“This Mauer is a tough mother, Quinn. He tricked me, that’s all. I’ll make him suffer for it, I swear. The Light Bringer will be proud of the way I let my serpent beast loose on him.”
“There’s no need,” Quinn said genially.
Bajan let out a faltering whimper of relief.
“I shall supervise his suffering myself.”
“But . . . how?”
In the absolute silence of the bridge, Lawrence Dillon sniggered.
“Leave us, Bajan, you little prick,” Quinn ordered. “You have failed me.”
“Leave? Leave what?”
“The body I provided for you. You don’t deserve it.”
“No!” Bajan howled.
“Go. Or I’ll shove you into zero-tau.”
With a last sob, Bajan let himself fall back into the beyond, the glories of sensation ripping out of his mind. His soul wept its torment as the crowded emptiness closed around him once again.
Gurtan Mauer coughed weakly, his body trembling. He had lurched from one nightmare to another. The Tantu’s bridge had become an archaic crypt where technological artifacts protruded from whittled ebony, as if they were the foreign elements. A monk in midnight-black robes stood at the side of his couch, the hint of a face inside the voluminous hood indicated by the occasional carmine flicker striking alabaster skin. An inverted crucifix hung on a long silver chain around his neck; for some reason it wasn’t drifting around as it ought in free fall.
“You didn’t just defy me alone,” Quinn said. “That I could almost accept. But when you held back that fucking ASA code you defied the will of God’s Brother. Right now I should have been in the docking station, by morning I would have kissed the ground at the foot of the orbital tower. I was destined to carry the gospel of the Night to the whole motherfucking world! And you fucked with me, shithead. You!”
Mauer’s ship-suit caught light. In free fall the flame was a bright indigo fluid, slithering smoothly across his torso and along his limbs. Scraps of charred fabric peeled off, exposing the charcoaled skin below. Fans whirred loudly behind the bridge’s duct grilles as they attempted to suck the awful stench from the compartment’s air.
Quinn ignored the agonized wailing muted by the captain’s clamped mouth. He let his mind lovingly undress Lawrence.
The slight lad drifted idly in the centre of the bridge, smiling dreamily down at his naked body. He allowed Quinn to shape him, the young stable boy’s skinny figure developing thick sinuous muscles, the width of his shoulders increasing. Clad only in a barbarian warrior garb of shiny leather strips, he began to resemble a dwarf addicted to bodybuilding.
The blue flame cloaking Mauer dribbled away as the last of the ship-suit was consumed. With a simple wave of his hand, Quinn healed the captain’s burns, restoring skin, nails, hair to their former state. Mauer became a picture of vitality.
“Your turn,” Quinn told Lawrence with a deviant laugh.
The pain-shocked, imprisoned captain could only stare upwards in terror as the freakishly hulking boy grinned broadly and glided in towards him.
* * *
Alkad Mzu accessed the Samaku’s sensor suite via the flight computer, allowing the picture to share her mind with a sense of benevolent dismay. This is what we fought over? This was what a planet died for? This? Dear Mary!
Like all starships jumping insystem, the Samaku had emerged a safe half-million kilometres above the plane of the eliptic. The star known as Tunja was an M4-type, a red dwarf. Bright enough from the starship’s forty million kilometres distance, but hardly dazzling like a G-type, the primary of most terracompatible planets. From Alkad’s excellent vantage point it hung at the centre of a vast disk of grizzled particles, extending over two hundred million kilometres in diameter.
The inner (annulet), surrounding Tunja out to about three million kilometres, was a sparsely populated region where the constant gale of solar wind had stripped away the smaller particles, leaving only tide-locked boulders and asteroid fragments. With their surfaces smoothed to a crystalline gloss by the incessant red heat, they twinkled scarlet and crimson as if they were a swarm of embers flung off by the dwarf’s arching typhonic prominences. Further out, the disk’s opacity began to build, graduating into a sheet of what looked like dense grainy fog; bright carmine at the inner fringe, shading away to a deep cardinal-red ninety million kilometres later. A trillion spiky shadows speckled the uniformity, cast by the larger chunks of rock and metal bobbing among the dust and slushy gravel.
