, get her back here. You can have everything now, remember? Kiera said so, did she not? Are you a part of that, Dariat? You have to decide, boy. Someday. If you don’t, they’ll do it for you.
“I can’t bring her back,” he whispered.
What’s that?
I can’t. You understand nothing.
Try me.
You, a confessor father? Never.
I always have been. I am the confessor for everyone inside me, you know that. I am the repository of everyone’s secrets. Including those of Anastasia Rigel.
I know everything about Anastasia. We had no secrets. We were in love.
Really? She had a life before you met her, you know. Seventeen long years. And afterwards, too.
Dariat glanced around with cold anger, his appearance sliding back to the white-suited ascetic. There was no afterwards. She died! Because of you.
If you knew of her past, you would understand what I meant.
What secrets?he demanded.
Help me, and I’ll show you.
You shit! I’m going to cremate you, I’ll dance on your fragments—
Rubra’s principal routine watched Dariat’s rage run its course. He thought at one point that the man would revert to flailing at the tunnel walls with white fire again. But Dariat managed to hang on to that last shred of control—barely.
Rubra stayed silent. He knew it was too early to play his ace, the one final secret he had kept safe for the last thirty years. The doubt he had planted deep in Dariat’s mind would have to be teased further, tormented into full-blown paranoia before the revelation was exposed.
Lady Macbeth ’s event horizon vanished, allowing her mushroom-shaped star trackers to rise out of their jump recesses and scan around. Fifteen seconds later the flight computer confirmed the starship had emerged fifty thousand kilometres above Tranquillity’s non-rotational spaceport. By the time her electronic warfare sensors registered, eight of the habitat’s Strategic Defence platforms had locked on to the hull, despite the fact their coordinate was smack in the centre of a designated emergence zone.
“Jesus,” Joshua muttered sourly. “Welcome home, people, nice to see you again.” He looked over to Gaura, who was lying on Warlow’s acceleration couch. “Update Tranquillity on our situation, fast, please. It seems a little trigger-happy today.” Combat sensors had located four blackhawks on interception trajectories, accelerating towards them at six gees.
Gaura acknowledged him with an indolent wrist flick. The Edenist’s eyes were closed; he’d been communicating with the habitat personality more or less from the moment the starship had completed the ZTT jump. Even with affinity it was difficult to convey their situation in a single quick summary; explanations, backed up with full memory exposure, took several minutes. He detected more than one ripple of surprise within the personality’s serene thoughts as the story of Lalonde unfolded in its mentality.
When he’d finished, Ione directed her identity trait at him in the Edenist custom. That’s some yarn you’ve got there,she said. Two days ago I wouldn’t have believed a word of it, but as we’ve had warning fleks arriving from Avon on an almost hourly basis for the last day and a half all I can say is I’ll grant you docking permission.
Thank you, Ione.
However, you will all have to be checked for possession before I’ll admit you into the habitat. I can hardly expose the entire population to the risk of contamination on the word of one man, even though you seem genuine.
Of course.
How’s Joshua?
He is well. A remarkable young man.
Yes.
The flight computer’s display showed the Strategic Defence platforms disengaging their weapons lock. Joshua received a standard acknowledgement from the spaceport’s traffic control centre followed by a datavised approach vector.
“I need a docking bay which can handle casualties,” he datavised back. “And put a pediatric team on alert status, as well as some biophysics specialists. These kids have had a real hard time on Lalonde, and that only finished when they got nuked.”
“I am assembling the requisite medical teams now,” Tranquillity replied. “They will be ready by the time you dock. I am also alerting a spaceport maintenance crew. Judging by the state of your hull, and the vapour leakages I can observe, I believe it would be appropriate.”
“Thank you, Tranquillity. Considerate as ever.” He waited for Ione to come on-line and say something, but the channel switched back to traffic control’s guidance updates.
If that’s the way she wants it . . . Fine by me. His features slumped into a grouch.
