The Naked God

by Peter F. Hamilton

  Rocio’s voice started issuing directions again, guiding him in towards the airlock. Tall spires of machinery ran up the rock cliff at the back of the ledge, sprouting pipes in a crazed dendritic formation. Several small fountains of thin vapour were jetting out horizontally from junctions and micrometeorite punctures; their presence a testament to Monterey’s floundering maintenance programme. Windows were set into the drab, sheered rock; long panoramic rectangles fronting departure lounges and engineering management offices. All but two were dark, reflecting weak outlines of the floodlit hellhawks. The remaining pair revealed nothing but vague shadows moving behind their frosted anti-glare shielding.

  Maintenance vehicles, cargo trucks, and crew buses had been left scattered along the base of the cliff. Jed made his way through the maze they formed, thankful of the cover. The airlocks waited for him beyond, unlit tunnels leading into the asteroid. Conduits that would take him directly to the nest of the most feared possessed in the Confederation.

  His trepidation rose again as he approached them. He stopped on the threshold of a personnel airlock, and used the wristpad again.

  “Careful how much of that trauma suppresser you inhale,” Rocio said lightly. “It’s strong stuff, they designed it to keep you functional after an accident.”

  “No worries,” Jed said earnestly. “I can handle it.”

  “Very well. There’s no one in the area immediately behind the airlock. Time to go in.”

  “Jed?” Beth’s voice sounded loud and high in his helmet. “Jed, can you hear me?”

  “Sure, doll.”

  “Okay. We’re watching the screens, too. Rocio is relaying images from the cameras inside, so we’ll look out for you, mate. And he’s right about the medical module, go easy on it, huh? I want to share some of that suffusion with you when you get back.”

  Even in his tranquil state, Jed interpreted that right. He went into the airlock feeling majestic.

  He took his helmet off, and took a breath of neutral air. It helped to clear his head a bit, not so much euphoria, but none of the fright, either. Good enough. Rocio gave him a whole string of directions to follow, and he started off cautiously down the corridor.

  The store room for crew supplies wasn’t far from the airlock, naturally enough. Rocio had been keeping a careful watch on things, seeing what happened when other hellhawks came to dock. Several of his bitek comrades still had crew on board. The combat wasps they carried required activation codes, and following standard security procedures, Kiera and Capone had split the codes between loyalists. No one person could fire them. It was a significant point that she hadn’t asked Rocio to carry any.

  Jed found the door Rocio nominated, and pulled back the clamps. Cold air breezed out, turning his breath to foggy streamers. Inside, the room was split into aisles by long free-standing shelves. Despite the Organization’s claim that normalizing food production on New California was a priority, there weren’t many packs left. Processing food for the space industry was a specialist business; ideally, everything had to be crumbs-free, taste-strengthened, and packaged in minimum volume. Leroy Octavius had decided that restarting the kitchen facilities of the relevant companies wasn’t cost effective. Consequently, fleet crews had been making do with old stocks and standard pre-packed meals.

  “What’s there?” Beth asked impatiently. There were no cameras actually in the store room, Rocio had to go on what he’d seen being taken in and out.

  Jed walked down the aisles, brushing the frost dust off various labels.

  “Plenty,” he muttered. Providing you liked yoghurt, mint potatocakes, cheese and tomato flans (dehydrated in sachets that looked like fat biscuits), blackcurrant and apple mousse concentrate; complemented with hot-frozen cubes of broccoli, spinach, carrot, and sprouts.

  “Oh bugger.”

  “What’s the matter?” Rocio asked.

  “Nothing. The boxes are heavy, that’s all. We’re going to have a real party when I get this lot back to the ship.”

  “Are there any chocolate oranges?” Gari piped up.

  “I’ll have a look, sweetheart,” Jed lied. He went back out into the corridor to fetch a trolley which had been abandoned just along from the store room. It ought to fit through the airlock, which meant he could use that to transport everything back to the Mindori. Then they’d all have to be carried up the stairs to the life support module’s airlock. It was going to be a long hard day.

