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There wasn’t much he could do to rectify the situation. The capsule’s reserve electron matrices didn’t have enough power to activate the internal life-support system. The thin atmosphere was already ten degrees below zero, and falling rapidly. Which meant he was unable to take the suit off and replace the nanonic packages. And just to twist the knife, an emergency survival gear locker containing fresh medical nanonic packages had popped open in the ceiling above him.
Backup lighting had come on, casting a weak pale blue glow across the compartment. Frost was forming on most of the surfaces, gradually obscuring the few remaining active holoscreen displays. Various pieces of refuse had been jolted loose from their nesting places to twirl whimsically through the air, throwing avian-style shadows across the acceleration couches.
Potentially the most troubling problem was the intermittent dropouts from which the flight computer’s datavises were suffering. Erick wasn’t entirely sure he could trust its status display. It still responded to simple commands, though.
With his personal situation stable for a moment, he instructed the capsule’s sensors to deploy. Three of the five responded, pistonlike tubes sliding up out of the nultherm foam coating. They began to scan around.
Astrogration programs slowly correlated the surrounding starfield. If they were working correctly, then the Tigara had emerged approximately fifty million kilometres from the coordinate he was aiming for. Ngeuni was only an unremarkable blue-green star to one side of the glaring A2 primary.
He wasn’t sure if they would pick up the capsule’s distress beacon. Stage one colonies did not have the most sophisticated communications satellites. When he instructed the capsule’s phased array antenna to focus on the distant planet, it didn’t acknowledge. He repeated the instruction, and there was still no activity.
The flight computer ran a diagnostic, which gave him a System Inviable code. Without actually going outside to examine it, there was no way of telling what was wrong.
Alone.
Cut off.
Fifty million kilometres from possible rescue.
Light-years from where he desperately needed to be.
All that was left for him now was to wait. He began switching off every piece of equipment apart from the attitude rockets, the guidance system which drove them, and the computer itself. Judging by the frequency of the thruster firings, the capsule was venting something. The last diagnostic sweep before he shut down the internal sensors couldn’t pinpoint what it was.
After he’d reduced the power drain to a minimum, he pressed the deactivation switch for his restraint webbing. Even that seemed reluctant to work, taking a long time to fold back below the side of the cushioning. At this movement, levering himself up from the couch, fluid stirred across his abdomen. He found that by moving very slowly, the effect (and perhaps the harm) was moderated.
Training took over, and he began to index the emergency gear which had deployed from the ceiling. That was when the emotional shock hammered him. He suddenly found himself shaking badly as he clung to a four person programmable silicon dinghy.
Indexing his position! Like a good little first-year cadet.
A broken laugh bubbled around the SII suit’s respirator tube. The glossy black silicon covering his eyes turned permeable to vent the salty fluid burning his squeezed up eyelids.
Never in his life had he felt so utterly helpless. Even when the possessed were boarding the Villeneuve’s Revenge he’d been able to do something. Fight back, hit them. Orbiting above New California with the Organization poised to obliterate them at the first false move, he’d been able to store most of the sensor images. There had always been something, some way of being positive.
Now he was humiliatingly aware of his mind crumbling away in mimicry of his tattered old body. Fear had risen to consume him, flowing swiftly out of the dark corners of the bridge. It produced a pain in his head far worse than any physical injury ever could.
Those muscles which still functioned disobeyed any lingering wishes he might have, leaving him ignominiously barnacled to the dinghy. Every last reserve of determination and resolve had been exhausted. Not even the ubiquitous programs could shore up his mentality anymore.
Too weak to continue living, too frightened to die: Erick Thakrar had come to the end of the line.
Eight kilometres west of Stonygate, Cochrane tooted the horn on the Karmic Crusader bus and turned off the road. The other three vehicles in the convoy jounced over the grass verge and came to a halt behind it.
“Yo, dudettes,” Cochrane yelled back to the juvenile rioters clambering over the seats. “Time out for like the big darkness.” He pressed the red button on the dash, and the doors hissed open. Kids poured out like a dam burst.
Cochrane put his purple glasses back on and climbed down out of the cab. Stephanie and Moyo walked over to him, arm in arm. “Good place,” she said. The convoy had halted at the head of a gentle valley which was completely roofed over by the rumbling blanket of crimson cloud, rendering the mountain peaks invisible.
“This whole righteous road trip is one major groove.”
“Right.”
He materialized a fat reefer. “Hit?”
“No thanks. I’d better see about cooking them some supper.”
“That’s cool. I can’t psyche out any hostile vibes in this locale. I’ll like keep watch, make sure the nazgul aren’t circling overhead.”
“You do that.” Stephanie smiled fondly at him and went to the back of the bus, where the big luggage hold was. Moyo started pulling out the cooking gear.
“We should manage to reach Chainbridge by tomorrow evening,” he said.
“Yes. This isn’t quite what I expected when we started out, you know.”
“Predictability is boring.” He put a big electric camping grille on the ground, adjusting the aluminum legs to make it level. “Besides, I think it’s worked out for the best.”
Stephanie glanced around the improvised campsite, nodding approval; nearly sixty children were scampering around the parked vehicles. What had started off as a private mission to help a handful of lost children had rapidly snowballed.
Four times during the first day they had been stopped by residents who had told them where non-possessed children were lurking. On the second day there were over twenty children packed on board; that was when Tina Sudol had volunteered to come with them. Rana and McPhee joined up on the third day, adding another bus.
Now there were four vehicles, and eight possessed adults. They were no longer making a straight dash for the border at the top of Mortonridge. It was more of a zigzag route, visiting as many towns as they could to pick up children. Ekelund’s people, who had evolved into the closest thing to a government on Mortonridge, maintained the communications net between the larger towns, albeit with a considerably reduced bit capacity than previously. News of Stephanie’s progress had spread widely. Children were already waiting for the buses when they reached some towns; on a couple of occasions dressed smartly and given packed lunches by the possessed who had taken care of them. They had borne witness to some very tearful partings.
After the children had eaten and washed and been settled in their tents, Cochrane and Franklin Quigley sliced branches off a tree and piled them up to form a proper campfire. The adults came to sit around it, enjoying the yellow light flaring out to repel the clouds’ incessant claret illumination.
“I think we should forget going back to a town when we’re done with the kids,” McPhee said. “All of us get along okay, we should try a farm. The towns are starting to run out of food, now. We could grow some and sell it to them. That would give us something to do.”
“He’s been back a whole week, and he’s already bored,” Franklin Quigley grunted.
“Bore-ing ,” Cochrane said. He blew twin streams of smoke out of his nostrils. They spiralled through the air to jab at McPhee’s nose like a cobra.
The giant Scot made a pass of his hand, and the smoke wilted, turning to tar and splattering on the ground. “I’m not bored, but we have to do something. It makes sense to think ahead.”
“You might be right,” Stephanie said. “I don’t think I’d like to live in any of the towns we’ve passed through so far.”
“The way I see it,” said Moyo, “is that the possessed are developing into two groups.”
“Please don’t use that word,” Rana said. Sitting cross-legged next to the flamboyantly feminine Tina Sudol, Rana appeared fastidiously androgynous with her short hair and baggy blue sweater.
“What word?” Moyo asked.
“Possession. I find it offensive and prejudicial.”
“That’s right, babe,” Cochrane chortled. “We’re not possessors, we’re just like dimensionally disadvantaged.”
“Call our cross-continuum placement situation whatever you wish,” she snapped back. “You cannot alter the fact that the term is wholly derogatory. The Confederation’s military-industrial complex is using it to demonize us so they can justify increased spending on their armaments programs.”
Stephanie pressed her face into Moyo’s arm to smother her giggles.
“Come on, we’re not exactly on the side of the saints,” Franklin observed.
“The perception of common morality is enforced entirely by the circumstances of male-dominated society. Our new and unique circumstances require us to re-evaluate that original morality. As there are clearly not enough living bodies to go around the human race, sensory ownership should be distributed on an equitable basis. It’s no good the living protesting about us. We have as much right to sensory input as they do.”
Cochrane took the reefer from his mouth and gave it a sad stare. “Man, I wish I could manifest your trips.”
“You ignore him, darling,” Tina Sudol said to Rana. “He’s a perfect example of male brutality.”
“I suppose a fuck is out of the question tonight, then?”
Tina sucked in her cheeks theatrically as she glowered at the unrepentant hippie. “I’m only interested in men.”
“And always have been,” McPhee said, in an unsubtle whisper.
Tina flounced her glossy, highlighted hair back with a manicured hand. “You men are animals, all of you, simply rancid with hormones. No wonder I wanted to escape that prison of flesh I was in.”
“The two groups ,” Moyo said, “seem to be divided into those that stay put, like the café proprietors, and the restless ones—like us I suppose, though we’re an exception. They complement each other perfectly. The wanderers go around playing tourist, drinking down the sights and experiences. And wherever they go, they meet the stayers and tell them about their journeys. That way both types get what they want. Both of us exist to relish experience; some like to go out and find it, others like it brought to them.”
