Infinite Day

by Chris Walley

  The scene was astonishing. Clouds of black smoke, edged with flame, bubbled and steamed upward from a tormented water surface, whipped into a fury of tiny columns of foam by an endless hail of bullets. Only a handful of Krallen were visible, and as he watched, they disintegrated into fragments.

  There was a roar from the machine above, and a blast of turbulent, oily flame raced across the waters and onto the beach. In its wake, steam rose from the sea.

  “Well, glory!” said Vero, next to him. “Someone is enjoying themselves.”

  “Get on board!” said the voice.

  Merral looked at Vero. “That sounds like—”

  “Lloyd?”

  They looked upward to see a wire ladder unraveling down toward them.

  A new wave of firing was unleashed with such force that they could see the ship shuddering under the recoil. Above its fury could be heard maniacal cries of delight.

  “It is Lloyd.” Merral grabbed the ladder. “And he is enjoying himself!”

  As he clambered up the ladder, Merral remembered the two attack skimmers in the hold of the Sacrifice. I can piece together the rest.

  As he and Vero clambered through a narrow hatchway, the ship began to swing round.

  Dripping water, Merral walked forward into the rear of the narrow cabin.

  Laura was piloting and she didn’t look up. “Welcome aboard, Commander, Vero. Don’t get water on the equipment. Please.” The pleasure in her voice was unmistakable.

  The hull vibrated violently as a thrashing, percussive noise echoed through the ship.

  Laura threw Merral a smile. “Lloyd’s been waiting for this for some time. Sergeant!” she ordered. “Playtime is over. Time to go home. And this one is mine.”

  The tower had come into view. The devastation in front of it was enormous; through the smoke Merral could see that the sand was pockmarked with craters and littered with burning Krallen.

  The landing strip with Lezaroth’s squat vessel came into view.

  “Now, watch,” Laura said, tapping keys and glancing at a screen.

  The vessel gave a tiny lurch, and two black points on trails of flame raced out from below them. In a second, the vessel and landing strip erupted in a blooming chrysanthemum of smoke and flame.

  “Nice. Very nice,” Laura murmured. “You could get a taste for that.”

  Then she tugged on the control column and the vessel began accelerating upward.

  “Did I say,” Merral said quietly, “how pleased we are to see you?”

  “The feeling is mutual. Sorry about the delay. Lloyd was busy reading the manuals.”

  “Lezaroth’s ship: isn’t that around?”

  The G-force was building up and Merral found a seat.

  “We snuck up on it half an hour ago and hammered some holes in the hull. It’s fled into Below-Space, but it’s in a bad state of repair. We don’t think it’s going to trouble us.”

  Merral fastened the seat belt. “So how did you find us?”

  “We didn’t leave Jigralt. We hung around in Below-Space listening in with Betafor.”

  “Of course.” Delastro wouldn’t have realized that was possible.

  “Anyway, he posted a flight plan with the Gate Station. So we just found the coordinates and headed off through Below-Space. We arrived about five days ago. We were trying to find you when Lezaroth turned up.”

  The sky was turning dark blue, and the first points of starlight were appearing.

  “Where are we?”

  “He didn’t tell you? Lathanthor.”

  “Lathanthor? Ah yes. I’ve heard of it. A late-stage seeding world. So how far are we from Earth?”

  “About a hundred and five light-years.”

  Abruptly the rear door opened and a large-framed man entered. Lloyd moved slowly against the G-forces and sank gratefully into a spare seat. Merral smelled the smoke lingering on him.

  There was a happy nod. “Good to see you, sir. And you too, Mr. V.”

  “Sergeant, good to see you. Thanks for the rescue.”

  “My pleasure. This thing packs some firepower.” He waved his palms wide. “I have blisters on my hands.”

  “Did you get Lezaroth?”

  “That’s not confirmed. If he was smart he’d have taken cover.”

  “Well, you can’t have everything.”

  In the darkness of the sky above, a silver object that was too angular to be a star was growing closer.

  “Sergeant, I do have to say I gave you express orders to head to Earth. You disobeyed. All of you.”

