“How do we get it there?” Melvyn asked.
“You know bloody well how we get it there,” Sarha said. “Someone’s got to carry it using a manoeuvring pack, right Joshua? That’s what you did in the Ruin Ring, isn’t it?”
“Yeah. They can’t detect one person fifteen kilometres deep in the ring, not using cold gas to manoeuvre.”
“Wait a minute,” Dahybi said. He had been running flight trajectory simulations in the navigation display. “Even if you did knock out the Gramine , and that’s a bloody long shot, we’re still no better off. Maranta will just launch her combat wasps straight at us. There’s no way we can out-run them, they’ll get us before we’re halfway to the edge of Murora’s gravity field, let alone Lalonde’s jump coordinate.”
“If we accelerate at eight gees, we’ll have seven minutes fifteen seconds before the Maranta ’s combat wasps will catch us,” Joshua said. “Distance-wise that works out at about sixteen thousand kilometres.”
“That still won’t get us outside Murora’s gravity field. We couldn’t even jump blind.”
“No, but there is one place we can jump from. It’s only fifteen thousand kilometres away; we would have a twenty-second safety margin.”
“Where?” Melvyn demanded.
Joshua datavised an instruction into the flight computer. The navigational display drew a violet trajectory line from the Lady Mac towards the edge of the ring, sliding round in a retrograde curve to end at one of the four tiny ring-shepherd moonlets.
“Murora VII,” Joshua said.
A terrible realization came to Dahybi; his balls retracted as though he’d dived into an icy lake. “Oh, Christ, no , Joshua. You can’t be serious, not at that velocity.”
“So give me an alternative.”
“An alternative to what?” Sarha asked petulantly.
Still looking at Joshua, Dahybi said: “The Lagrange point. Every two-body system has them. It’s where the moonlet’s gravity is balanced by Murora’s, which means you can activate a starship’s nodes inside it without worrying about gravitonic stress desynchronization. Technically, they’re points, but in practice they work out as a relatively spherical zone. A small zone.”
“For Murora VII, about two and a half kilometres in diameter,” Joshua said. “Unfortunately, we’ll be travelling at about twenty-seven kilometres per second when we reach it. That gives us a tenth of a second to trigger the nodes.”
“Oh, shit,” Ashly grunted.
“It won’t be a problem for the flight computer,” Joshua said blandly.
“But where will the jump take us?” Melvyn asked.
“I can give us a rough alignment on Achillea, the third gas giant. It’s on the other side of the system now, about seven billion kilometres away. We’ll jump a billion kilometres, align Lady Mac properly on one of its outer moons, then jump again. No way will Maranta be able to follow us through those kind of manoeuvres. When we get to Achillea we slingshot round the moon onto a Lalonde trajectory and jump in. Total elapsed time eighty minutes maximum.”
“Oh, God . . . well, I suppose you know what you’re talking about.”
“Him?” Sarha exclaimed. “You must be joking.”
“It has a certain degree of style,” Dahybi said. He nodded approvingly. “OK, Joshua, I’ll have the nodes primed. But you’re going to have to be staggeringly accurate when we hit that Lagrange point.”
“My middle name.”
Sarha studied the bridge decking. “I know another one,” she muttered under her breath.
“So who’s the lucky one that gets to EVA in the rings and blow up the Gramine ?” Melvyn asked.
“Volunteers can draw lots,” Joshua said. “Put my name in.”
“Don’t be stupid,” Sarha said. “We all know you’re going to have to fly the Lady Mac , no one else could hit that moonlet, let alone its Lagrange point. And Ashly has to take the spaceplane down, I expect that flight’s going to need a professional. So the rest of us will draw for it.”
“Kindly include twenty of us,” Gaura said. “We are all qualified in EVA work, and we have the added advantage of being able to communicate with Aethra in case the starship should alter course.”
“Nobody is volunteering, nobody is drawing lots,” Warlow said, using excessive volume to obliterate any dissent. “This is my job. It’s what I’m designed for. And I’m the oldest here. So I qualify on all counts.”