He ignited the Lady Mac ’s two functional fusion tubes, aligning the ship on their approach vector. They headed in for Tranquillity at one and a half gees.
“They believe all that spiel about possession?” Sarha asked Gaura, a note of worried scepticism in her voice.
“Yes.” He queried the habitat about the fleks from Avon. “The First Admiral’s precautions have been endorsed by the Assembly. By now ninety per cent of the Confederation should be aware of the situation.”
“Wait a minute,” Dahybi said. “We only just got back here from Lalonde, and we didn’t exactly hang around. How the hell could that navy squadron alert Avon two or three days ago?”
“They didn’t,” Gaura said. “The possessed must have got off Lalonde some time ago. Apparently Laton had to destroy an entire Atlantean island to prevent them from spreading.”
“Shit,” Dahybi grunted. “You mean they’re loose in the Confederation already?”
“I’m afraid so. It looks like Shaun Wallace was telling Kelly the truth after all. I had hoped it was all some subtle propaganda on his part,” the Edenist added sadly.
The news acted as a mood damper right through the starship. Their expected sanctuary wasn’t so secure after all; they’d escaped a battle to find a war brewing. Not even an Edenist psyche could suppress that much gloom. The children from Lalonde (those not squeezed into the zero-tau pods) picked up on it, another emotional ricochet, though admittedly not as large as all the others they’d been through. The happiness Father Horst had promised them waited at the end of their journey was proving elusive. Even the fact the voyage was ending didn’t help much.
The damage Lady Macbeth had suffered in the fight above Lalonde didn’t affect her manoeuvrability, not with Joshua piloting. She closed in on her designated docking bay, CA 5-099, at the very centre of the spaceport disk, precisely aligned along the vector assigned by traffic control. There was no hint that fifteen attitude control thrusters had been disabled, and she was venting steadily from emergency dump valves as well as a couple of fractured cryogenic feed pipes.
By that time almost a quarter of the habitat population was accessing the spaceport’s sensors, watching her dock. The news companies had broken into their schedules to announce that a single ship had made it back from Lalonde. Reporters had been very quick off the mark in discovering the pediatric teams were assembling in the bay. (Kelly’s boss was making frantic datavises to the incoming starship, to no avail.)
The space industry people, industrial station workers, and ships’ crews kicking their heels in the bars because of the quarantine observed the approach with a sense of troubled awe. Yes, Joshua had come through again, but the state of old Lady Mac . . . Charred, flaking nultherm foam exposed sections of her hull which showed innumerable heat-stress ripples (a sure sign of energy beam strikes), melted sensor clusters, only two fusion tubes functional. It must have been one hell of a scrap. They all knew no one else would be returning. Knowledge that every friend, colleague, or vague acquaintance who had accompanied Terrance Smith was either radioactive dust or lost to possession was hard to accept. Those starships were powerful, fast, and well armed.
The disembarkment process was, as expected, a shambles. People kept emerging from the airlock tube as if Lady Mac were the focus of some dimensional twist, her internal space far larger than that which the hull enclosed. Edenists formed a good percentage of the exiles, much to the surprise of the rover reporters. They helped a horde of wondrously senseogenic, scared-looking refugee kids in ragged clothes. Pediatric nurses floated after them in the reception compartment, while reporters dived like airborne sharks to ask the children how they felt/what they’d seen. Tears started to flow.
How the hell did they get in there?ione asked the habitat. Serjeants launched themselves to intercept the reporters.
Jay Hilton hugged her legs to her chest as she drifted across the compartment, shivering unhappily. None of this was what she’d been expecting, not the starship voyage nor their arrival. She tried to catch sight of Father Horst amid the noisy swirl of bodies bouncing around the compartment, knowing that he had others to look out for and probably couldn’t spare much time for her. In fact, she wouldn’t be needed for anything much now there were plentiful adults around to take care of things again. Perhaps if she hunched up really small everyone would ignore her, and she’d be able to have a look at the habitat’s park. Jay had heard stories of Edenist habitats and how beautiful they were; back in the arcology she’d often daydreamed that one day she’d visit Jupiter, despite everything Father Varhoos preached about the evils of bitek.
