Alkad picked her way carefully along the shingle-strewn path. An accident now would be the ultimate irony, she thought. There was the familiar nagging ache in her left leg, exacerbated by the rough incline.
Her retinal implants located a pair of adolescent lovers in the dunes at the far end of the beach. Craving solitude amid the deepening shadows, their dark entwined bodies were oblivious to the world, and nearly invisible. The girl’s baby-blonde hair provided a rich contrast to her ebony skin, while the boy reminded Alkad of Peter as he stroked and caressed his willing partner. An omen, though Alkad Mzu no longer really believed in deities.
She reached the warm, dry sands and adjusted the straps of her lightweight backpack. It was the one she had brought with her to the habitat twenty-six years ago; it contained the cagoule and flask and first aid kit which she carried unfailingly on every ramble through the interior. By now the routine of her hike was scribed in stone. If she hadn’t worn it, the Intelligence agencies would have been suspicious.
Alkad cut across the dunes at an angle, aiming for the middle of the beach, her feet leaving light imprints in the powdery sand. Three watchers made their way down the path behind her, the rest carried on walking along the top of the escarpment. And—a recent development, this—a couple of Tranquillity serjeants stood impassively at the foot of the escarpment beside the waterfall. She only saw them against the craggy polyp because of their infrared emission. They must have been positioned there in anticipation of her route.
It wasn’t entirely unexpected. Tranquillity would have informed Ione Saldana about all those agency-teasing meetings with starship captains. The girl was erring on the side of caution, which was quite acceptable. She did have the rest of the population to think about, after all.
Alkad peered ahead, out over the huge grey valley of water to the southern shore, searching. There, to the right, twenty degrees up the curve. The Laymil project campus was a unique splash of opal light on the darkened terraces of the southern endcap. Such a shame, really, she thought with a tinge of regret. The work had been an interesting challenge, interpreting and extrapolating xenoc technology from mere fragments of clues. She had made friends there, and progress. And now the whole campus was animated with the discovery of the Laymil sensorium memories that young scavenger had found. It was an exciting time to be a project researcher, full of promise and reward.
In another life she could easily have devoted herself to it.
Alkad reached the water’s edge as the light-tube cooled to a smirched platinum. Ripples sighed contentedly against the sand. Tranquillity really was a premium place to live. She shrugged out of her backpack, then touched the seal on her boots and started to pull them off.
Samuel, the Edenist Intelligence operative, was six metres from the foot of the scarp path when he saw the lone figure by the water bend over to take her boots off. That wasn’t part of the humdrum formula which governed Mzu’s activities. He hurried after Pauline Webb, the CNIS second lieutenant, who had reached the beach ahead of him. She dithered in the grove of palm trees which huddled along the base of the escarpment, debating whether to break cover and walk openly on the sands.
“It looks like she’s going for a swim,” he said.
Pauline gave him a cursory nod. The CNIS and the Edenists cooperated to a reasonable degree in their observation.
“At night?” she said. “By herself?”
“The doctor is a solitary soul, but I concede this isn’t the most sensible thing she’s ever done.” Samuel was thinking back to that morning when the news of Omuta’s sanctions being lifted had appeared in the AV projection at Glover’s restaurant.
“So what do we do?”
Monica Foulkes, the ESA operative, caught up with them. She increased the magnification factor of her retinal implants just as Alkad Mzu pulled her sweatshirt off over her head. “I don’t know what you two are panicking over. Nobody as smart as Dr Mzu would choose drowning as a method of suicide. It’s too prolonged.”
“Maybe she is just going for a quick swim,” Pauline suggested, without much hope. “It’s a pleasant enough evening.”
Samuel kept watching Mzu. Now her boots and clothes were off she was removing the contents of her backpack and dropping them on the sand. It was the casual way she did it which bothered him; as if she was without a care. “I somehow doubt it.”
“We’re going to look particularly stupid charging over there to rescue her if all she’s doing is taking a dip to cool off,” Monica groused.
The middle-aged Edenist’s lips pursed in amusement. “You think we don’t look stupid anyway?”
She scowled, and ignored him.
“Does anyone have any relevant contingency orders?” Pauline asked.
