André was re-installing the main power duct in the wall of the lower deck lounge, which required Shane to feed the cable to him when instructed. Someone glided silently through the ceiling hatch, blocking the beam from the bank of temporary lights André had rigged up. André couldn’t see what he was doing. “Desmond! Why must . . .” He gasped in shock. “You!”
“Hello again, Captain,” Kingsley Pryor said.
“What are you doing here? How did you get out of prison?”
“They set me free.”
“Who?”
“The possessed.”
“Non,” André whispered.
“Unfortunately so. Ethenthia has fallen.”
The anti-torque tool André was holding seemed such a pitiful weapon. “Are you one of them now? You will never have my ship. I will overload the fusion generators.”
“I’d really rather you didn’t,” Pryor datavised. “As you can see, I haven’t been possessed.”
“How? They take everybody, women, children.”
“I am one of Capone’s liaison officers. Even here, that carries enormous weight.”
“And they let you go?”
“Yes.”
A heavy dread settled in André’s brain. “Where are they? Are they coming?” He datavised the flight computer to review the internal sensors (those remaining—curse it). As yet no systems were glitching.
“No,” Pryor said. “They won’t come into the Villeneuve’s Revenge. Not unless I tell them to.”
“Why are you doing this?” As if I didn’t know.
“Because I want you to fly me away from here.”
“And they’ll let us all go, just like that?”
“As I said, Capone has a lot of influence.”
“What makes you think I will take you? You blackmailed me before. It will be simple to throw you out of the airlock once we are free of Ethenthia.”
Pryor smiled a dead man’s smile. “You’ve always done exactly as I wanted, Duchamp. You were always supposed to break away from Kursk.”
“Liar.”
“I have been given other, more important objectives than ensuring a third-rate ship with its fifth-rate crew stay loyal to the Organization. You have never had any free will since you arrived in the New California system. You still don’t. After all, you don’t really think there was only one bomb planted on board, do you?”
* * *
Erick watched the Villeneuve’s Revenge lift from its cradle. The starship’s thermo-dump panels extended, ion thrusters took over from the verniers. It rose unhurriedly from the spaceport. When he switched his collar sensors to high resolution he could see the black hexagon on the fuselage where plate 8-92-K was missing.
He didn’t understand it, Duchamp was making no attempt to flee. It was almost as if he was obeying traffic control, departing calmly along an assigned vector. Had the crew been possessed? Small loss to the Confederation.
His collar sensors refocused on the docking bay he was approaching, a dark circular recess in the spaceport’s gridiron exterior. It was a maintenance bay, twice as wide as an ordinary bay. The clipper-class starship, Tigara, which sat on the docking cradle seemed unusually small in such surroundings.
Erick fired his manoeuvring pack jets to take him down towards the Tigara. There were no lights on in the bay; all the gantries and multi-segment arms were folded back against the walls. Utility umbilicals were jacked in, and an airlock tube had mated with the starship’s fuselage; but apart from that there was no sign of any activity.
The silicon hull showed signs of long-term vacuum exposure—faded lettering, micrometeorite impact scuffs, surface layer ablation stains—all indicating hull plates long overdue for replacement. He drifted over the blurred hexagons until he was above the EVA airlock, and datavised the hatch control processor to cycle and open. If anyone was on board, they would know about him now. But there were no datavised questions, no active sensor sweeps.
The hatch slid open, and Erick glided inside.
Clipper-class starships were designed to provide a speedy service between star systems, carrying small high-value cargoes. Consequently, as much of their internal volume as possible was given over to cargo space. There was only one life-support capsule, which accommodated an optimum crew of three. That was the principal reason Erick had chosen the Tigara. In theory, he would be able to fly it solo.
Most of the starship systems were powered down. He kept his SII suit on as he moved through the two darkened lower decks to the bridge. As soon as he was secured in the captain’s acceleration couch he accessed the flight computer and ordered a full status review.
