The Naked God

by Peter F. Hamilton

  “Found them,” North America datavised.

  “Who?”

  “The possessed Quinn Dexter left behind in New York. Just to make you more insufferable, you were right. He went for the Light Bringer sect.”

  “Ah.” The Labradors found the stick, one of them clamped it in his jaw.

  Western Europe slapped his hands on his thighs, and the dogs started to bound back to him. “How bad is it?”

  “Not too bad, I believe. I lost the High Magus, of course. I guess he suicided. But there are several actives left. Two of them called me before the energistic effect glitched their neural nanonics. They’re taking over the covens one at a time. Eight down already, including the arcology headquarters in the Leicester skyscraper.”

  “Numbers?”

  “That’s the good news. About ten possessed to each coven. The moron acolytes are actually welcoming them, and doing as they’re told. Their new masters are just sitting tight, and holding some pretty gross orgies. They’ve made sure each coven’s electronics are switched off, not that many of their units were ever interfaced with the net anyway.”

  “I knew it. They’re moving with a purpose.”

  “Definite infiltration tactics. They’ve got their foothold, now they’re waiting.”

  “If they’re spreading to each dome, then some of them must be on the move.”

  “Yes, I know. And they’ve had it easy in all the confusion. With all those riots resulting from the vac-train shutdown there’s been a lot of vandalism; that makes it tough for the AI to locate glitches.”

  “So when are you going to hit the covens?”

  “Good question. I wanted your opinion on that. If I hit them now, then whoever’s moving about will be warned and go to ground. That’ll leave New York vulnerable.”

  Western Europe took the stick from the Labrador, and paused. “Yes, but if you wait until every coven is taken over, you’ll have a lot of the bastards to deal with. Someone will inevitably get through the police cordons, and you’ll be back in the same leaky boat. How many covens can you monitor in real time?”

  “All of them. That’s already being done. Those I have no direct access to are being watched by agents.”

  “Then you’ve got it covered. Wait until a group of possessed shows up at a new coven, then take them all out together.”

  “And if there’s more than one group moving round?”

  “I’m paranoid, but am I paranoid enough. What sort of assault were you planning?”

  “GISD tactical team, with shoot to kill orders. Wipe each coven out, I don’t want prisoners to interrogate. Fletcher is still cooperating with Halo’s science teams.”

  “Given the stakes, here, I’d suggest using a gamma pulse against them first. You’ll get peripheral casualties, but it’ll be nothing like as bad as an SD strike. Send the tactical teams in to secure and mop up afterwards.”

  “All right. I can live with that.”

  “We might even get a vote of confidence from our illustrious colleagues.”

  “Not even this century’s geneering can make pigs fly yet. I’ll get the assault organized for three hundred hours EST.”

  “If you need any help, just whistle.” Western Europe smiled happily, and slung the stick high into the air.

  Not even B7 could block news of events inside New York from spilling out across the global net. Speculation had been hot and intense ever since the arcology’s vac-trains had been shut down after the Dome One “incident.” Several riots had been captured by rover reporters; two of whom had been badly injured during the coverage, adding extra spice to the sensevise. Then eleven hours later, the North American Commissioner had appeared before the press once more to announce the investigation had been completed, and confirm the incident was not caused by the possessed.

  It was in fact a professional assassination carried out in Grand Central Station involving a sophisticated weapons implant and a chameleon suit.

  Business rivals of the deceased Bud Johnson were currently being sought for questioning.

  The vac-trains had been re-opened. The rioters and looters had cleared the streets. The police reinforcements had been stood down. Celebrity news presenters were given extended programmes to cover the paranoia raging across the planet. The arrival of the Mount’s Delta appeared to have acted as the trigger for a multitude of small events that were blamed on the possessed, culminating in the Grand Central Station disturbance. And Capone’s recent switch in tactics to flying infiltration attacks against Confederation planets served to exacerbate people’s fears. The Confederation Navy and local SD networks seemed unable to prevent the Organization’s strike flotillas. After the quarantine appeared to be preventing the spread, worlds were starting to fall again.