“You think that’s what it’s going to be like from now on?” McPhee asked.
“Yes. That’s what we’ll settle down into.”
“But for how long? Wanting to see and feel is just a reaction from the beyond. Once we’ve had our fill, human nature will come back. People want to settle down, have a family. Procreation is our biological imperative. And that’s one thing we never can do. We will always be frustrated.”
“I’ll like give it a try,” Cochrane said. “Me and Tina can make babies in my tepee anytime.”
Tina gave him a single disgusted look, and shuddered.
“But they wouldn’t be yours,” McPhee said. “That isn’t your body, and it certainly isn’t your DNA. You will never have a child again, not one of your own. That phase of our lives is over, it cannot be regained no matter how much of our energistic ability we expend.”
“You’re also forgetting the third type walking among us,” Franklin said. “The Ekelund type. And I do know her. I signed up with her for the first couple of days. She seemed to know what she was doing. We had ‘objectives’ and ‘target assignments,’ and ‘command structures’—and God help anyone who disobeyed those fascists. She’s a straight power nut with a Napoleonic complex. She’s got her little army of wannabe toughs running around in combat fatigues thinking they’re reborn special forces brigades. And they’re going to keep sniping away at the Royal Marines over the border until the Princess gets so pissed with us she nukes Mortonridge down to the bedrock.”
“That situation won’t last,” McPhee said. “Give it a month, or a year, and the Confederation will fall. Don’t you listen to the whispers in the beyond? Capone is getting his act together out there. It won’t be long before the Organization fleet jumps to Ombey. Then there will be nobody left for Ekelund to fight, and her command structure will simply fade away. Nobody is going to do what she tells them for the rest of time.”
“I don’t want to live for the rest of time,” Stephanie said. “I really don’t. That’s almost as frightening as being trapped in the beyond. We’re not made to live forever, we can’t handle it.”
“Lighten up, babe,” Cochrane said. “I don’t mind giving eternity a try; it’s the flipside which is the real bummer.”
“We’ve been back a week, and Mortonridge is already falling apart. There’s hardly any food left, nothing works properly.”
“Give it a chance,” Moyo said. “We’re all badly shocked, we don’t know how to control this new power we’ve got, and the non-possessed want to hunt us down and fling us back. You can hardly expect instant civilization under those circumstances. We’ll find a way to adjust. As soon as the rest of Ombey is possessed we’ll take it out of this universe altogether. Once that happens, things will be different. You’ll see; this is just an interim stage.” He put his arm around her as she leaned into him. She kissed him lightly, mind shining with appreciation.
“Yo, love machines,” Cochrane said. “So while you two screw like hot bunnies for the rest of the night, who’s going into town to track down some food?”
Got a beacon,edwin announced. his mind was hot with triumph.
Around Oenone ’s bridge, the communal tension level reduced with a strong mental sigh. They had arrived above Ngeuni twenty minutes ago. Every sensor extended. The crew in alert status one. Weapons powered up. Ready for anything. To retrieve Thakrar. To fight possessed starships that had captured Thakrar.
And there had been nothing. No ships in orbit. No response from the small development company advance camp on the planet.
Oenone accelerated into a high polar orbit, and Edwin activated every sensor they had.
It’s very weak, some kind of capsule emergency signal. Definitely the Tigara ’s identification code, though. The ship must have broken up.
Lock on to it, please,syrinx said. she was aware of the astrogration data from the sensors flooding into the bitek processor array. From that, she and Oenone understood exactly where the signal was in relation to themselves.
Go.
The voidhawk swallowed through a wormhole that barely had any internal length at all. Starlight blue-shifted slightly as it twisted into a tight rosette, kissing the hull, then expanding. A life-support capsule was spinning idly ten kilometres in front of the terminus as Oenone shot out. Local space was smeared with scraps of debris from the Tigara ’s violent end. Syrinx could feel the capsule’s mass in her mind as it hung in Oenone ’s distortion field. Sensors and communications dishes in the lower hull pods swung around to point at the dingy sphere.
There’s no response from the capsule,edwin said. I’m registering some power circuits active in there, but they’re very weak. And it’s been venting its atmosphere.
Oxley, Serina, take the MSV over there,syrinx ordered. Bring him back.
Oenone ’s crew watched through Serina’s armour suit sensors as she crept through the decks of the life-support capsule, searching for Captain Thakrar. It was a shambles inside, with equipment torn off bulkheads, hatches jammed, lockers broken open to send junk and old clothes floating free. The air had gone, allowing several pipes to burst and release globules of fluid, which had subsequently frozen solid. She had to use a high-powered fission cutter on the latches around the final hatch before she could worm her way into the bridge. At first she didn’t even recognize the SII-suited figure clutching at one of the emergency supply cases on the ceiling. Granules of frost had solidified on him as they had on every surface, glinting a dusty grey in the beams thrown out by her helmet lights. In his fetal position he looked like some kind of giant mummified larva.
At least he got into a suit,oxley said. Is there any infrared emission?
Check the electronic warfare block first,syrinx said.
Negative electronic warfare emission. He’s not possessed. But he is alive. The suit’s a couple of degrees above ambient.
Are you sure it’s not just natural body heat residue? Those suits are a good insulator. If he’s alive, then he hasn’t moved since the frost formed on him. That must have been hours ago.
Serina’s bitek processor block converted her affinity voice into a straight datavise. “Captain Thakrar? Are you receiving this, sir? We’re Edenists from Golomo; we received your message.” The ice-encrusted figure didn’t move. She waited a moment, then made her way towards him. I’ve just datavised his suit processor for a status update. He’s still breathing. Oh, damn.
They all saw it at the same time: ancillary medical modules anchored to Thakrar by small plastic tubes which burrowed through the SII suit material. Two of the modules had red LEDs shining under their coating of frost, the others were completely dark. The tubes had all frozen solid.
Get him back here,syrinx instructed. Fast as you can, Serina.
Caucus was waiting with a stretcher right outside the MSV’s airlock. Oenone had stopped generating a gravity field in the crew torus so that Serina and Oxley could tow Thakrar’s inert form through the cramped little tube without too much difficulty. He was shedding droplets as they went, the layer of frost melting in the warm air. They got him onto the stretcher, and Oenone immediately reinstated gravity in the torus, tugging the crew down to the decking again. Oxley held on to the dead medical modules as they raced around the central corridor to the sick bay.
Deactivate the suit, please,caucus told serina as the stretcher was wheeled under the diagnostic scanner. She issued the order to the suit’s control processor, which examined the external environment before obeying. The black silicon retreated from Thakrar’s skin, sliding from his extremities to glide smoothly toward his throat. Dark fluids began to stain the stretcher. Syrinx wrinkled her nose up at the smell, putting a hand over her nose.
Is he all right?Oenone asked.
I don’t know yet.
Please, Syrinx, it is him who is hurt, not you. Please don’t remember like this.
I’m sorry. I didn’t know I was being so obvious.
To the others, perhaps not.
It does make me remember, I won’t deny that. But his injuries are very different.
Pain is pain.
My pain is only a memory,she recited; in her mind it was wing-tsit Chong’s voice which spoke the phrase. Memories do not hurt, they only influence.
Caucus winced at the sight which was unveiled. Thakrar’s lower right arm was new, that much was obvious. The medical packages wrapped around it had shifted, opening large gashes in the translucent immature skin. AT muscles lay exposed, their drying membranes acquiring a nasty septic tint. Scars and skin grafts on the legs and torso were a livid red against the snowy skin. The remainder of his packages appeared to have withered, green surfaces crinkling up like aging rubber, pulling the edges back from the flesh they were supposed to heal. Sour nutrient fluids dripped out of torn inlet plugs.
For a moment, all Caucus could do was stare in a kind of revolted dismay. He simply didn’t know where to start.
Erick Thakrar’s bruised eyelids slowly opened. What alarmed Syrinx the most was the lack of confusion they showed.
“Can you hear me, Erick?” Caucus said in an overloud voice. “You’re perfectly safe now. We’re Edenists, we rescued you. Now please don’t try and move.”
Erick opened his mouth, lips quivering.
“We’re going to treat you in just a moment. Are your axon blocks functional?”
“No!” It was very clear, very determined.
Caucus picked up an anaesthetic spray from the bench. “Is the program faulty, or have your neural nanonics been damaged?”
Erick brought his good arm around and pressed his knuckles into Caucus’s back. “No, you will not touch me,” he datavised. “I have a nerve burst implant. I will kill him.”
The spray fell from Caucus’s hand to clatter on the deck.
Syrinx could barely credit what was happening. Her mind instinctively opened to Caucus, offering support to his own frightened thoughts. All the crew were doing the same.
“Captain Thakrar, I am Captain Syrinx, this is my voidhawk Oenone . Please deactivate your implant. Caucus was not going to harm you.”
Erick laughed, an unsteady gulp which shook his whole body. “I know that. I don’t want to be treated. I’m not going back, not out there. Not again.”