It could have been a lot better. Tigara was in the maintenance bay for a complete refit. One of the fusion generators was inoperative, two energy patterning nodes were dead, heat exchangers were operating dangerously short of required levels, innumerable failsoft components had been allowed to decay below their safety margins.
None of the maintenance work had even been started. The owners hadn’t been prepared to commit that much money while the quarantine was in force.
Dear Lord, Erick thought, the Villeneuve’s Revenge was in better condition than this.
He datavised the flight computer to disengage the bay’s airlock tube, then initiated a flight prep procedure. The Tigara took a long time to come on-line. At every stage he had to order backup sequences to take over, or override safety programs, or re-route power supplies. He didn’t even bother with the life-support functions, all he wanted was power in the energy patterning nodes and secondary drive tubes.
With a fusion generator active, he ordered some sensor clusters to deploy. An image of the bay filled his mind, overlaid with fragile status graphics. He scanned the electromagnetic spectrum for any traffic, but there was only the background hash of cosmic radiation. Nobody was saying anything to anybody. What he wanted was someone asking Ethenthia what was happening, why they’d gone off the air. A ship close by that could help.
Nothing.
Erick fired the emergency release pins which the docking cradle’s load clamps were gripping. Verniers sent out a hot deluge of gas which shimmered across the bay’s walls, shaking loose blankets of thermal insulation from the gantries. Tigara rose a metre off its cradle, straining at the nest of umbilical hoses jacked into its rear fuselage. The snapfree couplings began to break, sending the hoses writhing.
The starship was low on cryogenic fuel; he couldn’t afford to waste delta-V reserve aligning himself on an ideal vector. The astrogration program produced a series of options for him.
None of them were what he’d been hoping for. So what else was new?
The last of the umbilicals broke, and the Tigara lurched up out of the bay. Erick ordered the flight computer to extend the communications array and align it on Golmo and the Edenist habitats orbiting there. Sensor clusters began to sink down into their recesses as energy poured into the patterning nodes.
The flight computer alerted him that an SD platform was sweeping the ship with its radar. Then it relayed a signal from traffic control into his neural nanonics.
“Is that you, Erick? We think it’s you. Who else is this stupidly ballsy? This is Emonn Verona, Erick, and I’m asking you: Don’t do it. That ship is completely fucked; I’ve got the CAB logs in front of me. It can’t fly. You’re only going to hurt yourself, or worse.”
Erick transmitted a single message to Golmo, then retracted the communications array down into its jump configuration. The SD platform had locked on. Some of the patterning nodes were producing very strange readings in the prejump diagnostic run-through. CAB monitor programs flashed up jump proscription warnings. He switched them off.
“Game over, Erick. Either return to the docking bay or you join our comrades in the beyond. You don’t want that. Where there’s life, there’s hope. Right? Of all people, you must believe that.”
Erick ordered the flight computer to activate the jump sequence.
22
The hellhaw
k Socratous was a flat V-shaped mechanical spacecraft with a grey-white fuselage made up from hundreds of different component casings, a veritable jigsaw of mismatched equipment, not all of it astronautic. Two long engine nacelles were affixed to the stern, transparent tubes filled with a heavy opaque gas which fluoresced its way through the spectrum in a three-minute cycle.
It was an impressive sight as it slid down out of the starfield for a landing on Valisk’s docking ledge. Had it been real, it would be capable of taking on an entire squadron of Confederation Navy ships with its exotic weapons.
The illusion popped as a crew bus rolled across the ledge towards it. Socratous reverted to a muddy-brown egg-shape with a crew toroid wrapped around its midsection. Rubra could just see two small ridges on the rear quarter which hadn’t been there before. They corresponded roughly with the nacelles of the fantasy starship. He wondered if the tumours would be benign. Did the energistic ability prevent metastasis from exploding inside possessed bodies as the wished-for changes became less illusion and cells multiplied to obey the will of the dominant soul? It seemed an awfully complex requirement for such a crude power, modifying the molecular structure of DNA and taming the mitosis process. The apparent milieux of their energistic ability was blasting holes through solid walls and contorting matter into new shapes; he’d never seen any demonstrations of subtlety.