  Everyone, ran the feeling, was vulnerable.

  But the lifting of the vac-train restrictions eased the tension a little, right up until 2:50 EST when they were abruptly shut again. Frustrated commuters datavised the information to the news agencies within ten seconds. New York’s rover reporters, who had descended en masse into the arcology’s bars after a hard day’s sensationalising, were hauled back out onto the concrete canyons by their editors. Agencies which datavised information requests to the arcology’s civic authority were met with blank puzzlement. Nobody had told the graveyard shift about the vac-trains. The police precinct houses were equally baffled. Even the urgent requests to in-house sources produced a blank, at least in the ten minutes that counted.

  With all of the B7 supervisors on-line and observing, North America gave the order to launch the assault.

  The Internal Security Directorate tactical teams had been arriving in New York ever since the vac-trains started running again. By the time the assault was launched, there were over eight hundred personnel deployed around the various sect covens. They were all armed with projectile weapons loaded with chemical or electric rounds. Complementing them were the gamma lasers. Intended for anti-terrorist interception situations, they were powerful enough to penetrate at least five metres of carbon-concrete. Such a range would allow the teams to strike at targets holed up deep inside skyscrapers and megatowers. One would usually be sufficient to eliminate an entire room full of hostiles instantaneously.

  North America had ringed each coven with nine, while the Leicester skyscraper had fifteen ranged against it. The supervisor’s deepest worry was that the possessed with their extended senses would discover the preparations. To try and deny them any hint, engineering mechanoids had been used throughout the day to unpack and install the gamma lasers in surrounding buildings. Give-away human supervision had been kept to an absolute minimum. As well as the gamma lasers, North America had the exits and service tunnels rigged to electrify anyone who scuttled down them. That was the most dangerous aspect of the work, but again mechanoids with New York’s civic service emblem on their sides trundled along modifying wires and cables without drawing questions or interest.

  The tactical teams had assembled several blocks away to avoid attention.

  North America started to move them forward simultaneously with closing down the vac-trains. He also closed down all road traffic and metro transit carriages inside the arcology, and sealed the domes from each other; an aspect the news agencies didn’t realize until a lot later.

  According to every asset and functional bug infiltrated into the covens, neither the possessed nor the acolytes were aware of the preparations.

  They didn’t even know the tactical teams were advancing.

  The gamma ray lasers fired at 2:55 EST. The fifteen beams transfixing the Leicester skyscraper swept through the lower eight stories which made up the sect’s headquarters. They used a scan pattern, switching between vertical and horizontal to cover every cubic centimetre. When the beams were aimed right through the core of the skyscraper, the energy was absorbed by the structure, while furnishings and composite walls ignited instantly under the intense radiation barrage. Thick, radiant orange lines were scratched across the carbon-co
ncrete support pillars and floors as the beams traversed the building. The air was superheated, dissolving into its component atoms. Windows detonated outward from the appalling pressure, showering the street below with daggers of glass.

  Fire sprinklers burst into life, only for their water to vaporise first into steam then clouds of ions. Glaring blue and violet streamers jetted out of the smashed windows, and fountained up the skyscraper’s elevator shafts. Ruptured air-conditioning ducts provided secondary routes for the heatstorm to pervade the building. The entire lower floors were engulfed in a dazzling fireball.

  Human bodies caught within the flexing three-dimensional mesh of beams burst apart from the terrible energy input. Their water content exploded into steam as the carbon combusted. When the beams reached the outer sections of the skyscraper, they were powerful enough to pierce clean though the walls. Surrounding skyscrapers were strafed with the radiation, resulting in vast tracts of damage. Then the sharp spires of ions exhaled by the Leicester played across their outer walls, igniting dozens of ordinary fires.