  His aide looked thoughtful and then winked at him. “We thought about it, sir. And then we realized that if we didn’t go after you, we really wouldn’t be Assembly, would we?”

  “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery,” Vero observed.

  In twenty minutes the attack skimmer had docked and been drawn inside the cavernous vessel hold of the Sacrifice.

  Anya was waiting beyond the air lock, trying—and failing—to conceal her joy. Ignoring Merral’s still-wet clothes, she hugged him. “Well, Tree Man, how surprising; you went to ground in the forest.”

  “I was in my element.” It’s good to be back. Very good.

  She turned to Vero. “How was it?”

  He gave a dismissive shrug. “A walk in the park.”

  29

  Pausing only to change his clothes, Merral headed to the bridge. After consulting with Laura and the navigator, they decided to head to Hamalal, a world ten light-years away where there was a Gate.

  Then, as they headed down into Below-Space, Merral and Vero ate.

  Afterward, feeling almost elated, Merral set about checking up on the Sacrifice. As the colors were ebbing away he found Jorgio in his room. The old man could barely contain his pleasure and kept hugging him. “I’m so glad to see you, Mister Merral. I’ve spent long hours praying for you.”

  Merral threw himself into the spare chair. “Your prayers are answered. I—we—survived.”

  “More than survived, it seems to me. You’ve lost a burden.”

  “Yes, I have. It was what I needed, Jorgio. A chance to sort myself out, deal with my pride.”

  They shared smiles and then Merral asked, “How are things with you?”

  Jorgio gave him a shake of the head. “I’m fine, but there’s trouble brewing, Mister Merral. I can feel it. Evil’s growing in the Assembly.” He ran his tongue round his lips in an odd, almost animal gesture. “At times I think I can taste the evil. There’s something rotting.”

  Jorgio’s gloomy diagnosis was confirmed later when Merral and Vero saw some of the material that had been collected from the various transmissions monitored at Jigralt. It included broadcasts by the prebendant and a compilation of older speeches. After an hour’s viewing of the material, Merral realized that Delastro and his Guards of the Lord were now a major and growing factor in the Assembly.

  “Vero, does he want power?”

  “Yes. But I think only as the means to an end. He genuinely wants to destroy the Dominion. This is just the byproduct.” Vero sighed. “But, my friend, if a man becomes a tyrant, does it matter if it happens by accident or design?”

  Later, Merral’s unease acquired a new focus when he talked with Betafor. After thanking her for her work in facilitating his rescue, he asked her if there was anything new he ought to know.

  “Commander, after a lot of work, I have managed to decrypt the files of Professor Habbentz.”

  “I had almost forgotten those. Tell me about them.”

  “I will show you the diagrams on the screen.”

  After a few minutes, Merral stopped Betafor, summoned Vero, and made her start all over again. After she had finished, Merral dismissed her so that he and Vero could talk alone.

  Merral ordered the main diagram to slowly loop so that the screen showed endless explosions of a gray sphere expanding in a tidal wave of white light.

  “Vero, what do you think?”

  After a considerable silence
, he answered. “It’s too big to take in. A sun—whole worlds—being consumed. It’s g-ghastly.”

  “I am shocked. I need to think about it more and order my thoughts, but I can’t believe that a weapon like this is for us to use.”

  Vero put his head between his hands for long moments and then looked up. “You’re right. But if we can get to Earth, you will have to argue it, and argue it well.”

  “I will pray and think exactly how, and what, to say.”

  “You will have to come up with an alternative, you know.”

  “No. We need no alternatives for evil to be rejected. There may be no alternative except fight until we drop.”

  “That is an easy phrase.” Vero rose to his feet, switched off the image, and then turned to Merral. “But you’re right. The attractiveness of this weapon is that, to fearful men and women, it appears to be an easy solution.”

  “Easy solutions are not necessarily the right ones.”

  Suddenly Merral saw Vero give him a strange, almost admiring, look. “You know, my friend, you have grown. You have often fallen and come close to disaster, but I think you now see things more clearly than I do.”

