The Naked God - Faith nd-6

by Peter F. Hamilton

  Murphy burst out into the main corridor, and shouted at his squad to follow. With ten suited figures clattering along at his heels, he sprinted for Gilmore’s office.

  As soon as the black shell of the zero-tau field had snapped up around Jacqueline Couteur, Pierce Gilmore headed back for his office. He didn’t protest at Hewlett’s continuing restrictions in preventing them from leaving the secure laboratory complex. In fact, he rather approved. He’d received a nasty shock when Couteur escaped, on top of the asteroid physically shaking in the wake of the antimatter blast. Under the circumstances, such precautions were both logical and sensible.

  The office door slid shut behind him, and some of the lighting came on. Current power rationing permitted him only four of the ceiling panels, the kind of light provided by a cold winter afternoon. None of the holographic windows were active.

  He walked over to the percolator jug, which was still bubbling away contentedly, and poured himself a cup. After a moment of regret, he switched it off. There probably wouldn’t be enough space in his evacuation allocation to take it or any of the bone china cups with him. Assuming there would be any allocation for personal effects. With over three hundred thousand people to evacuate in a week, the amount of baggage they could take with them would be minimal to zero.

  The small solaris tube running above his orchids was also off. Several of the rare pure-genotype plants were due to flower, their fleshy buds had almost burst. They never would now. There would be no light and fresh air, and the heat would arrive soon. The secure laboratory was closer to the surface than most of the asteroid’s habitable sections, it would receive the worst of the inward seepage. Furniture, equipment, it would all be lost. The only thing to survive would be their files.

  Pierce sat behind his desk. In fact, he really ought to be drawing up procedures to safeguard the information ready for when they transferred to their secondary facility. He put his cup down on the leather surface, next to an empty cup. That hadn’t been there before.

  “Hello, Doctor,” Jacqueline Couteur said.

  He did flinch, but at least he didn’t jump or yelp. She didn’t have the satisfaction of witnessing any disconcertion, which in the game they played was a big points winner. His eyes locked on an empty section of wall directly ahead, refusing to turn round and look for her. “Jacqueline. You have no feelings. Poor Lieutenant Hewlett really won’t enjoy being outsmarted in this manner.”

  “You can stop trying to datavise for help now, Doctor. I disabled the room’s net processors. Not with my energistic power, either, there was no glitch to alert the AI. Kate Morley had some knowledge of electronics, a couple of old didactic courses.”

  Pierce Gilmore datavised the comprehensive processor array installed in his desk. It reported that its link with Trafalgar’s communication’s net had been removed.

  Jacqueline chuckled softly as she walked round the desk into his line of sight. She was carrying a processor block, its small screen alive with graphics that monitored his datavises. “Anything else you’d like to try?” she enquired lightly.

  “The AI will notice the processors have gone off line. Even if it isn’t caused by a glitch, a marine squad will be sent to investigate.”

  “Really, Doctor? A lot of systems were damaged by the EM pulse. I’ve apparently been caught and shoved into zero-tau, and the marines have already cleared this level. I think that gives us time enough.”

  “For what?”

  “Oh dear me. Is that finally a spike of fear I sense in your mind, Doctor? That has got to be the first arousal of any kind you’ve had for many a year. Perhaps it’s even a hint of remorse? Remorse for what you put me through.”

  “You put yourself through it, Jacqueline. We asked you to cooperate; you were the one who chose to refuse. Very bluntly, as I recall.”

  “Not guilty. You tortured me.”

  “Kate Morley. Maynard Khanna. Should I go on?”

  She stood directly in front of the desk, staring at him. “Ah. Two wrongs making a right? Is that what I’ve reduced you to, Doctor? Fear does things to the most brilliant of minds. It makes them desperate. It makes them pitiful. Is there any other excuse you’d like to offer?”

  “If I was facing a jury, good and true, I could offer several justifications. Such arguments would be wasted on a bigot.”