“Nobody is going to send you anywhere.”
“They will. They always do. You do, you navy people. Always one final mission, one little bit of vital information to collect, then it will all be over. It never is, though. Never.”
“I understand.”
“Liar.”
She gestured to the outlines of the medical packages visible through her ship-tunic. “I do have some knowledge of what you have been through. The possessed had me for a brief time.”
Erick gave her a scared glance. “They’ll win. If you saw what they can do, you’ll know that. There’s nothing we can do.”
“I think there is. I think there must be a solution.”
“We’ll die. We’ll become them. They’re us, all of us.”
Captain? I’ve got a clean shot at him.
Syrinx was aware of Edwin, out in the central corridor, a maser carbine raised. The blank muzzle was pointing at Erick Thakrar’s back. A feed from the weapon’s targeting processor showed it was aimed precisely on Thakrar’s spinal column. The coherent microwaves would sever his nerves before he could use the implant.
No,she said. Not yet. He deserves our efforts to talk him out of this.for the first time in a long time, she was angry at an Adamist for being just that, an Adamist. Closed mind, locked up tight in its skull. No way of knowing what others were thinking, never really knowing love, kindness, or sympathy. She couldn’t take the simple truth to him directly. Not the easy way.
“What do you want us to do?” she asked.
“I have information,” Erick datavised. “Strategic information.”
“We know. Your message to Golomo said it was important.”
“I will sell it to you.”
There was a collective burst of surprise from the crew.
“Okay,” Syrinx said. “If I have the price on board, you will have it.”
“Zero-tau.” Erick’s face became pleading. “Tell me you have a pod on board. For God’s sake.”
“We have several.”
“Good. I want to be put inside. They can’t get to you in there.”
“All right, Erick. We’ll put you in zero-tau.”
“Forever.”
“What?”
“Forever. I want to stay in zero-tau forever.”
“Erick . . .”
“I thought about this; I thought about it a lot, it can work. Really it can. Your habitats can resist the possessed. Adamist starships don’t work for them, not properly. Capone is the only one who has any military ships, and he won’t be able to keep them going for long. They’ll need maintenance, spares. He’ll run out eventually. Then there won’t be any more invasions, only infiltrations. And you won’t let your guard down. We will, Adamists will. But not you. In a hundred years from now there will be nothing left of our race, except for you. Your culture will live forever. You can keep me in zero-tau forever.”
“There’s no need for this, Erick. We can beat them.”
“No,” he brayed. “Can’t can’t can’t.” The effort of speaking made him cough painfully. His breathing was very heavy now. “I’m not going to die,” he datavised. “I’m not going to be one of them; not like little Tina. Dear little Tina. God, she was only fifteen. Now she’s dead. But you don’t die in zero-tau. You’re safe. It’s the only way. No life, but no beyond, either. That’s the answer.” Very slowly, he took his hand away from Caucus. “I’m sorry. I wouldn’t have hurt you. Please, you have to do this for me. I can tell you where Capone is going to invade next. I can give you the coordinate of an antimatter station. Just give me your word, as an Edenist, as a voidhawk captain; your word that you will take my pod to a habitat, and that your culture will always keep me in zero-tau. Your word, please, it’s so little to ask.”
What do I do?she asked her crew.
Their minds merged, awash with compassion and distress. The answer, she felt, was inevitable.
Syrinx walked over and took Erick’s cold, damp hand in hers. “All right, Erick,” she said softly. Wishing once more for a single second of genuine communication. “We’ll put you in zero-tau. But I want you to promise me something in return.”
Erick’s eyes had closed. His breathing was very shallow now as he datavised several files into the toroid’s net. Caucus was exuding concern at the read-out from the diagnostic scanner. Hurry, he urged.
“What?” Erick asked.
“I want your permission to take you out of zero-tau if we find a proper solution to all this.”
“You won’t.”
“But if we do!”
“This is stupid.”
“No it isn’t. Edenism was founded on hope, hope for the future, the belief that life can get better. If you have faith in our culture to preserve you for eternity, you must believe in that. Jesus, Erick, you have to believe in something.”
“You are a very strange Edenist.”
“I am a very typical Edenist. The rest just don’t know it yet.”
“Very well, deal.”
“I’ll talk to you soon, Erick. I’ll be the one who wakes you up and tells you.”
“At the end of the universe, perhaps. Until then . . .”
Chapter 08
Backup lighting had come on, casting a weak pale blue glow across the compartment. Frost was forming on most of the surfaces, gradually obscuring the few remaining active holoscreen displays. Various pieces of refuse had been jolted loose from their nesting places to twirl whimsically through the air, throwing avian-style shadows across the acceleration couches.
Potentially the most troubling problem was the intermittent dropouts from which the flight computer’s datavises were suffering. Erick wasn’t entirely sure he could trust its status display. It still responded to simple commands, though.
With his personal situation stable for a moment, he instructed the capsule’s sensors to deploy. Three of the five responded, pistonlike tubes sliding up out of the nultherm foam coating. They began to scan around.
Astrogration programs slowly correlated the surrounding starfield. If they were working correctly, then the Tigara had emerged approximately fifty million kilometres from the coordinate he was aiming for. Ngeuni was only an unremarkable blue-green star to one side of the glaring A2 primary.
He wasn’t sure if they would pick up the capsule’s distress beacon. Stage one colonies did not have the most sophisticated communications satellites. When he instructed the capsule’s phased array antenna to focus on the distant planet, it didn’t acknowledge. He repeated the instruction, and there was still no activity.
The flight computer ran a diagnostic, which gave him a System Inviable code. Without actually going outside to examine it, there was no way of telling what was wrong.
Alone.
Cut off.
Fifty million kilometres from possible rescue.
Light-years from where he desperately needed to be.
All that was left for him now was to wait. He began switching off every piece of equipment apart from the attitude rockets, the guidance system which drove them, and the computer itself. Judging by the frequency of the thruster firings, the capsule was venting something. The last diagnostic sweep before he shut down the internal sensors couldn’t pinpoint what it was.
After he’d reduced the power drain to a minimum, he pressed the deactivation switch for his restraint webbing. Even that seemed reluctant to work, taking a long time to fold back below the side of the cushioning. At this movement, levering himself up from the couch, fluid stirred across his abdomen. He found that by moving very slowly, the effect (and perhaps the harm) was moderated.
Training took over, and he began to index the emergency gear which had deployed from the ceiling. That was when the emotional shock hammered him. He suddenly found himself shaking badly as he clung to a four person programmable silicon dinghy.
Indexing his position! Like a good little first-year cadet.
A broken laugh bubbled around the SII suit’s respirator tube. The glossy black silicon covering his eyes turned permeable to vent the salty fluid burning his squeezed up eyelids.
Never in his life had he felt so utterly helpless. Even when the possessed were boarding the Villeneuve’s Revenge he’d been able to do something. Fight back, hit them. Orbiting above New California with the Organization poised to obliterate them at the first false move, he’d been able to store most of the sensor images. There had always been something, some way of being positive.
Now he was humiliatingly aware of his mind crumbling away in mimicry of his tattered old body. Fear had risen to consume him, flowing swiftly out of the dark corners of the bridge. It produced a pain in his head far worse than any physical injury ever could.
Those muscles which still functioned disobeyed any lingering wishes he might have, leaving him ignominiously barnacled to the dinghy. Every last reserve of determination and resolve had been exhausted. Not even the ubiquitous programs could shore up his mentality anymore.
Too weak to continue living, too frightened to die: Erick Thakrar had come to the end of the line.
Eight kilometres west of Stonygate, Cochrane tooted the horn on the Karmic Crusader bus and turned off the road. The other three vehicles in the convoy jounced over the grass verge and came to a halt behind it.
“Yo, dudettes,” Cochrane yelled back to the juvenile rioters clambering over the seats. “Time out for like the big darkness.” He pressed the red button on the dash, and the doors hissed open. Kids poured out like a dam burst.
Cochrane put his purple glasses back on and climbed down out of the cab. Stephanie and Moyo walked over to him, arm in arm. “Good place,” she said. The convoy had halted at the head of a gentle valley which was completely roofed over by the rumbling blanket of crimson cloud, rendering the mountain peaks invisible.
“This whole righteous road trip is one major groove.”
“Right.”
He materialized a fat reefer. “Hit?”
“No thanks. I’d better see about cooking them some supper.”
“That’s cool. I can’t psyche out any hostile vibes in this locale. I’ll like keep watch, make sure the nazgul aren’t circling overhead.”
“You do that.” Stephanie smiled fondly at him and went to the back of the bus, where the big luggage hold was. Moyo started pulling out the cooking gear.
“We should manage to reach Chainbridge by tomorrow evening,” he said.
“Yes. This isn’t quite what I expected when we started out, you know.”
“Predictability is boring.” He put a big electric camping grille on the ground, adjusting the aluminum legs to make it level. “Besides, I think it’s worked out for the best.”