  “Somebody coming,” Rocio announced after Jed had got a dozen boxes out of the store room and onto the trolley.

  Jed stopped dead, hugging a box of compressed rye chips. “Who?” he hissed.

  “Not sure. Camera image isn’t too good. Small guy.”

  “Where is he?” Jed dropped the box, wincing at the sound.

  “A hundred metres away. But heading your way.”

  “Oh Jeeze. Is he possessed?”

  “Unknown.”

  Jed shot across the storage room and closed the door. Nothing he could do about the damning trolley outside, though. His heart began yammering as he flattened himself against the wall beside the door—as if that made a difference.

  “Still coming,” Rocio announced calmly. “Seventy metres now.”

  Jed’s hand crept down to the utility pocket on his hip. Fingers flicked the seal catch, and he dug inside. His hand closed around the cold, reassuring grip of the laser pistol.

  “Thirty metres. He’s coming to the junction with your corridor.”

  Don’t look at the bloody trolley, Jed prayed. Christ, please don’t.

  He drew the laser pistol out, and studied the simple controls for a second. Switched modes to constant beam, full power. Repeater was no good, a possessed would be able to screw with the electrics inside while he was shooting. He was only going to have one chance.

  “He’s in the corridor. I think he’s seen the trolley. Stopping just outside.”

  Jed closed his eyes, shaking badly. A possessed would be able to sense his thoughts. They would all be hauled off to face Capone. He would be tortured and Beth would get sent to the brothel.

  I should have left the door open, that way I could have sprung out and surprised them.

  “Hello?” a voice called. It was very high pitched, almost a girl.

  “Is that them?” he whispered to his suit mike.

  “Yes. He’s examined the trolley. Now by the door.”

  The locking clamp moved, slowly hinging back. Jed stared at it in dread, desperate for one last hit from the suit’s medical module.

  If the laser doesn’t work, I’ll kill myself, he decided. Better that …

  “Hello?” the high voice sounded timid. “Is someone there?”

  The door started to open.

  “Hello?”

  Jed shouted in fury, and jumped from the wall. Holding the laser pistol in a double handed grip, he spun round and fired out into the corridor.

  Webster Pryor was saved by two things: his own diminutive height, and Jed’s quite abysmal aim.

  The red strand of laserlight was quite brilliant compared to the corridor lighting. It left Jed squinting against the glare, trying to see what he was shooting at. Blue-white flames and black smoke were squirting out of the corridor wall opposite, tracing a meandering line in the composite.

  Then the smoke stopped, and a spray of molten metal rained down. He was slicing through a conditioning duct.

  He did—just—see a small man dive to the floor at his feet as the laser slashed round in search of a target. There was a yell of panic, and someone was screaming: “Don’t shoot me don’t shoot me!” in a high pitched voice.

  Jed yelled himself. Confused all to hell what was happening. Tentatively, he took his finger off the laser’s trigger. Metal creaked alarmingly as the duct sagged around the dripping gap in its side. He looked down at the figure in the white jacket and black trousers grovelling on the floor. “What in Christ’s name is going on? Who are you?”

  A terrified face was looking up at him
. It wasn’t a bloke, just a kid.

  “Please don’t kill me,” Webster pleaded. “Please. I don’t want to be one of them. They’re horrible.”

  “What’s happening?” Rocio asked.

  “Not sure,” Jed mumbled. He took a look down the corridor. All clear.

  “Was that a laser?”

  “Yeah.” He aimed it down at Webster. “Are you possessed?”

  “No. Are you?”

  “Course bloody not.”

  “Well I didn’t know,” Webster wailed.

  “How did you get a weapon?” Rocio asked.

  “Shut up! Jeeze, give me a break. I just got one, okay?”

  Webster was frowning through his tears. “What?”

