The Naked God - Faith nd-6

by Peter F. Hamilton

  He opened his arms wide, and grabbed her in a fierce bear hug that turned into a rugby tackle. “Mine!” he howled. “You’re mine.” They crashed painfully to the floor, Kiera’s knee cracking against the carbon-concrete. “Darling, baby, Marie, I’m here. I’m here.”

  “Daddy!” She didn’t say it. The voice came from within, rising irresistibly from Marie Skibbow’s imprisoned mind. Incredulity poured through Kiera’s thoughts, smothering her own responses. Marie was sweeping back towards full control.

  “I’m going to get her out of you, I promise,” Gerald shouted. “I know how. Loren told me.”

  Hudson Proctor finally recovered from his shock, and leant over the squirming couple to grab Gerald’s sleeve. He pulled hard, muscles reinforced by energistic strength, attempting to tear the deranged man free from Kiera. Gerald stabbed a small power cell against Hudson’s hand, its naked electrodes digging deep. Hudson screamed as the excruciating bolt of electricity flowed across his skin. He lurched back in terror and pain, a bud of flame sizzling bright from his hand. Two of the bodyguards pounced on Gerald, trapping his legs and one arm. He bucked about frantically.

  Kiera went skidding over the floor, barely aware of the disorderly scrum tumbling around her. Her limbs were starting to move in the way which Marie commanded, as the girl’s thoughts expanded rapidly back along their old pathways. She concentrated on fighting the girl’s re-emergence.

  Gerald jabbed the power cell towards Marie’s face, the electrodes halting millimetres from her eyes. “Get out of her,” he raged. “Out! Out! She’s mine. My baby!”

  One of the bodyguards grabbed his wrist and twisted hard. Gerald’s bone shattered. The power cell dropped to the floor. Gerald screamed in fury. He slammed his elbow back with berserker strength. It caught the bodyguard in his stomach, doubling him up.

  “Daddy!”

  “Marie?” Gerald gasped, fearful with hope.

  “Daddy.” Marie’s voice was dwindling. “Daddy, help.”

  Gerald scrabbled round desperately for the power cell. His cold fingers closed around it. Hudson Proctor landed on his back, and the two of them rolled over together.

  “Marie!” He could see her beautiful face in front of him. Shaking like a dog coming out of deep water, hair fanning round.

  “Not any more,” she snarled. Her fist smashed dead into Gerald’s nose.

  Kiera slowly climbed to her feet, swaying slightly as long tremors clattered along her body. The bitch girl was back where she belonged, weeping at the centre of her brain. One of the bodyguards was curled up on the floor, clutching his abdomen, cheek resting in a small puddle of vomit. Hudson Proctor was hopping about, shaking his hand violently as if it was still on fire. A deep pock of blackened flesh above his knuckles was trailing smoke, filling the air with a disgusting smell. His eyes were shedding tears of pain. The remaining bodyguards were standing round Gerald, spoiling for trouble.

  “I’m going to kill the bastard!” Hudson shouted. He kicked Gerald hard in the ribs.

  “Enough,” Kiera said. She wiped a shaking hand across her forehead. Her tangle of hair stirred itself, straightening out and flowing back to its usual dark glossy arrangement. She looked down at Gerald. He was groaning faintly, fingers pawing weakly at his side where Hudson had kicked him. Blood was pumping out from his flattened nose. His thoughts and emotions were a discordant nonsense. “How the fuck did he get here?” she grumbled.

  “You know him?” Hudson asked in surprise.

  “Oh yes. This is Marie Skibbow’s father. Last seen on Lalonde. Which was last seen departing this universe.”

  Hudson gave an uncomfortable flinch. “You don’t think they’re coming back, do you?”

  “No.” Kiera glanced along the hall. Three of Al’s gangsters had emerged from the Hilton’s lobby to look at what was going on.

  “We have to move. Get him up,” she told her bodyguards.

  They grabbed Gerald under his shoulders and hauled him upright. His dazed eyes peered at Kiera. “Marie,” he pleaded.

  “I don’t know how you got here, Gerald, but we’ll find that out eventually. You must really love your daughter to have attempted this.”