“Don’t be so bloody morbid,” Joshua said, annoyance covering his real concern. “You just plant the nuke on a rock particle and come straight back.”
Warlow laughed, making them all wince. “Of course, so easy.”
Now, finally, under the slowly spinning inferno and looking up into a glaring formless void. Journey’s end. Chas Paske had to turn down his optical sensors’ receptivity, the light was so bright. At first he had thought some kind of miniature sun lurked up there at the centre of the flaming vortex of cloud, but now the boat had carried him faithfully under the baleful cone he could see the apex had burst open like a malignant tumour. The rent was growing larger. The cyclone was growing larger, deeper and wider.
He knew its purpose at last, that knowledge was inescapable where he was, pressed down in the bottom of the flat boat under the sheer pressure of the light. It was a mouth, jaws opening wide. One day—soon—it would devour the whole world.
He gave a wild little giggle at the notion.
That heavy, heavy light was migrating from whatever (wherever?) lay on the other side. Weighty extrinsic photons sinking slowly downwards like snow to smother the land and river in their own special frost. Whatever they touched, gleamed, as though lit from within. Even his body, shoddy, worthless thing it was now, had acquired a dignified lustre.
Above the gashed cloud was a sheer plane of white light, a mathematical absolute. The ocean into which his white silk dream river emptied. A universal ocean into which Lalonde was destined to fall like a pearl droplet, and lose itself for evermore. He felt himself wanting to rise up towards it, to defy gravity and soar. Into the perpetual light and warmth which would cleanse him and banish sorrow. It would ripple once as he penetrated the meniscus, throwing out a polished wave crown, a single ephemeral spire rising at the centre. After that there would be no trace. To pass through was to transcend.
His remoulded face was incapable of smiling. So he lay there gladly on the boat, mind virtually divorced from his body, looking up at his future, awaiting his moment of ascension. His physical purpose long since abandoned.
Even though the red cloud’s thunder had retreated to a muffled rumbling he never heard the starting gun being fired, so the first cannonball shattered his serenity with shocking abruptness.
They had known he was there, the possessed, they had been aware of him all along. From the moment he’d passed under the aegis of the red cloud he had registered in their consciousness, as an orbiting gnat might impinge upon a man’s peripheral vision. His hapless journey down the river was of no consequence to them; in his miserable degenerative state he was simply not worth their attention nor a moment’s effort. The river was bringing him surely to their bosom, they were content to let him come in his own time.
Now he was here, and they had assembled down by the docks to provide a maliciously frolicsome reception. It was a black-hearted jamboree suitable to celebrate the last possession before Lalonde escaped the universe for good.
The iron ball whistled low over Chas’s boat with a backlash crack that set the insecure craft rocking, then splattered into the snowlily mush thirty metres away. Purple smoke and ten-metre magnesium flames squirted joyously into the air like a jumbo Roman candle.
Chas shunted round on his elbows, looking in disbelief at the chromatic blaze. The snowlilies started to melt away around his boat, lowering it into sparkling clear blue water. Whoops and catcalls wafted over the river from the shore. He twisted round.
Durringham with all of its white towers and onion-dome spires and lofty castles and lush hanging gard
ens formed a magnificent backdrop to the armada racing to collect him. There were Polynesian war canoes with flower-garlanded warriors digging their paddles into the clear water; rowing eights with lean young men sweating under the cox’s bellowed orders; triremes, their massed oars flashing in immaculate unison; Viking marauders sporting resplendent scarlet and gold sun-god sails; dhows whose lateens strained ahead of the fresh breeze; junks, sampans, ketches, sloops . . . and riding fast and proud out in front was a big three-masted buccaneer, its crew in striped shirts scrambling over the rigging. A quarter of the city’s population crowded the circular harbours (now ancient solid stone) cheering on their chosen team in a boisterous rollicking carnival atmosphere.
Chas gagged at the sight of it all; the nightmare dormant in every human brain the entire world is out to get me. The whole city was chasing him, wanted him, hated him. He was their new toy, the day’s amusement.