  “Nothing.” Jed hesitated, then put the laser pistol back in his utility pocket. The kid looked harmless; though the waiter’s jacket with its brass buttons which he wore, along with his oil-slicked hair, was a little odd. But he was more scared than anything else. “Who are you?”

  The story came out in broken sentences, punctuated by sobs. How Webster and his mother had been caught up in Capone’s take-over. How they’d been held in one of the asteroid’s halls with hundreds of other women and children. How some Organization woman came searching them out from the rest. How he’d been separated from his mother and put to work serving drinks and food for the gangster bosses and a peculiar, very pretty, lady. How he kept hearing Capone and the lady mention his father’s name, and then glance in his direction.

  “What are you doing down here?” Jed asked.

  “They sent me for some food,” Webster said. “The cook told me to find out if there were any swans left in storage.”

  “This is the spacecraft section,” Jed said. “Didn’t you know?”

  Webster sniffled loudly. “Yes. But if I look everywhere, I could stay away from them for a while.”

  “Right.” He straightened, and found one of the small camera lenses. “What do we do?” he asked, flustered by the boy’s tale.

  “Get rid of him,” Rocio said curtly.

  “What do you mean?”

  “He’s a complication. You’ve got the laser pistol, haven’t you?”

  Webster was looking up at him passively, eyes red-rimmed from the tears.

  All mournful and beat; the way not so long ago Jed had looked at Digger when the pain was at its worst.

  “I can’t do that!” Jed exclaimed.

  “What do you need, a note from your mother? Listen to me, Jed, the second he steps within range of a possessed, they’ll know something’s happened to him. Then they’ll come looking for you. They’ll get you, and Beth, and the girls.”

  “No way. I can’t. I just can’t. Not even if I wanted to.”

  “So what are you going to do instead?”

  “I don’t know! Beth? Beth, have you been switched on to all this?”

  “Yes, Jed,” she replied. “You’re not to touch that boy. We’ve got plenty of food, now, so bring him back with you. He can come with us.”

  “Really?” Rocio enquired disdainfully. “And where’s his spacesuit? How’s he supposed to get out to me?”

  Jed looked at Webster, thoroughly disconcerted. This whole situation was just getting worse and worse. “For Christ’s sake, just get me out of this.”

  “Stop being an arsehole,” Beth snapped. “It’s bloody obvious, you’ll have to steal one of the vehicles. There’s plenty of them about. I can see some of them docked to the airlocks close to where you went in. Take one and drive it over to us.”

  Jed wanted to curl up into a ball and take a decent hit. A vehicle! In full view of this whole nest of possessed.

  “Please Jed, come back,” Gari entreated. “I don’t like it here without you.”

  “All right, doll,” he said, too bushed to kick up an argument. “On my way.” He rounded on Webster. “And you’d better not be any trouble.”

  “You’re going to take me away?” the boy asked in wonder.

  “Sort of, yeah.”

  Jed didn’t bother about collecting any more food from the shelves. He just started pushing the trolley, making sure Webster was in sight the whole time.

  Rocio reviewed the camera images and schematic data available to him, and quickly devised a route to one of the docking ledge vehicles. It meant the two of them taking a lift up to the lounge level, which he didn’t like. But previewing enabled him to hurry them past the sections where crews were still working without incident.

  The vehicle he’d chosen for them was a small taxi with a five-seater cab.

  Large enough to take the trolley, and simple enough for Jed to drive. He was back at the Mindori three minutes after disengaging from the airlock.

  It actually took him longer than that to match the taxi’s docking tube with the starship’s life support module hatch. Once the tube was locked and pressurized, Beth, Gari, and Navar came rushing in to greet the returning hero. Beth put her hands on either side of his face and gave him a long kiss. “I’m proud of you,” she said.

  That wasn’t something she’d ever told him before, and she didn’t hand out platitudes, either. Of course, today had been full of not merely the unusual, but the positively weird. However, the words left him warm and uncertain. The moment was only slightly spoilt when the two younger girls started reading labels and found out what he’d brought back.

