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“Thanks. Now even with the asteroid campaign going well, we haven’t got anything like numerical parity with the Confederation’s conventional forces. However, antimatter is a superb force multiplier. If you’ve got some, they’re going to think twice before launching any sort of offensive.”
“Jeeze, you are a fucking marvel. I gotta get this organized with the boys.” He swung his legs over the side of the bed, and started to reconstitute his clothes out of the magic realm where they’d been banished.
“Wait.” She pressed up against his back, arms sliding around to hug. “Don’t go rushing into this half-cocked, Al. We’ve got to think this through. You’re going to have problems with antimatter, it’s vicious stuff. And you don’t help.”
“What do you mean?” he bridled.
“The way your energistic ability gronks out electronics and power circuits, you just can’t afford that with antimatter. Put a possessed anywhere near a confinement system and we’re all going to be watching the last half of the explosion from the beyond. So . . . it will have to be the non-possessed who work with the stuff.”
“Sheesh.” Al scratched his mussed hair, desperately uncertain. His Organization was built along the principle of keeping the non-possessed in line, under his thumb. You had to have some group at the bottom who needed to be watched on a permanent basis, it kept the Organization soldiers busy, gave them a purpose. Made them take orders. But give the non-possessed antimatter . . . that would screw up the balance something chronic. “I ain’t so sure, Jez.”
“It’s not that big a problem. You just have to make sure you’ve got a secure hold over anyone you assign to handle the stuff. Harwood and Leroy can fix that; they can arrange for you to hold their families hostage.”
Al considered it. Hostages might just work. It would take a lot of effort to arrange, and the Organization soldiers would really have to be on the ball. Risky.
“Okay, we’ll give it a shot.”
“Al!” Jezzibella squealed girlishly and started kissing his throat exuberantly.
Al’s half-materialized clothes vanished again.
The chiefs of staff’s office was as extravagant as only senior government figures could get away with; its expensive, handcrafted furniture arranged around a long hardwood table running down the centre. One wall could be made transparent, giving the occupants a view out over the SD tactical operations centre.
Al sat himself down at the head of the table and acknowledged his senior lieutenants with a wave of his hand. There was no smile on his face, a warning that this was strictly business.
“Okay,” he said. “So what’s been happening? Leroy?”
The corpulent manager glanced along the table, a confident expression in place. “I’ve more or less kept to the original pacification schedule we drew up. Eighty-five per cent of the planet is now under our control. There are no industrial or military centres left outside our influence. The administrative structure Harwood has been building up seems to be effective. Nearly twenty per cent of the population is non-possessed, and they’re doing what they’re told.”
“Do we need them?” Silvano Richmann asked Al, not even looking at Leroy.
“Leroy?” Al asked.
“For large urban areas, almost certainly,” Leroy said. “The smaller towns and villages can be kept going with their possessed inhabitants providing a combined energistic operation. But cities still require their utilities to function, you just can’t wish that much shit and general rubbish away. Apparently the possessed cannot create viable food out of inorganic compounds, so the transport network has to be maintained to keep edible supplies flowing in. At the moment that’s just stock from the warehouses. Which means we’ll have to come up with a basic economy of some sort to persuade the farms to keep supplying the cities. The problem with that is, the possessed who are living out in the rural areas aren’t inclined to do too much work, and in any case I haven’t got a clue what we could use for money—counterfeiting is too damn easy for you. We may just have to resort to barter. Another problem is that the possessed cannot manufacture items which have any permanence; once outside the energistic influence they simply revert to their component architecture. So a lot of factories are going to have to be restarted. As for the military arena, non-possessed are unquestionably necessary, but that’s Mickey’s field.”
“Okay, you done good, Leroy,” Al said. “How long before I’m in charge of everything down there?”
“You’re in charge of everything that counts right now. But that last fifteen per cent is going to be a hard slog. A lot of the resistance is coming from the hinterland areas, farm country where they’re pretty individual characters. Tough, too. A lot of them are holed up in the landscape with their hunting weapons. Silvano and I have been putting together hunter teams, but from what we’ve experienced so far it’s going to be a long dirty campaign, on both sides. They know the terrain, our teams don’t; it’s an advantage which almost cancels out the energistic ability.”
Al grunted sardonically. “You mean we gotta fight fair?”
“It’s a level playing field,” Leroy acknowledged. “But we’ll win in the end, that’s inevitable. Just don’t ask me for a timetable.”
“Fine. I want you to keep plugging away at that economy idea. We gotta maintain some kind of functioning society down there.”
“Will do, Al.”
“So, Mickey, how are you holding out?”
Mickey Pileggi scrambled to his feet, sweat glinting on his forehead. “Pretty good, Al. We broke forty-five asteroids with that first action. They’re the big ones, with the most important industrial stations. So now we’ve got three times as many warships as when we started. The rest of the settlements are just going to be a mopping-up operation. There’s nothing out there which can threaten us anymore.”
“You got crews for all these new ships?”
“We’re working on it, Al. It isn’t as easy as the planet. There’s a lot of distance involved here, our communications lines aren’t so hot.”
“Any reaction from the Edenists?”
“Not really. There were some skirmishes with armed voidhawks at three asteroids, we took losses. But no big retaliation attacks.”
“Probably conserving their strength,” Silvano Richmann said. “It’s what I would do.”
Al fixed Mickey with the look (God, the hours he’d spent practising that back in Brooklyn). And he hadn’t lost it, poor old Mickey’s tic started up like he’d thrown a switch. “When we’ve taken over all the ships docked at the asteroids, are we gonna be strong enough to bust the Edenists?”
Mickey’s eyes performed a desperate search for allies. “Maybe.”
“It’s a question of how you want them, Al,” Emmet Mordden said. “I doubt we could ever subdue them, not make them submit to possession, or hand the habitats over to the Organization’s control. You’ll just have to trust me on this, they’re completely different from any kind of people you have ever met before. All of them, even the kids. You might be able to kill them, destroy their habitats. But conquest? I don’t think so.”
Al squeezed his lips together and studied Emmet closely. Emmet was nothing like Mickey; timid, yeah, but he knew his stuff. “So what are you saying?”
“That you’ve got to make a choice.”
“What choice?”
“Whether to go for the antimatter. You see, Edenism has a monopoly on supplying He3 , and that’s the fuel which all the starships and industrial stations run on, as well as the SD platforms, and we all know they have to be kept powered up. Now there’s an awful lot of He3 stored around the New California system, but ultimately it’s going to run out. That means we must go to the source if we want to keep our starships going, and maintain our hold over the planet. Either that or use the alternative.”
“Right,” Al said reasonably. “You’ve been talking to this Nicolai Penovich character, Emmet, is he on the level?”
“As far as I can make out, yeah. He certainly knows a lot about antimatter. I’d say he can take us to this production station of his.”
“We got ships which can handle that?”
Emmet gave an unhappy scowl. “Ships, yeah, no problem now. But, Al, starships and antimatter, it means using a lot of non-possessed to run them. Our energistic power, it’s not good for space warfare, if anything it puts our ships at a disadvantage.”
“I know,” Al said smoothly. “But, shit, we can turn this in our favour if we handle it right. It’ll prove that the non-possessed have got a part in the Organization just as much as anyone. Good publicity. Besides, those boosted guys, they helped out in the asteroids, right?”
“Yes,” Silvano admitted reluctantly. “They’re good.”
“That’s it then,” Al said. “We’ll give our ships a crack at the Edenists, for sure. See if we can snatch the helium mines they got. But in the meantime we take out a sweet little insurance policy. Emmet, start putting together the ships you’ll need. Silvano, I want you and Avvy to work on who’s gonna crew them. I only want you to use non-possessed who are family guys, catch? And before they leave for the station, I want those families up here in Monterey being given the holiday of a lifetime. Shift everyone out of the resort complex, and house them there.”
Silvano produced a greedy smile. “Sure thing, Al, I’m on it.”
Al sat back and watched as they started to implement his instructions. It was all going real smooth, which threw up its own brand of trouble. One which even Jez had overlooked—but then this was one field where he had a shitload more experience than she had. The lieutenants were getting used to wielding power, they were learning how to pull levers. They all had their own territories right now, but pretty soon they’d start to think. And sure as chickens shat eggs, one of them would try for it. He looked around the table and wondered which it would be.
Kiera Salter sat down on the president’s chair in Magellanic Itg’s boardroom and surveyed her new domain. The office was one of the few buildings inside the habitat; a circular, fifteen-storey tower situated at the foot of the northern endcap. Its windows gave her a daunting view down the interior. The shaded browns of the semi-arid desert were directly outside, slowly giving way to the tranquil greens of grassland and forest around the midsection, before finally merging into the rolling grass plains, currently dominated by some vivid pink xenoc plant. Moating that, and forming an acute contrast, was the circumfluous sea; a broad band of near-luminous turquoise shot through with wriggling scintillations. High and serene above it all, the axial light tube poured out a glaring noon-sun radiance. The only incongruity amid the peaceful scene was the dozen or so clouds which glowed a faint red as they drifted through the air.