Stephanie glanced around the improvised campsite, nodding approval; nearly sixty children were scampering around the parked vehicles. What had started off as a private mission to help a handful of lost children had rapidly snowballed.
Four times during the first day they had been stopped by residents who had told them where non-possessed children were lurking. On the second day there were over twenty children packed on board; that was when Tina Sudol had volunteered to come with them. Rana and McPhee joined up on the third day, adding another bus.
Now there were four vehicles, and eight possessed adults. They were no longer making a straight dash for the border at the top of Mortonridge. It was more of a zigzag route, visiting as many towns as they could to pick up children. Ekelund’s people, who had evolved into the closest thing to a government on Mortonridge, maintained the communications net between the larger towns, albeit with a considerably reduced bit capacity than previously. News of Stephanie’s progress had spread widely. Children were already waiting for the buses when they reached some towns; on a couple of occasions dressed smartly and given packed lunches by the possessed who had taken care of them. They had borne witness to some very tearful partings.
After the children had eaten and washed and been settled in their tents, Cochrane and Franklin Quigley sliced branches off a tree and piled them up to form a proper campfire. The adults came to sit around it, enjoying the yellow light flaring out to repel the clouds’ incessant claret illumination.
“I think we should forget going back to a town when we’re done with the kids,” McPhee said. “All of us get along okay, we should try a farm. The towns are starting to run out of food, now. We could grow some and sell it to them. That would give us something to do.”
“He’s been back a whole week, and he’s already bored,” Franklin Quigley grunted.
“Bore-ing ,” Cochrane said. He blew twin streams of smoke out of his nostrils. They spiralled through the air to jab at McPhee’s nose like a cobra.
The giant Scot made a pass of his hand, and the smoke wilted, turning to tar and splattering on the ground. “I’m not bored, but we have to do something. It makes sense to think ahead.”
“You might be right,” Stephanie said. “I don’t think I’d like to live in any of the towns we’ve passed through so far.”
“The way I see it,” said Moyo, “is that the possessed are developing into two groups.”
“Please don’t use that word,” Rana said. Sitting cross-legged next to the flamboyantly feminine Tina Sudol, Rana appeared fastidiously androgynous with her short hair and baggy blue sweater.
“What word?” Moyo asked.
“Possession. I find it offensive and prejudicial.”
“That’s right, babe,” Cochrane chortled. “We’re not possessors, we’re just like dimensionally disadvantaged.”
“Call our cross-continuum placement situation whatever you wish,” she snapped back. “You cannot alter the fact that the term is wholly derogatory. The Confederation’s military-industrial complex is using it to demonize us so they can justify increased spending on their armaments programs.”
Stephanie pressed her face into Moyo’s arm to smother her giggles.
“Come on, we’re not exactly on the side of the saints,” Franklin observed.
“The perception of common morality is enforced entirely by the circumstances of male-dominated society. Our new and unique circumstances require us to re-evaluate that original morality. As there are clearly not enough living bodies to go around the human race, sensory ownership should be distributed on an equitable basis. It’s no good the living protesting about us. We have as much right to sensory input as they do.”
Cochrane took the reefer from his mouth and gave it a sad stare. “Man, I wish I could manifest your trips.”
“You ignore him, darling,” Tina Sudol said to Rana. “He’s a perfect example of male brutality.”
“I suppose a fuck is out of the question tonight, then?”
Tina sucked in her cheeks theatrically as she glowered at the unrepentant hippie. “I’m only interested in men.”
“And always have been,” McPhee said, in an unsubtle whisper.
Tina flounced her glossy, highlighted hair back with a manicured hand. “You men are animals, all of you, simply rancid with hormones. No wonder I wanted to escape that prison of flesh I was in.”
“The two groups ,” Moyo said, “seem to be divided into those that stay put, like the café proprietors, and the restless ones—like us I suppose, though we’re an exception. They complement each other perfectly. The wanderers go around playing tourist, drinking down the sights and experiences. And wherever they go, they meet the stayers and tell them about their journeys. That way both types get what they want. Both of us exist to relish experience; some like to go out and find it, others like it brought to them.”
“You think that’s what it’s going to be like from now on?” McPhee asked.
“Yes. That’s what we’ll settle down into.”
“But for how long? Wanting to see and feel is just a reaction from the beyond. Once we’ve had our fill, human nature will come back. People want to settle down, have a family. Procreation is our biological imperative. And that’s one thing we never can do. We will always be frustrated.”
“I’ll like give it a try,” Cochrane said. “Me and Tina can make babies in my tepee anytime.”
Tina gave him a single disgusted look, and shuddered.
“But they wouldn’t be yours,” McPhee said. “That isn’t your body, and it certainly isn’t your DNA. You will never have a child again, not one of your own. That phase of our lives is over, it cannot be regained no matter how much of our energistic ability we expend.”
“You’re also forgetting the third type walking among us,” Franklin said. “The Ekelund type. And I do know her. I signed up with her for the first couple of days. She seemed to know what she was doing. We had ‘objectives’ and ‘target assignments,’ and ‘command structures’—and God help anyone who disobeyed those fascists. She’s a straight power nut with a Napoleonic complex. She’s got her little army of wannabe toughs running around in combat fatigues thinking they’re reborn special forces brigades. And they’re going to keep sniping away at the Royal Marines over the border until the Princess gets so pissed with us she nukes Mortonridge down to the bedrock.”
“That situation won’t last,” McPhee said. “Give it a month, or a year, and the Confederation will fall. Don’t you listen to the whispers in the beyond? Capone is getting his act together out there. It won’t be long before the Organization fleet jumps to Ombey. Then there will be nobody left for Ekelund to fight, and her command structure will simply fade away. Nobody is going to do what she tells them for the rest of time.”
“I don’t want to live for the rest of time,” Stephanie said. “I really don’t. That’s almost as frightening as being trapped in the beyond. We’re not made to live forever, we can’t handle it.”
“Lighten up, babe,” Cochrane said. “I don’t mind giving eternity a try; it’s the flipside which is the real bummer.”
“We’ve been back a week, and Mortonridge is already falling apart. There’s hardly any food left, nothing works properly.”
“Give it a chance,” Moyo said. “We’re all badly shocked, we don’t know how to control this new power we’ve got, and the non-possessed want to hunt us down and fling us back. You can hardly expect instant civilization under those circumstances. We’ll find a way to adjust. As soon as the rest of Ombey is possessed we’ll take it out of this universe altogether. Once that happens, things will be different. You’ll see; this is just an interim stage.” He put his arm around her as she leaned into him. She kissed him lightly, mind shining with appreciation.
“Yo, love machines,” Cochrane said. “So while you two screw like hot bunnies for the rest of the night, who’s going into town to track down some food?”
Got a beacon,edwin announced. his mind was hot with triumph.
Around Oenone ’s bridge, the communal tension level reduced with a strong mental sigh. They had arrived above Ngeuni twenty minutes ago. Every sensor extended. The crew in alert status one. Weapons powered up. Ready for anything. To retrieve Thakrar. To fight possessed starships that had captured Thakrar.
And there had been nothing. No ships in orbit. No response from the small development company advance camp on the planet.
Oenone accelerated into a high polar orbit, and Edwin activated every sensor they had.
It’s very weak, some kind of capsule emergency signal. Definitely the Tigara ’s identification code, though. The ship must have broken up.
Lock on to it, please,syrinx said. she was aware of the astrogration data from the sensors flooding into the bitek processor array. From that, she and Oenone understood exactly where the signal was in relation to themselves.
Go.
The voidhawk swallowed through a wormhole that barely had any internal length at all. Starlight blue-shifted slightly as it twisted into a tight rosette, kissing the hull, then expanding. A life-support capsule was spinning idly ten kilometres in front of the terminus as Oenone shot out. Local space was smeared with scraps of debris from the Tigara ’s violent end. Syrinx could feel the capsule’s mass in her mind as it hung in Oenone ’s distortion field. Sensors and communications dishes in the lower hull pods swung around to point at the dingy sphere.
There’s no response from the capsule,edwin said. I’m registering some power circuits active in there, but they’re very weak. And it’s been venting its atmosphere.
Oxley, Serina, take the MSV over there,syrinx ordered. Bring him back.
Oenone ’s crew watched through Serina’s armour suit sensors as she crept through the decks of the life-support capsule, searching for Captain Thakrar. It was a shambles inside, with equipment torn off bulkheads, hatches jammed, lockers broken open to send junk and old clothes floating free. The air had gone, allowing several pipes to burst and release globules of fluid, which had subsequently frozen solid. She had to use a high-powered fission cutter on the latches around the final hatch before she could worm her way into the bridge. At first she didn’t even recognize the SII-suited figure clutching at one of the emergency supply cases on the ceiling. Granules of frost had solidified on him as they had on every surface, glinting a dusty grey in the beams thrown out by her helmet lights. In his fetal position he looked like some kind of giant mummified larva.