“If she wants to drown herself, then I say let her,” Monica said. “Problem solved at long last. We can all pack up and go home then.”
“I might have known you’d take that attitude.”
“Well, I’m not swimming after her if she gets into trouble.”
“You wouldn’t have to,” Samuel said, without shifting his gaze. “Tranquillity has affinity-bonded dolphins. They’ll assist any swimmers that get into difficulties.”
“Hoo-bloody-rah,” Monica said. “Then we can have another twenty years of worrying about who the daft old biddy will talk to and what she’ll say.”
Alkad datavised a code to the processor in her empty backpack. The seal around the bottom opened, and the composite curled up revealing the hidden storage space. She reached in to remove the programmable silicon spacesuit which had lain there undisturbed for twenty-six years.
Ione, Tranquillity said urgently. We have a problem developing.
“Excuse me,” Ione said to her cocktail party guests. They were members of the Tranquillity Banking Regulatory Council, invited to discuss the habitat’s falling revenue which the massive decrease in starship movements was causing. Something needed to be done to halt the stock market’s wilder fluctuations, so she had thought an informal party was the best way of handling it. She turned instinctively to face her apartment’s window wall and the shoals of yellow and green fish nosing round the fan of light it threw across the dusky sand. What?
It’s Alkad Mzu. Look.
The image fizzed up into her mind.
Samuel frowned as Mzu drew some kind of object from deep inside her backpack. It looked ridiculously like a football, but with wings attached. Even with his retinal implants on full magnification he couldn’t quite make it out. “What is that?”
Mzu fastened the collar round her neck, and bit down on the nozzle of the respirator tube. She datavised an activation code into the suit’s control processor. The black ball flattened itself against her upper chest and started to flow over her skin.
Both the other Intelligence operatives turned to look at the sharpness in Samuel’s voice. The two serjeants began to walk forwards over the beach.
Ione! Tranquillity’s thoughts rang with surprise, turning to alarm. I can sense a gravitonic-distortion zone building.
So? she asked. Every starship emerging above Mirchusko registered in the habitat’s mass-sensitive organs. There was no requirement for the usual network of strategic warning grav-distortion-detector satellites which guarded ordinary asteroid settlements and planets, Tranquillity’s perception of local space was unrivalled, making threat response a near-instantaneous affair. Is the starship emerging too close? Arm the strategic-defence platforms.
No use. It’s—
At first Samuel mistook it for a shadow cast by an evening cloud. There was still enough pearly radiance coming from the light-tube to give the circumfluous sea a sparse shimmer, a cloud would produce exactly that patch of darkness. But there was only one patch of darkness; and when he glanced up the air was clear. Then the noise began, a distant thunderclap which lasted for several seconds, then chopped off abruptly. A brilliant star shone at the centre of the darkness, sending long radials of frigid white light into the habitat.
Mzu was silhouetted perfectly against the white blaze reflected off the sea, encased in the black skin of the spacesuit, a consummate monochrome picture.
Shock immobilized Samuel’s body for a precious second. Out of the centre of the fading star a blackhawk came skimming silently over the sea towards Mzu; a compressed ovoid one hundred and thirty metres long, with a horseshoe life-support section moulded round the rear dorsal bulge. Its blue polyp hull was marbled with an imperial-purple web.
“Jesus wept!” Pauline said in an aghast whisper. “It jumped inside. It’s come right into the fucking habitat!”
“Get her!” Monica cried. “For Christ’s sake stop the bitch!” She ran forwards.
“No, stop! Come back,” Samuel yelled. But Pauline was already charging out of the trees after the ESA agent, boosted muscles accelerating her to a phenomenal speed. “Oh, shit.” He started to run.
Meyer saw the small spacesuited woman standing at the water’s edge, and Udat obligingly angled round towards her. Tension had condensed his guts into a solid lump. Swallowing inside a habitat, it had to be the craziest stunt in the history of spaceflight. Yet they’d done it!
We are in, Udat observed sagely. That’s halfway.
And don’t I know it.
WHAT ARE YOU DOING? Tranquillity’s outraged broadcast thundered into the blackhawk’s mind.
Meyer winced. Even Udat’s calm thoughts fluttered.