His body spasmed in massive quakes, implants faltering. Intolerable waves of pain from his leg crashed past the crumbling analgesic blocks. “Bastards!” he roared. “You shit-eating bastards. You don’t play with me. I am your enemy. I am not a joke. Fear me. Fear me, God damn you!”
A dainty ring of smoke puffed out of the buccaneer’s forward gun. Chas screamed, fury and terror in one incoherent blast of sound.
The cannon-ball hit the water ten metres away, sending up a sheet of steaming white water. Wavelets rushed out, slapping his boat.
“Bastards.” It wasn’t even a whisper. Adrenalin and nerves could do nothing more for him, he was devoid of strength. “I’ll show you. Freaks. Zoo people. I am not a joke.” Somewhere far away a soprano chorus was singing black canticles.
Chas datavised the activation code into the kiloton bomb strapped in its harness at his side. Good old faithful bomb. Stuck to him the whole time. That’ll wipe the smile off their faces.
Nothing happened, his neural nanonics had shut down. Pain was burning through him, leaving only numbness in its wake. Fingers scrabbled feebly at the bomb’s small manual control panel, prising open the cover. His head flopped to one side to follow the movement. He eventually managed to focus an optical sensor. The panel keyboard was dark, inert. It had failed. He had failed.
Almost forgotten natural tear glands squeezed out their very last drops as he slowly knocked a fist on the wooden planking in utter futility.
A couple of the triremes were gaining on the buccaneer. It was developing into a three-boat race, though one of the war canoes refused to give up, warriors pounding the water with their paddles, skin gleaming as though they were sweating oil. Back on the harbours the elated cheering mixed with songs and chants from across five millennia.
The buccaneer crew fired another cannon to terrorize their crushed victim.
“You won’t have me!” Chas cried in defiance. He put a hand on each gunwale and started to rock the boat as the cannon-ball’s wavelets broke against the hull. “Never. Never. I won’t be a part of it, not of you.”
Pain and numbness had gorged on his torso. His arms began to fail as the swaying reached a peak. Water slopped in over the narrow gunwale. The flimsy boat turned turtle, dumping him into the Juliffe. He saw bubbles churning past. The rumpled silver foil of the surface receded. Neural nanonics told him his lungs were filling with water. Pain diminished. His implants were working again. They couldn’t reach him under water, he was beyond them here. He focused every sensor he had on the bomb whose weight was dragging him down.
On shore the audience had stopped cheering when their prey (so unsportingly) capsized himself. A groan went up. He’d pay for that.
Boat crews stopped rowing and slumped over their oars, exhausted and angry. The buccaneer’s sails calmly rolled themselves up as the sailors hung like listless spiders in the rigging. They stared morosely at the tiny half-sunken boat bobbing about ahead of them.
Together Durringham’s possessed exerted their power. The river around the hull of Chas Paske’s boat began to ripple energetically.
“Hey look, it’s Moses!” someone yelled from the harbour wall. A laugh ran along the spectators. They clapped their hands and stomped their feet, a stadium crowd demanding their sporting hero appear. “Moses! Moses! Moses!”
The waters of the Juliffe parted.
Chas felt it happening. His surroundings were getting lighter, pressure was reducing. Below his fingers the bomb’s keyboard was a glowing ruby chessboard. He typed in the code, refusing to hurry, watching the numbered squares turn green. There was a loud gurgling sound building all around. Fast-conflicting currents sucked at him, twisting his lifeless legs about. Then the rucked surface came rushing down to seek him out. Too late.
The kiloton nuke detonated at the bottom of a twenty-metre crater in the river. Its initial blast pulse was punched straight up into the core of the transplanarity ferment raging above. A solar fireball arose from the water with splendid inevitability, and the entire river seemed to lift with it. Energy in every spectrum poured outwards, smashing solid matter apart. None of those lining the harbour wall really knew what was happening. Their stolen bodies disintegrated before the nerve impulses could reach the brain. Only after annihilation, when the possessing souls found themselves back in the bestial beyond, did the truth dawn.