At least he got into a suit,oxley said. Is there any infrared emission?
Check the electronic warfare block first,syrinx said.
Negative electronic warfare emission. He’s not possessed. But he is alive. The suit’s a couple of degrees above ambient.
Are you sure it’s not just natural body heat residue? Those suits are a good insulator. If he’s alive, then he hasn’t moved since the frost formed on him. That must have been hours ago.
Serina’s bitek processor block converted her affinity voice into a straight datavise. “Captain Thakrar? Are you receiving this, sir? We’re Edenists from Golomo; we received your message.” The ice-encrusted figure didn’t move. She waited a moment, then made her way towards him. I’ve just datavised his suit processor for a status update. He’s still breathing. Oh, damn.
They all saw it at the same time: ancillary medical modules anchored to Thakrar by small plastic tubes which burrowed through the SII suit material. Two of the modules had red LEDs shining under their coating of frost, the others were completely dark. The tubes had all frozen solid.
Get him back here,syrinx instructed. Fast as you can, Serina.
Caucus was waiting with a stretcher right outside the MSV’s airlock. Oenone had stopped generating a gravity field in the crew torus so that Serina and Oxley could tow Thakrar’s inert form through the cramped little tube without too much difficulty. He was shedding droplets as they went, the layer of frost melting in the warm air. They got him onto the stretcher, and Oenone immediately reinstated gravity in the torus, tugging the crew down to the decking again. Oxley held on to the dead medical modules as they raced around the central corridor to the sick bay.
Deactivate the suit, please,caucus told serina as the stretcher was wheeled under the diagnostic scanner. She issued the order to the suit’s control processor, which examined the external environment before obeying. The black silicon retreated from Thakrar’s skin, sliding from his extremities to glide smoothly toward his throat. Dark fluids began to stain the stretcher. Syrinx wrinkled her nose up at the smell, putting a hand over her nose.
Is he all right?Oenone asked.
I don’t know yet.
Please, Syrinx, it is him who is hurt, not you. Please don’t remember like this.
I’m sorry. I didn’t know I was being so obvious.
To the others, perhaps not.
It does make me remember, I won’t deny that. But his injuries are very different.
Pain is pain.
My pain is only a memory,she recited; in her mind it was wing-tsit Chong’s voice which spoke the phrase. Memories do not hurt, they only influence.
Caucus winced at the sight which was unveiled. Thakrar’s lower right arm was new, that much was obvious. The medical packages wrapped around it had shifted, opening large gashes in the translucent immature skin. AT muscles lay exposed, their drying membranes acquiring a nasty septic tint. Scars and skin grafts on the legs and torso were a livid red against the snowy skin. The remainder of his packages appeared to have withered, green surfaces crinkling up like aging rubber, pulling the edges back from the flesh they were supposed to heal. Sour nutrient fluids dripped out of torn inlet plugs.
For a moment, all Caucus could do was stare in a kind of revolted dismay. He simply didn’t know where to start.
Erick Thakrar’s bruised eyelids slowly opened. What alarmed Syrinx the most was the lack of confusion they showed.
“Can you hear me, Erick?” Caucus said in an overloud voice. “You’re perfectly safe now. We’re Edenists, we rescued you. Now please don’t try and move.”
Erick opened his mouth, lips quivering.
“We’re going to treat you in just a moment. Are your axon blocks functional?”
“No!” It was very clear, very determined.
Caucus picked up an anaesthetic spray from the bench. “Is the program faulty, or have your neural nanonics been damaged?”
Erick brought his good arm around and pressed his knuckles into Caucus’s back. “No, you will not touch me,” he datavised. “I have a nerve burst implant. I will kill him.”
The spray fell from Caucus’s hand to clatter on the deck.
Syrinx could barely credit what was happening. Her mind instinctively opened to Caucus, offering support to his own frightened thoughts. All the crew were doing the same.
“Captain Thakrar, I am Captain Syrinx, this is my voidhawk Oenone . Please deactivate your implant. Caucus was not going to harm you.”
Erick laughed, an unsteady gulp which shook his whole body. “I know that. I don’t want to be treated. I’m not going back, not out there. Not again.”
“Nobody is going to send you anywhere.”
“They will. They always do. You do, you navy people. Always one final mission, one little bit of vital information to collect, then it will all be over. It never is, though. Never.”
“I understand.”
“Liar.”
She gestured to the outlines of the medical packages visible through her ship-tunic. “I do have some knowledge of what you have been through. The possessed had me for a brief time.”
Erick gave her a scared glance. “They’ll win. If you saw what they can do, you’ll know that. There’s nothing we can do.”
“I think there is. I think there must be a solution.”
“We’ll die. We’ll become them. They’re us, all of us.”
Captain? I’ve got a clean shot at him.
Syrinx was aware of Edwin, out in the central corridor, a maser carbine raised. The blank muzzle was pointing at Erick Thakrar’s back. A feed from the weapon’s targeting processor showed it was aimed precisely on Thakrar’s spinal column. The coherent microwaves would sever his nerves before he could use the implant.
No,she said. Not yet. He deserves our efforts to talk him out of this.for the first time in a long time, she was angry at an Adamist for being just that, an Adamist. Closed mind, locked up tight in its skull. No way of knowing what others were thinking, never really knowing love, kindness, or sympathy. She couldn’t take the simple truth to him directly. Not the easy way.
“What do you want us to do?” she asked.
“I have information,” Erick datavised. “Strategic information.”
“We know. Your message to Golomo said it was important.”
“I will sell it to you.”
There was a collective burst of surprise from the crew.
“Okay,” Syrinx said. “If I have the price on board, you will have it.”
“Zero-tau.” Erick’s face became pleading. “Tell me you have a pod on board. For God’s sake.”
“We have several.”
“Good. I want to be put inside. They can’t get to you in there.”
“All right, Erick. We’ll put you in zero-tau.”
“Forever.”
“What?”
“Forever. I want to stay in zero-tau forever.”
“Erick . . .”
“I thought about this; I thought about it a lot, it can work. Really it can. Your habitats can resist the possessed. Adamist starships don’t work for them, not properly. Capone is the only one who has any military ships, and he won’t be able to keep them going for long. They’ll need maintenance, spares. He’ll run out eventually. Then there won’t be any more invasions, only infiltrations. And you won’t let your guard down. We will, Adamists will. But not you. In a hundred years from now there will be nothing left of our race, except for you. Your culture will live forever. You can keep me in zero-tau forever.”
“There’s no need for this, Erick. We can beat them.”
“No,” he brayed. “Can’t can’t can’t.” The effort of speaking made him cough painfully. His breathing was very heavy now. “I’m not going to die,” he datavised. “I’m not going to be one of them; not like little Tina. Dear little Tina. God, she was only fifteen. Now she’s dead. But you don’t die in zero-tau. You’re safe. It’s the only way. No life, but no beyond, either. That’s the answer.” Very slowly, he took his hand away from Caucus. “I’m sorry. I wouldn’t have hurt you. Please, you have to do this for me. I can tell you where Capone is going to invade next. I can give you the coordinate of an antimatter station. Just give me your word, as an Edenist, as a voidhawk captain; your word that you will take my pod to a habitat, and that your culture will always keep me in zero-tau. Your word, please, it’s so little to ask.”
What do I do?she asked her crew.
Their minds merged, awash with compassion and distress. The answer, she felt, was inevitable.
Syrinx walked over and took Erick’s cold, damp hand in hers. “All right, Erick,” she said softly. Wishing once more for a single second of genuine communication. “We’ll put you in zero-tau. But I want you to promise me something in return.”
Erick’s eyes had closed. His breathing was very shallow now as he datavised several files into the toroid’s net. Caucus was exuding concern at the read-out from the diagnostic scanner. Hurry, he urged.
“What?” Erick asked.
“I want your permission to take you out of zero-tau if we find a proper solution to all this.”
“You won’t.”
“But if we do!”
“This is stupid.”
“No it isn’t. Edenism was founded on hope, hope for the future, the belief that life can get better. If you have faith in our culture to preserve you for eternity, you must believe in that. Jesus, Erick, you have to believe in something.”
“You are a very strange Edenist.”
“I am a very typical Edenist. The rest just don’t know it yet.”
“Very well, deal.”
“I’ll talk to you soon, Erick. I’ll be the one who wakes you up and tells you.”
“At the end of the universe, perhaps. Until then . . .”
Chapter 08
Alkad Mzu hadn’t seen snow since she left Garissa. Back in those days she’d never bothered indexing a memory of winter in her neural nanonics. Why waste capacity? The season came every year, much to Peter’s delight and her grudging acceptance.
The oldest human story of all: I never knew what I had until I lost it.
Now, from her penthouse in the Mercedes Hotel, she watched it falling over Harrisburg, a silent cascade as inexorable as it was gentle. The sight made her want to go outside and join the children she could see capering about in the park opposite.