The opportunity to escape the melee never quite presented itself. A reporter soared past her, noticed she was the oldest kid in the compartment, and used a grab hoop to brake himself abruptly. His mouth split into a super-friendly smile, the kind his neural nanonics program advised was best to interface trustfully with Young Children. “Hi there. Isn’t this atrocious? They should have organized things better.”
“Yes,” Jay said doubtfully.
“My name is Matthias Rems.” The smile broadened further.
“Jay Hilton.”
“Well, hi there, Jay. I’m glad you’ve reached Tranquillity, you’re quite safe here. From what we’ve heard it was nasty for all of you on Lalonde.”
“Yes!”
“Really? What happened?”
“Well, Mummy got possessed the first night. And then—” A hand closed on her shoulder. She glanced around to see Kelly Tirrel giving Matthias Rems an aggressive stare.
“He wants to know what happened,” Jay said brightly. She liked Kelly, admiring her right from the moment she arrived at the savanna homestead to rescue them. On the voyage to Tranquillity she’d secretly decided that she was going to be a tough, Confederation-roaming reporter like Kelly when she grew up.
“What happened is your story, Jay,” Kelly said slowly. “It belongs to you; it’s all you’ve got left. And if he wants to hear it he has to offer you a great deal of money for it.”
“Kelly!” Matthias flashed her a slightly exasperated you-know-the-score grin.
It made no discernible impression on Kelly. “Pick on someone your own size, Matthias. Ripping off traumatized children is low even for you. I’m covering for Jay.”
“Is that right, Jay?” he asked. “Did you thumbprint a contract with Collins?”
“What?” Jay glanced from one to the other, puzzled.
“Serjeant!” Kelly shouted.
Jay squeaked in alarm as a glitter-black hand closed around Matthias Rems’s upper arm. The owner of the hand was a hard-skinned monster worse than any shape a possessed had ever worn.
“It’s all right, Jay.” Kelly grinned for the first time in days. “It’s on our side. This is what Tranquillity uses for its police force.”
“Oh.” Jay swallowed loudly.
“I’d like to complain about an attempted violation of confidentiality copyright,” Kelly told the serjeant. “Also, Matthias is breaking the sense-media ethics charter concerning the approach and enticement of minors in the absence of their parents or guardians.”
“Thank you, Kelly,” the serjeant said. “And welcome home, I offer my congratulations on your endurance through difficult times.”
She grimaced numbly at the bitek servitor.
“Come along now, sir,” the serjeant said to Matthias Rems. It pushed away from the compartment bulkhead with its stocky legs, the pair of them heading for one of the hatchways.
“Don’t ever trust reporters, Jay,” Kelly said. “We’re not nice people. Worse than the possessed really; they only steal bodies, we steal your whole life and make a profit out of it.”
“You don’t,” Jay said, shoving the full child-force of trusting worship behind the words. A belief which was a sheer impossibility for any adult to live up to.
Kelly kissed her forehead, emotions in a muddle. Kids today, so knowing, which only makes them even more vulnerable. She gently pushed Jay towards one of the pediatric nurses, and left them discussing what the little girl had eaten last, and when.
“Kelly, thank Christ!”
The familiar voice made her twitch, a movement which in free fall was like a ripple running from toe to crown. She held on to a grab hoop to steady herself.
Feetfirst, Garfield Lunde slid down into her vision field. Her direct boss, and the man who had authorized her assignment. A big gamble, as he told her at the time, this kind of fieldwork is hardly your forte. Putting her deeper in his debt; everything he did for his workforce was a favour, an against-the-rules kindness. He owed his position entirely to his mastery of office politics; sensevise talent and investigative ability never entered into it.
“Hello, Garfield,” she said in a dull tone.
“You made it back. Great hairstyle, too.”