Perhaps the whole possession problem would burn itself out in an orgy of irreversible cancer. Few of the returned souls were content with the physical appearance of the bodies they had claimed.
How superbly ironic, Rubra thought, that vanity could be the undoing of entities who had acquired near-godlike powers. It was also a dangerous prospect, once they realized what was happening. Those people remaining free would become even more valuable, the attempts to possess them ever more desperate. And Edenism would be the last castle to besiege.
He decided not to mention the prospect to the Kohistan Consensus. It was another small private advantage; no one else in the Confederation had such a unique and extensive vantage point of the possessed and their behaviour as him. He wasn’t sure if he could exploit the knowledge, but he wasn’t going to give it away until he was certain.
A sub-routine of his principal personality was designated to observe the aberrant melanomata and carcinomas developing on the possessed inside the habitat. If the growths turned malignant the current situation would change drastically right across the Confederation.
The crew bus had left the Socratous to trundle back across the ledge. Kiera and about forty of her cronies were flocking into a reception lounge. When the bus docked, it disgorged about thirty-five Deadnight kids. Eager besotted youngsters with red handkerchiefs worn proudly around their ankles and wonder in their eyes that they’d reached the promised land after so much difficulty.
Damn it, you have to stop these flights, Rubra complained to the Kohistan Consensus. That’s nearly two thousand victims this week. There must be something you can do.
We really cannot interdict every hellhawk flight. Their objective does not affect the overall balance of strategic events, and is relatively harmless.
Not to these kids it isn’t!
Agreed. But we cannot be everyone’s keeper. The effort and risk involved in arranging clandestine rendezvous to pick up the Deadnights is disproportionate to the reward.
In other words, as long as the hellhawks are busy with this, they can’t cause much trouble elsewhere.
Correct. Unfortunately.
And you used to call me a heartless bastard.
Everybody is suffering from the effects of possession. Until we discover a solution to the entire problem, all we can hope for is to reduce it to an absolute minimum wherever possible.
Right. I’d like to point out that when Kiera reaches the magic number, it’s me who is going to be the one suffering.
That is some time off yet. Asteroid settlements have been alerted to these clandestine rendezvous flights. There should be less of them in future.
I bloody well knew I could never trust you lot.
We did not inflict any of this on you, Rubra. And you are quite welcome to transfer into the neural strata of one of our habitats should it look like Kiera Salter is preparing to shift Valisk out of this universe.
I’ll keep it in mind. But I don’t think you’ll need to welcome this particular prodigal. Dariat is almost ready. Once he comes over, it’ll be Kiera who is going to have to worry about where I shift Valisk.
Your attempt at subversion is a risky strategy.
That’s how I built Magellanic Itg, through sheer balls. It’s also why I rejected you. You don’t have any.
This is not getting us anywhere.
If it works, I’ll be able to start fighting back on a level you can’t conceive of. Risk makes you alive, that’s what you never understood. That’s the difference between us. And don’t try coming over all smarmy superior with me. It’s me who’s got an idea, me who stands a chance. Have you got any suggestions to make, an alternative?
No.
Exactly. So don’t lecture me.
We would urge caution, though. Please.
Urge away.
Rubra dismissed the affinity link with his usual contempt. Circumstances might have forced him into an alliance with his old culture; but all the renewed contact had done was convince him how right he had been to reject them all those centuries ago.