The snow had begun during the night, just after they landed at the spaceport, and hadn’t let up in the seven hours since. Down on the streets tempers were getting shorter as the traffic slowed and the pavements turned slippery with the slush. Ancient municipal mechanoids, backed up by teams of men with shovels, struggled to clear the deep drifts which blockaded the main avenues.
The sight didn’t exactly bode well. If the Tonala nation’s economy was so desperate that they used human labour to clean the streets of their capital . . .
So far Alkad had managed to keep her objective in focus. She was proud of that; after every obstacle thrown in her way she had proved herself resourceful enough to keep the hope alive. Even back on the Tekas she’d thought she would soon be retrieving the Alchemist.
Nyvan had done much to wreck her mood and her confidence. There were starships docked at the orbiting asteroids, and the local astroengineering companies could probably provide her with the equipment she wanted; yet the decay and suspicion native to this world made her doubt. The task was slipping from her grasp once more. Difficulties were piling up against her, and now she had no more fallback positions. They were on their own now: she, Voi, Lodi, and Eriba, with money as their only resource. True to his word, Prince Lambert had taken the Tekas out of orbit as soon as they’d disembarked. He said he was flying to Mondul, it had a strong navy, and he knew people there.
Alkad resisted accessing her time function. Prince Lambert must have made his third ZTT jump by now, and another potential security hazard was no more.
“That’s a new one,” Eriba announced. He was stretched out along the settee, bare feet dangling over the armrest. It meant he could just see the holoscreen on the far wall. A local news show was playing.
“What is?” Alkad asked him. He had been consuming news ever since they arrived, switching between the holoscreen and the communications net’s information cores.
“Tonala has just ordered every border to be closed and sealed. The cabinet claims that New Georgia’s actions are overtly hostile, and other nations can’t be trusted. Apparently, the SD networks are still blasting each other with electronic warfare pulses.”
Alkad grimaced. That clash had been going on when the Tekas arrived. “I wonder how that affects us? Are those the land borders, or are they going to prohibit spaceflight as well?”
“They haven’t said.”
The door chimed as it admitted Voi. She strode into the big living room shrugging out of her thick navy-blue coat and shaking grubby droplets of melted snow on the white carpet. “We’ve got an appointment for two o’clock this afternoon. I told the Industry Ministry we were here to buy defence equipment for the Dorados, and they recommended the Opia company. Lodi ran a check through the local data cores, and they own two asteroid industrial stations along with a starship service subsidiary.”
“That sounds promising,” Alkad said guardedly. She had left all the organization to Voi. The agencies would be looking for her; zipping around town would be asking for trouble. As it was, using the Daphine Kigano passport when they arrived was a risk, but she didn’t have any others prepared.
“Promising? Mary, it’s spot on. What do you want, the Kulu Corporation?”
“I wasn’t criticising.”
“Well it sounded like it.”
Voi had slowly reverted to her original temper during the voyage. Alkad wasn’t sure if the waspy girl was recovering from her father’s death or reacting to it.
“Has Lodi found out if there are any suitable starships for hire?”
“He’s still checking,” Voi said. “So far he’s located over fifty commercial vehicles stranded insystem due to the quarantine. Most of them are docked in low orbit stations and the asteroid ports. He’s running performance comparisons against the requirements you gave us. I just hope he can find us one at a Tonala facility. Did you hear about the border restrictions? They’re even closing down net interface points with the other nations.”
“That’s a minor problem compared to the one we’ll have crewing the ship.”
“What do you mean?”
“Our flight is not the kind of job you normally give mercenaries. I’m not sure money will guarantee loyalty for this mission.”
“Why didn’t you say so, then? Mary, Alkad, how can I help if you keep complaining after the fact? Be more cooperative.”
“I’ll bear it in mind,” Alkad said mildly.
“Is there anything else we should know?”
“I can’t think of anything, but you’ll be the first to be told if I do.”
“All right. Now, I’ve arranged for a car to take us to Opia’s offices. The security company which supplied it is also providing bodyguards. They will be here in an hour.”
“Good thinking,” Eriba said.
“Elementary thinking,” Voi shot back. “We’re foreigners who have arrived in the middle of an Assembly-imposed quarantine. That’s hardly an optimum low-visibility scenario. I want to downgrade our risk to a minimum.”
“Bodyguards ought to help, then,” Alkad said prosaically. “You should go and take a rest before we visit Opia. You haven’t slept since we landed. I’ll need you to be fresh for the negotiations.”
Voi gave a distrustful nod, and went into her bedroom.
Alkad and Eriba exchanged a glance and smiled simultaneously.
“Did she really say low-visibility scenario ?” he asked.
“Sounded like it to me.”
“Mary, that detox therapy was a bad idea.”
“What was she like before?”
“About the same,” he admitted.
Alkad turned back to the window and the snow softening the city skyline.
The door chimed again.
“Did you order something from room service?” she asked Eriba.
“No.” He gave the door a worried look. “Do you think it’s the bodyguards Voi hired?”
“They’re very early, then; and if they’re professional they would datavise us first.” She picked up her shoulder bag and selected one of the devices inside. When she datavised the penthouse’s net processor to access the camera in the corridor outside there was no response. The cut crystal wall lights began to flicker. “Stop!” she told Eriba, who had drawn his laser pistol. “That won’t work against the possessed.”
“Do you think . . .”
He trailed off just as Voi burst back into the lounge. She was gripping a maser carbine tight in her hand.
The penthouse’s entrance door swung open. Three people were standing behind it, their features lost in the darkened corridor.
“Do not come in,” Alkad said loudly. “My weapons will work, even against you.”
“Are you quite sure, Doctor?”
Sections of Alkad’s neural nanonics were dropping out. She datavised a primer code at the small sphere she held in her hand before she lost even that ability. “Fairly sure. Do you want to be the first experimental subject?”
“You haven’t changed; you were always so confident you were right.”
Alkad frowned. It was a female voice, but she couldn’t place it. She didn’t have the processing power left in her neural nanonics to run an audio comparison program. “Do I know you?”
“You used to. May we come in, please? We really aren’t here to harm you.”
Since when did the possessed start saying please? Alkad thought the circumstances out and said: “It only needs one of you to speak. And if you’re not a threat, stop glitching our electronics.”
“That last request is difficult, but we will try.”
Alkad’s neural nanonics started to come back on-line. She quickly re-established full control over the device.
“I’ll call the police,” Voi datavised. “They can send a Tac Squad. The possessed won’t know until it’s too late.”
“No. If they wanted to hurt us, they would have done it by now. I think we’ll hear what she has to say.”
“You shouldn’t expose yourself to a negative personal safety context. You are the only link we have to the Alchemist.”
“Oh, shut up,” Alkad said aloud. “All right, come in.”
The young woman who walked into the penthouse was in her early twenties. Her skin was several shades lighter than Alkad’s, though her hair was jet black, and her face was rounded by a little too much cellulite for her to be pretty; it fixed her expression to one of continual shy resentment. She wore a long tartan-print summer dress, with a kilt-style skirt that had been the fashion on Garissa the year of the genocide.
Alkad ran a visual comparison program search through her memory cells. “Gelai? Gelai, is that really you?”
“My soul, yes,” she said. “Not my body. This is just an illusion, of course.” For a moment the solid mirage vanished, revealing a teenaged Oriental girl with fresh jagged scars on her legs.
“Mother Mary!” Alkad croaked. She’d hoped the tales of torture and atrocity were just Confederation propaganda.
Gelai’s usual profile returned. The flicker of exposure was so fast, it made Alkad’s mind want to believe Gelai’s was the true shape; the abused girl was something decency rejected.
“What happened?” Alkad asked.
“You know her?” Voi demanded indignantly.
“Oh, yes. Gelai was one of my students.”
“Not one of your best, I’m sorry to say.”
“You were doing all right, as I recall.”
“This enhances stress relief nicely,” Voi said. “But you haven’t told us why you’re here.”
“I was killed in the planet-buster attack,” Gelai said. “The university campus was only five hundred kilometres from one of the strikes. The earthquake levelled it. I was in my residence hall when it hit. The thermal flash set half of the building alight. Then the quake arrived; Mary alone knows how powerful it was. I was lucky, I suppose. I died in the first hour. That was reasonably quick. Compared to a lot of them, anyway.”
“I’m so sorry,” Alkad said. She had rarely felt so worthless; confronted by the pitiful evidence of the greatest failure it was possible to have. “I failed you. I failed everybody.”
“At least you were trying,” Gelai said. “I didn’t approve at the time. I took part in all the peace demonstrations. We held vigils outside the continental parliament, sang hymns. But the media said we were cowards and traitors. People actually spat on us in the streets. I kept going, though, kept protesting. I thought if we could just get our government to talk to the Omutans, then the military would stop attacking each other. Mary, how naive.”
“No, Gelai, you weren’t naive, you were brave. If enough of us had stood for that principle, then maybe the government would have tried harder to find a peaceful solution.”
“But they didn’t, did they?”