Kelly had almost forgotten her hair, cut to a fine fuzz to fit her armour suit’s skull helmet. Style, dress sense, cosmetic membranes: concepts which seemed to have dissolved clean out of her universe. “Well done, Garfield; I can see why your observational ability pushed you right the way up the seniority league.”
He wagged a finger, almost catching his ponytail which was snaking around his neck. “Tough lady, at last. Looks like you lost your cherry on this assignment; touched a few corpses, wondered if you should have helped instead of recorded. Don’t feel bad, it happens to us all.”
“Sure.”
“Is anyone else coming back, any other starships?”
“If they’re not here by now, they won’t be coming.”
“Christ, this is getting better by the second. We’ve got us a total exclusive. Did you get down to the planet?”
“Yes.”
“And is it possessed?”
“Yes.”
“Magnificent!” He glanced contentedly around the reception chamber, watching children and Edenists in free-fall flight, their movements reminiscent of geriatric ballerinas. “Hey, where are the mercs you went with?”
“They didn’t make it, Garfield. They sacrificed themselves so the Lady Mac ’s spaceplane could lift the children off.”
“Oh, my God. Wow! Sacrificed themselves for kids?”
“Yes. We were outgunned, but they stood their ground. All of them. I never expected . . .”
“Stunning. You got it, didn’t you? For Christ’s sake, Kelly, tell me you recorded it. The big fight, the last noble stand.”
“I recorded it. What I could. When I wasn’t so scared I couldn’t think straight.”
“Yes! I knew I made the right decision sending you. This is it, babe. Just watch our audience points go galactic. We’re going to put Time Universe and the others out of business. Do you realize what you’ve done here? Shit, Kelly, you’ll probably wind up as my boss, after this. Wonderful!”
Very calmly, Kelly let Ariadne’s free-fall unarmed combat program shift into primary mode. Her sense of balance was immediately magnified, making her aware of every slight movement her body made in the minute air currents churning through the chamber. Her spacial orientation underwent a similar augmentation; distances and relative positions were obvious.
“Wonderful?” she hissed.
Garfield grinned proudly. “You bet.”
Kelly launched herself at him, rotating around her centre of gravity as she did so. Her feet came around, seeking out his head, legs kicking straight.
Two of the serjeants had to pull her off. Luckily the pediatric team had some medical nanonic packages with them; they were able to save Garfield’s eye; it would take a week before his broken nose knitted back into its proper shape, though.
All the passenger refugees had left Lady Mac . Overstressed environmental systems were calming. The docking bay’s umbilicals sent a cool wind washing through the bridge, taking with it the air of the voyage; ugly air with its smell of human bodies, humidity, and heavy carbon dioxide. To Joshua’s mind even the fans behind the grilles weren’t whining so much. Perhaps it was his imagination.
Now there was only the crew left to soak up the luxuriously plentiful oxygen. The crew minus one. There hadn’t been much time for Joshua to dwell on Warlow during the flight. Racing between jump coordinates, worrying about the energy patterning nodes holding out, the leakages, the damaged systems, children he had suddenly become responsible for, the desperate need to succeed.
Well, now he’d won, beaten the odds the universe had thrown at him. And it made him feel good, even though there was no happiness to accompany it. Self-satisfaction was a curious state, in this case roughly equivalent to fatigue-induced nirvana, he thought.
Ashly Hanson came up through the decking hatch and took a swift glance around the lethargic forms still encased by their acceleration couch webbing. “Flight’s over, you know,” he said.
“Yeah.” Joshua datavised an instruction into the flight computer. Harlequin schematics of the starship’s principal systems vanished from his mind, and the webbing peeled back.
“I think the cleaning up can wait until tomorrow,” Dahybi said.
“Message received,” Joshua said. “Shore leave is now granted, and compulsory.”
Sarha glided over from her couch and gave Joshua a tiny kiss. “You were magnificent. After all this is over, we’re going back to Aethra so we can tell him we escaped and got the children off.”
“If he’s there.”
“He’s there. You know he is.”