There was little other evidence of the coup which she had led, one or two small smudges of black smoke, a crashed rent-cop plane in the parkland surrounding a starscraper lobby. Most of the real damage had occurred inside the starscrapers; but the important sections, the industrial stations and spaceport, had sustained only a modest amount of battering.
Her plan had been a good one. Anyone who came into contact with a possessed was immediately taken over, regardless of status. A ripple effect spread out from the seventeenth floor of the Diocca starscraper, slow at first, but gradually gaining strength as the numbers grew. The possessed moved onto the next starscraper.
Rubra warned people of course, told them what to look out for, told them where the possessed were. He directed the rent-cops and the boosted mercenary troops, ambushing the possessed. But good as they were, the troops he had at his disposal were heavily dependent on their hardware. That gave the possessed a lethal advantage. Unless it was as basic as a chemical projectile weapon, technology betrayed them, failing at critical moments, producing false data. He didn’t even attempt to take Valisk’s small squad of assault mechanoids out of storage.
Out on the docking ridges, the polyp hulls of possessed starships began to swell below a shimmer of exotic light patterns, emerging from their convulsions as full-grown hellhawks. Fantastically shaped starships and huge harpies zoomed away from the habitat to challenge the voidhawks and Srinagar frigates that were edging in cautiously. The military ships had pulled back, abandoning their effort to assist the beleaguered population.
Kiera’s authority now extended the length of the habitat, and encompassed a zone a hundred thousand kilometres in diameter outside the shell. All in all, not a bad little fiefdom for an ex-society wife from New Munich. She’d glimpsed it briefly once before, this position, the influence, importance, and respect which authority endowed. It could have been hers for the taking back then; she had the breeding and family money, her husband had the ambition and skill. By rights a cabinet seat awaited, and maybe even the chancellorship (so she dreamed and schemed). But he’d faltered, betrayed by his ambition and lack of patience, making the wrong deals in search of the fast track. A weak failure condemning her to sitting out her empty life in the grand old country house, working studiously for the right charities, pitied and avoided by the social vixens she’d once counted as her closest friends. Dying bitter and resentful.
Well, now Kiera Salter was back, younger and prettier than ever before. And the mistakes and weaknesses of yesteryear were not going to be repeated again. Not ever.
“We finished going through the last starscraper three hours ago,” she told the council she’d assembled (oh-so-carefully selecting most of the members). “Valisk now effectively belongs to us.”
That brought applause and some whistles.
She waited for it to die down. “Bonney, how many non-possessed are left?”
“I’d say a couple of hundred,” the hunter woman said. “They’re hiding out, with Rubra’s help, of course. Tracking them down is going to take a while. But there’s no way for them to get out; I’ll find them eventually.”
“Do they pose any danger?”
“The worst case scenario would be a few acts of sabotage; but considering we can all sense them if they get close enough to us, it would be very short-lived. No, I think the only one who could hurt us now would be Rubra. But I don’t know enough about him and what his capabilities are.”
Everyone turned to look at Dariat. Kiera hadn’t wanted him on the council, but his understanding of affinity and the habitat routines was peerless. They needed his expertise to deal with Rubra. Despite that, she still didn’t consider him a proper possessed; he was crazy, a very ruthless kind of crazy. His agenda was too different from theirs. A fact which to her mind made him a liability, a dangerous one.
“Ultimately, Rubra could annihilate the entire ecosystem,” Dariat said calmly. “He has control over the environmental maintenance and digestive organs; that gives him a great deal of power. Conceivably he could release toxins into the water and food, replace the present atmosphere with pure nitrogen and suffocate us, even vent it out into space. He can turn off the axial light tube and freeze us, or leave it on and cook us. None of that would damage him in the long term; the biosphere can be replanted, and the human population replaced. He cares less for the lives of humans than we do, his only priority is himself. As I told you right at the start, everything else we achieve is completely pointless until he is eliminated. But you didn’t listen.”
“So, shitbrain, why hasn’t he done any of that already?” Stanyon asked contemptuously.
Kiera put a restraining hand on his leg under the table. He was a good deputy for her, his intimidating strength accounting for a great deal of the obedience she was shown; he also made an excellent replacement for Ross Nash in her bed. However, vast intelligence was not one of his qualities.
“Yes,” she said levelly to Dariat. “Why not?”
“Because we have one key element left to restrain him,” Dariat said. “We can kill him. The hellhawks are armed with enough combat wasps to destroy a hundred habitats. We’re in a deterrence situation. If we fight each other openly, we both die.”
“Openly?” Bonney challenged.
“Yes. Right now, he will be conferring with the Edenist Consensus about methods of reversing possession. And as you know, I’m investigating methods of transferring my personality into the neural strata without him blocking it. That way I could assume control of the habitat and eliminate him at the same time.”
Which isn’t exactly the solution I want, Kiera thought.
“So why don’t you just do it?” Stanyon asked. “Shove yourself in there and fight the bastard on his own ground. Don’t you have the balls for it?”
“The neural strata cells will only accept Rubra’s thought routines. If a thought routine is not derived from his own personality pattern it will not function in the neural strata.”
“But you fucked with the routines before.”
“Precisely. I made changes to what was there, I did not replace anything.” Dariat sighed elaborately, resting his head in his hands. “Look, I’ve been working on this problem for nearly thirty years now. Conventional means were utterly useless against him. Then I thought I’d found the answer with affinity enhanced by this energistic ability. I could have used it to modify sections of the neural strata, force the cells to accept my personality routines. I was exploring that angle when that drunk cretin Ross Nash blew our cover. So we went overt and showed Rubra what we can do; fine, but by doing that we threw away our stealth advantage. He is on his guard like never before. I’ve had enough evidence of that over the last ten hours. If I try to convert a chunk of the neural strata ready to accept me, it drops out of the homogeneity architecture, and he does something to the cells’ bioelectric component, too, which kills them instantly. Don’t ask me what—breaks down the natural chemical regulators, or simply electrocutes them with nerve impulse surges. I don’t know! But he’s blocking me every step of the way.”
“All very interesting,” Kiera said coldly. “What we need to know, however, is can you beat him?”
Dariat smiled, his gaze unfocused. “Yes. I’ll beat him, I feel the lady Chi-ri touching me. There will be a way, and I’ll find it eventually.”
The rest of the council exchanged irritated or worried glances; except for Stanyon who merely gave a disgusted groan.
“Can we take it then, that Rubra does not pose any immediate threat?” Kiera asked. She found Dariat’s devotion to the Starbridge religion with its Lords and Ladies of the realms another indication of just how unstable he was.
“Yes,” Dariat said. “He’ll keep up the attrition, of course. Electrocution, servitor housechimps cracking rocks over your skull; and we’ll have to abandon the tubes and starscraper lifts. It’s an annoyance, but we can live through it.”
“Until when?” Hudson Proctor asked. He was an ex-general Kiera had drafted in to her initial coterie to help plan their takeover strategy. “Rubra is in here with us, and the Edenists are outside. Both of them are doing their damnedest to push us back into the beyond. We have to stop that, we must fight back. I’m damned if I’m prepared to sit here and let them win.” He glanced around the table, buoyed by the level of silent support shown by the council.
“Our hellhawks are easily a match for any voidhawk,” Kiera said. “The Edenists cannot get inside Valisk, all they can do is sit at a safe distance and watch. I don’t consider them a problem at all, let alone a threat.”
“The hellhawks might be as good as a voidhawk in a fight, but what’s to make them stay and guard us?”
“Dariat,” Kiera said, irked at having to defer to him again. But he was the one who’d worked out how to keep the hellhawks loyal to Valisk.
“The souls possessing the hellhawks will help us for as long as we want,” Dariat said. “We have something they ultimately want: human bodies. Rubra’s descendants can all use their affinity to converse with Magellanic Itg’s blackhawks. That means the souls can get out of the hellhawks and into those bodies the same way as they got in. During our takeover we captured enough of Rubra’s descendants to provide each hellhawk possessor with a human body. They’re all stored in zero-tau, waiting.”
“Waiting for what?” Hudson Proctor asked. “This is what gets me. I don’t even know why we’re bothering with this discussion in the first place.”
“What do you suggest we should be doing, then?” Kiera asked.
“The blindingly obvious. Let’s just go. Now! We know we can do it; together we have the power to lift Valisk clean out of this universe. We can create our own universe around us; one with new laws, a place where there’s no empty eternity around us, and where we’re safely sealed off from the beyond. We’ll be safe there, from Rubra, from the Edenists, from everybody. Safe and immortal.”
“Quite right,” Kiera said. Most possessed had only been back for a few hours, but already the urge was growing. To run, to hide from the dreadful empty sky. Enclosed Valisk was better than a planet; but Kiera had hated the starscrapers with their windows showing the naked stars, always reminding her of the beyond. Yes, she thought, we will have to leave that sight eventually. But not yet. There were other, older instincts prising at her thoughts. For when Valisk departed to a universe where anything became possible to every individual, the need for leadership would fade away, lost among the dream of eternal sybaritic life into which they would all fall. Kiera Salter would cease to be anything special. Maybe it was inevitable, but there was no need to rush into it. “What about the threat from ourselves?” she asked them, a high note of curiosity in her voice. As if they’d already solved the obvious problem.