No terracompatible planet was conceivable in such an environment. The star was barren except for a single gas giant, Duida, orbiting a hundred and twenty-eight million kilometres out. A couple of young Edenist habitats circled above it, but the main focus of human life was scattered across the disk.
A disk of such density was usually the companion of a newborn star, but Tunja was estimated to be over three billion years old. Confederation planetologists suspected the red dwarf’s disk had its genesis in a spectacularly violent collision between a planet and a very large interstellar meteor. It was a theory which could certainly explain the existence of the Dorados themselves: three hundred and eighty-seven large asteroids with a near-pure metal content. Two-thirds of them were roughly spherical, permitting the strong conclusion that they were molten core magma material when the hypothetical collision took place. Whatever their origin, such abundant ore was an immensely valuable economic resource for the controlling government. Valuable enough to go to war over.
“Ayacucho’s civil traffic control is refusing us docking permission,” Captain Randol said. “They say all the Dorados are closed to civil starflight and we have to return to our port of origin.”
Alkad exited the sensor visualization and stared across the Samaku’s bridge. Randol was wearing a diplomatically apologetic expression.
“Has this ever happened before?” she asked.
“No. Not that we’ve been to the Dorados before, but I’ve never heard of anything like it.”
I have not waited this long, nor come so far, to be turned away by some bloody bureaucrat, Alkad thought. “Let me talk to them,” she said.
Randol waved a hand, signalling permission. The Samaku’s flight computer opened a channel to Ayacucho asteroid’s traffic control office.
“This is Immigration Service Officer Mabaki, how can I help you?”
“My name is Daphine Kigano,” Alkad datavised back—she ignored the speculative gaze from Randol at the name on one of her passports. “I’m a Dorado resident, and I wish to dock. I don’t see why that should be a problem.”
“It isn’t a problem, not under normal circumstances. I take it you haven’t heard of the warning from the Confederation Assembly?”
“No.”
“I see. One moment, I’ll datavise the file over.”
Alkad and the rest of the crew fell silent as they accessed the report. More than surprise, more than disbelief, she felt anger. Anger that this should happen now. Anger at the threat it posed to her mission, her life’s duty. Mother Mary must have deserted the Garissan people long ago, leaving the universe to place so much heartbreak and malicious catastrophe in their path.
“I would still like to come home,” she datavised when it was over.
“Impossible,” Mabaki replied. “I’m sorry.”
“I’m the only one who will enter the asteroid. Even if I were possessed I would present no threat. And I’m quite willing to be tested for possession, the Assembly warning says electronics malfunction in their presence. It should be simple enough.”
“I’m sorry, we simply can’t take the risk.”
“How old are you, Officer Mabaki?”
“Excuse me?”
“Your age?”
“Is there some relevance to this?”
“Indeed there is.”
“I’m twenty-six.”
“Indeed? Well, Officer Mabaki, I am sixty-three.”
“Yes?”
Alkad sighed quietly. Exactly
what was included in the Dorados’ basic history didactic courses? Did today’s youth know nothing of their tragic past? “That means I was evacuated from Garissa. I survived the genocide, Officer Mabaki. If our Mother Mary had wanted me harmed, she would have done it then. Now, I am just an old woman who wishes to come home. Is that really so hard?”
“I’m sorry, really. But no civil starships can dock.”
Suppose I really can’t get in? The intelligence services will be waiting back at Narok, I can’t return there. Maybe the Lord of Ruin would take me back. That would circumvent any personal disaster, not to mention personality debrief, but it would all be over then: the Alchemist, our justice.
She could see Peter’s face that last time, still covered in a medical nanonic, but with his eyes full of trust. And that was the crux; too many people were relying on her; those treasured few who knew, and the blissfully ignorant masses who didn’t.
“Officer Mabaki.”
“Yes?”
“When this crisis is over, I will return home, will I not?”
“I shall look forward to issuing your ship docking permission personally.”