  “Vero, I doubt that. But I have no option but to oppose this. For another reason.”

  “Which is?”

  “I made a promise that I would do all I could to protect Slabodal and, if possible, to rescue him from Nithloss.”

  “Yes. At the time I thought it a typical piece of Merral rhetoric. Noble but impractical. Do you think he would keep the promise were the shoe on the other foot?”

  “The other . . . ? Oh, never mind; I get the sense. No, but that’s irrelevant.”

  “True.”

  “But surely the Assembly will not agree to this weapon? The sentinels, the stewards, the Custodians of the Faith? Won’t they oppose it?”

  “A few weeks ago, I would have said yes. But now?” Vero looked troubled. “The fact is, my friend, we have been caught out by evil throughout. Things that we thought unthinkable have happened.”

  “You think Delastro can push this through?”

  “Not alone. But fear and Delastro might.”

  “That just confirms that we need to get there soon.”

  “And that may be easier said than done.”

  For all the urgency, it still took another four days to get to Hamalal. The time did, however, allow Merral and Vero to somewhat regain their strength, although neither put on weight.

  “I have decided that Below-Space is no place for recuperation,” Abilana said as she finished giving Merral his daily examination. “Good of any sort, whether healing or anything else, doesn’t flourish here. But you’ll live.” She gestured for him to get up off the couch. “At least until someone tries to kill you again.”

  Eventually they reached Hamalal. They went through the by-now familiar procedure of launching a surveillance probe before emerging. The data came back to show five defense vessels guarding the Gate. Betafor was ordered to find out all she could about them.

  It took Merral a few moments to recognize what the impossibly long cylinder at the Gate Station was. “An evacuation ship, of course,” he murmured to Laura. “But they can’t evacuate everybody.”

  “No. Just the most vulnerable. There’s a thousand berths on that, but you wouldn’t want to travel in it unless it was an emergency.”

  “It is.”

  “It’s being loaded,” Laura added. “I’d guess it will be leaving inside twenty-four hours.”

  Merral turned to Vero. “We need to be on that ship.”

  Vero looked up from a screen. “I agree. Which of us, by the way?”

  “You, me, Jorgio, Anya, Lloyd?”

  “Five, then. Everyone else will have to take the Sacrifice on the slow Below-Space road to Earth. Another ten to twelve days.”

  “Yes. But any ideas how we get beyond here?”

  Vero frowned. “It’s not going to be easy. The Guards of the Lord seem to be operating here, too. I’ll bet they control all the Gates. They don’t know we have escaped, but they won’t miss us if we turn up.”

  “So how are we going to get past them?”

  “Leave it to me.”

  “Will I approve of what you’re going to do?”

  “Of course not.”

  Twenty minutes later, Merral sat down on the edge of a desk and stared at Vero. “So you can get us on this ship?”

  “Yes.” The brown eyes stared at him. “Apologies in advance. We are going to have to be tricky.”

  “Tricky is not my favorite word, Vero.”

  “Do you want to get to Earth tomorrow night or in a fortnight?”

  Merral heard himself give a deep sigh of exasperation. “Very well; give me the plan.”

  Vero tapped his diary and the screen image showed a gray-haired man in a beige uniform. His sharp, bony face bore a look of authority. “Shipmaster Crehual. He’s in charge of the evacuation plans. In practical matters, he outranks the captain. Notice his lapel.”

  Merral saw the silver flicker of a pin badge. “One of Delastro’s people. That’s going to make things harder.”

  “No. Easier.”

  “How so?”

  Vero took a deep breath. “Betafor creates a message from the prebendant to him.”

  “Good grief.”

  “Hear me out. Quite simply, the prebendant will request that the shipmaster find berths for those of us who need to go to Earth. We will be—” Vero looked embarrassed—“members of the Guards ourselves, on a mission for him. A mission whose nature need not concern Shipmaster Crehual. It will be a matter of the greatest urgency that we are safely and anonymously taken to Earth as soon as possible.”

  “I see.”

