The Naked God - Faith nd-6

by Peter F. Hamilton

  “I was docked for a routine maintenance overhaul, some replacement components were fitted, so what?”

  “Want me to check on that with Kiera?”

  “I thought you didn’t like her.”

  “I don’t, that’s why I came to you first.”

  “What do you want, Mr Capone?”

  “Two things. If your factory doesn’t work out, come and talk to me, okay? We can arrange much better terms than Kiera’s giving you. No rumbles, for a start. You hellhawks just keep a look out for us around New California. That long-range sight of yours is a valuable commodity. I respect that, and I’m prepared to pay you the top-dollar price for it.”

  “I’ll consider the offer. What’s the other thing?”

  “I want to talk to the guy who saw the murder. That was a good friend of mine got whacked. I got some questions about it for your guy.”

  “Not in person. He’s useful to me, I don’t want him taken away.”

  “Hell no. I know he ain’t a possessed. I just wanna talk, is all.”

  “Very well.”

  Al sat drinking the rest of his coffee for a minute, trying to display patience. When Jed’s sullen suspicious face finally appeared he laughed softly. “I’ll be goddamned. How old are you, kid?”

  “What do you care?”

  “I’m impressed, that’s why. You got balls, I’ll say that for you, kid. Waltzing straight into my headquarters and stinging me for a hundred grand’s worth of electrical garbage. That’s the kind of style I like. Ain’t many in this universe would have done that.”

  “Didn’t have any choice,” Jed grunted.

  “Hell, I know that. I grew up in a tough neighbourhood myself. I know how it works when you’re on the bottom of the pile. You gotta show the boss you can take the heat, right? If you can’t take it, you ain’t no use to him. You get kicked out, because there’s always some other wiseass who thinks he can do better.”

  “Are you really Al Capone?”

  Al ran his hands down his jacket lapel. “Check out the threads, sonny. Nobody else got my class.”

  “So what do you want to talk to me for?”

  “I need to know things. Now, I can’t offer you much in return. I mean, you ain’t too keen to come visit me in person. I can appreciate that, so I can’t give you no reward; dames, booze, that kind of thing. What I got plenty of is local currency. You heard about that?”

  “Some kind of tokens?”

  “Yeah. Tokens, backed up by my word. If I say you owe somebody something, then you have to pay. So I’ll owe you three favours. Me, Al Capone, I will personally go into debt to you. That’s bankable on any possessed planet. Now you can’t ask for stuff like world peace, or crap like that. But any service or help you need, it’s yours. Think of it as the ultimate insurance. I mean, us possessed, we’re spreading through this universe. So, you game?”

  It wasn’t a smile, but the sullen scowl had gone. “Okay, what do you want to know?”

  “First off, that other guy with you, the one you left behind. Is he here to kill me?”

  “Gerald? Christ, no. He’s ill, real bad.” Jed brightened. “Hey, that’s my first favour. His name is Gerald Skibbow, and if you find him, I want you to bung him in a proper hospital with real doctors and stuff.”

  “Okay. This is more like it, we got a dialogue here, you and me. Okay, Gerald Skibbow. If we find him, he gets good medical care. Now the other thing is, I want to know if you saw anyone else hanging around in that corridor when you found the corpse.”

  “There was one bloke, yeah. I saw him through the glass in the door. Didn’t see much of him. Got a long nose. Oh, and really thick eyebrows. You know, the kind that meet over your nose.”

  “Luigi,” Al growled. I should have known he’d side with Kiera. Disciplining people always sparks off a shitload of resentment. He’s going to have contacts among the fleet officers, too, a lot of contacts. She’ll love that. “Thanks kid, I still owe you a couple of favours.”

  Jed gave an exaggerated nod. “Right.” His image faded out.

  Al let out an infuriated breath. Partly angry at himself. He should have kept an eye on Luigi. It was this whole return setup. You couldn’t have a wiseguy whacked no more, because there was a good chance he’d come back somewhere on New California, and madder at you than when the beef started.

  A wave of surprise and consternation flowed through the souls in the beyond, for once drawing Al’s attention. Something momentous was happening. Terror and awe at the event were the dominant sensations spiralling off from the relayed impression.