“What threat?” Stanyon asked.
“Think about it. How long are we intending to leave this universe for?”
“I wasn’t planning on coming back,” Hudson Proctor said caustically.
“Me neither. But eternity is rather a long time, isn’t it? And those are the terms we’re going to have to start thinking in nowadays.”
“So?” he demanded.
“So how many people are there in Valisk right now? Stanyon?”
“Close to nine hundred thousand.”
“Not quite nine hundred thousand people. And the purpose of life, or the nearest definition I’ll ever make, is to experience. Experience whatever you can for as long as you can.” She gave the councillors a morbid smile. “That isn’t going to change whatever universe we occupy. As it stands, there aren’t enough of us; not if we want to keep providing ourselves with new and different experiences for all of eternity. We have to have variety to keep on generating freshness, otherwise we’ll just be playing variants on a theme for ever. Fifty thousand years of that, and we’ll be so desperate for a change that we’ll even come back here just for the novelty.” She’d won them; she could see and sense the doubt and insecurity fission in their minds.
Hudson Proctor sat back in his chair and favoured her with a languid smile. “Go on, Kiera, you’ve obviously thought this through. What’s the solution?”
“There are two possibilities. First, we use the hellhawks to evacuate ourselves to a terracompatible world and begin the possession campaign all over again. Personally I’d hate to risk that. Srinagar’s warships might not be able to break into Valisk, but if we tried to land on the planet it would be a shooting gallery. Alternatively, we can play it smart and gather people in to us. Valisk can support at least six or seven million, and that’s without our energistic ability enhancing it. Six million should be enough to keep our society alive and fresh.”
“You’re joking. Bring in over five million people?”
“Yes. It’ll take time, but it can be done.”
“Bringing some people in, yes, but so many . . . Surely our population is going to grow anyway?”
“Not by five million it isn’t. We’d have to make permanent pregnancy compulsory for every female for the next ten years. This council might be in command now, but try implementing that and see how long we last.”
“I’m not talking about right now, I’m talking about after. We’ll have children after we leave.”
“Will we? These aren’t our actual bodies, they’d never be our children. The biological imperative isn’t driving us anymore; these bodies are sensory receptors for our consciousness, nothing else. I certainly don’t intend to have any children.”
“All right, even assuming you’re right, and I’m not saying you are, how are you going to get that kind of influx, launch the hellhawks on pirate flights to capture people?”
“No,” she said confidently. “Invite them. You’ve seen the Starbridge tribes. There are the disaffected just like them in every society throughout the Confederation. I know, one of the charities I used to work for helped rehabilitate youngsters who couldn’t cope with modern life. Gather them all together, and you could fill twenty habitats this size.”
“But how? What’s going to make them want to come here, to Valisk?”
“We just have to find the right message, that’s all.”
Even by day, Burley Palace stood aloof from the city of Atherstone; surrounded by extensive parkland at the top of a small rise, it surveyed the sprawling lower districts with a suitably regal detachment. At night the isolation made it positively imperious. Atherstone’s lights turned the motorways, boulevards, and grand squares into a gaudy mother-of-pearl blaze which shimmered as though it were alive. Right in the centre, however, the palace grounds were a lake of midnight darkness. And in the centre of that, Burley Palace shone brighter than it ever did under the noon sun, illuminated by a bracelet of five hundred spotlights. It was visible from almost anywhere in the city.
Ralph Hiltch observed it through the Royal Navy Marine flyer’s sensor suite as they approached. It was a neoclassic building with innumerable wings slotting together at not quite geometrical angles, and five quadrangles enclosing verdant gardens. Even though it was nearly one o’clock in the morning, there were a lot of cars using the long drive which cut through the parkland, headlights creating a near-constant stream of white light. Although highly ornamental, the palace was the genuine centre of government; so given the planet’s current state of alert, the activity was only to be expected.
The pilot brought the flyer down on one of the discreetly positioned rooftop pads. Roche Skark was waiting for Ralph as he came down the airstairs, two bodyguards standing unobtrusively a few metres behind.
“How are you?” the ESA director asked.
Ralph shook his hand. “Still in one piece, sir. Unlike Mortonridge.”
“That’s a nasty case of guilt you’ve got there, Ralph. I hope it’s not clouding your judgement.”
“No, sir. In any case, it isn’t guilt. Just resentment. We nearly had them, we were so close.”
Roche gave the younger operative a sympathetic look. “I know, Ralph. But you drove them out of Pasto, and that’s got to be a colossal achievement. Just think what would have happened if it had fallen to the likes of Annette Ekelund. Mortonridge multiplied by a hundred. And if they’d possessed that many people they wouldn’t have been content to stay put like they are on the peninsula.”
“Yes, sir.”
They walked into the palace.
“This idea the pair of you came up with. Is it workable?” Roche asked.
“I believe so, sir,” Ralph said. “And I appreciate you allowing me to outline it to the Princess myself.” The notion had evolved from several strategy reviews he and Colonel Palmer had held during the occasional lull in the frantic two days of the Mortonridge evacuation. Ralph knew that it contained suggestions which had to be made to the Princess personally. He feared it being diluted by navy staff analysts and tacticians if he routed it through the correct procedural channels. Smooth minds polishing away the raw substance to present a sleek concept, one that was politically acceptable. And that wouldn’t work, nothing short of hundred per cent adherence to the proposal would produce success.
Sometimes when he stood back and observed this obsessional character he’d become he wondered if he wasn’t simply overdosing on arrogance.
“Given the circumstances, it was the least we could do,” Roche Skark said. “As I told you, your efforts have not gone unnoticed.”
Sylvester Geray was waiting for them in the decagonal reception room with its gleaming gold and platinum pillars. The equerry in his perfect uniform gave Ralph’s borrowed marine fatigues a reluctant appraisal, then opened a set of doors.
After the opulence of the state rooms outside, Princess Kirsten’s private office was almost subdued, the kind of quietly refined study a noble landowner would run an estate from. He couldn’t quite make the leap to accepting that the entire Ombey star system was ruled from this room.
He stepped up to the desk, feeling he ought to salute, but knowing it would appear ridiculous; he wasn’t military. The Princess didn’t look much different from her images on the news, a dignified lady who seemed to be locked in perpetual middle age. No amount of discipline was able to stop him checking her face. Sure enough, there was the classic Saldana nose, slender with a downturned end; which was almost her only delicate feature, she had an all-over robustness of a kind which made it impossible ever to imagine her growing into a frail old grandmother.
Princess Kirsten acknowledged him with a generous nod. “Mr Hiltch. In the flesh at last.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Thank you so much for coming. If you’d like to sit down, we can start.”
Ralph took the chair next to Roche Skark, grateful for the illusion of protection his boss gave him. Jannike Dermot was eyeing him with what was almost a sense of amusement. The only other person in the room, apart from the equerry, was Ryle Thorne, who didn’t appear to care about Ralph’s presence one way or the other.
“We’ll bring in Admiral Farquar now,” Kirsten said. She datavised the desk’s processor for a security level one sensenviron conference. The white bubble room emerged to claim them.
Ralph found he was sitting to the right of the admiral, down at the end of the table away from the Princess.
“If you’d like to summarize the current Mortonridge situation for us, Mr Hiltch,” Kirsten said.
“Ma’am. Our principal evacuation operation is now finished. Thanks to the warnings we broadcast, we managed to lift out over eighteen thousand people with the planes and Royal Navy transport flyers. Another sixty thousand drove up the M6 and got out that way before the motorway failed. The sensor satellites show us that there are about eight hundred boats carrying refugees which are heading up to the main continent. Our priority at the moment is to try and take people off the smaller ones, which are desperately overcrowded.”
“Which leaves us with close to two million people stranded in Mortonridge,” Admiral Farquar said. “And not a damn thing we can do about it.”
“We believe most of them are now possessed,” Ralph said. “After all, Ekelund’s people have had two days. And those that aren’t possessed will be by tomorrow. We keep running into this exponential curve. It’s a frightening equation when it’s translated into real life.”
“You’re absolutely sure they are being possessed?” Princess Kirsten asked.
“I’m afraid so, ma’am. Our satellite images are being fudged, of course, right across the peninsula. But we can still use sections of the communications net. The possessed seem to have forgotten or ignored that. The AIs have been pulling what images they can from sensors and cameras. The overall pattern is constant. Non-possessed are tracked down, then systematically hurt until they submit to possession. They’re fairly ruthless about it, though they do seem to be reticent with children. Most of those reaching the evacuation points now are under sixteen.”
“Dear Heaven,” the Princess muttered.
“Any of the possessed trying to get out?” Ryle Thorne asked.
“No, sir,” Ralph said. “They seem to be sticking to the agreement as far as we can tell. The only anomaly at the moment is the weather. There’s a considerable amount of unnatural cloud building up over Mortonridge, it started this morning.”
“Unnatural cloud?” Ryle Thorne inquired.