  “Petty, even for you.”

  “Cooperate with us. It’s not too late.”

  “Not even clichés change in five hundred years. That says quite a lot about the human race, don’t you think? Certainly everything I need to know.”

  “You’re transferring onto an abstract concept. Self-hatred is a common aspect of a diseased mind.”

  “If I’m the one that’s ill and incapable, how come you’re the one in terminal trouble?”

  “Then stop being the problem, and help us with a solution.”

  “We are not problems .” Her hand slammed down on the front of the desk, making the two coffee cups jump. “We are people. If that simple fact could ever register in that fascist bitek brain of yours then you might be able to look in a different direction, one that would help bring an end to our suffering. But that is beyond you. To think along those lines you have to be human. And after all these weeks of study, the one definite conclusion I have come to, is that you are not human. Nor can you ever become human. You have nothing, no moral foundation from which to grow out of. Laton and Hitler were saints compared to you.”

  “You’re taking your situation far too personally. Understandably, after all, you can hardly retreat from it. You lack the courage for that.”

  “No.” She straightened up. “But I can make my last noble stand. And depriving the Confederation Navy of your so-called talent will be a satisfactory achievement for me. Nothing personal, you understand.”

  “I can put an end to this, Jacqueline. We’re so very close to an answer now.”

  “Let’s see how your rationality endures the reality of the beyond. You will now experience every facet of it. Being possessed by one of its inhabitants; living within it, and if you’re really fortunate, as a possessor, forever terrified that some lucky living bastard is going to rip you out of your precious new prize and send you back screaming. What will your answer be then, I wonder?”

  “Unchanged.” He gave her a sad defeated smile. “It’s called resolution, the ability and determination to see things through to the end. However unexpected or disappointing that end turns out to be. Not that anyone will ever know now. But I held true to myself.”

  Alarmed by his mind tone, Jacqueline started to point her right arm. Slivers of white fire licked up from her wrist.

  In Gilmore’s mind the alternatives were stark. That she would torture him was inevitable. He would be possessed, or more likely damaged so badly that his body died, banishing his soul to the beyond. That was where logic broke down. He believed, or thought he did, that there was a way out of the beyond. Doubt undermined him, though. Factious, unclean human emotion, the type he hated so. If a way through the beyond existed, why did the souls remain trapped? There was no certainty any more. Not for him, not there. And he couldn’t stand that. Facts and rationality were more than the building blocks of his mind, they were his existence. If the beyond was truly a place without logic, then Pierce Gilmore had no wish to exist there. And his own sacrifice would advance human understanding by a fraction. Such knowledge was a fitting last thought.

  He datavised the processor array for the latest version of the anti-memory. Jacqueline’s hand was already lining up desperately on him when the desktop AV projection pillar silently pumped a blindingly pervasive red light across the office.

  Sixty minutes later Murphy Hewlett and his squad blew the office door out with an EE charge, and rushed in to the rescue. They found Gilmore slumped over his desk, and Kate Morley lying on the floor in front of it. Both of them were alive, but completely unresponsive to any kind of stimulus the squad medic could apply. As Murphy said later during his debriefing, they we
re nothing but a pair of wide awake corpses.

  Chapter 04

  From the safety of the little plateau, a quarter of the way up the northern endcap, Tolton trained his telescope on the lobby of the Djerba starscraper. Another swirl of darkness was pushing up through the dome of white archways. Pieces of the structure tumbled across the crumpled lawn circling the forlorn building. He kept expecting to hear the sound of breaking glass reach across the distance. The telescope provided a good, sharp image, as if he was just a few metres away. He shivered at that errant thought, still able to feel the wave of coldness that had swept through him every time the flying monster passed overhead.

  “This one’s a walker.” He moved aside and let Erentz use the telescope’s eyepiece.