  “What?” Al asked them. “What is it?”

  Nothing like that first agonising blow against Mortonridge, thank Christ. When he concentrated on the slippery grey images fluttering from soul to soul he saw a sun with another sun erupting out of it. Space was filled with flame, and death flooded inexorably across the sky like a stormfront.

  Arnstat!

  “Holy Christ,” Al gasped. “Cameron? You seeing this?”

  “Loud and clear. I think the hellhawks swallowed out.”

  “Don’t blame them.” Organization warships were vanishing inside blossoming shells of dazzling white light.

  The Confederation Navy had answered Trafalgar in a way he had never dreamed they would. Brute force on an irresistible level. His warships were helpless. Their precious antimatter useless. “Don’t they understand?” he asked the desperate souls. “Arnstat will go.”

  Already flashes of joy were cutting through the beyond as a multitude of bodies were proffered for possession. The reality dysfunction around Arnstat began to strengthen as more and more possessed added themselves to its gestalt. With the Organization’s orbital weapons falling to earth in a rain of smoke there was nothing left to prevent them.

  “Cameron, get me home. Fast.”

  He knew what would happen. The Confederation Navy would visit New California next, its imminent arrival presenting Kiera with her main chance. This time the lieutenants and soldiers would most likely listen when she told them they should return to the planet.

  A bad day getting worse.

  The hostage families of the starship crew members were held on several floors of a hotel overlooking Monterey’s biosphere. During the day, they gathered together in the building’s lounges and public areas to provide each other with whatever mutual comfort they could muster. It wasn’t much. They had become a weary crowd surviving each day on shattered nerves: barely fed, denied information, ignored and despised in equal measure by their Organization guards.

  Silvano and the two gangsters ushered Kingsley into the hotel’s conference suite. He saw Clarissa immediately, helping serve the morning meal. She caught sight of him and cried out, dropping her serving spatula into the pan of beans. Everybody watched as they embraced.

  She was overjoyed to see him. For the first minute. Then Kingsley could stand the dishonesty no longer, and confessed what he had become. She stiffened, backing away in anguish. Wanting to block out the words, for them never to have been spoken.

  “How did it happen?” she asked. “How did you die?”

  “I was in a starship. There was an antimatter explosion.”

  “Trafalgar?” she whispered. “Was it Trafalgar, Kingsley?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh dear God. Not you. Not that.”

  “I have to know something. I’m sorry I’m not asking about you—I should be, I guess—but this is the most important thing in the universe right now. Do you know where Webster is?”

  She shook her head. “They keep us apart. He was assigned to the kitchen staff by that fat collaborator bastard Octavius. I used to see him every week. But it’s been over a fortnight since they brought him last. None of them will tell me anything.” She broke off at the strange smile rising on Kingsley’s face. “What is it?”

  “He was telling the truth.”

  “Who?”

  “I was told that Webster had gotten away from the Organization, that he
was on a starship. Now you tell me you haven’t seen him, and Capone can’t find him.”

  “He’s free?” The knowledge overcame her reluctance, and she reached out to touch him again.

  “It looks that way.”

  “Who told you?”

  “I don’t know. Someone very strange. Clarissa, believe me, there’s a lot more going on in this universe than we realised.”

  Her smile was tragic. “I can hardly doubt my dead husband.”

  “Time to go,” he said abruptly.

  “Go where?”

  “For you, anywhere but here. Capone owes me that, but I suspect I might have trouble trying to collect. So we’ll just take this one stage at a time.”

  He walked over to the conference suite’s door, Clarissa following timidly behind him. The two gangsters lounging by the door straightened up as he approached; Silvano had disappeared, and they didn’t know what they were supposed to do.

  “I’m leaving now,” Kingsley said in a smoothly reasonable tone. “Be sensible. Move aside.”

  “Silvano won’t like this,” one said.

  “Then he should tell me in person. It’s not your job.” He concentrated on the door, visualising it swinging open.

  They tried to prevent it, focusing their own power on keeping it shut. A black magic version of arm wrestling.