“Yes, sir. It’s an almost uniform blanket spreading up from the south, which doesn’t appear to be affected by the wind. Oh, and it’s starting to glow red. We believe it could be an additional form of protection from the sensor satellites. If it continues to expand at its current rate, Mortonridge will be completely veiled in another thirty-six hours. After that we’ll only have the sensors hooked into the net, and I don’t believe they’ll overlook them for much longer.”
“A red cloud? Is it poisonous?” Princess Kirsten asked.
“No, ma’am. We flew some drones through it, taking samples. It’s just water vapour. But they’re controlling it somehow.”
“What about its potential as a weapon?”
“I don’t see how it could be used aggressively. The amount of power necessary to generate it is quite impressive, but that’s all. In any case, the border we’ve established at the top of Mortonridge is an effective block. The troops are calling it a firebreak. The SD lasers have cleared a two-kilometre-wide line of scorched earth straight across the neck. We’re combining satellite observation with ground patrols to monitor it. If anything moves out there it’ll be targeted immediately.”
“What happens if the cloud tries to move over?”
“Then we’ll attempt to burn it back with the SD lasers. If that doesn’t work, then we’ll need your authority to launch punitive strikes, ma’am.”
“I see. How will you know how to target these punitive strikes if the red cloud covers all of Mortonridge?”
“Scout teams will have to go in, ma’am.”
“Let us pray the cloud can be halted by the lasers, then.”
“I can see you’re geared up to prevent any attempt at a mass breakout,” Ryle Thorne said. “What have you done to prevent individual possessed sneaking out among the refugees? We all know it only takes one to restart the whole nightmare. And I monitored aspects of the evacuation, it was rather chaotic at times.”
“It was chaotic getting the refugees out, sir,” Ralph said. “But the other end was more straightforward. Everyone was tested to see if they had this energistic effect. We didn’t find anybody. Even if they did manage to get through, the refugees are all being held in isolation. We think the only possessed on Ombey are on Mortonridge.”
“Good,” Princess Kirsten said. “I know Roche Skark has already congratulated you, Mr Hiltch, but I’d like to express my own gratitude for the way you’ve handled this crisis. Your conduct has been exemplary.”
“Thank you, ma’am.”
“It galls me to say it, but I think that Ekelund woman was right. The final outcome isn’t going to be decided here.”
“Excuse me, ma’am, but I told Ekelund I thought that was incorrect, and I still believe that.”
“Go on, Mr Hiltch,” Kirsten told him cordially. “I don’t bite, and I’d dearly love to be proved wrong in this instance. You have an idea?”
“Yes, ma’am. I think just waiting passively for this problem to be resolved somewhere else would be a vast mistake. For our own peace of mind, if nothing else, we have to know that the possessed can be beaten, can be made to give up what they’ve taken. We know zero-tau can force them to abandon the bodies they’ve stolen; and it may be that Kulu or Earth, or somewhere with real top-grade scientific resources, can find a quicker more effective method. But the point is, whatever solution we eventually come up with we still have to get out there on the ground and implement it.”
“So you want to start now?” Admiral Farquar asked.
“The preparation stage, yes, sir. There is a lot of groundwork to be laid first. Colonel Palmer and myself believe the possessed have already made one critical mistake. By possessing everyone left in Mortonridge they have given up their blackmail weapon. They cannot threaten us with a massacre as they did in Exnall, not anymore, because they have no hostages left. There is only us and them now.”
“Ralph, you’ve had firsthand experience of how hard they fight. It would cost us a couple of marines for every four or five possessed we captured. That’s a bad ratio.”
Ralph switched his attention to the Princess, wishing they were out of the sensenviron. He wanted physical eye contact, delivering her the truth of what he believed. “I don’t believe we should use our own marines, sir. Not in the front line. As you say, they would be wiped out. We know the possessed have to be completely overwhelmed before they can be subdued, and those kinds of battles would demoralize the troops long before we made any real inroads.”
“So what do you want to use?” Kirsten asked curiously.
“There is, ma’am, one technology which can function effectively around a possessed, and is also available in the kind of quantities necessary to liberate Mortonridge.”
“Bitek,” Kirsten said quickly, vaguely pleased at making the connection.
“Yes, ma’am.” Ralph made an effort to rein in his surprise. “The Edenists could probably produce some kind of warrior construct which could do the job.”
“There’s even an appropriate DNA sequence which they could employ,” she said, enjoying the game, her thoughts racing ahead, mapping our possibilities. “A Tranquillity serjeant. I’ve accessed sensevises of them. Nasty-looking brutes. And Ione is a cousin of ours, I’m sure acquisition wouldn’t be a problem.”
The rest of the security committee remained silent, startled by her apparent eagerness to discard taboos.
“We would still need a massive conventional army to occupy and hold the land we regained, and support the bitek constructs,” Ralph said cautiously.
“Yes.” The Princess was lost in thought. “You’ve certainly offered a valid proposal, Mr Hiltch. Unfortunately, as I’m sure you are aware, I could not conceivably approach the Edenists with such a request. The political implications of such an alliance would undermine some of the Kingdom’s basic tenets of foreign policy, a policy which has been maintained for centuries.”
“I see, ma’am,” Ralph said stiffly.
“I can’t petition them,” Kirsten said, enjoying herself. “Only King Alastair can do that. So you’d better go and ask my big brother for me, hadn’t you, Mr Hiltch?”
As soon as New California fell to the Capone Organization the Consensus of the thirty habitats orbiting Yosemite started preparing for war. It was a situation which had never before occurred in the five centuries since Edenism was founded. Only Laton had ever threatened them in the past, but he was one man; the staggering pan-Confederation resources they had were adequate to deal with him (so they considered at the time). This was different.
Adamists throughout the Confederation nearly always allowed prejudice to contaminate their thinking towards the Edenist culture. They assumed that as it was both wealthy and cloistered it would be if not decadent, then at least timorous. They were wrong. Edenists prided themselves in their rational approach to all facets of life. They might deplore violence, favouring endless diplomatic negotiations and economic sanctions to any form of conflict, but if there was no alternative, they would fight. And fight with a coldly logical precision which was frightening.
Once the decision was taken, Consensus began the job of coordinating the gas giant’s resources and priorities. The extensive clusters of industrial stations which surrounded each habitat were immediately turned over in their entirety to armaments manufacture. Component production was integrated by Consensus, matching demand to capability within hours, then going on to harmonize final fabrication procedures. Barely four hours after the operation started, the first new combat wasps were emerging from their freshly allocated assembly bays.
After conquering New California itself, Capone began his campaign against the system’s asteroid settlements. Consensus knew then it would only be a matter of time. Yosemite was the source of He3 for the entire system, the strategic high ground.
Perhaps if Capone had ordered an all-out assault on Yosemite as his first action he might have been successful. Instead, taking over the asteroid settlements was a tactical error. It allowed the Consensus precious days to consolidate the gas giant’s defences. Not even Emmet Mordden really grasped the awesome potential of an entire civilization converted to a war footing, especially one with Edenism’s technological resources. How could he? It had never happened before.
Voidhawks hovering seven hundred thousand kilometres above New California’s poles observed the three new squadrons being assembled among the fifty-three asteroids orbiting the planet. Their composition, numbers, and in some cases even the armament specifications were duly noted and relayed to Yosemite. Unknown to the Organization, the voidhawks were not the summation of the Edenist intelligence gathering operation, they simply coordinated the observation. Thousands of stealthed spy sensor globes the size of tomatoes were falling past the asteroids like a constant black snow. All the information they gathered was passed back to the voidhawks through affinity links with their bitek processors. The possessed couldn’t detect affinity, nor was it susceptible to either conventional electronic warfare or the interference by the energistic ability, all of which allowed the spy globes to reveal a minute by minute account of the buildup.
Had anyone in the Organization realized just how detailed the Edenist knowledge was, they would never have dispatched the starships.
Thirty-nine hours after Capone had given the go-ahead to try to capture the Yosemite cloudscoops, two of the three squadrons of ships docked in the asteroids departed. Consensus knew both the vectors of the ships and their arrival time.
Yosemite orbited seven hundred and eighty-one million kilometres from the G5-type star of the New California system. At a hundred and twenty-seven thousand kilometres in diameter it was slightly smaller than Jupiter, although its storm bands lacked the vigour normally associated with such mass; even their coloration was uninspiring, streamers of sienna and caramel meandering among the pristine white upbursts of ammonia crystals.
The thirty Edenist habitats orbited sedately three-quarters of a million kilometres above the equator, their tracks perturbed only by gentle resonances with the eight large innermost moons. It was that radial band where the Consensus had concentrated its new defensive structure. Each of the habitats was englobed by beefed-up Strategic Defence platforms; but given the demonstrated ruthlessness of the attackers, Consensus was attempting to prevent any Organization ships getting near enough to launch a combat wasp salvo.
With the vectors identified and timed, Consensus redeployed twelve thousand of the combat wasps out of the total of three hundred and seventy thousand it had already seeded across the gas giant’s equatorial zone. Their fusion drives ignited for a few minutes, putting them on a loose interception trajectory with the area of space the attackers were likely to emerge in. A hundred of the patrolling voidhawks were moved closer.
