Guardians of Paradise

by Jaine Fenn

  ‘That’s what we’re assuming.’ Taro didn’t sound entirely sure. ‘So this is the same thing that invaded the ship you used to live on; I thought that ship got trashed, and left dead in space? How did the thing get here, pretending to be one of the Court?’

  ‘I’m not s—’

  ‘Attention all passengers. We are experiencing multiple systems failures. Please remain calm but be prepared for the order to evacuate. Repeat: all passengers and crew are to prepare for evacuation.’

  ‘Taro? Did you hear that?’

  ‘Yes! Shit. Nual, we’re coming as fast as we can—’

  ‘Good, good. Keep talking to me, please.’ Because I’m scared.

  ‘You bet. Ah, Jarek says this thing turning up might be his fault. The Sidhe who interrogated him at Serenein must’ve worked out where the mothership was and sent someone to investigate. When they got there, they found these whatever-they-ares waiting for them.’

  ‘They call themselves avatars. Of what I’m not yet sure.’ Destruction. Chaos. Entropy. ‘The one I met wasn’t from my ship: the infection must have spread.’

  ‘Can the infected Sidhe still do the scary mind-stuff ?’

  ‘I’m not sure. They can read surface emotions and strong thoughts, but they don’t appear to have the finesse for anything subtle. As for control over others . . . I don’t think so, otherwise the one I met today would have tried it on me. But it did do something I’ve never seen before: they can affect nearby matter. She - it - managed to unmake a chair.’

  ‘That don’t sound good.’

  ‘No, I—’ Nual stopped and looked up. Her first thought when someone came into the room was relief, though Taro should have said he was that close.

  But it wasn’t Taro.

  ‘Nual?’ Taro looked at Jarek. ‘Something’s wrong!’

  ‘We’re nearly there - just round the next corner.’

  Taro forced himself not to run ahead. When they reached the lounge the door was open, but they couldn’t see inside without breaking cover. Taro listened as hard as he could, and thought he caught the rustle of cloth. He looked at Jarek who whispered, ‘In after three, all right? One . . . two . . . three . . . !’

  The room looked like a stripped-down version of a starliner lounge. Two people stood next to one of the couches. One was Nual. She was naked and unconscious - or dead - and the other figure, clothed, had her by the shoulders and was shaking her like a ragdoll. That had to be a Sidhe. From the corner of his eye Taro saw Jarek raise his gun. Something went pphhhssstt, and a swarm of silver flashed through his vision.

  Taro was instantly afraid for Nual in case he hit her, firing without aiming properly in bad light. Except . . . Jarek hadn’t hit anyone. How could he miss at this range?

  The Sidhe turned to look at them. Something in the way she stared made Taro’s bowels go watery. He’d met one alien in his life - two if you counted Nual - but this was totally other.

  She said, ‘We know you, little mind.’

  She was talking to Jarek. And she wasn’t a Sidhe. This was one of the avatars Nual had talked about. Taro wasn’t sure if it’d deflected or actually unmade the fléchettes Jarek had just fired at it, but the result was the same: they were in deep shit. ‘Fuck,’ he breathed.

  The avatar dropped Nual, who fell half on the couch, and Taro winced. It turned to face them. ‘You have a link to this one, yes?’ A momentary flick of its hand towards Nual. ‘She is ours now. Leave us and live. Or stay and die. It is of little consequence.’

  One good thing, thought Taro through the rising panic: it can’t do the scary head stuff. At least, it hasn’t yet.

  ‘Attention please. An overload in the ship’s power-plant has been detected. All personnel must board the evac-pods immediately. Crew members must follow full evacuation protocols. Passengers kindly remain calm and allow your crew to see you to safety.’

  Without Angel conditioning Taro suspected he’d be having a hard time standing his ground right now.

  The avatar cocked its head. ‘They would destroy themselves to thwart us . . .’ It sounded amazed at this turn of events.

  Jarek used the distraction to fire again. At the last moment, the avatar noticed the attack. A thin shower of silver rained at its feet. But some of the needles got through, though at reduced power. Pinpricks of red appeared all down its left leg.

  It’s gonna kill us now for sure. Taro was more angry than scared. They’d come so far, only to fail in the end!

  The avatar glanced down at its wounds, then up at its attackers. Taro braced himself. But it just frowned and said, ‘Are you so far in the Sidhe girl’s thrall that you would die trying to save her? A shame time is short, for such displays of loyalty are intriguing. We would have liked to find out more before we dealt with you.’

  The thing was in no hurry to take them out, presumably because it thought they weren’t a threat. Was it right? It couldn’t affect his thoughts - he was free to act. It could affect matter, so shooting it wouldn’t work. His blades would probably be equally useless, assuming it didn’t just unmake him when he got close enough.

  But he had another weapon.

  He’d entered the room with their assassin’s rifle pointed down - waving it at the walls made Jarek nervous - but now he raised the gun and slipped a finger under the trigger-guard.

  The avatar lifted a hand, reaching towards them.

  As the firing pads warmed to Taro’s touch the avatar-thing’s gaze went to the gun. It hesitated, hand still outstretched, and said disdainfully, ‘Do you not understand? You cannot physically harm me.’