  She studied it for a minute. “You’re right. It’s picking up speed, too.” The visitor had shoved its way through the smouldering ruins of the shanties, leaving a deep furrow in its wake. Now it was traversing the meadows beyond. The wispy pink grass stalks around it turned black, as if they’d been singed. “Moving smoothly enough; fast, too. It should reach the southern endcap in five or six hours at that rate.”

  Just what we need,the personality groused. Another of the buggers leeching off us. We’ll just have to reduce nutrient fluid production to survival minimum, keep the neural strata alive. That’ll play hell with our main mitosis layer. It’ll take us years to regenerate the damage.

  Eight of the dire visitors had now emerged from the Djerba, three of them taking flight. Without fail, they had headed for the southern endcap, just as the first and largest had done. Those that moved over the land had left a contrail of dead vegetation behind them. When they reached the endcap, they bored their way through the polyp and into the arteries which fed the giant organs, suckling the nutrient fluid.

  “We should be able to burn them out soon,” she said. “The flame throwers and incendiary torpedoes are coming on fine. You’ll be okay.”

  The look Tolton gave her made his lack of affinity irrelevant. He bent over the telescope again. The visitor was crunching its way through a small forest. Trees swayed and toppled, broken off at the base. It seemed incapable of going round anything. “That thing is goddamn strong.”

  “Yeah.” Her worry was pronounced.

  “How’s the signal project coming?” He asked the question several times every day, frightened he might miss out on some amazing breakthrough.

  “Most of us are working on developing and producing our weapons right now.”

  “You can’t give up on that. You can’t!” He said it loud for the benefit of the personality.

  “Nobody’s giving up. The physics core team is still active.” She didn’t tell him it was down to five theorists who spent most of their time arguing about how to proceed.

  “Okay then.”

  Two more are approaching,the personality warned.

  Erentz gave the street poet a swift glance. He was engrossed with the telescope again, tracking the movements of the visitors still loose on the grass plains. No need to panic the others.

  Quite.

  The creatures had been arriving at the rate of nearly one every half hour ever since Erentz’s disastrous foray into the Djerba. The personality was now worried about its ability to maintain the habitat’s environmental integrity. Each new arrival invariably smashed its way into a starscraper, then proceeded to hammer the tower’s internal structure. So far the emergency inter-floor pressure seals had held. But if the invasion continued at this rate a breach was inevitable.

  We believe some of the incumbents are now starting to move,the personality said. It’s slow, which makes it hard to tell, but they could start to emerge into the parkland within in the next day or so.

  Do you think they’re multiplying like the first one did?

  Impossible to tell. Our perception routines close to them are almost completely inviolable now. We suspect a great deal of the polyp is dead. However, if one did, then it is logical to assume the others will follow that pattern.

  Oh great. Oh shit. We’re going to have to tackle each one separately. I’m not even sure we can win. The numbers are starting to stack up against us.

  We will have to review our tactics after the first few encounters. If the expenditure is too great then we may adopt Tolton’s wishes and deploy everyone on the signal project.

  Right.she let out a beaten sigh. You know, I don’t even consider that defeatist. Anything which gets us out of this is fine by me.

  A healthy attitude.

  Tolton straightened up. “What next?”

  “We’d better get back down to the others. The visitors aren’t immediately threatening.”

  “That can change.”

  “If it does, I’m sure we’ll know about it real soon.”

  They walked into the small cave at the back of the plateau. It housed a tunnel which spiralled down through several chambers to the caverns at the base of the endcap. Wave escalators and stairs were arranged in parallel down each level. Most of the wave escalators had stopped, so the descent took them quite a while.

  The caverns had taken on the aspect of a fort under siege. Tens of thousands of people lay ill on whatever scraps of bedding were available. There was no order to the way they were arranged. Nursing the bedridden was left entirely to those slightly less ill, and consisted mainly of taking care of their sanitary needs. Those qualified (or with basic how-to didactic memories) to operate medical packages circulated constantly, perpetually exhausted.