“Jeeze, you are a fucking marvel. I gotta get this organized with the boys.” He swung his legs over the side of the bed, and started to reconstitute his clothes out of the magic realm where they’d been banished.
“Wait.” She pressed up against his back, arms sliding around to hug. “Don’t go rushing into this half-cocked, Al. We’ve got to think this through. You’re going to have problems with antimatter, it’s vicious stuff. And you don’t help.”
“What do you mean?” he bridled.
“The way your energistic ability gronks out electronics and power circuits, you just can’t afford that with antimatter. Put a possessed anywhere near a confinement system and we’re all going to be watching the last half of the explosion from the beyond. So . . . it will have to be the non-possessed who work with the stuff.”
“Sheesh.” Al scratched his mussed hair, desperately uncertain. His Organization was built along the principle of keeping the non-possessed in line, under his thumb. You had to have some group at the bottom who needed to be watched on a permanent basis, it kept the Organization soldiers busy, gave them a purpose. Made them take orders. But give the non-possessed antimatter . . . that would screw up the balance something chronic. “I ain’t so sure, Jez.”
“It’s not that big a problem. You just have to make sure you’ve got a secure hold over anyone you assign to handle the stuff. Harwood and Leroy can fix that; they can arrange for you to hold their families hostage.”
Al considered it. Hostages might just work. It would take a lot of effort to arrange, and the Organization soldiers would really have to be on the ball. Risky.
“Okay, we’ll give it a shot.”
“Al!” Jezzibella squealed girlishly and started kissing his throat exuberantly.
Al’s half-materialized clothes vanished again.
The chiefs of staff’s office was as extravagant as only senior government figures could get away with; its expensive, handcrafted furniture arranged around a long hardwood table running down the centre. One wall could be made transparent, giving the occupants a view out over the SD tactical operations centre.
Al sat himself down at the head of the table and acknowledged his senior lieutenants with a wave of his hand. There was no smile on his face, a warning that this was strictly business.
“Okay,” he said. “So what’s been happening? Leroy?”
The corpulent manager glanced along the table, a confident expression in place. “I’ve more or less kept to the original pacification schedule we drew up. Eighty-five per cent of the planet is now under our control. There are no industrial or military centres left outside our influence. The administrative structure Harwood has been building up seems to be effective. Nearly twenty per cent of the population is non-possessed, and they’re doing what they’re told.”
“Do we need them?” Silvano Richmann asked Al, not even looking at Leroy.
“Leroy?” Al asked.
“For large urban areas, almost certainly,” Leroy said. “The smaller towns and villages can be kept going with their possessed inhabitants providing a combined energistic operation. But cities still require their utilities to function, you just can’t wish that much shit and general rubbish away. Apparently the possessed cannot create viable food out of inorganic compounds, so the transport network has to be maintained to keep edible supplies flowing in. At the moment that’s just stock from the warehouses. Which means we’ll have to come up with a basic economy of some sort to persuade the farms to keep supplying the cities. The problem with that is, the possessed who are living out in the rural areas aren’t inclined to do too much work, and in any case I haven’t got a clue what we could use for money—counterfeiting is too damn easy for you. We may just have to resort to barter. Another problem is that the possessed cannot manufacture items which have any permanence; once outside the energistic influence they simply revert to their component architecture. So a lot of factories are going to have to be restarted. As for the military arena, non-possessed are unquestionably necessary, but that’s Mickey’s field.”
“Okay, you done good, Leroy,” Al said. “How long before I’m in charge of everything down there?”
“You’re in charge of everything that counts right now. But that last fifteen per cent is going to be a hard slog. A lot of the resistance is coming from the hinterland areas, farm country where they’re pretty individual characters. Tough, too. A lot of them are holed up in the landscape with their hunting weapons. Silvano and I have been putting together hunter teams, but from what we’ve experienced so far it’s going to be a long dirty campaign, on both sides. They know the terrain, our teams don’t; it’s an advantage which almost cancels out the energistic ability.”
Al grunted sardonically. “You mean we gotta fight fair?”
“It’s a level playing field,” Leroy acknowledged. “But we’ll win in the end, that’s inevitable. Just don’t ask me for a timetable.”
“Fine. I want you to keep plugging away at that economy idea. We gotta maintain some kind of functioning society down there.”
“Will do, Al.”
“So, Mickey, how are you holding out?”
Mickey Pileggi scrambled to his feet, sweat glinting on his forehead. “Pretty good, Al. We broke forty-five asteroids with that first action. They’re the big ones, with the most important industrial stations. So now we’ve got three times as many warships as when we started. The rest of the settlements are just going to be a mopping-up operation. There’s nothing out there which can threaten us anymore.”
“You got crews for all these new ships?”
“We’re working on it, Al. It isn’t as easy as the planet. There’s a lot of distance involved here, our communications lines aren’t so hot.”
“Any reaction from the Edenists?”
“Not really. There were some skirmishes with armed voidhawks at three asteroids, we took losses. But no big retaliation attacks.”
“Probably conserving their strength,” Silvano Richmann said. “It’s what I would do.”
Al fixed Mickey with the look (God, the hours he’d spent practising that back in Brooklyn). And he hadn’t lost it, poor old Mickey’s tic started up like he’d thrown a switch. “When we’ve taken over all the ships docked at the asteroids, are we gonna be strong enough to bust the Edenists?”
Mickey’s eyes performed a desperate search for allies. “Maybe.”
“It’s a question of how you want them, Al,” Emmet Mordden said. “I doubt we could ever subdue them, not make them submit to possession, or hand the habitats over to the Organization’s control. You’ll just have to trust me on this, they’re completely different from any kind of people you have ever met before. All of them, even the kids. You might be able to kill them, destroy their habitats. But conquest? I don’t think so.”
Al squeezed his lips together and studied Emmet closely. Emmet was nothing like Mickey; timid, yeah, but he knew his stuff. “So what are you saying?”
“That you’ve got to make a choice.”
“What choice?”
“Whether to go for the antimatter. You see, Edenism has a monopoly on supplying He3 , and that’s the fuel which all the starships and industrial stations run on, as well as the SD platforms, and we all know they have to be kept powered up. Now there’s an awful lot of He3 stored around the New California system, but ultimately it’s going to run out. That means we must go to the source if we want to keep our starships going, and maintain our hold over the planet. Either that or use the alternative.”
“Right,” Al said reasonably. “You’ve been talking to this Nicolai Penovich character, Emmet, is he on the level?”
“As far as I can make out, yeah. He certainly knows a lot about antimatter. I’d say he can take us to this production station of his.”
“We got ships which can handle that?”
Emmet gave an unhappy scowl. “Ships, yeah, no problem now. But, Al, starships and antimatter, it means using a lot of non-possessed to run them. Our energistic power, it’s not good for space warfare, if anything it puts our ships at a disadvantage.”
“I know,” Al said smoothly. “But, shit, we can turn this in our favour if we handle it right. It’ll prove that the non-possessed have got a part in the Organization just as much as anyone. Good publicity. Besides, those boosted guys, they helped out in the asteroids, right?”
“Yes,” Silvano admitted reluctantly. “They’re good.”
“That’s it then,” Al said. “We’ll give our ships a crack at the Edenists, for sure. See if we can snatch the helium mines they got. But in the meantime we take out a sweet little insurance policy. Emmet, start putting together the ships you’ll need. Silvano, I want you and Avvy to work on who’s gonna crew them. I only want you to use non-possessed who are family guys, catch? And before they leave for the station, I want those families up here in Monterey being given the holiday of a lifetime. Shift everyone out of the resort complex, and house them there.”
Silvano produced a greedy smile. “Sure thing, Al, I’m on it.”
Al sat back and watched as they started to implement his instructions. It was all going real smooth, which threw up its own brand of trouble. One which even Jez had overlooked—but then this was one field where he had a shitload more experience than she had. The lieutenants were getting used to wielding power, they were learning how to pull levers. They all had their own territories right now, but pretty soon they’d start to think. And sure as chickens shat eggs, one of them would try for it. He looked around the table and wondered which it would be.
Kiera Salter sat down on the president’s chair in Magellanic Itg’s boardroom and surveyed her new domain. The office was one of the few buildings inside the habitat; a circular, fifteen-storey tower situated at the foot of the northern endcap. Its windows gave her a daunting view down the interior. The shaded browns of the semi-arid desert were directly outside, slowly giving way to the tranquil greens of grassland and forest around the midsection, before finally merging into the rolling grass plains, currently dominated by some vivid pink xenoc plant. Moating that, and forming an acute contrast, was the circumfluous sea; a broad band of near-luminous turquoise shot through with wriggling scintillations. High and serene above it all, the axial light tube poured out a glaring noon-sun radiance. The only incongruity amid the peaceful scene was the dozen or so clouds which glowed a faint red as they drifted through the air.