The woman is a political dissident being persecuted by the Kulu ESA, Meyer replied with shaky bravado. Of all people, Ione Saldana should sympathize with that. We’re taking her where she will be safe.
STOP IMMEDIATELY. I WILL NOT PERMIT THIS. UDAT, SWALLOW OUT NOW. The force of the mental compulsion which the habitat personality exerted was incredible. Meyer felt as though someone had smashed a meat hook into his skull to pull his brain out by the roots. He groaned, clutching at the cushioning of his acceleration couch, heart pounding in his ears.
STOP!
“Keep going,” he gasped. His nose started to bleed. Neural nanonics sent out a flurry of metabolic overrides.
Alkad waded through the shallows as the blackhawk descended, gliding fastidiously round one of the cove’s small islands. She hadn’t grasped how big the bitek creature was. To see that almighty bulk suspended so easily in the air was an uncanny marvel. Its rounded nose was streaked with long frost rays as the sea’s humidity gusted over polyp which was accustomed to the radiative chill of deep space. A huge patch of water below the hull began to foam and churn as the distortion field interacted with it. She suddenly felt as though the horizontal was rolling. Udat turned through ninety degrees, and tilted sharply, bringing the portside wing of its life-support horseshoe down towards the water. An airlock slid open. Cherri Barnes stood inside, wearing her spacesuit. Orange silicon-fibre straps tethered her securely to the sides of the small chamber. She threw a rope-ladder down.
On the beach five figures were racing over the dunes.
Ione said: Kill her.
The serjeants pulled laser pistols from their holsters. Alkad Mzu already had her foot on the first rung.
Udat’s maser cannon fired.
Monica Foulkes pounded hard across the sand, neural nanonics commands and boosted muscles meshing so that her body ate the distance effortlessly, a hundred and fifty metres in nine seconds. The prime order of the ESA’s Tranquillity operation was to prevent Mzu from leaving, that took precedence over everything. It didn’t look like Monica was going to get to the blackhawk in time, Mzu had started to claw her way up the rocking ladder. She reviewed which of her weapon implants would have the best chance; the trouble was most of them were designed for unobtrusive close-range work. And that bloody Lunar SII spacesuit didn’t help. It would have to be a microdart, and hope the tip penetrated. She was aware of the serjeants off to her left pulling out their laser pistols.
A metre-wide column of air fluoresced a faint violet, drawing a line from a silver bubble on the blackhawk’s lower hull to a serjeant. The bitek servitor blew apart in an explosion of steam and carbon granules. Fifteen metres behind it, where the beam struck the beach, a patch of sand became a puddle of glass, glowing a vivid rose-gold.
Over-hyped nerves sent Monica diving for cover the instant the beam appeared. She hit the loose sand, momentum ploughing a two and a half metre long furrow. There were two near-simultaneous thuds behind her as Samuel and Pauline flung themselves down. The second serjeant erupted into a black-grain mist with a loud burping sound as the maser hit it. Monica’s mind gibbered as she waited, head buried in the sand. At least with that power rating it’ll be quick . . .
A wind began howling over the dunes.
Samuel raised his head to see his worst expectation confirmed. A wormhole interstice was opening around the nose of the blackhawk. Alkad Mzu was halfway up the rope-ladder.
You must not take her from here, he pleaded with the starship. You must not!
The interstice widened, a light-devouring tunnel boring through infinity. Air streamed in.
“Hang on!” Samuel shouted to the two women agents.
COME BACK! Tranquillity commanded.
Meyer, his mind twinned with the blackhawk, quailed under the habitat’s furious demand. It was too much, the storm voice had raged inside his skull for what seemed like days, bruising his neurons with its violence. Welcome surrender beckoned—to hell with Mzu, nothing was worth this. Then he felt local space twisting under the immense distortion which Udat’s energy patterning cells exterted. A pseudoabyss leading into freedom opened before him. Go, he ordered. The cold physical blackness outside invaded his mind, plunging him into glorious oblivion.