Alkad traced Gelai’s cheeks with her finger, touching the past she’d thought was so far behind her, the cause of the present. Feeling the ersatz skin was all she needed to know she had been right to do what she’d done thirty years ago. “I was going to protect you. I thought I’d sold my very soul so that you would all be safe. I didn’t care about that. I thought you were worth the sacrifice; all you bright young minds so full of the silliest hopes and proudest ideals. I would have done it, too, for you. Slain Omuta’s star, the biggest crime in the galaxy. And now all that’s left of us are the ones like these.” She waved a hand limply at Voi and Eriba. “Just a few thousand kids living in rocks that mess with their heads. I don’t know which of you suffered the worst fate. At least you had a taste of what our people might have achieved if we’d lived. This new generation are just poor remnants of what they could’ve been.”
Gelai puffed up her lips and stared firmly at the floor. “I wasn’t sure what I was going to do when I came here. Warn you or kill you.”
“And now?”
“I didn’t realize why you were doing it, why you went off to help the military. You were this aloof professor that we were all a bit in awe of, you were so smart. We respected you so much, I never gave you human motives, I thought you were a lump of chilled bitek on legs. I see I was wrong, though I still think you are wrong to have built anything as evil as the Alchemist.”
Alkad stiffened. “How do you know about the Alchemist?”
“We can see this universe from the beyond, you know. It’s very faint, but it’s there. I watched the Confederation Navy trying to get people off Garissa before the radiation killed them. I’ve seen the Dorados, too. I even saw you a few times in Tranquillity. Then there are the memories that we tear from each other. Some soul I encountered knew about you. Perhaps it was more than one, I don’t know. I never kept count; you don’t, not when you do that hundreds of times a day. So that’s how I know what you built, although no one knows what it is. And I’m not the only one, Doctor; Capone knows about it too, and quite a few other possessed.”
“Oh, Mother Mary,” Alkad groaned.
“They’ve shouted into the beyond, you see. Promised every soul bodies if they cooperated in finding you.”
“You mean the souls are watching us now?” Voi asked.
Gelai smiled dreamily. “Yes.”
“Fuck!”
Mzu glanced at the penthouse’s door, which was closed on Gelai’s two companions. “How many possessed are on Nyvan?”
“Several thousand. It will belong to us within a week.”
“That doesn’t leave us much time,” Alkad said.
Voi and Eriba were starting to look panic-stricken.
“Forget the Alchemist,” Voi said heatedly. “We must get ourselves outsystem.”
“Yes. But we have a few days grace. That gives us time to be certain about our escape, we can’t afford a mistake now. We’ll charter a ship as we always intended; Opia’s service subsidiary can do that for us. But I don’t think there will be enough time to have the carrier built. Ah well, if it comes to it, we can always load the Alchemist onto a combat wasp.”
“You can fit it on a combat wasp?” Voi was suddenly intrigued. “Just how big is it?”
“You don’t need to know.”
The tall girl scowled.
“Gelai, will you warn us if any of the possessed come close?”
“Yes, Doctor, we’ll do that much. For a couple of days anyway, just while you find a ship. Are you really going to use the Alchemist after all this time?”
“Yes, I am. I’ve never been as sure about it as I am now.”
“I don’t know if I want you to, or not. I can never accept that revenge wrought on such a scale is right. What can it ever achieve except make a few bitter old refugees feel better? But if you don’t use it against Omuta, then someone else will take it from you and fire it at another star. So if it must be fired, then I suppose I’d rather it was Omuta.” Naked distress swarmed over her face. “Funny how we all lose our principles at the end, isn’t it?”
“You haven’t,” Alkad told her. “Killed by the Omutans, thirty years in the beyond, and you would still spare them. The society that can produce you is a miracle. Its destruction was a sin beyond anything our race had committed before.”
“Except perhaps possession.”
Alkad slipped her arms around the distraught girl and hugged her. “It will be all right. Somehow, this dreadful conflict will finish up without us destroying ourselves. Mother Mary wouldn’t condemn us to the beyond forever, you’ll see.”
Gelai broke away to study Mzu’s face. “You think so?”
“Strange as it seems for a semi-atheist, yes. But I know the structure of the universe better than most, I’ve glimpsed order in there, Gelai. There has always been a solution to the problems we’ve posed. Always. This won’t be any different.”
“I’ll help you,” Gelai said. “I really will. We’ll make sure all three of you get off the planet unharmed.”
The oldest human story of all: I never knew what I had until I lost it.
Now, from her penthouse in the Mercedes Hotel, she watched it falling over Harrisburg, a silent cascade as inexorable as it was gentle. The sight made her want to go outside and join the children she could see capering about in the park opposite.
The snow had begun during the night, just after they landed at the spaceport, and hadn’t let up in the seven hours since. Down on the streets tempers were getting shorter as the traffic slowed and the pavements turned slippery with the slush. Ancient municipal mechanoids, backed up by teams of men with shovels, struggled to clear the deep drifts which blockaded the main avenues.
The sight didn’t exactly bode well. If the Tonala nation’s economy was so desperate that they used human labour to clean the streets of their capital . . .
So far Alkad had managed to keep her objective in focus. She was proud of that; after every obstacle thrown in her way she had proved herself resourceful enough to keep the hope alive. Even back on the Tekas she’d thought she would soon be retrieving the Alchemist.
Nyvan had done much to wreck her mood and her confidence. There were starships docked at the orbiting asteroids, and the local astroengineering companies could probably provide her with the equipment she wanted; yet the decay and suspicion native to this world made her doubt. The task was slipping from her grasp once more. Difficulties were piling up against her, and now she had no more fallback positions. They were on their own now: she, Voi, Lodi, and Eriba, with money as their only resource. True to his word, Prince Lambert had taken the Tekas out of orbit as soon as they’d disembarked. He said he was flying to Mondul, it had a strong navy, and he knew people there.
Alkad resisted accessing her time function. Prince Lambert must have made his third ZTT jump by now, and another potential security hazard was no more.
“That’s a new one,” Eriba announced. He was stretched out along the settee, bare feet dangling over the armrest. It meant he could just see the holoscreen on the far wall. A local news show was playing.
“What is?” Alkad asked him. He had been consuming news ever since they arrived, switching between the holoscreen and the communications net’s information cores.
“Tonala has just ordered every border to be closed and sealed. The cabinet claims that New Georgia’s actions are overtly hostile, and other nations can’t be trusted. Apparently, the SD networks are still blasting each other with electronic warfare pulses.”
Alkad grimaced. That clash had been going on when the Tekas arrived. “I wonder how that affects us? Are those the land borders, or are they going to prohibit spaceflight as well?”
“They haven’t said.”
The door chimed as it admitted Voi. She strode into the big living room shrugging out of her thick navy-blue coat and shaking grubby droplets of melted snow on the white carpet. “We’ve got an appointment for two o’clock this afternoon. I told the Industry Ministry we were here to buy defence equipment for the Dorados, and they recommended the Opia company. Lodi ran a check through the local data cores, and they own two asteroid industrial stations along with a starship service subsidiary.”
“That sounds promising,” Alkad said guardedly. She had left all the organization to Voi. The agencies would be looking for her; zipping around town would be asking for trouble. As it was, using the Daphine Kigano passport when they arrived was a risk, but she didn’t have any others prepared.
“Promising? Mary, it’s spot on. What do you want, the Kulu Corporation?”
“I wasn’t criticising.”
“Well it sounded like it.”
Voi had slowly reverted to her original temper during the voyage. Alkad wasn’t sure if the waspy girl was recovering from her father’s death or reacting to it.
“Has Lodi found out if there are any suitable starships for hire?”
“He’s still checking,” Voi said. “So far he’s located over fifty commercial vehicles stranded insystem due to the quarantine. Most of them are docked in low orbit stations and the asteroid ports. He’s running performance comparisons against the requirements you gave us. I just hope he can find us one at a Tonala facility. Did you hear about the border restrictions? They’re even closing down net interface points with the other nations.”
“That’s a minor problem compared to the one we’ll have crewing the ship.”
“What do you mean?”
“Our flight is not the kind of job you normally give mercenaries. I’m not sure money will guarantee loyalty for this mission.”
“Why didn’t you say so, then? Mary, Alkad, how can I help if you keep complaining after the fact? Be more cooperative.”
“I’ll bear it in mind,” Alkad said mildly.
“Is there anything else we should know?”
“I can’t think of anything, but you’ll be the first to be told if I do.”
“All right. Now, I’ve arranged for a car to take us to Opia’s offices. The security company which supplied it is also providing bodyguards. They will be here in an hour.”
“Good thinking,” Eriba said.
“Elementary thinking,” Voi shot back. “We’re foreigners who have arrived in the middle of an Assembly-imposed quarantine. That’s hardly an optimum low-visibility scenario. I want to downgrade our risk to a minimum.”
“Bodyguards ought to help, then,” Alkad said prosaically. “You should go and take a rest before we visit Opia. You haven’t slept since we landed. I’ll need you to be fresh for the negotiations.”