There was little other evidence of the coup which she had led, one or two small smudges of black smoke, a crashed rent-cop plane in the parkland surrounding a starscraper lobby. Most of the real damage had occurred inside the starscrapers; but the important sections, the industrial stations and spaceport, had sustained only a modest amount of battering.
Her plan had been a good one. Anyone who came into contact with a possessed was immediately taken over, regardless of status. A ripple effect spread out from the seventeenth floor of the Diocca starscraper, slow at first, but gradually gaining strength as the numbers grew. The possessed moved onto the next starscraper.
Rubra warned people of course, told them what to look out for, told them where the possessed were. He directed the rent-cops and the boosted mercenary troops, ambushing the possessed. But good as they were, the troops he had at his disposal were heavily dependent on their hardware. That gave the possessed a lethal advantage. Unless it was as basic as a chemical projectile weapon, technology betrayed them, failing at critical moments, producing false data. He didn’t even attempt to take Valisk’s small squad of assault mechanoids out of storage.
Out on the docking ridges, the polyp hulls of possessed starships began to swell below a shimmer of exotic light patterns, emerging from their convulsions as full-grown hellhawks. Fantastically shaped starships and huge harpies zoomed away from the habitat to challenge the voidhawks and Srinagar frigates that were edging in cautiously. The military ships had pulled back, abandoning their effort to assist the beleaguered population.
Kiera’s authority now extended the length of the habitat, and encompassed a zone a hundred thousand kilometres in diameter outside the shell. All in all, not a bad little fiefdom for an ex-society wife from New Munich. She’d glimpsed it briefly once before, this position, the influence, importance, and respect which authority endowed. It could have been hers for the taking back then; she had the breeding and family money, her husband had the ambition and skill. By rights a cabinet seat awaited, and maybe even the chancellorship (so she dreamed and schemed). But he’d faltered, betrayed by his ambition and lack of patience, making the wrong deals in search of the fast track. A weak failure condemning her to sitting out her empty life in the grand old country house, working studiously for the right charities, pitied and avoided by the social vixens she’d once counted as her closest friends. Dying bitter and resentful.
Well, now Kiera Salter was back, younger and prettier than ever before. And the mistakes and weaknesses of yesteryear were not going to be repeated again. Not ever.
“We finished going through the last starscraper three hours ago,” she told the council she’d assembled (oh-so-carefully selecting most of the members). “Valisk now effectively belongs to us.”
That brought applause and some whistles.
She waited for it to die down. “Bonney, how many non-possessed are left?”
“I’d say a couple of hundred,” the hunter woman said. “They’re hiding out, with Rubra’s help, of course. Tracking them down is going to take a while. But there’s no way for them to get out; I’ll find them eventually.”
“Do they pose any danger?”
“The worst case scenario would be a few acts of sabotage; but considering we can all sense them if they get close enough to us, it would be very short-lived. No, I think the only one who could hurt us now would be Rubra. But I don’t know enough about him and what his capabilities are.”
Everyone turned to look at Dariat. Kiera hadn’t wanted him on the council, but his understanding of affinity and the habitat routines was peerless. They needed his expertise to deal with Rubra. Despite that, she still didn’t consider him a proper possessed; he was crazy, a very ruthless kind of crazy. His agenda was too different from theirs. A fact which to her mind made him a liability, a dangerous one.
“Ultimately, Rubra could annihilate the entire ecosystem,” Dariat said calmly. “He has control over the environmental maintenance and digestive organs; that gives him a great deal of power. Conceivably he could release toxins into the water and food, replace the present atmosphere with pure nitrogen and suffocate us, even vent it out into space. He can turn off the axial light tube and freeze us, or leave it on and cook us. None of that would damage him in the long term; the biosphere can be replanted, and the human population replaced. He cares less for the lives of humans than we do, his only priority is himself. As I told you right at the start, everything else we achieve is completely pointless until he is eliminated. But you didn’t listen.”
“So, shitbrain, why hasn’t he done any of that already?” Stanyon asked contemptuously.
Kiera put a restraining hand on his leg under the table. He was a good deputy for her, his intimidating strength accounting for a great deal of the obedience she was shown; he also made an excellent replacement for Ross Nash in her bed. However, vast intelligence was not one of his qualities.
“Yes,” she said levelly to Dariat. “Why not?”
“Because we have one key element left to restrain him,” Dariat said. “We can kill him. The hellhawks are armed with enough combat wasps to destroy a hundred habitats. We’re in a deterrence situation. If we fight each other openly, we both die.”
“Openly?” Bonney challenged.
“Yes. Right now, he will be conferring with the Edenist Consensus about methods of reversing possession. And as you know, I’m investigating methods of transferring my personality into the neural strata without him blocking it. That way I could assume control of the habitat and eliminate him at the same time.”
Which isn’t exactly the solution I want, Kiera thought.
“So why don’t you just do it?” Stanyon asked. “Shove yourself in there and fight the bastard on his own ground. Don’t you have the balls for it?”
“The neural strata cells will only accept Rubra’s thought routines. If a thought routine is not derived from his own personality pattern it will not function in the neural strata.”
“But you fucked with the routines before.”
“Precisely. I made changes to what was there, I did not replace anything.” Dariat sighed elaborately, resting his head in his hands. “Look, I’ve been working on this problem for nearly thirty years now. Conventional means were utterly useless against him. Then I thought I’d found the answer with affinity enhanced by this energistic ability. I could have used it to modify sections of the neural strata, force the cells to accept my personality routines. I was exploring that angle when that drunk cretin Ross Nash blew our cover. So we went overt and showed Rubra what we can do; fine, but by doing that we threw away our stealth advantage. He is on his guard like never before. I’ve had enough evidence of that over the last ten hours. If I try to convert a chunk of the neural strata ready to accept me, it drops out of the homogeneity architecture, and he does something to the cells’ bioelectric component, too, which kills them instantly. Don’t ask me what—breaks down the natural chemical regulators, or simply electrocutes them with nerve impulse surges. I don’t know! But he’s blocking me every step of the way.”
“All very interesting,” Kiera said coldly. “What we need to know, however, is can you beat him?”
Dariat smiled, his gaze unfocused. “Yes. I’ll beat him, I feel the lady Chi-ri touching me. There will be a way, and I’ll find it eventually.”
The rest of the council exchanged irritated or worried glances; except for Stanyon who merely gave a disgusted groan.
“Can we take it then, that Rubra does not pose any immediate threat?” Kiera asked. She found Dariat’s devotion to the Starbridge religion with its Lords and Ladies of the realms another indication of just how unstable he was.
“Yes,” Dariat said. “He’ll keep up the attrition, of course. Electrocution, servitor housechimps cracking rocks over your skull; and we’ll have to abandon the tubes and starscraper lifts. It’s an annoyance, but we can live through it.”
“Until when?” Hudson Proctor asked. He was an ex-general Kiera had drafted in to her initial coterie to help plan their takeover strategy. “Rubra is in here with us, and the Edenists are outside. Both of them are doing their damnedest to push us back into the beyond. We have to stop that, we must fight back. I’m damned if I’m prepared to sit here and let them win.” He glanced around the table, buoyed by the level of silent support shown by the council.
“Our hellhawks are easily a match for any voidhawk,” Kiera said. “The Edenists cannot get inside Valisk, all they can do is sit at a safe distance and watch. I don’t consider them a problem at all, let alone a threat.”
“The hellhawks might be as good as a voidhawk in a fight, but what’s to make them stay and guard us?”
“Dariat,” Kiera said, irked at having to defer to him again. But he was the one who’d worked out how to keep the hellhawks loyal to Valisk.
“The souls possessing the hellhawks will help us for as long as we want,” Dariat said. “We have something they ultimately want: human bodies. Rubra’s descendants can all use their affinity to converse with Magellanic Itg’s blackhawks. That means the souls can get out of the hellhawks and into those bodies the same way as they got in. During our takeover we captured enough of Rubra’s descendants to provide each hellhawk possessor with a human body. They’re all stored in zero-tau, waiting.”
“Waiting for what?” Hudson Proctor asked. “This is what gets me. I don’t even know why we’re bothering with this discussion in the first place.”
“What do you suggest we should be doing, then?” Kiera asked.
“The blindingly obvious. Let’s just go. Now! We know we can do it; together we have the power to lift Valisk clean out of this universe. We can create our own universe around us; one with new laws, a place where there’s no empty eternity around us, and where we’re safely sealed off from the beyond. We’ll be safe there, from Rubra, from the Edenists, from everybody. Safe and immortal.”
“Quite right,” Kiera said. Most possessed had only been back for a few hours, but already the urge was growing. To run, to hide from the dreadful empty sky. Enclosed Valisk was better than a planet; but Kiera had hated the starscrapers with their windows showing the naked stars, always reminding her of the beyond. Yes, she thought, we will have to leave that sight eventually. But not yet. There were other, older instincts prising at her thoughts. For when Valisk departed to a universe where anything became possible to every individual, the need for leadership would fade away, lost among the dream of eternal sybaritic life into which they would all fall. Kiera Salter would cease to be anything special. Maybe it was inevitable, but there was no need to rush into it. “What about the threat from ourselves?” she asked them, a high note of curiosity in her voice. As if they’d already solved the obvious problem.