“She’s right, Joshua,” Melvyn Ducharme said as he cancelled the neurographic visualization of Lady Mac ’s power circuits. “He’s there. And even if the transfer didn’t work, his soul is going to be watching us right now.”
“Jesus.” Joshua shivered. “I don’t even want to think about that.”
“We don’t have a lot of choice in the subject anymore.”
“But not today,” Ashly put in heavily. He held out an arm to Sarha. “Come along, we’ll leave these morbids to moan among themselves. I don’t know about you, but I’m having one very stiff drink in Harkey’s first, then it’s bed for a week.”
“Sounds good.” She twisted her feet off the stikpad by Joshua’s couch and followed the old time-hopper pilot through the hatch.
A vaguely nonplussed expression appeared on Joshua’s face as they left together. None of your business, he told himself. Besides, there was Kelly to consider, though she’d been almost unrecognizable since returning from Lalonde. And then there was Louise. Ione, too.
“I think I’ll skip the drink and go straight to bed,” he announced to the other two.
They went out of the bridge hatch one at a time. It was only when they got to the airlock that they encountered the service company’s systems specialist coming the other way. She wanted the captain’s authority to begin assessing the ship so she could assemble a maintenance schedule. Joshua stayed behind to discuss priorities, datavising over the files on systems which had taken punishment above Lalonde.
There was nobody about when he finally left the starship. The circus in the reception chamber had ended. The reporters had packed up. There wasn’t even a serjeant left to check him over for possession. Sloppy, he thought, not like Tranquillity at all.
A commuter lift took him along the spindle which connected the spaceport disk to the centre of the habitat’s northern endcap. It deposited him in one of the ten tube stations which served the hub; deserted but for a single occupant.
Ione stood outside the waiting tube carriage, dressed in a sea-blue sarong and matching blouse. He smiled ruefully at the memory that evoked.
“I remember you,” she said.
“Funny, I thought you’d forgotten.”
“No. Not you, no matter what.”
He stood in front of her, looking down at a face which owned far too much wisdom for such delicate features. “I was stupid,” he confessed.
“I think you and I can withstand one argument, don’t you?”
“I was stupid more than once.”
“Tranquillity’s been reviewing the memories of the Edenists you saved. I’m very proud of what you achieved on that flight, Joshua, and I don’t just mean all that fancy flying. Very proud indeed.”
All he could do was nod ineffectually. For a long time he’d dreamed about a reunion like this; going off after they’d had a fight had left too many things open-ended, too much unsaid. Now it was actually happening, his mind was slipping to Louise, who had also been left behind. It was all Warlow’s fault, him and that damn promise to be a little less selfish with his girls.
“You look tired,” Ione said, and held out her hand. “Let’s go home.”
Joshua looked down at her open hand, small and perfect. He twined his fingers through hers, rediscovering how warm her skin was.
Parker Higgens thought it must have been about twenty years since he last left Tranquillity, a short trip on an Adamist starship to a university on Nanjing so he could deliver a paper and assess some candidates for the Laymil project. He hadn’t enjoyed the experience; free-fall nausea seemed capable of penetrating whatever defences his neural nanonics erected across his nerve pathways.
This time it was pleasantly different. The gravity in the blackhawk’s life-support capsule never fluctuated, he had a comfortable cabin to himself, the crew were friendly, and his navy escort officer was a cultured lady who made an excellent travelling companion.
At the end of the flight he even accessed the blackhawk’s electronic sensors to watch their approach to Trafalgar. Dozens of navy starships swarmed around its two large spaceport globes. Avon provided a sumptuous backdrop; the warm blues, whites, greens, and browns of a terracompatible planet were so much kinder than the abrasive storm bands of Mirchusko, he realized. Parker Higgens almost laughed at the stereotype image he presented as he gawped like some stupefied tourist: the dusty old professor finally discovers there is life outside the research centre.