  Kingsley laughed as the door crashed open. He looked from one gangster to the other, eyebrow arched in mocking challenge. Unopposed, he stepped through, and took Clarissa’s hand.

  Behind him, one of the gangsters picked up an ivory telephone and dialled furiously.

  Gerald walked cautiously along the corridor, pausing by each door to discover if anyone was inside. It took a lot of Loren’s attention just to make sure his legs moved in a regular motion. The state of his mind had horrified his wife; thoughts disjointed, personality retarded to a childlike confusion, memories becoming fainter and difficult to recall. Only his emotions remained at their adult strength, unmollified by reason and consideration. They pummelled what was left of his rationality with the sharp peaks of extreme states. He experienced fear, never mild anxiety; shame not embarrassment.

  She was constantly having to calm and soothe, offering the kind of persistent encouragement longed for by every child. Her presence was a comfort to him, he kept talking to her, a stream of consciousness drivel she found highly distracting.

  He was in bad physical shape, too. The crude injuries Kiera’s goons had inflicted were easy enough to heal with energistic power. But his body remained perpetually cold, and there was a nasty sharp ache behind his temples which even energistic power couldn’t banish entirely. What he needed was a week of proper sleep, a month of good meals, and a year on a psychiatrist’s couch. It would have to wait.

  They were somewhere inside the docking ledge spaceport which Kiera had taken over for herself and her fraternity. Cabal Centre. Except it was virtually deserted. Apart from the two goons she’d killed, she’d seen only three other possessed. None of them had paid her any attention, hurrying along with fraught minds to obey whatever orders they’d received. The lounges and halls were all empty.

  Loren entered the main lounge, almost familiar with the bland decorations and subdued furniture. She’d seen this place often enough from the beyond. Kiera’s haunt.

  Gerald’s hand ran over the woolly fabric of the couch. Marie had sat on it for hours, talking to her fellow conspirators. The coffee machine; she’d had that brought in along with fine china. It was bubbling away, filling the lounge with its aromatic scent. His eyes moved fast across the door to her bedroom. The men she’d taken in there.

  Loren tried asking the souls of the beyond where she was. But the agitation and unrest created by Arnstat was snarling up their bitter cacophony even more than usual. There were some glimpses of a female shape. Possibly her. Running with a group of people along an unknown corridor.

  The face was less like Marie’s than it used to be.

  Loren swore viciously. To have come this far. She and Gerald enduring horrors greater than anyone knew existed. To have prevailed through all that. To be so close. Whatever omnipotent entity had designed the beyond must surely have come up with the concept of fate as well.

  She could feel Gerald starting to crumple in utter dismay as the prospect of reclaiming their daughter started to recede once again. It will not happen, she promised him.

  As she moved across the lounge she saw a hellhawk on its pedestal outside. Gerald’s surprise halted her as he recognised the Mindori ’s naked form. Platforms and mobile gantries were ranged up against its cargo holds, each one surrounded by bright floodlights. Maintenance crews in sleek black SII spacesuits were installing bulky equipment modules, mating their power and coolant lines to the spacecraft’s existing utility points. Though she couldn’t understand any of the activity, Loren was confident they now had an escape route when the time came. Providing that time was soon.

  She left the lounge and descended one level. This was the engineering section, though none of its workforce had spent much time on internal upkeep recently. Lightpanels along the corridor roof were a feeble yellow; a few of the air ducts buzzed irritably as they blew out erratic streams of air, but most were still. The only clue it wasn’t entirely abandoned came from a near-subliminal humming thrown out by heavy machinery. Loren swivelled round trying to guess the direction, curious about what could be functioning at such a pace when nobody else was around.

  When she finally located the guilty door and opened it, she emerged into a vast maintenance shop that had been converted into a cybernetic factory. Rows of industrial machinery were pounding away with furious intent, hammering, drilling, and cutting components out of raw metal. Crude conveyer belts had been set up between them, carrying the freshly minted chunks of metal to assembly tables at one end. Over two dozen non-possessed workers were employed building machine guns. They were stripped to the waist, their skin gleaming with sweat from the unfiltered heat given off by the machinery.