“Good, because it will be the last docking authorization you ever do issue. The first thing I intend to do on my return will be to visit my close personal friend Ikela and tell him about this ordeal you have put me through.” She held her breath, seemingly immersed in zero-tau. It was one lone name from the past flung desperately into the unknown. Mother Mary please let it strike its target.
Captain Randol gave a bass chuckle. “I don’t know what you did, Alkad,” he said loudly. “But they just datavised our docking authority and an approach vector.”
* * *
André Duchamp had long since come to the bitter realization that the lounge compartment would never be the same again. Between them, Erick and the possessed had wrought an appalling amount of damage, not just to the fittings, but the cabin systems as well.
The small utility deck beneath the lounge was in a similar deplorable state. And the spaceplane was damaged beyond repair. The loading clamps hadn’t engaged, allowing it to twist about while the Villeneuve’s Revenge was under acceleration. Structural spars had snapped and bent all along its sleek fuselage.
He couldn’t afford to rectify half of the damage, let alone replace the spaceplane. Not unless he took on another mercenary contract. That prospect did not appeal, not after Lalonde. I am too old for such antics, he thought, by rights I should have made a fortune to retire on by now. If it wasn’t for those bastard anglo shipping cartels I would have the money.
Anger gave him the strength to snap the last clip off the circulation fan unit he was working on; the little plastic star shattered from the pressure, chips spinning off in all directions. Bombarded by heat from a possessed’s fireball, then subjected to hard vacuum for a week, the plastic had turned dismayingly brittle.
“Give me a hand, Desmond,” he datavised. They had turned off the lounge’s environmental circuit in order to dismantle it, which meant wearing his SII suit for the task. Without air circulating at a decent rate the smell in the compartment was unbearable. The bodies had been removed, but a certain amount of grisly diffusion had occurred during their flight from Lalonde.
Desmond left the thermal regulator power circuit he was testing and drifted over. They hauled the cylindrical fan unit out of the duct. It was clogged solid with scraps of cloth and spiral shavings of nultherm foam. André prodded at the grille with an anti-torque keydriver, loosening some of the mangled cloth. Tiny flakes of dried blood swirled out like listless moths.
“Merde. It’ll have to be broken down and purged.”
“Oh, come on, André, you can’t use this again. The motor overloaded when Erick dumped the atmosphere. There’s no telling what internal damage the voltage spike caused.”
“Ship systems all have absurdly high performance margins. The motor can withstand a hundred spikes.”
“Yeah, but the CAB . . .”
“To hell with them, data-constipated bureaucrats. They know nothing of operational flying.”
“Some systems you don’t take chances with.”
“You forget, Desmond, this is my ship, my livelihood. Do you think I would risk that?”
“You mean, what’s left of your ship, don’t you?”
“What are you implying, that I am responsible for the souls of humanity returning to invade us? Perhaps also it is my fault that the Earth is ruined, and the Meridian fleet never returned.”
“You’re the captain, you took us to Lalonde.”
“On a legitimate government contract. It was honest money.”
“Have you never heard of fool’s gold?”
André’s answer was lost as Madeleine opened the ceiling hatch and used the crumbling composite ladder to pull herself down into the lounge. “Listen, you two, I’ve seen . . . Yek!” She slapped a hand over her mouth and nose, eyes smarting from the unwholesome scents layering the atmosphere. In the deck above, an air contamination warning sounded. The ceiling hatch started to hinge down. “Christ, haven’t the pair of you got this cycled yet?”
“Non,” André datavised.
“It doesn’t matter. Listen, I’ve just seen Harry Levine. He was in a bar on the second residence level. I got out fast, I’m pretty sure he didn’t see me.”
“Merde!” André datavised the flight computer for a link into the spaceport’s civil register, loading a search order. Two seconds later it confirmed the Dechal was docked, and had been for ten days. His SII suit’s permeability expanded, allowing a sudden outbreak of sweat to expire. “We must leave. Immediately.”
“No chance,” Madeleine said. “The port office wouldn’t even let us disengage the umbilicals, let alone launch, not with that civil starflight proscription order still in force.”