A small but ferocious hurricane set Alkad spinning like a runaway propeller at the end of her precarious silicon-fibre ladder. “Wait!” she datavised in mounting terror. “You’re supposed to wait till I’m in the airlock.” Her digitalized vehemence made no impression on Udat. The air buoyed her up as though she had become weightless, swinging her round until the ladder was horizontal. Oscillating gravity was doing terrible things to her inner ears. Screaming air tried to tear her from the ladder. Neural nanonics pumped muscle-lock orders into her hands and calves to reinforce her grip. She could feel ligaments ripping. Collar sensors showed her the fuzzy rim of the wormhole interstice sliding inexorably along the hull towards her. “No. In the name of Mary, wait!” And then Dr Alkad Mzu was suddenly presented with every physicist’s dream opportunity: observing the fabric of the universe from the outside.
Monica Foulkes heard Samuel’s shouted warning and instinctively grabbed a tuft of reedy dune grass. The wind surged with impossible strength. Gravity shifted round until the beach was above her. Monica wailed fearfully as sand fell up into the sky. She felt herself following it, feet pulled into the air and sliding round to point at the interstice surrounding the blackhawk’s nose. The grass clump made an awful slow tearing sound. Her hips and chest left the ground. Sand was blasting directly into her face. She couldn’t see, couldn’t breathe. The grass clump moved several centimetres. “OhdearGodpreservemeee!”
A long-fingered hand clamped around her free wrist. The grass clump left the sand with a sharp sucking noise, its weight wrenching her arm out towards the blackhawk. For an eternal second Monica hung splayed in the air as the sand scudded around her. Someone groaned with pained effort.
The wormhole interstice closed behind Udat.
Sand, water, mangled vegetation, and demented fish cascaded down out of the sky. Monica landed flat on her belly, breath knocked out of her. “Oh my God,” she wheezed. When she looked up, the haggard Edenist was crouched on his knees, panting heavily as he clutched his wrist. “You”—the words were difficult to form in her throat—“you held on to me.”
He threw her a nod. “I think my wrist is broken.”
“I would have . . .” She shuddered, then gave a foolish jittery laugh. “God, I don’t even know your name.”
“Samuel.”
“Thank you, Samuel.”
He rolled onto his back and sighed. “Pleasure.”
Are you all right? Tranquillity asked the Edenist.
My wrist is very painful. She’s heavy.
Your colleagues are approaching. Three of them are carrying medical nanonic packages in their aid kits. They will be with you shortly.
Even after all this time spent in Tranquillity, he couldn’t get used to the personality’s lack of empathy. Habitats were such an essential component of Edenism. It was disconcerting to have one treat him in this cavalier fashion. Thank you.
“I didn’t think voidhawks and blackhawks could operate in a gravity field,” Monica said.
“They can’t,” he told her. “This isn’t gravity, it’s centrifugal force. It’s no different to the docking-ledges they use outside.”
“Ah, of course. Have you ever heard of one coming inside a habitat before?”
“Never. A swallow like that requires phenomenal accuracy. From a strictly chauvinistic point of view I hate to say this, but I think it would be beyond most voidhawks. Even most blackhawks, come to that. Mzu made an astute choice. This was a very well thought out escape.”
“Twenty-six years in the making,” Pauline said. She climbed slowly to her feet, shaking her cotton top, which had been soaked by the falling water. A fat blue fish, half a metre long, was thrashing frantically on the sand by her shoes. “I mean that woman had us fooled for twenty-six goddamn years. Acting out the role of a flekhead physics professor with all the expected neuroses and eccentricities slotting perfectly into place. And we believed it. We patiently watched her for twenty-six years and she behaved exactly as predicted. If my home planet had been blown to shit, I’d behave like that. She never faltered, not once. But it was a twenty-six-year charade. Twenty-six goddamn years! What kind of a person can do that?”
Monica and Samuel exchanged an anxious look.
“Someone pretty obsessive,” he said.
“Obsessive!” Pauline’s face darkened. She leant over to pick the big fish up, but it squirmed out of her hands. “Keep bloody still,” she shouted at it. “Well, God help Omuta now she’s loose in the universe again.” She finally succeeded in grabbing hold of the fish. “You do realize that thanks to our sanctions they haven’t got a defensive system which can even fart loudly?”
The Night's Dawn Trilogy Page 109