Pity he didn’t have time to enjoy it. The navy officer had been datavising Trafalgar constantly since their wormhole terminus closed behind them, outlining their brief and authenticating it with a series of codes. They’d been given a priority approach vector, allowing them to curve around one of the spaceports at an exhilarating speed before sliding into the huge crater which served as a docking ledge for bitek starships (they were the only blackhawk using it).
After that he’d had a couple of meetings with the First Admiral’s staff officers, an exchange of information which chilled both sides. Parker found out about possession, they were given the data on the Laymil home planet, Unimeron. They decided there wasn’t any room for doubt.
When he was shown into Samual Aleksandrovich’s big circular office the first thing Parker Higgens felt was an obscure burst of jealousy. The First Admiral had a view out over Trafalgar’s biosphere which was more impressive than the one in his own office back on the Laymil project campus. A true dedicated bureaucrat’s reaction, he chided himself; prestige is everything.
The First Admiral came around from behind his big teak desk to greet Parker with a firm handshake. “Thank you for coming, Mr Director; and I’d also like to convey my gratitude to the Lord of Ruin as well for acting so promptly in this matter. It would appear she is a strong supporter of the Confederation; I just wish other heads of state followed her example.”
“I’ll be sure to tell her,” Parker said.
The First Admiral introduced the others sitting around his desk: Admiral Lalwani, Captain Maynard Khanna, Dr Gilmore, and Mae Ortlieb, the President’s science office liaison aide.
“Well the Kiint did warn us, I suppose,” Admiral Lalwani said. “All races eventually face the truth about death. It would appear the Laymil lost their confrontation.”
“They never said anything before,” Parker said bitterly. “We have six Kiint assisting the project back at Tranquillity; I’ve worked with them for decades; they’re helpful, cooperative, I even considered them as friends . . . And never once did they drop the slightest hint. Damn them! They knew all along why the Laymil killed themselves and their habitats.”
“Ambassador Roulor did say it was something which we must come to terms with on our own.”
“Very helpful,” Dr Gilmore grunted. “I have to say it’s a typical attitude to take given their psychology inclines towards the mystic.”
“I think any race which has uncovered the secret of death and survived the impact is inevitably going to take a highly spiritual approach to life,” the First Admiral said. “Don’t begrudge them that, Doctor. Now then, Mr Director, it would appear that our possession and the Laymil reality dysfunction are one and the same thing, correct?”
“Yes, Admiral. In fact, in the light of what we know now, the Laymil shipmaster’s reference to the Galheith clan’s death essence makes perfect sense. Possession was spreading across Unimeron as he left orbit.”
“I think I can confirm that,” Admiral Lalwani said. She glanced at the First Admiral for permission. He inclined his head. “A voidhawk messenger has just returned from Ombey. Several possessed got loose there; fortunately the authorities were remarkably successful in hunting them down. However, despite that success, they’ve had to cede some ground to them. We have a recording of the phenomena.”
Parker accessed the flek of images compiled by Ombey’s Strategic Defence sensor satellites, seeing the remarkably smooth red cloud slowly sheathing Mortonridge. Time-lapse coverage showed the planet’s terminator cruise in across the ocean. At night the peninsula’s covering glowed a hostile cerise, its edges flexing in agitation over the crinkled coastline.
“Oh, dear,” he said after he cancelled the visualization.
“They match,” Dr Gilmore said. “Absolutely, the same event.”
“Admittedly Laton was in a hurry and under a great deal of stress,” Lalwani said. “But if we understand him correctly, once that red cloud envelops a world completely, the possessed can take it right out of the universe.”
“Not outside, exactly,” Dr Gilmore said. “If you can manipulate space-time to the extent they apparently can, then you should be able to format a favourable micro-continuum around a world. The surface simply won’t be accessible through ordinary space-time. A wormhole might reach them, if we knew the correct quantum signature for its terminus.”
“The Laymil homeworld wasn’t destroyed,” Parker said slowly. “Of that we are sure. We speculated that it could have been moved, but naturally we considered only physical movement through this universe.”