  ‘Wanna bet?’ said Taro, and pulled the trigger.

  The avatar’s raised hand came off at the wrist. On the weakest setting the laser didn’t cauterise the wound. The avatar’s eyes widened in surprise as blood spurted from the stump.

  Taro twitched the laser back.

  The avatar shuddered . . .

  . . . folded . . .

  . . . and fell.

  A grisly assortment of internal organs burst free from the massive wound in its side when the body hit the floor.

  ‘Try some coherent fucking light, bitch!’ Taro found himself shouting.

  Beside him, Jarek muttered, ‘Holy shit!’ Then, a little louder, ‘That seemed to work!’

  Taro put the gun down and rushed over to Nual. He cradled her head, looking for signs of life. She was breathing, at least.

  Jarek called over ‘Is she—?’

  ‘She’s alive.’

  ‘Thank fuck for that. Come on, we need to get out of here. Can you carry her?’

  ‘Wait, I’ll—I’m gonna try and wake her.’ He wasn’t sure he could, and given how they’d found her, he wasn’t sure he should, but to finally see her, touch her - it was as though the world had come alive again. He held her close, trying to recapture the sensation of their mind-to-mind contact . . .

  He felt her mind straining towards his, and then she blinked and looked up at him. And it was her, not something terrible looking out of her eyes.

  ‘You know what?’ he said, his voice near to breaking. ‘If we’d gone to all this effort only to find you’d died on us, I’d never’ve fucking spoken to you again.’

  She smiled, then frowned and rasped, ‘Is it dead?’

  Taro looked down at the mess by his feet. The only movement was a slow spilling of guts. He’d pretty much cut the thing in half. He swallowed hard and said, ‘If it can survive that, then we’re really fucked.’

  ‘Which we will be anyway if we hang around much longer,’ called Jarek.

  Taro pulled Nual to her feet. ‘C’mon, we gotta go.’

  Jarek said, ‘Right. Let’s get the hell off this ship before it blows.’

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  They’d just left the lounge when the ship’s com announced:

  ‘Attention please. A power-plant overload is now imminent. Any remaining crew and passengers must evacuate the vessel with all possible haste. Repeat: power-plant overload immin
ent, abandon ship immediately .’

  Jarek cursed the infuriatingly calm voice. How imminent exactly? A minute? Twenty? At least a countdown would’ve told him how screwed they were. He glanced back at the others. Nual was in a bad way, but she’d activated her flight implants, and Taro had grabbed her arm and was towing her along. ‘Ready to run?’ Jarek asked.

  Taro nodded.

  And they ran, Taro dragging Nual behind him like some bizarre child’s balloon. Jarek forced himself to slow down whenever they passed a junction and checked his com. Getting lost now could be fatal.

  As they turned into the corridor where he’d killed the first Sidhe the lights went out. Though the guidance decals stayed illuminated, conveniently pointing to the airlock, they didn’t give enough light to see obstacles and Jarek almost tripped over the dead Sidhe. He could feel by the way his feet slid around that he’d stepped in blood, but he slowed just enough not to lose his balance.

  When they reached the airlock he punched it closed and carried on up to the bridge, leaving the other two to fend for themselves.

  He powered up the engines - he’d had the wit to leave everything on standby, ready for a quick getaway - then undocked and shot off from the doomed ship at top speed.

  When they were safely under way, the little moon receding rapidly behind them, he sat back in his couch. Nothing was happening to the Sidhe ship, and for a moment he felt oddly cheated. They’d gone balls-to-the-wall to escape, only to have the Sidhe ship not blow up after all.

  Then it did.

  He’d left the bridge shutters closed, and he hadn’t bothered to select a projection to simulate the view, so the explosion registered as a simultaneous spike on all his sensors. He ran a quick diagnostic, letting out a relieved sigh when he confirmed that the Heart of Glass hadn’t sustained any damage.

  A few seconds later, traffic control hailed him.

  Jarek’s hand hovered over the ship’s com. Of course they’d want a word with him. But if he answered, then things could get complicated, and they weren’t home and dry yet. He ignored the incoming message, though he did moderate his speed so it didn’t look quite so much like he was fleeing the scene of a crime.

  With no further need for stealth, he fired up all his remaining sensors, focusing every instrument at his disposal on Kama Nui, watching for signs of a ship heading his way. It was a good job beacons operated independently of traffic control; if they’d had any way of blocking his transit, they might just have done so now. As it was they had about ten minutes to despatch pursuit, after which time he’d be out of range of even a fast interceptor. And once he was in the shift, he was safe; just being in the wrong place at the wrong time shouldn’t be enough to invoke Treaty law against a freetrader, not unless the locals wanted the Alliance on their case.

  He gave it fifteen minutes, just to be sure.