“The captain’s right, Madeleine,” Desmond datavised. “There are only three of us left. We can’t go up against Rawand’s crew like this. We have to fly outsystem.”
“Four!” she said through clenched teeth. “There are four of us left . . . Oh, mother of God, they’ll go for Erick.”
* * *
The fluid in Erick’s inner ears began to stir, sending a volley of mild nerve impulses into his sleeping brain. The movement was so slight and smooth it made no impression on his quiescent mind. It did, however, register within his neural nanonics; the ever-vigilant basic monitor program noted the movement was consistent with a constant acceleration. Erick’s body was being moved. The monitor program triggered a stimulant program.
Erick’s hazy dream snuffed out, replaced by the hard-edged schematics of a personal situation display. Second-level constraint blocks were erected across his nerves, preventing any give-away twitches. His eyes stayed closed as he assessed what the hell was happening.
Quiet, easy hum of a motor. Tap tap tap of feet on a hard floor—an audio discrimination program went primary—two sets of feet, plus the level breathing of two people. Constant pulse of light pressure on the enhanced retinas below closed eyelids indicated linear movement, backed up by inner ear fluid motion; estimated at a fast walking pace. Posture was level: he was still lying on his bed.
He datavised a general query/response code, and received an immediate reply from a communications net processor. Its location was a corridor on the third storey of the hospital, already fifteen metres from the implant surgery care ward. Erick requested a file of the local net architecture, and found a security observation camera in the corridor. He accessed it to find himself with a fish-eye vantage point along a corridor where his own bed was sliding underneath the lens. Madeleine and Desmond were at either end of the bed, straining to supplement the motor as they hauled it along. A lift door was sliding open ahead of them.
Erick cancelled the constraint blocks and opened his eyes. “What the fuck’s going on?” he datavised to Desmond.
Desmond glanced around to see a pair of furious eyes staring at him out of the green medical nanonic mask covering Erick�
��s face. He managed a snatched, semi-embarrassed grin. “Sorry, Erick, we didn’t dare wake you up in case someone heard the commotion. We had to get you out of there.”
“Why?”
“The Dechal is docked here. But don’t worry, we don’t think Hasan Rawand knows about us. And we intend to keep it that way. André is working on his political contact to get us a departure authorization.”
“For once he might make a decent job of it,” Madeleine muttered as they steered Erick’s bulky bed into the lift. “After all, it’s his own neck on the block this time, not just ours.”
Erick tried to rise, but the medical packages were too restrictive, he could only just get his head off the pillows, and that simple motion was tiring beyond endurance. “No. Leave me. You go.”
Madeleine pushed him down gently as the lift started upwards. “Don’t be silly. They’ll kill you if they catch up with you.”
“We’ll see this through together,” Desmond said, his voice full of sympathy and reassurance. “We won’t desert you, Erick.”
Encased in the protective, nurturing packages, Erick couldn’t even groan in frustration. He opened a secure encrypted channel to the Confederation Navy Bureau. Lieutenant Li Chang responded immediately.
“You have to intercept us,” Erick datavised. “These imbeciles are going to take me off Culey if no one stops them.”
“Okay, don’t panic, I’m calling in the covert duty squad. We can reach the spaceport in time.”
“Do we have any assets in the flight control centre?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Activate one; make sure whatever departure authorization Duchamp gets is invalidated. I want the Villeneuve’s Revenge to stay locked tight in that bloody docking bay.”
“I’m on it. And don’t worry.”
Desmond and Madeleine had obviously devoted considerable attention to planning their route in order to avoid casual observation. They took Erick straight up through the rock honeycomb which was Culey’s habitation section, switching between a series of public utility lifts. When they were in the upper levels, where gravity had dropped to less than ten per cent standard, they left the bed behind and tugged him along a maze of simple passages bored straight through the rock. It was some kind of ancient maintenance or inspection grid, with few functional net processors. Lieutenant Li Chang had trouble tracking their progress.
The Night's Dawn Trilogy Page 174