“Then the possessed Laymil must have worked this vanishing trick,” Lalwani said. “It really is possible.”
“Dear God,” the First Admiral murmured. “As if it wasn’t enough trying to find a method of reversing possession, we now have to to consider how to bring back entire planets from some demented version of Heaven.”
“And the Laymil in the spaceholms committed suicide rather than submit,” Lalwani said bleakly. “The parallel between the Ruin Ring and Pernik island is one I find most disturbing. The possessed confront us with a single choice; surrender or die. And if we do die, we enhance their own numbers. Yet Laton chose death; indeed he seemed almost happy at the prospect. Right at the end he told Oxley he would begin what he named the great journey, though he never elaborated. But the intimation that he would not suffer in the beyond was a strong one.”
“Unfortunately it’s hardly something you can turn into a firm policy,” Mae Ortlieb observed. “Nor one to reassure people with even if you did.”
“I am aware of that,” Lalwani told the woman coolly. “What this information can do is point us towards areas which should be investigated. From the result of those investigations, policies can then be formulated.”
“Enough,” the First Admiral said. “We are here to try and decide which is the most fruitful line of scientific inquiry. Given we now have a basic understanding of the problem confronting us I’d like some suggestions. Dr Gilmore?”
“We’re continuing to examine Jacqueline Couteur to try and determine the nature of the energy which the possessing soul utilizes. So far we’ve had very little success. Our instruments either cannot read it, or suffer glitches produced by it. Either way, we cannot define its nature.” He gave the First Admiral a timorous glance. “I’d like your permission to move on to reactive tests.”
Parker couldn’t help the disapproving snort which escaped from his lips. Again reinforcing the persona of crusty old academic; but he deplored Gilmore’s wholehearted right-wing militarism.
No one would think of it to look at him now, but Parker Higgens had done his stint for radicalism and its various causes during his student days. He wondered if that was on the file Lalwani must invariably keep on him, aging bytes in an obsolete program language detailing his protests over military development work carried out on the university campus. Had she accessed that before he’d been allowed in here, the heart of the greatest military force the human race had ever assembled? Perhaps she judged him safe these days. Perhaps she was even right in doing so. But people like Gilmore reopened all the old contemptuous thoughts. Reactive tests, indeed.
“You have a problem with that, Mr Director?” Dr Gilmore asked with formal neutrality.
Parker let his gaze wander around the office’s big holoscreens, watching the starships shoaling over Avon. Readying themselves for combat. For conflict. “I agree with the First Admiral,” he said sorrowfully. “We must attempt to locate a scientific solution.”
“Which is only going to happen if my research can proceed unhindered. I know what you’re thinking, Mr Director, and I regret the fact that we’re dealing with a live human here. But unless you can offer me a valid alternative we must use her to add to our knowledge base.”
“I am aware of the argument about relative levels of suffering, Doctor. I just find it depressing that after seven centuries of adhering to the scientific method we haven’t come up with a more humane principle. I find the prospect of experimenting on people to be abhorrent.”
“You should review the file Lieutenant Hewlett made when his marine squad were sent on their capture mission to obtain Jacqueline Couteur. You’d see exactly who really practises abhorrent behaviour.”
“Excellent argument. They do it to us, so we’re fully justified doing it to them. We are all people.”
“I’m sorry,” the First Admiral interjected. “But we really don’t have time for the pair of you to discuss ethics and morality. The Confederation is now officially in a state of emergency, Mr Director. If that turns us into what you regard as savages in order to defend ourselves, then so be it. We did not initiate this crisis, we are simply reacting to it the only way I know how. And I am going to use you as much as Dr Gilmore will use the Couteur woman.”
Parker straightened his spine, sitting up to stare at the First Admiral. Somehow arguing with him as he had with the navy scientist wasn’t even an option. Lalwani was right, he acknowledged sorely. Student politics didn’t stand much chance against his adult survival instinct. We are what our genes made us. “I don’t think I would be much use to your endeavour, Admiral. I’ve made my contribution.”