Two seconds after the bomb exploded, a forty-metre wall of water moving at near-sonic speed slammed into Durringham. And the dead, ensconced in their beautiful new mansions and fanciful castles, died again in their tens of thousands beneath the usurping totem of the radiant mushroom cloud.
Chapter 12
With his enhanced retinas switched to full sensitivity it appeared as though Warlow was flying through a dry iridescent mist. Ring particles still crawled with wayward spurts of energy; micrometre dust flowed in slow streams around the larger boulders and ice chunks. Despite the shimmering phosphorescence he was basically flying blind. Occasionally he could catch a glimpse of stars flickering past his feet, short-lived embers skipping from an invisible bonfire.
After leaving the Lady Macbeth he had moved twelve kilometres out from Murora, an orbit which saw him falling behind the sheltering starship. The big dark sphere, upper hull glinting in the livid red glow from its own thermo-dump panels, had been lost from sight in three minutes. Isolation had tightened its bewitching fingers almost immediately. Strangely enough, here, where he could barely see ten metres, a realization of the universe’s vastness was all too strong.
The ten-megaton bomb was strapped to his chest, a fat ovoid seventy-five centimetres high. Weightless, yet weighing heavily in his heart—titanium and composite device though it was.
Sarha had given him one of the Edenist bitek processor blocks which she had modified with augmentation modules. The idea was to provide him with a link to Aethra in case the Gramine should unexpectedly alter track.
Makeshift, like this whole mission.
“Can I speak with you alone?” he datavised.
“Of course,” the habitat answered. “I would be glad to keep you company. Yours is a fraught task.”
“But it is mine alone.”
“You are the best qualified.”
“Thank you. I wanted to ask you a question on the nature of death.”
“Yes?”
“It involves a small story.”
“Go on. I am always interested to hear of human events. I understand very little of your species so far, even though I have inherited a wealth of data.”
“Ten years ago I was a crew-member in the starship Harper’s Dragon . It was a line cargo ship, nothing special, although the pay was comfortingly regular. We had a new cadet lieutenant join us on Woolsey, called Felix Barton. He was only twenty, but he had assimilated his didactic courses well. I found him competent, and a reasonable messmate. He was no different to any other young man starting his career. Then he fell in love with an Edenist woman.”
“Ah; this is, perhaps, a Shakespearian tragedy?”
Warlow saw thin ribbons of orange dust winding corkscrew fashion
around an ice chunk straight ahead; a bird-kite’s tail, he thought. They sparked pink on his carbotanium space armour as he splashed through. Then he was past them and curving round a mealy boulder, guidance and optical interpretation programs operating in tandem to steer him automatically around obstacles. “Not at all. It is a very straightforward story. He simply became besotted. I admit she was beautiful, but then every geneered human seems to be. Harper’s Dragon had a regular contract to supply her habitat with specialist chemicals for one of their electronics manufacturing stations. After four trips, Felix declared he could not bear to be parted from her. And he was lucky, she felt the same way about him.”
“How fortunate.”
“Yes. Felix left Harper’s Dragon and became an Edenist. He had neuron symbionts implanted to give him general affinity, and underwent specialist counselling to help him adapt. The last time Harper’s Dragon visited, I spoke with him, and he was extremely happy. He said he had fitted in perfectly and that she was expecting their first child.”
“That is nice. There are something like a million and a half Adamists who become Edenists every year.”
“So many? I didn’t know.”
“Seventy per cent are love cases similar to your friend, the rest join because it attracts them intellectually or emotionally. Over half of the love cases are Adamists who form relationships with voidhawk crew-members, which is only to be expected given that they have the most contact with Adamists. It leads to many jokes about the voidhawk families having wild blood.”
“So tell me, is the conversion absolute, do these newfound Edenists transfer their memories into the habitat when they die?”
“Of course.”
His neural nanonics displayed a guidance plot, updating his position. Purple and yellow vectors slithered through his head, temporarily displacing his view of the irradiated dust. He was on course. His course. “Then my question is this. Is it possible to transfer a person’s memories into a habitat if that person has neural nanonics rather than affinity?”
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