  “All being well, the shipmaster will hear his master’s voice and allow us on board.”

  Merral shook his head. “Vero, you’re right. I don’t like it at all. Do you remember, once upon a time, how horrified we were when we realized that Anya had been lied to in this way?”

  “Yes.”

  “But, Vero, look at the trend. First, it’s used against us. Then we used it against an enemy, Captain Haqzintal. And now we use the same technique against our own people. I was not top of my class in moral theology, but I think I can easily see a trend.”

  “Well, I agree, but this talk of ‘enemies’ and ‘our own people’ is simplistic. Our own people are now our enemies. Or have you forgotten who marooned us on Lathanthor?”

  “Well, I don’t like it.”

  “Look, Merral, let me reassure you: this man will only fall for this if he has been corrupted by Delastro.”

  Shipmaster Crehual did fall for the message, and Merral felt saddened and relieved at the same time. Soon the five of them had packed the smallest of bags and clambered into the Assembly ferry craft in the hold. Their flight path was programmed to allow it to emerge from shallow Below-Space and make an automated docking with the rear section of the evacuation ship.

  Laura bade Merral farewell with her habitual smile. “Commander, I really wouldn’t mind coming with you. But I’ll take this ship there as fast as we can.”

  “I’ll hope to see you there soon.”

  In an instant the smile faded, and she dropped her voice. “And, Commander, remember that Captain Huang-Li was an old friend of mine. I have a bad feeling about what happened to her. Do what you can to get justice.”

  The ferry craft emerged into Normal-Space at the rear of the long cylinder of the evacuation ship, where they hoped they would not be easily observed. Other vessels milled around by the great ship, and Merral hoped there was enough activity that the existence of an unreported craft would just be attributed to the chaos of the moment. Sooner or later, someone would realize that Hamalal had gained a shuttle craft, but by then they would be gone. With a series of shudders they attached the ship to a port in the rear docking bay, and Merral sent a message to the shipmaster.

  The answer was an acknowledgment and a curt order for them to come aboard.


  Shipmaster Crehual was waiting in the corridor for them. “Purity and dedication,” he said with a quiet intensity.

  Merral bowed his head. “We, too, serve him in purity and dedication.” That’s not a lie; though the one I serve is not Delastro.

  Wary eyes looked at them with a searching curiosity, and Merral sensed that doubt might not be far beneath. He put his hand on Crehual’s arm and bent his mouth to the man’s ear. “Shipmaster, this is the most delicate of matters.” He tried the most confiding tone that he could manage. “There are forces at work within the Assembly that seek to destroy it. We must be witnesses. It is vital that we meet with the lord-prebendant as soon as possible. We have weighty tidings. I can’t say any more.”

  The man seemed to be reassured. “We leave for Kirbal 3 in two hours. Three hours to their Gate Station; from there you should be able to get to Earth within a dozen hours. Flights out are all full, but inbound are almost empty.”

  Merral wondered if evacuation of Earth was already under way but decided now was not the time to reveal ignorance. Trying to think of what to say, Merral remembered a fragment from one of the prebendant’s sermons. “‘The hour grows dark. Do not fear; for the godly, righteousness will triumph.’”

  Crehual gave a grim smile. “‘And the wicked will perish from the worlds.’”

  Merral patted him confidently on the arm. “Just so. Thank you, Shipmaster. I will express your worth to the lord-prebendant.”

  “Now, follow me. Do you know the design?”

  “No.”

  “Six long compartments. As many bunk berths as we can fit in each. It will not be a pleasant flight—we are crammed. We could fill another three such vessels.”

  The shipmaster led them forward, up a stairway, and through a sliding door. Merral nearly gasped at the sight that greeted him. Stretching far ahead was a cramped and stuffy passageway jammed with people and baggage and echoing with conversation and sobs. On each side of the passageway, five levels of bunks stretched up to the ceiling. Merral was reminded of the refuge at Ynysmant. He had the same sense of the maximum number of people crammed into the smallest possible space—and the same sense of powerlessness and puzzlement.