  “Marie, baby, Daddy’s here. Can you hear me? I’m here. Please, Marie.”

  Kiera bent her bruised knee, wincing at the lick of pain which the movement brought. She focused her energistic power around the joint, feeling it ease up. “Ordinarily, just working you over ready to receive a soul from the beyond would be punishment enough. But after all you’ve done, you deserve better.” She smiled, leaning in closer. Her voice became husky. “You’re going to be possessed, Gerald. And the lucky boy who wins your body is going to get me as well. I’m going to take him to bed, and let him fuck me any way he wants, as much as he wants. And you’re going to feel it happening the whole time, Gerald. You’re going to feel yourself fucking your darling daughter.”

  “Noooo!” Gerald howled, shuddering in his captor’s grip. “No, you can’t. You can’t!”

  Kiera slowly licked Gerald’s cheek, holding his head fast as he tried to squirm away. Her mouth arrived at his ear. “It won’t be Marie’s first perversion, Gerald,” she whispered smoothly. “I enjoy how hot this body gets when I use it to perform my deviancies. And I have a lot of them, as you’ll find out.”

  Gerald began a tormented wailing; his knees buckled. “It hurts again,” he burbled. “My head hurts. I can’t see anything. Marie? Where are you, Marie?”

  “You’ll see her, Gerald, I promise I’ll open your eyes for you.” Kiera jerked her head at the bodyguards holding the wretched madman. “Bring him.”

  The office Emmet Mordden had claimed for himself was on the same corridor as the tactical operations centre. Its previous occupant, the Admiral commanding New California’s SD network, had favoured striking colours for his furniture. The easy chairs were purple, scarlet, lemon, and emerald, while his curving desk was a perfect mirror. A continual holographic screen formed a narrow band circling the room half-way up the wall, showing a view out over a coral reef colonized by some xenoc species of aquatic termites. Emmet didn’t mind, like all possessed he enjoyed the impact of strong colours, and found the ocean relaxing. Besides, there was a very powerful desktop processor which allowed him to track down most of the problems he was given, and he was close to the Organization’s communication centre when a crisis hit—like five times a day. The admiral also had an excellent stash of booze.

  When Al came in he gave the easy chairs a disapproving grunt. “I gotta sit in one of those? Je-zus, Emmet, don’t you tell no one. I got an image around here.” Al sat in the one nearest the desk and rested his fedora on its wide arm. He took a longer look round. Same as everywhere else in the asteroid. Trash piling up, food wrappers and cups, along with a pile of clothes in one corner waiting for the laundry. If anyone should have room service sorted, he expected it to be Emmet. Bad sign that he hadn’t. But the brain boy had been busy in other ways. His desk was covered in those electric calculation machines, all stitched together with glass wire. Picture screens lined the edge of the desk, standing on things like sheet music racks; the whole set up was hurried, just out of the workshop. “You been busy by the looks of things.”

  “I have.” Emmet gave him a pensive look. “Al, I gotta tell you, I’ve wound up with more questions than when we started.”

  “Figures.”

  “First off, I checked the corridor cameras, and all the ones round about that area. They came to a big zero. I don’t know who killed Bernhard, but they definitely messed with the camera processors. The memories were deleted, someone used a codebuster against our protocols.”

  “Emmet . . . come on man, you know I don’t grab any of that shit.”

  “Sorry, Al. Okay, it’s like the photos the cameras take are automatically locked inside a safe. Well, somebody cracked it, took the photos out, then locked it up again behind them.”

  “Shit. So no pictures, huh?”

  “Not in the
corridor, no. So I widened the search and hunted through the cameras outside, the ones covering the ledge.” He tapped one of the makeshift screens. “Watch.”

  A picture of the docking ledge sprang up. They were looking down on the airlock as it jetted air out to the stars. Two spacesuited figures stood watching it. One of them started bounding towards the open hatch. After a short interval, the other one followed him.

  “Nothing happens for a couple of minutes,” Emmet said.

  The image zipped with static, then the two spacesuits emerged from the airlock and carried on walking down the ledge.

  “The footprint guys?” Al suggested.