  None of it really registered with Gerald, while Loren looked round in complete confusion. She walked over to one of the non-possessed workers.

  “Hey! You. What the hell are these for?”

  The man looked up in shock, then bowed his head. “They’re guns,” he grunted sullenly.

  “I can see that, but what are they for?”

  “Kiera.”

  It was all the answer she was going to get from him. Loren picked up one of the guns, her hands slipping on the fine spray of protective oil. Neither she nor Gerald knew much about weapons outside of a didactic course they’d both taken to handle the laser hunting rifle they were allowed on the homestead. Even so, this looked strange. She watched one being put together. Its firing mechanism was too large, and the barrel was lined with some kind of composite.

  Memories which belonged to neither of them foamed away behind Gerald’s eyes. Memories of mud and pain. Of dark humanoid monsters armed with blazing machine guns, advancing with deadly inexorability out of the grey rain.

  Mortonridge. Kiera was building the kind of weapons the Confederation had used at Mortonridge. Against the possessed!

  Loren looked round the factory again, thoroughly unnerved by what she was seeing. The production rate must run into hundreds a day. She was surrounded by non-possessed churning out the one weapon that could blast her back to the beyond in a second. If they had any ammunition.

  She checked over the gun she was holding, wiping off the surplus oil with a tissue. Satisfied it was fully functional, she left the factory and started hunting for the second one. It wouldn’t be too far away.

  Monterey was twenty kilometres away; Cameron’s approach made it look as though the asteroid was moving to eclipse New California. Sliding across the crescent as it expanded in the promenade deck’s big window. The flight path, coming in at ninety degrees to the rotation axis made it look as though the rock was sprouting a glittery metallic mushroom straight up. That changed as Cameron curved round above t
he counter-rotating spaceport, and started to slide in parallel to the spindle. The docking ledge was directly ahead, a deep circular gully chiselled into the rock, with tiny brilliant lights on one side producing wide circles of illumination on the other. Orientation shifted again as the hellhawk chased the asteroid’s rotation, turning the gully sides to a floor and ceiling. And Al finally began to understand the way centrifugal force worked.

  An explosion bloomed out of the cliff-face rear of the ledge, quarter of the way round from Cameron’s position. It came from a section of rock that was clad in a big mosaic of metal and composite equipment. A broad fountain of brilliant white gas, moving sluggishly enough to be a liquid, spitting out from a jagged hole at the centre of the machinery. Tiny chunks of solid matter spun through the plume.

  Al took the Havana from his mouth and crossed over to the window, pressing against it for a better look. “Holy shit. Cameron, what the hell was that? Is the Navy here already?”

  “No, Al. There’s been a breach in the rock. I’m monitoring the radio, nobody’s quite sure what happened.”

  “Where did it happen?” Al was straining to see if there were any hellhawks or people on the ledge near the plume.

  “It’s in an industrial sector, where you were repairing that nutrient fluid refinery.”

  Al slammed the palm of his hand into the window. “That bitch !” His three small scars were snow-white against a burning cheek. He stared at the plume as it slowly died down, exposing the crumpled wreckage that was peeling away from the vertical rock. “Okay, a straight fight is what she wants, that what she gets.”

  “Al, I’m picking up a broadband message to the fleet. It’s Kiera.”

  One of the small circular ports along the side of the observation deck shimmered over and began showing Kiera’s face. “. . . after Arnstat there can be no alternative. The Confederation Navy is coming, and with the numbers to defeat us. Unless you want to be banished back to the beyond, we have to transfer ourselves down to the planet. I have the means to do this, and the ability to maintain our authority on the surface without relying on the SD platforms and antimatter. Everything you have now, your status and position, can be continued under my patronage. And this time around you don’t have to risk yourselves on those dangerous war missions of Capone’s. His day is over. For those of you who choose to have a privileged future, get in touch with Luigi, he will be joining you in the Swabia. If you follow him to low orbit, I will provide the means to establish yourselves on the surface. Anyone who wants to stay and wait for the Navy, feel free.”