“What threat?” Stanyon asked.
“Think about it. How long are we intending to leave this universe for?”
“I wasn’t planning on coming back,” Hudson Proctor said caustically.
“Me neither. But eternity is rather a long time, isn’t it? And those are the terms we’re going to have to start thinking in nowadays.”
“So?” he demanded.
“So how many people are there in Valisk right now? Stanyon?”
“Close to nine hundred thousand.”
“Not quite nine hundred thousand people. And the purpose of life, or the nearest definition I’ll ever make, is to experience. Experience whatever you can for as long as you can.” She gave the councillors a morbid smile. “That isn’t going to change whatever universe we occupy. As it stands, there aren’t enough of us; not if we want to keep providing ourselves with new and different experiences for all of eternity. We have to have variety to keep on generating freshness, otherwise we’ll just be playing variants on a theme for ever. Fifty thousand years of that, and we’ll be so desperate for a change that we’ll even come back here just for the novelty.” She’d won them; she could see and sense the doubt and insecurity fission in their minds.
Hudson Proctor sat back in his chair and favoured her with a languid smile. “Go on, Kiera, you’ve obviously thought this through. What’s the solution?”
“There are two possibilities. First, we use the hellhawks to evacuate ourselves to a terracompatible world and begin the possession campaign all over again. Personally I’d hate to risk that. Srinagar’s warships might not be able to break into Valisk, but if we tried to land on the planet it would be a shooting gallery. Alternatively, we can play it smart and gather people in to us. Valisk can support at least six or seven million, and that’s without our energistic ability enhancing it. Six million should be enough to keep our society alive and fresh.”
“You’re joking. Bring in over five million people?”
“Yes. It’ll take time, but it can be done.”
“Bringing some people in, yes, but so many . . . Surely our population is going to grow anyway?”
“Not by five million it isn’t. We’d have to make permanent pregnancy compulsory for every female for the next ten years. This council might be in command now, but try implementing that and see how long we last.”
“I’m not talking about right now, I’m talking about after. We’ll have children after we leave.”
“Will we? These aren’t our actual bodies, they’d never be our children. The biological imperative isn’t driving us anymore; these bodies are sensory receptors for our consciousness, nothing else. I certainly don’t intend to have any children.”
“All right, even assuming you’re right, and I’m not saying you are, how are you going to get that kind of influx, launch the hellhawks on pirate flights to capture people?”
“No,” she said confidently. “Invite them. You’ve seen the Starbridge tribes. There are the disaffected just like them in every society throughout the Confederation. I know, one of the charities I used to work for helped rehabilitate youngsters who couldn’t cope with modern life. Gather them all together, and you could fill twenty habitats this size.”
“But how? What’s going to make them want to come here, to Valisk?”
“We just have to find the right message, that’s all.”
Even by day, Burley Palace stood aloof from the city of Atherstone; surrounded by extensive parkland at the top of a small rise, it surveyed the sprawling lower districts with a suitably regal detachment. At night the isolation made it positively imperious. Atherstone’s lights turned the motorways, boulevards, and grand squares into a gaudy mother-of-pearl blaze which shimmered as though it were alive. Right in the centre, however, the palace grounds were a lake of midnight darkness. And in the centre of that, Burley Palace shone brighter than it ever did under the noon sun, illuminated by a bracelet of five hundred spotlights. It was visible from almost anywhere in the city.
Ralph Hiltch observed it through the Royal Navy Marine flyer’s sensor suite as they approached. It was a neoclassic building with innumerable wings slotting together at not quite geometrical angles, and five quadrangles enclosing verdant gardens. Even though it was nearly one o’clock in the morning, there were a lot of cars using the long drive which cut through the parkland, headlights creating a near-constant stream of white light. Although highly ornamental, the palace was the genuine centre of government; so given the planet’s current state of alert, the activity was only to be expected.
The pilot brought the flyer down on one of the discreetly positioned rooftop pads. Roche Skark was waiting for Ralph as he came down the airstairs, two bodyguards standing unobtrusively a few metres behind.
“How are you?” the ESA director asked.
Ralph shook his hand. “Still in one piece, sir. Unlike Mortonridge.”
“That’s a nasty case of guilt you’ve got there, Ralph. I hope it’s not clouding your judgement.”
“No, sir. In any case, it isn’t guilt. Just resentment. We nearly had them, we were so close.”
Roche gave the younger operative a sympathetic look. “I know, Ralph. But you drove them out of Pasto, and that’s got to be a colossal achievement. Just think what would have happened if it had fallen to the likes of Annette Ekelund. Mortonridge multiplied by a hundred. And if they’d possessed that many people they wouldn’t have been content to stay put like they are on the peninsula.”
“Yes, sir.”
They walked into the palace.
“This idea the pair of you came up with. Is it workable?” Roche asked.
“I believe so, sir,” Ralph said. “And I appreciate you allowing me to outline it to the Princess myself.” The notion had evolved from several strategy reviews he and Colonel Palmer had held during the occasional lull in the frantic two days of the Mortonridge evacuation. Ralph knew that it contained suggestions which had to be made to the Princess personally. He feared it being diluted by navy staff analysts and tacticians if he routed it through the correct procedural channels. Smooth minds polishing away the raw substance to present a sleek concept, one that was politically acceptable. And that wouldn’t work, nothing short of hundred per cent adherence to the proposal would produce success.
Sometimes when he stood back and observed this obsessional character he’d become he wondered if he wasn’t simply overdosing on arrogance.
“Given the circumstances, it was the least we could do,” Roche Skark said. “As I told you, your efforts have not gone unnoticed.”
Sylvester Geray was waiting for them in the decagonal reception room with its gleaming gold and platinum pillars. The equerry in his perfect uniform gave Ralph’s borrowed marine fatigues a reluctant appraisal, then opened a set of doors.
After the opulence of the state rooms outside, Princess Kirsten’s private office was almost subdued, the kind of quietly refined study a noble landowner would run an estate from. He couldn’t quite make the leap to accepting that the entire Ombey star system was ruled from this room.
He stepped up to the desk, feeling he ought to salute, but knowing it would appear ridiculous; he wasn’t military. The Princess didn’t look much different from her images on the news, a dignified lady who seemed to be locked in perpetual middle age. No amount of discipline was able to stop him checking her face. Sure enough, there was the classic Saldana nose, slender with a downturned end; which was almost her only delicate feature, she had an all-over robustness of a kind which made it impossible ever to imagine her growing into a frail old grandmother.
Princess Kirsten acknowledged him with a generous nod. “Mr Hiltch. In the flesh at last.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Thank you so much for coming. If you’d like to sit down, we can start.”
Ralph took the chair next to Roche Skark, grateful for the illusion of protection his boss gave him. Jannike Dermot was eyeing him with what was almost a sense of amusement. The only other person in the room, apart from the equerry, was Ryle Thorne, who didn’t appear to care about Ralph’s presence one way or the other.
“We’ll bring in Admiral Farquar now,” Kirsten said. She datavised the desk’s processor for a security level one sensenviron conference. The white bubble room emerged to claim them.
Ralph found he was sitting to the right of the admiral, down at the end of the table away from the Princess.
“If you’d like to summarize the current Mortonridge situation for us, Mr Hiltch,” Kirsten said.
“Ma’am. Our principal evacuation operation is now finished. Thanks to the warnings we broadcast, we managed to lift out over eighteen thousand people with the planes and Royal Navy transport flyers. Another sixty thousand drove up the M6 and got out that way before the motorway failed. The sensor satellites show us that there are about eight hundred boats carrying refugees which are heading up to the main continent. Our priority at the moment is to try and take people off the smaller ones, which are desperately overcrowded.”
“Which leaves us with close to two million people stranded in Mortonridge,” Admiral Farquar said. “And not a damn thing we can do about it.”
“We believe most of them are now possessed,” Ralph said. “After all, Ekelund’s people have had two days. And those that aren’t possessed will be by tomorrow. We keep running into this exponential curve. It’s a frightening equation when it’s translated into real life.”
“You’re absolutely sure they are being possessed?” Princess Kirsten asked.
“I’m afraid so, ma’am. Our satellite images are being fudged, of course, right across the peninsula. But we can still use sections of the communications net. The possessed seem to have forgotten or ignored that. The AIs have been pulling what images they can from sensors and cameras. The overall pattern is constant. Non-possessed are tracked down, then systematically hurt until they submit to possession. They’re fairly ruthless about it, though they do seem to be reticent with children. Most of those reaching the evacuation points now are under sixteen.”
“Dear Heaven,” the Princess muttered.
“Any of the possessed trying to get out?” Ryle Thorne asked.
“No, sir,” Ralph said. “They seem to be sticking to the agreement as far as we can tell. The only anomaly at the moment is the weather. There’s a considerable amount of unnatural cloud building up over Mortonridge, it started this morning.”
“Unnatural cloud?” Ryle Thorne inquired.