  The gamma ray lasers switched off. The night was filled with the roar of flames and the screams of those being burnt alive. There was enough light thrown out from the fires to light the entire district. Unharmed residents of the nearby buildings lucky enough to live on the lower floors rushed onto the street; while those higher up could only stare out helplessly as the flames took hold. The images they relayed to the news agencies, which were distributed across the planet in real-time, showed the GISD tactical teams marching down every approach road to the Leicester. Against the raging orange flames, their heat-proof flexarmour suits appeared as matte-black silhouettes. Weapons with long snouts were cradled casually on their arms as they walked into the conflagration with astounding nonchalance.

  Three times, figures rushed out of the skyscraper’s main entrance doors, making their bid for freedom. They were like fire monsters, flames shooting from every part of their bloated figures. The tactical team guns spat short pulses of turquoise flame with quiet efficiency, and the fiery creatures crumpled to burn unhindered on the wide sidewalk.

  It was those scenes of perfunctory extermination which finally convinced the world that the possessed had somehow penetrated the titanic defences of the Halo. The political fallout was considerable. A motion of impeachment was put before the Govcentral Grand Senate, condemning the President for not informing the senatorial defence committee in advance.

  The President, who could hardly publicly admit to knowing nothing about the situation, fired the chiefs of GISD Bureaus 1 through 4, for gross insubordination and overreaching their authority. The GISD’s New York chief was charged with reckless homicide, and put under immediate arrest.

  Such machinations went almost unnoticed by the public, who were fed a continual stream of updates of the on-the-ground aftermath by the news agencies.

  Once the tactical teams had confirmed that there were no possessed left alive in any of the sect covens, they withdrew. Only then were the emergency services allowed in. It took ten hours for the fire department mechanoids to extinguish the last fires. Paramedic crews followed them through the burnt out floors. The arcology hospitals were swamped by casualties. Preliminary insurance damage estimates ran into hundred of millions of G-dollars. Dome One’s mayor, in conjunction with the other fourteen mayors of the arcology, instigated an official day of mourning, and opened a bereavement fund.

  Officially, one thousand two hundred and thirty-three people died in the assault against the New York possessed; nearly half as a result of being hit by gamma radiation. The rest were either burned or asphyxiated. Over nine thousand needed hospital treatment for minor burns, shock, and other injuries. Double that number lost their homes; with several hundred businesses forced to try and relocate. The vac-trains in and out of New York remained closed.

  “Well?” North Pacific asked. It was five hours after the tactical teams had finished their sweep of the covens, and B7 had reconvened to hear the genuine results.

  “We got a hundred and eight possessed, that’s the best estimate I can provide. There wasn’t a hell of a lot left for the forensic crew to analyse after the gamma lasers finished.”

  “I’m more interested in the ones you didn’t eliminate.”

  “Eight of the electrocution traps we rigged along possible escape routes were triggered. The teams pulled eleven corpses out of various ducts and service tunnels.”

  “Quit stalling!” South America said. “Did any of them get out?”

  “Probably, yes. Forensics thinks maybe three or four people got past the electrocution traps. There’s no way of telling if they were possessed or not, but it would take one inhumanly tough mother to survive what we threw at them.”

  “Shit! We’re right back where we started. You’re going to have to initiate this kind of slaughter operation each time they regroup. Only now they don’t have any convenient sects to flee back to.”

  “Well this time, I’m going to insist on keeping New York’s vac-trains shut,” North Pacific said. “We can’t let them get out of New York.”

  “I quite agree,” Western Europe said.

  “Only because you can’t risk another vote.”

  “There’s no need to get personal. We remain on top of the situation.”

  “Really? Where’s Dexter, then?”

  “When the time comes, I will eliminate him.”

  “You’re so full of shit.”