  “I think so. But I don’t think they’re part of Bernhard’s hit.”

  “Sure they are. They didn’t holler about what happened.”

  “They’re in spacesuits, so they’re not possessed. Look at it from their angle. They’ve just stumbled over the newly dead corpse of one of your senior lieutenants, and they’ve even got his blood on their boots. There’s no one else around they can point the finger at. What would you do?”

  “Keep my mouth shut,” Al agreed. “Do you know who they are?”

  “This is where it gets odd. I backtracked them; they came out of a hellhawk called Mindori .”

  “Goddamn! Kiera’s people.”

  “I don’t think so.” The camera memory played on, showing the two spacesuited figures getting into a small truck and driving it round to another airlock. “I couldn’t get a record off the cameras in this section either. So I don’t know what they got up to inside. But it was a different program which erased their memories, not the same one used in Bernhard’s hit.” One of the spacesuited figures re-emerged onto the docking ledge and loaded several trays of small packages onto the truck. It was then driven back to the Mindori . The figure eventually climbed back up into the hellhawk’s life support module.

  “Kiera doesn’t use non-possessed to crew her hellhawks,” Emmet said. “And that guy was still on board when it took off. The other one must still be inside the habitat.”

  “Je-zus. He’s walking around in here?”

  “Looks that way. All we know for sure is that they’re nothing to do with Kiera.”

  “But he could be the goddamn Confederation Navy. Some kind of assassin. Their version of Kingsley Pryor.”

  “I’m not so sure, Al. Those boxes in the truck. I ran a search through our store’s inventory. It’s not exactly tight at the best of times, but there’s a lot of electronics I can’t account for. I can’t see the Confederation Navy breaking in here to steal a truck full of spare parts. That doesn’t make any sense.”

  Al stared at the screen, which had frozen on the last image of the spacesuited guy stepping into Mindori ’s airlock. “All right, so we’ve got two separate things going on here. Kiera hits Bernhard, and a hellhawk helps someone steal our electrical stuff. The first one I can understand. But the hellhawk . . . Can you figure what it’s doing?”

  “No. But it’s back here right now. We can just ask it straight out. Mindori docked on the ledge this morning. Kiera’s got her engineering teams out there fitting it ready for a long-duration flight. Something else to consider: our defence network says another hellhawk has gone missing from its patrol. They’re running a check on the rest to see how many are still there.”

  Al leaned back into the chair, and grinned happily. “They could be trying to break free. How long till that food factory they need is fixed?”

  “Another week. Five days if we really hustle.”

  “Then hustle, Emmet. Meantime I’m going out to take a ride in Cameron. He can talk to the other hellhawks for me, without Kiera listening in.”

  Gerald’s fractured thoughts slithered through a universe of darkness and pain. He didn’t know where he was, what he was doing. He didn’t really care. Flashes erupted from time to time as neurons made erratic connections, releasing bright images of Marie. His thoughts clustered round them like worshipful congregations. The reason for such adulation was slipping from him.

  Voices began to impinge on his miserable existence. A chorus of whispers. Insistent. Relentless. Growing louder, stronger. They began to intrude on his vague consciousness.

  A blast of white-hot pain put him in sudden, frightening contact with his body again.

  Let us in. End the torment. We can help.

  The pain changed position and texture. Burning.

  We can stop it.

  I can stop it. Let me in. I want to help.

  No, me. I’m the one you need.

  Me.

  I have the secret to end their torture.

  There was sound. Real sound, rattling through the air. His own thin screams. And laughter. Cruel cruel laughter.

  Gerald.

  No, he told them. No, I won’t. Not again. I’d rather die.

  Gerald, let me in. Don’t fight.

  I’ll die for Marie. Rather that . . .

  Gerald, it’s me. Feel me. Know me. Taste my memories.

  She said . . . She said she’d . . . Oh no. Not that. Don’t make me, not with her. No.

  I know. I was there. Now let me come through. It’s difficult, I know. But we have to help her. We have to help Marie. This is the only way now.