“Yes, sir. It’s an almost uniform blanket spreading up from the south, which doesn’t appear to be affected by the wind. Oh, and it’s starting to glow red. We believe it could be an additional form of protection from the sensor satellites. If it continues to expand at its current rate, Mortonridge will be completely veiled in another thirty-six hours. After that we’ll only have the sensors hooked into the net, and I don’t believe they’ll overlook them for much longer.”
“A red cloud? Is it poisonous?” Princess Kirsten asked.
“No, ma’am. We flew some drones through it, taking samples. It’s just water vapour. But they’re controlling it somehow.”
“What about its potential as a weapon?”
“I don’t see how it could be used aggressively. The amount of power necessary to generate it is quite impressive, but that’s all. In any case, the border we’ve established at the top of Mortonridge is an effective block. The troops are calling it a firebreak. The SD lasers have cleared a two-kilometre-wide line of scorched earth straight across the neck. We’re combining satellite observation with ground patrols to monitor it. If anything moves out there it’ll be targeted immediately.”
“What happens if the cloud tries to move over?”
“Then we’ll attempt to burn it back with the SD lasers. If that doesn’t work, then we’ll need your authority to launch punitive strikes, ma’am.”
“I see. How will you know how to target these punitive strikes if the red cloud covers all of Mortonridge?”
“Scout teams will have to go in, ma’am.”
“Let us pray the cloud can be halted by the lasers, then.”
“I can see you’re geared up to prevent any attempt at a mass breakout,” Ryle Thorne said. “What have you done to prevent individual possessed sneaking out among the refugees? We all know it only takes one to restart the whole nightmare. And I monitored aspects of the evacuation, it was rather chaotic at times.”
“It was chaotic getting the refugees out, sir,” Ralph said. “But the other end was more straightforward. Everyone was tested to see if they had this energistic effect. We didn’t find anybody. Even if they did manage to get through, the refugees are all being held in isolation. We think the only possessed on Ombey are on Mortonridge.”
“Good,” Princess Kirsten said. “I know Roche Skark has already congratulated you, Mr Hiltch, but I’d like to express my own gratitude for the way you’ve handled this crisis. Your conduct has been exemplary.”
“Thank you, ma’am.”
“It galls me to say it, but I think that Ekelund woman was right. The final outcome isn’t going to be decided here.”
“Excuse me, ma’am, but I told Ekelund I thought that was incorrect, and I still believe that.”
“Go on, Mr Hiltch,” Kirsten told him cordially. “I don’t bite, and I’d dearly love to be proved wrong in this instance. You have an idea?”
“Yes, ma’am. I think just waiting passively for this problem to be resolved somewhere else would be a vast mistake. For our own peace of mind, if nothing else, we have to know that the possessed can be beaten, can be made to give up what they’ve taken. We know zero-tau can force them to abandon the bodies they’ve stolen; and it may be that Kulu or Earth, or somewhere with real top-grade scientific resources, can find a quicker more effective method. But the point is, whatever solution we eventually come up with we still have to get out there on the ground and implement it.”
“So you want to start now?” Admiral Farquar asked.
“The preparation stage, yes, sir. There is a lot of groundwork to be laid first. Colonel Palmer and myself believe the possessed have already made one critical mistake. By possessing everyone left in Mortonridge they have given up their blackmail weapon. They cannot threaten us with a massacre as they did in Exnall, not anymore, because they have no hostages left. There is only us and them now.”
“Ralph, you’ve had firsthand experience of how hard they fight. It would cost us a couple of marines for every four or five possessed we captured. That’s a bad ratio.”
Ralph switched his attention to the Princess, wishing they were out of the sensenviron. He wanted physical eye contact, delivering her the truth of what he believed. “I don’t believe we should use our own marines, sir. Not in the front line. As you say, they would be wiped out. We know the possessed have to be completely overwhelmed before they can be subdued, and those kinds of battles would demoralize the troops long before we made any real inroads.”
“So what do you want to use?” Kirsten asked curiously.
“There is, ma’am, one technology which can function effectively around a possessed, and is also available in the kind of quantities necessary to liberate Mortonridge.”
“Bitek,” Kirsten said quickly, vaguely pleased at making the connection.
“Yes, ma’am.” Ralph made an effort to rein in his surprise. “The Edenists could probably produce some kind of warrior construct which could do the job.”
“There’s even an appropriate DNA sequence which they could employ,” she said, enjoying the game, her thoughts racing ahead, mapping our possibilities. “A Tranquillity serjeant. I’ve accessed sensevises of them. Nasty-looking brutes. And Ione is a cousin of ours, I’m sure acquisition wouldn’t be a problem.”
The rest of the security committee remained silent, startled by her apparent eagerness to discard taboos.
“We would still need a massive conventional army to occupy and hold the land we regained, and support the bitek constructs,” Ralph said cautiously.
“Yes.” The Princess was lost in thought. “You’ve certainly offered a valid proposal, Mr Hiltch. Unfortunately, as I’m sure you are aware, I could not conceivably approach the Edenists with such a request. The political implications of such an alliance would undermine some of the Kingdom’s basic tenets of foreign policy, a policy which has been maintained for centuries.”
“I see, ma’am,” Ralph said stiffly.
“I can’t petition them,” Kirsten said, enjoying herself. “Only King Alastair can do that. So you’d better go and ask my big brother for me, hadn’t you, Mr Hiltch?”
As soon as New California fell to the Capone Organization the Consensus of the thirty habitats orbiting Yosemite started preparing for war. It was a situation which had never before occurred in the five centuries since Edenism was founded. Only Laton had ever threatened them in the past, but he was one man; the staggering pan-Confederation resources they had were adequate to deal with him (so they considered at the time). This was different.
Adamists throughout the Confederation nearly always allowed prejudice to contaminate their thinking towards the Edenist culture. They assumed that as it was both wealthy and cloistered it would be if not decadent, then at least timorous. They were wrong. Edenists prided themselves in their rational approach to all facets of life. They might deplore violence, favouring endless diplomatic negotiations and economic sanctions to any form of conflict, but if there was no alternative, they would fight. And fight with a coldly logical precision which was frightening.
Once the decision was taken, Consensus began the job of coordinating the gas giant’s resources and priorities. The extensive clusters of industrial stations which surrounded each habitat were immediately turned over in their entirety to armaments manufacture. Component production was integrated by Consensus, matching demand to capability within hours, then going on to harmonize final fabrication procedures. Barely four hours after the operation started, the first new combat wasps were emerging from their freshly allocated assembly bays.
After conquering New California itself, Capone began his campaign against the system’s asteroid settlements. Consensus knew then it would only be a matter of time. Yosemite was the source of He3 for the entire system, the strategic high ground.
Perhaps if Capone had ordered an all-out assault on Yosemite as his first action he might have been successful. Instead, taking over the asteroid settlements was a tactical error. It allowed the Consensus precious days to consolidate the gas giant’s defences. Not even Emmet Mordden really grasped the awesome potential of an entire civilization converted to a war footing, especially one with Edenism’s technological resources. How could he? It had never happened before.
Voidhawks hovering seven hundred thousand kilometres above New California’s poles observed the three new squadrons being assembled among the fifty-three asteroids orbiting the planet. Their composition, numbers, and in some cases even the armament specifications were duly noted and relayed to Yosemite. Unknown to the Organization, the voidhawks were not the summation of the Edenist intelligence gathering operation, they simply coordinated the observation. Thousands of stealthed spy sensor globes the size of tomatoes were falling past the asteroids like a constant black snow. All the information they gathered was passed back to the voidhawks through affinity links with their bitek processors. The possessed couldn’t detect affinity, nor was it susceptible to either conventional electronic warfare or the interference by the energistic ability, all of which allowed the spy globes to reveal a minute by minute account of the buildup.
Had anyone in the Organization realized just how detailed the Edenist knowledge was, they would never have dispatched the starships.
Thirty-nine hours after Capone had given the go-ahead to try to capture the Yosemite cloudscoops, two of the three squadrons of ships docked in the asteroids departed. Consensus knew both the vectors of the ships and their arrival time.
Yosemite orbited seven hundred and eighty-one million kilometres from the G5-type star of the New California system. At a hundred and twenty-seven thousand kilometres in diameter it was slightly smaller than Jupiter, although its storm bands lacked the vigour normally associated with such mass; even their coloration was uninspiring, streamers of sienna and caramel meandering among the pristine white upbursts of ammonia crystals.
The thirty Edenist habitats orbited sedately three-quarters of a million kilometres above the equator, their tracks perturbed only by gentle resonances with the eight large innermost moons. It was that radial band where the Consensus had concentrated its new defensive structure. Each of the habitats was englobed by beefed-up Strategic Defence platforms; but given the demonstrated ruthlessness of the attackers, Consensus was attempting to prevent any Organization ships getting near enough to launch a combat wasp salvo.
With the vectors identified and timed, Consensus redeployed twelve thousand of the combat wasps out of the total of three hundred and seventy thousand it had already seeded across the gas giant’s equatorial zone. Their fusion drives ignited for a few minutes, putting them on a loose interception trajectory with the area of space the attackers were likely to emerge in. A hundred of the patrolling voidhawks were moved closer.