He switched his primary routine’s attention inward. The group of newly arrived Deadnights had been split up and taken away to be opened for possession. A temporary village had sprung up at the base of the northern endcap, extravagant tents and small cosy cottages for the possessed to dwell in. A smaller version of the camps which ringed the starscraper foyers halfway down the interior. The teams Kiera had working to make the starscrapers safe were finding progress difficult. And in any case, the possessed didn’t entirely trust the areas they claimed to have secured. Rubra had never stopped his continual harassment. Nearly ten per cent of the servitor population had been killed as he deployed them on sneak attacks, but he still managed to eliminate a couple of possessed every day.
Separated from their companions, the Deadnights were easily overwhelmed. Piteous screams and pleas hung over the village like smog.
One of Rubra’s newest monitor routines alerted him to a minuscule electrical discrepancy within the starscraper where Tolton was hiding. He had discovered electricity was the key to locating Bonney Lewin when she was using her energistic ability to fox his visual observation. A series of extremely sensitive routines which now monitored his own biolectric patterns could sometimes detect a possessed from the backwash of their energistic power. In effect, the entire polyp structure had become an electronic warfare detector. It was hardly reliable, but he was constantly refining the routines.
He tracked down the wraithish presence to the twenty-seventh floor vestibule where it was moving towards the stairwell muscle membrane door. Visually, the vestibule was empty. At least, according to his local autonomic sub-routines it was. The current in one of the organic conductor cables buried behind the wall fluctuated subtly.
Rubra reduced the power to the electrophorescent cells covering the polyp ceiling. The visual image remained the same for a couple of seconds, then the ceiling darkened. It should have been instantaneous. Whatever was causing the electrical disturbance stopped moving.
He opened a channel to Tolton’s processor block. “Get going, boy. They’re coming for you.”
Tolton rolled off the bed where he’d been dozing. He’d been staying in the apartment for five days. The original occupant’s wardrobes had been ransacked for a new ensemble. He’d accessed a good number of the MF and bluesense fleks in the lounge. And he’d sampled all of the imported delicacies in the kitchen, washing them down with fine wines and a lot of Norfolk Tears. For a suffering social poet, he’d adapted to hedonism with the greatest of ease. Small wonder there was a graceless scowl on his face as he snatched up his leather trousers and w
riggled his bulk into them.
“Where are they?”
“Ten floors above you,” Rubra assured him. “Don’t worry, you’ve got plenty of time. I’ve got your exit route ready for you.”
“I’ve been thinking, maybe you ought to steer me toward some weapons hardware. I could start evening up the score a little.”
“Let’s just concentrate on the essentials, shall we? Besides, if you get close enough to a possessed to use a weapon, they’re close enough to turn it against you.”
Tolton addressed the ceiling. “You think I can’t handle it?”
“I thank you for the offer, son, but there are just too many of them. You staying free is my victory against all of them, don’t blow it for me.”
Tolton clipped the processor block to his belt and fastened his straggly hair back in a ponytail. “Thanks, Rubra. We all got it way wrong about you. I know it don’t mean shit to you probably, but when this is over, I’m going to tell the whole wide Confederation what you done.”
“That’s one MF album I’ll buy. First in a long time.”
Tolton stood in front of the apartment’s door, breathed in like a yogamaster, flexed his shoulders like a sport pro warming up, nodded briskly, and said: “Okay, let’s hustle.”
Rubra felt an obdurate burst of sympathy and, strangely enough, pride as the poet stepped out into the vestibule. When Kiera started her takeover he assumed Tolton would last a couple of days. Now he was one of only eighty non-possessed left. One of the reasons he’d survived was because he followed instructions to the letter; in short, he trusted Rubra. And Rubra was damned if Bonney would get him now.
The invisible energistic swirl was on the move again, descending the stairwell. Rubra started to modify the output of the electrophorescent cells in the ceiling. HELLO, BONNEY, he printed. I HAVE A PROPOSITION FOR YOU.
The swirl stopped again.
COME ON, TALK TO ME. WHAT HAVE YOU GOT TO LOSE?
The Night's Dawn Trilogy Page 208