  Astonishment at the soul’s identity crumbled his mental barriers. The soul roared through from the beyond, permeating his body; the energy it brought seething along his limbs, sparkling down his spinal column. Invigorating. New memories invaded his synapses, colliding with the emplaced recollections in cascades of sights, sounds, tastes, and sensation. It wasn’t like before. Before, he’d been confined, shoved down to the very edge of awareness, knowing of the outside by the tiniest trickle of nerve impulses. A passive, near-insensate passenger/prisoner in his own body. This time it was a more equal partnership, though the newcomer was dominant.

  Gerald’s eyes opened, a flush of energistic power helping them to focus. Another application finally banished the terrible headache that had raged for so long.

  Two of Kiera’s bodyguards were smirking down at him. “Who’s a lucky boy then,” one chortled. “Man, you are in for the shag of a lifetime tonight.”

  Gerald raised a hand. Two searing spears of white fire flashed from his fingertips, drilling straight through the craniums of both bodyguards. Four souls gibbered their fury as they plunged back into the beyond.

  “I have other plans for this evening, thank you,” said Loren Skibbow.

  It had been a while since Al took a ride in his rocketship. Sitting in the fat green-leather couch on the hellhawk’s promenade deck made him realize just how long. He stretched out, putting his feet up.

  “Where can I take you, Al?” Cameron’s voice asked from the silver tannoy grill on the wall.

  “Just off Monterey, you know.” He needed a break, just a short time alone to get his head around what was happening. In the old days he would have just gone for a drive, maybe take a fishing rod with him. Golf, too, he’d played golf a few times; though not to any rules the Royal and Ancient had ever heard about. Just buddies fooling round on a fine day.

  The view through the big forward window showed him the asteroid’s counter-rotating spaceport slipping away overhead as they leapt off the docking ledge. Gravity inside the cabin was rock steady. New California tracked in from the riveted steel rim around the window, a silvery half crescent, like the moon had looked on clear summer nights above Brooklyn. He never could get used to how much cloud planets had. It was amazing anyone on the surface ever saw the sun.

  Cameron was curving out from the big asteroid, rolling continually like a playful dolphin. If Al looked back through the portholes down the side of the promenade deck, he could see brilliant sunlight sweeping over the yellow fins and scarlet fuselage.

  “Hey, Cameron, can you show me the Orion Nebula?”

  The hellhawk’s antics slowed. Its nose swung across the starscape, hunting like a compass needle. “There we go. Should be dead centre in the window now.”

&n
bsp; Al saw it then, a delicate haze of light, like God had wet his thumb and smeared a star across the canvas of space. He sat back in the couch and drank cappuccino from a tiny cup as he looked at it. Weird little thing. A fog in space, Emmet said. Where stars are born. The Martians and their death rays lived on the other side.

  There was no way he could get his head round that. The idea of the Navy ships going there had frightened Kiera, and even Jez was concerned. But it didn’t connect for him. He was going to have to ask for advice again. He sighed, acknowledging the inevitable. But there were some things he could still take care of by himself. Chicago had more territories, factions and gangs than the whole Confederation put together. He knew how to manipulate them. Make new friends, lose old ones. Apply some heat. Bribe, blackmail, extort. Nobody today, living or dead, had his kind of political experience. Prince of the city. Then, now, and always.

  “Cameron, I want to talk to a hellhawk called Mindori , and I want it confidential.”

  The sharply pointed scarlet nose began to turn, sending the nebula sliding from view. Monterey reappeared, a grubby ochre splodge with pinpricks of light shimmering around its spaceport.

  “The guy’s name is Rocio, Al,” Cameron said.

  A square in the corner of the window turned grey, then swirled into a face. “Mr Capone,” Rocio said politely. “I’m honoured. What can I do for you?”

  “I don’t like Kiera,” Al told him.

  “Who does? But we’re both stuck with her.”

  “You’re hurting me, Rocio. You know that’s bullshit. She’s got you by the short and curlies because she blew up all your food factories. What if I told you I might be able to rebuild one?”

  “Okay, I’m interested.”

  “I know you are. You’re trying to set one up yourself. That’s why you grabbed those electric gadgets the other day, right?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “We got it all on film, Rocio; your guys breaking in to Monterey and driving a truckload of stuff back to you.”