  The K5 star had a catalogue number, but that was all. Only three planets were in orbit around it, two of them smaller than Mars, and a gas giant fifty-thousand kilometres in diameter. Undistinguished in astronomical terms, it lay forty-one light-years outside the loose boundary of space claimed by the Confederation. There had been a single scoutship visit in 2530, which quickly established its worthlessness. As far as official records were concerned, that was the first and last time humans had visited the barren system. Certainly the Navy never bothered with it; their patrols were stretched thinly enough as it was searching for illegal activity within the Confederation and through the stars fringing the boundary. Although the surrounding wreath of stars was an obvious location for illegal operations (and several highly dubious independent colony ventures), forty-one light-years was just too far away to justify the expense of regular inspection flights.

  Such a safeguard made it ideal for the black cartel. Their antimatter station orbited five million kilometres from the star’s surface, a closeness which stretched human materials science to its limit. The radiation, heat, particle, and magnetic forces it encountered were appalling. An approaching ship would see it as a simple black disk sailing across the incandescent solar glare. Sixty kilometres in diameter, it cast a significant cone-shaped umbra behind it; a zone insulated from the star’s heat, the one place where hell’s proverbial snowflake might just have survived. The surface facing the star was a radial concertina array of solid state cells absorbing the incredible blast of heat and converting it directly into electricity. At the back they glowed a gentle pink, utilizing their own shade to radiate the immense thermal load away into space. In total, the array was capable of generating over one and a half terawatts of electricity.

  The antimatter production system itself was housed in a cluster of boxy silver-white industrial modules right in the centre of the array. The mundane method of churning out antimatter was essentially unchanged since the late Twentieth Century; although the levels of scale and efficiency had risen considerably since the first few experimental antiprotons had been manufactured in high-energy physics laboratories. Production requires individual protons to be accelerated until their energy becomes greater than a giga-electron-volt, at which point each one has more energy in its motion than its mass. Once that state has been achieved, they are collided with heavy nuclei, resulting in a spray of elementary particles that includes antiprotons, antielectrons, and antineutrons.

  These are then separated, collected, cooled, and merged into antihydrogen. But it is that
initial proton acceleration stage which absorbs the phenomenal amount of electricity produced by the solar array in its entirety.

  The whole operation was overseen by a crew of twenty-five technicians, stationed in a large, heavily-shielded rotating carbotanium wheel that floated deep inside the array’s umbra. They had now been joined by eight members of the Organization to keep them in line. Taking over the station had been absurdly easy.

  Because the black cartel took the elementary precaution of installing its own modified neural nanonics in everyone who knew of the station’s location, there could only ever be two kinds of visitor: the Confederation Navy on a search and destroy mission, or a legitimate buyer. The arrival of Capone’s lieutenants came as a severe shock to the crew. The few hand weapons available were utterly useless against the possessed; their only other option was to kamikaze. Once the Organization’s terms and conditions had been laid on the line, that was postponed indefinitely. The same kind of uneasy stand-off balance between need and fear that had claimed New California settled across the station.

  After supplying the first Organization convoy with every gram of antimatter held in storage, the station had been operating a full production schedule ever since, attempting to cope with Capone’s desperate demands for more. Starships came from New California every five or six days for new supplies.

  Admiral Saldana’s squadron made no attempt at stealth or subtlety when it jumped into the system, emerging twenty-five million kilometres from the star. Navy starships always had a tremendous advantage against the stations they hunted. Deep inside the star’s gravity field, there could be no quick escape for the station’s crew. Defensive weapons were almost useless. Not even antimatter propulsion and warheads could produce their usual overwhelming advantage; in such proximity to the star, combat wasp sensors were almost blind.

  Standard procedure for the Navy starships was to launch a volley of kinetic projectiles in a retrograde orbit. It was a tactic that would quickly exhaust the station’s stock of drones, leaving them with beam weapons alone. Against a swarm of ten thousand harpoons, their chances of vaporizing every one before it hit was effectively nil. That was assuming the station sensors were even capable of locating the incoming missiles to begin with. In most cases the hellish solar environment completely masked their approach. And the Navy vessels would never issue a warning, the station might never know of their presence until the first missile struck.