  Erentz’s relatives had formed an inner coterie in the deepest caverns, where the light manufacturing tools and research equipment were concentrated. They’d also taken care to stockpile their own food supply, which could last them for well over a month. Here at least, a semblance of normality remained. Electrophorescent strips shone brightly in the corridors. Mechanical doors whirred open and shut. The clatter of industrial cybernetics vibrated along the polyp. Even Tolton’s processor block let out a few modest bleeps as basic functions returned to life.

  Erentz let him into a chamber serving as an armoury. Her relatives had been busy since the reconnaissance in the Djerba, designing and producing a personal flame thrower. The basic principal hadn’t changed much in six hundred years: a chemical tank carried on the user’s back, with a flexible hose leading to a slim rifle-like nozzle. Modern materials and fabrication techniques allowed for a high pressure system, giving a narrow flame that could reach over twenty metres, or be switched to a wide short-range cone. Scalpel or blunderbuss, Erentz commented. There were also incendiary torpedo launchers; essentially scaled-up versions of an emergency flare.

  She started into discussions with several of her relatives, mostly using affinity. Only a few exclamations were actually voiced. Tolton felt like a child left out of abstruse adult conversation. His attention wandered off. Surely the personality wouldn’t expect him to join the combatants fighting the dark creatures? He lacked the kind of driven intensity Erentz and her relatives flaunted, their birthright. He was afraid to ask in case they said yes. Worse, they could say no and kick him out of their caverns to rejoin the rest of the population.

  There must be some important non-combatant post he could fill. He raised his processor block to type an unobtrusive question for the personality. The Rubra of old would sympathise with that, and the Dariat section was his friend. Then he realized Erentz and her cousins had stopped talking.

  “What?” he asked nervously.

  “We can sense something in the rail tube approaching one of the endcap stations,” the block said. It was essentially the same voice Rubra had used to speak with him the whole time he was in hiding; though something about it had changed. A stiffness in the inflexion? Minor yet significant.

  “One of them’s coming here?”

  “We don’t believe so. They rampage about without any attempt to disguise themselves. This is more like a mouse sneaking along. None of the surrounding polyp is suffering the usual heat-loss death. But our perceptive cells are unable t
o obtain a clear image.”

  “The bastards have changed tactics,” Erentz snarled. She snatched one of the flame throwers from a rack. “They know we’re here!”

  “We are uncertain on that point,” the personality said. “However, this new incursion will have to be investigated.”

  Several more people ran into the armoury, and began picking up weapons. Tolton watched the abrupt whir of activity with bewildered alarm.

  “Here.” Erentz thrust an incendiary torpedo launcher at him.

  He grabbed it in reflex. “I don’t know how to use this.”

  “Aim it and shoot. Effective range two hundred metres. Any questions?”

  She didn’t sound in a forgiving mood.

  “Oh crap,” he grunted. He rocked his head from side to side, attempting to force the stiffness out of his neck muscles, then joined them in the hurried exodus.

  There were nine of them in the group which marched down the stairs to the endcap tube station. Eight of Rubra’s heavily armed, grim-faced descendants; and Tolton hanging as close to the back of the pack as possible while trying not to make it too obvious.

  The main lighting strips were dark and cold. Emergency panels flickered with sapphire phosphorescence as if stirred into guilty life by the clumping footsteps. Not that they were of much use. Helmet projectors encased each member of the group in a sphere of bright white light. So far their power cells were unaffected.

  “Any change?” Tolton whispered.

  “No,” the block whispered back. “The creature is still moving along the tube tunnel.”

  Rubra hadn’t damaged this particular station during the brief active phase of his conflict with the possessed. Tolton kept expecting everything to return to life in a blast of light and noise and motion. It was Marie Celeste territory. A carriage was standing abandoned at one of the twin platforms, its door open. A couple of fast food packets lay abandoned on the marble floor outside, their contents dissolved into a pellicle of grey mould.