Voi gave a distrustful nod, and went into her bedroom.
Alkad and Eriba exchanged a glance and smiled simultaneously.
“Did she really say low-visibility scenario ?” he asked.
“Sounded like it to me.”
“Mary, that detox therapy was a bad idea.”
“What was she like before?”
“About the same,” he admitted.
Alkad turned back to the window and the snow softening the city skyline.
The door chimed again.
“Did you order something from room service?” she asked Eriba.
“No.” He gave the door a worried look. “Do you think it’s the bodyguards Voi hired?”
“They’re very early, then; and if they’re professional they would datavise us first.” She picked up her shoulder bag and selected one of the devices inside. When she datavised the penthouse’s net processor to access the camera in the corridor outside there was no response. The cut crystal wall lights began to flicker. “Stop!” she told Eriba, who had drawn his laser pistol. “That won’t work against the possessed.”
“Do you think . . .”
He trailed off just as Voi burst back into the lounge. She was gripping a maser carbine tight in her hand.
The penthouse’s entrance door swung open. Three people were standing behind it, their features lost in the darkened corridor.
“Do not come in,” Alkad said loudly. “My weapons will work, even against you.”
“Are you quite sure, Doctor?”
Sections of Alkad’s neural nanonics were dropping out. She datavised a primer code at the small sphere she held in her hand before she lost even that ability. “Fairly sure. Do you want to be the first experimental subject?”
“You haven’t changed; you were always so confident you were right.”
Alkad frowned. It was a female voice, but she couldn’t place it. She didn’t have the processing power left in her neural nanonics to run an audio comparison program. “Do I know you?”
“You used to. May we come in, please? We really aren’t here to harm you.”
Since when did the possessed start saying please? Alkad thought the circumstances out and said: “It only needs one of you to speak. And if you’re not a threat, stop glitching our electronics.”
“That last request is difficult, but we will try.”
Alkad’s neural nanonics started to come back on-line. She quickly re-established full control over the device.
“I’ll call the police,” Voi datavised. “They can send a Tac Squad. The possessed won’t know until it’s too late.”
“No. If they wanted to hurt us, they would have done it by now. I think we’ll hear what she has to say.”
“You shouldn’t expose yourself to a negative personal safety context. You are the only link we have to the Alchemist.”
“Oh, shut up,” Alkad said aloud. “All right, come in.”
The young woman who walked into the penthouse was in her early twenties. Her skin was several shades lighter than Alkad’s, though her hair was jet black, and her face was rounded by a little too much cellulite for her to be pretty; it fixed her expression to one of continual shy resentment. She wore a long tartan-print summer dress, with a kilt-style skirt that had been the fashion on Garissa the year of the genocide.
Alkad ran a visual comparison program search through her memory cells. “Gelai? Gelai, is that really you?”
“My soul, yes,” she said. “Not my body. This is just an illusion, of course.” For a moment the solid mirage vanished, revealing a teenaged Oriental girl with fresh jagged scars on her legs.
“Mother Mary!” Alkad croaked. She’d hoped the tales of torture and atrocity were just Confederation propaganda.
Gelai’s usual profile returned. The flicker of exposure was so fast, it made Alkad’s mind want to believe Gelai’s was the true shape; the abused girl was something decency rejected.
“What happened?” Alkad asked.
“You know her?” Voi demanded indignantly.
“Oh, yes. Gelai was one of my students.”
“Not one of your best, I’m sorry to say.”
“You were doing all right, as I recall.”
“This enhances stress relief nicely,” Voi said. “But you haven’t told us why you’re here.”
“I was killed in the planet-buster attack,” Gelai said. “The university campus was only five hundred kilometres from one of the strikes. The earthquake levelled it. I was in my residence hall when it hit. The thermal flash set half of the building alight. Then the quake arrived; Mary alone knows how powerful it was. I was lucky, I suppose. I died in the first hour. That was reasonably quick. Compared to a lot of them, anyway.”
“I’m so sorry,” Alkad said. She had rarely felt so worthless; confronted by the pitiful evidence of the greatest failure it was possible to have. “I failed you. I failed everybody.”
“At least you were trying,” Gelai said. “I didn’t approve at the time. I took part in all the peace demonstrations. We held vigils outside the continental parliament, sang hymns. But the media said we were cowards and traitors. People actually spat on us in the streets. I kept going, though, kept protesting. I thought if we could just get our government to talk to the Omutans, then the military would stop attacking each other. Mary, how naive.”
“No, Gelai, you weren’t naive, you were brave. If enough of us had stood for that principle, then maybe the government would have tried harder to find a peaceful solution.”
“But they didn’t, did they?”
Alkad traced Gelai’s cheeks with her finger, touching the past she’d thought was so far behind her, the cause of the present. Feeling the ersatz skin was all she needed to know she had been right to do what she’d done thirty years ago. “I was going to protect you. I thought I’d sold my very soul so that you would all be safe. I didn’t care about that. I thought you were worth the sacrifice; all you bright young minds so full of the silliest hopes and proudest ideals. I would have done it, too, for you. Slain Omuta’s star, the biggest crime in the galaxy. And now all that’s left of us are the ones like these.” She waved a hand limply at Voi and Eriba. “Just a few thousand kids living in rocks that mess with their heads. I don’t know which of you suffered the worst fate. At least you had a taste of what our people might have achieved if we’d lived. This new generation are just poor remnants of what they could’ve been.”
Gelai puffed up her lips and stared firmly at the floor. “I wasn’t sure what I was going to do when I came here. Warn you or kill you.”
“And now?”
“I didn’t realize why you were doing it, why you went off to help the military. You were this aloof professor that we were all a bit in awe of, you were so smart. We respected you so much, I never gave you human motives, I thought you were a lump of chilled bitek on legs. I see I was wrong, though I still think you are wrong to have built anything as evil as the Alchemist.”
Alkad stiffened. “How do you know about the Alchemist?”
“We can see this universe from the beyond, you know. It’s very faint, but it’s there. I watched the Confederation Navy trying to get people off Garissa before the radiation killed them. I’ve seen the Dorados, too. I even saw you a few times in Tranquillity. Then there are the memories that we tear from each other. Some soul I encountered knew about you. Perhaps it was more than one, I don’t know. I never kept count; you don’t, not when you do that hundreds of times a day. So that’s how I know what you built, although no one knows what it is. And I’m not the only one, Doctor; Capone knows about it too, and quite a few other possessed.”
“Oh, Mother Mary,” Alkad groaned.
“They’ve shouted into the beyond, you see. Promised every soul bodies if they cooperated in finding you.”
“You mean the souls are watching us now?” Voi asked.
Gelai smiled dreamily. “Yes.”
“Fuck!”
Mzu glanced at the penthouse’s door, which was closed on Gelai’s two companions. “How many possessed are on Nyvan?”
“Several thousand. It will belong to us within a week.”
“That doesn’t leave us much time,” Alkad said.
Voi and Eriba were starting to look panic-stricken.
“Forget the Alchemist,” Voi said heatedly. “We must get ourselves outsystem.”
“Yes. But we have a few days grace. That gives us time to be certain about our escape, we can’t afford a mistake now. We’ll charter a ship as we always intended; Opia’s service subsidiary can do that for us. But I don’t think there will be enough time to have the carrier built. Ah well, if it comes to it, we can always load the Alchemist onto a combat wasp.”
“You can fit it on a combat wasp?” Voi was suddenly intrigued. “Just how big is it?”
“You don’t need to know.”
The tall girl scowled.
“Gelai, will you warn us if any of the possessed come close?”
“Yes, Doctor, we’ll do that much. For a couple of days anyway, just while you find a ship. Are you really going to use the Alchemist after all this time?”
“Yes, I am. I’ve never been as sure about it as I am now.”
“I don’t know if I want you to, or not. I can never accept that revenge wrought on such a scale is right. What can it ever achieve except make a few bitter old refugees feel better? But if you don’t use it against Omuta, then someone else will take it from you and fire it at another star. So if it must be fired, then I suppose I’d rather it was Omuta.” Naked distress swarmed over her face. “Funny how we all lose our principles at the end, isn’t it?”
“You haven’t,” Alkad told her. “Killed by the Omutans, thirty years in the beyond, and you would still spare them. The society that can produce you is a miracle. Its destruction was a sin beyond anything our race had committed before.”
“Except perhaps possession.”
Alkad slipped her arms around the distraught girl and hugged her. “It will be all right. Somehow, this dreadful conflict will finish up without us destroying ourselves. Mother Mary wouldn’t condemn us to the beyond forever, you’ll see.”
Gelai broke away to study Mzu’s face. “You think so?”
“Strange as it seems for a semi-atheist, yes. But I know the structure of the universe better than most, I’ve glimpsed order in there, Gelai. There has always been a solution to the problems we’ve posed. Always. This won’t be any different.”
“I’ll help you,” Gelai said. “I really will. We’ll make sure all three of you get off the planet unharmed.”