  Once he was certain no one was coming after them, Jarek returned to the rec-room. Nual was lying on the couch, Taro sitting beside her. They helped her stand, and Jarek guided her to the med-bay. Its diagnosis was that she was experiencing the tail-end of a severe adrenalin come-down and had recently been shot with some sort of low-level neural disruptor, though the effects were already wearing off. Her main problem was lack of food and liquids. She refused Jarek’s suggestion that he hook up a drip for her, but let him adapt a favourite hangover cure, adding a few extra ingredients suggested by the med-bay. Whilst she was physically better off than she had any right to be, it didn’t take Sidhe intuition to work out that her recent experiences had left her severely shaken.

  As his com hadn’t relayed any further incoming messages, Jarek got himself a drink. Then the three of them sat in the Heart of Glass’s rec-room and swapped stories.

  When they’d brought each other up to date Taro, who was sitting with one arm around Nual, asked Jarek, ‘So, we found out what you wanted to know, even if we can’t do much about it. What now?’

  ‘We need to get back to Xantier and find out what Bez’s got for us. What we do next depends partly on that: I’m hoping that with the data she can provide, plus what you’ve unearthed here, we can start to act against the Sidhe, and actually begin to undermine their power-base - though we’ll have to be careful.’

  ‘What about the avatar thing?’ asked Taro.

  ‘Hopefully the Sidhe themselves took care of that when they blew their ship up. And if not . . . well we need to avoid it, but we need to avoid direct confrontation with the Sidhe anyway.’ Jarek had enough on his plate without worrying about where the infected Sidhe fitted in; the way he saw it anything that killed Sidhe had to be a good thing. ‘My priority is to get hold of a shiftspace beacon, then try to get back to Serenein and open a new transit-path there.’

  ‘I know you wanna help those people,’ said Taro, ‘but if the consorts didn’t end up here, then don’t that mean your friends managed to see off the Sidhe by themselves?’

  ‘For the moment, yes they must have. But I doubt the Sidhe will give up. And there’s something at Serenein that can help us fight the Sidhe.’

  Nual spoke up for the first time since she’d finished recounting her adventures. ‘What sort of thing?’

  ‘Well, not a thing as such. People. The consorts themselves, actually. There’s thirty-seven of them in stasis on the Setting Sun, which is parked up at the top of the planet’s beanstalk. Those boys have powers the Sidhe can’t counter. We can use that.’

  Nual said softly, ‘You are correct, of course. But have you thought through the full implications of cutting off the source of shift-minds?’

  ‘I’m setting a world free. And I’m ending a lie.’

  ‘True enough. But in the long run, you are also taking away humanity’s ability to travel the stars. No more transit-kernels means no new shiftships.’

  ‘Yeah . . . I know. Believe me, I know. But I still have to do it.’

  In the awkward silence that followed, Jarek’s com chirped. He checked it. ‘We’re being hailed.’

  ‘By traffic control?’ asked Nual.

  ‘No, I think they’ve realised I’m not going to answer. I need to get up to the bridge and find out who it is.’ He stood up.

  Taro and Nual followed him, waiting at the back of the bridge while he checked the sensor-logs. The unknown ship wasn’t an in-system interceptor; it was a corvette, and it was heading their way. He called up a retroactive display of likely vectors, sending the bright little dots representing the two ships zipping backwards through the holo-cube. ‘The ship was on its way in from the beacon - it must’ve arrived in-system earlier today. It looks like they spotted us heading away from Rangui-iti after the explosion, then braked and turned to follow. They’re running silent, and they only hailed us when they were already on our tail. That’s not friendly behaviour.’

  ‘It’s the Court,’ said Nual in a small voice.

  ‘What? I thought you said their ship got taken over by these infected Sidhe.’

  ‘No, I—I wasn’t thinking straight, was I? The avatar said it came to Kama Nui because the entity knew there would be a lot of Sidhe here, waiting for the consorts. I assumed it - they - must have intercepted the Court’s ship, but it never actually said that. Jarek, I’m really sorry. I should have thought.’

  ‘And I should have been keeping an eye on the beacon, not just the planet. We can do sorries later. Are you sure it’s the Court?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Shit. And I thought today couldn’t get any worse.’ He ramped the drive back up to max. It was unlikely to make much difference, but it made him feel better. ‘Shame we can’t persuade them we’re not worth bothering with . . .’ He’d been about to discard that option, but it wasn’t an entirely stupid idea. Sidhe powers wouldn’t work over a com, and they were close enough, and still going slow enough, for tight-beam messaging, so he wouldn’t have to blow his new ship ID. Then again, at the rate the corvette was gaining, perhaps he should just prep for transit.

  He realised the others were looking at him
expectantly. ‘I was wondering if it was worth trying to talk to them to throw them off the trail, but I think my time would be better spent getting us out of here.’

  ‘Is that “out” as in an unscheduled transit?’ asked Taro.

  ‘This far from the beacon it’ll have to be.’

  ‘Ain’t that a bit drastic?’

  ‘That ship is way faster than us. They can’t board us at this speed, but they might be armed, and even if they’re not, once they’ve closed, they can tail us wherever we go - including into shiftspace. If it is the Court - and Nual’s word is good enough for me - then we need to be gone before that happens.’ He started the priming sequence on the transit-kernel and began to initiate fast shutdowns on the ship’s other major systems.