  It had taken the Monterey Hilton’s head chef over three hours to prepare the meal. A dozen or so senior lieutenants and their partners had been invited to an evening with Al and Jezzibella. Pasta with a sauce that was at least as good as they used to make on Earth (supervised by Al), swan stuffed with fish, fresh vegetables boosted up from the planet that afternoon, desserts heavy on chocolate and calories, matured cheeses, the finest wines New California could produce, the fanciest liqueurs. As well as the food, there was a five-piece band, and some showgirls for later.

  Guests would also receive items of twenty-four carat jewellery (genuine, not energistic baubles), personally selected by Al himself. The evening was intended to be memorable. Nobody left Al Capone’s party without a smile on their face. His reputation as a wild and exuberant host had to be preserved, after all.

  What Al didn’t know was that Leroy had to be taken off Organization administration duties in order to make the arrangements. He’d spent over an hour calling senior Organization personnel to facilitate the ingredients and people necessary to make the party work. That bothered the obese manager. The picture he and Emmet were getting from various lieutenants and city bosses down on the surface was a smooth one, things falling neatly into place, people doing as they were told. But not so long ago, when the fleet left for Arnstadt, Leroy had put together a grand ball in under a week. A time when the planet and high-orbit asteroids had fought for the privilege of supplying Al with the best of anything they had. This party was a fraction of that scale and a multiple of the effort.

  However, despite the grudging donations, the Nixon suite’s dining room was an impressive and dramatic example of lavishness when Leroy finally arrived, immaculate tuxedo straining around his huge frame. One of the more lissome girls from the brothel was on his arm; the pair of them a gross example of human glandular divergence. Heads turned to look at him when they arrived together. Silent calculations were quickly performed when a smiling Al greeted them, and handed the girl a diamond necklace which even her cleavage couldn’t devour. No snide remarks were ventured, though the mind-tones said it all.

  Monterey was out of the umbra again, heading into the light. Outside the broad window, New California’s green and blue crescent gleamed warmly. It was a sumptuous atmosphere for the pre-dinner drinks, and the atmosphere was suitably relaxed. Waiters circulated with gold and silver trays of canapés, making sure no glass was ever in danger of heading towards half empty. Conversation flowed, and Al circulated with grace, showing no favouritism.

  His mood didn’t even falter when Kiera showed up an easy fifteen minutes after everyone else. She wore a provo
catively simple sleeveless summer dress of some thin mauve fabric, cut to emphasise her figure. On a girl of her body’s age it would have been charmingly guileless, on her it was a declaration of all-out fashion war against the other females in the room. Only Jezzibella in the ever-classic little black cocktail number looked snazzier. And by the bright cherub’s smile she used to welcome Kiera, she knew it.

  “Al, darling,” Kiera’s smile was wide and sweltering as she kissed Al’s cheek. “Great party, thanks for the invite.”

  For a second, Al worried her teeth might be going for his jugular. Her thoughts bristled with an icy superiority. “Wouldn’t be the same without you,” he told her. Jeeze, and to think he’d once considered her a possible lay. His wang would get so cold inside her, it’d snap clean off.

  The notion made him shiver. He beckoned to one of the waiters. The guy must have been in his nineties, one of those dignified old coots that were perfect as butlers. Young Webster should have been doing this job, Al thought, it would have made for a cuter image. But he hadn’t seen the boy all evening. The old man wobbled forwards obediently, carrying a tray of black velvet with a shimmering sapphire cobweb necklace resting on it.

  “For me?” Kiera simpered. “Oh, how lovely.”

  Al took the necklace off the tray and slowly fastened it round her neck, ignoring her lecherous smirk at his proximity.

  “It’s so nice to see you here,” Jezzibella said, clinging to Al’s arm.

  “We weren’t sure if you could spare the time.”

  “I’ve always got time for Al.”

  “That’s nice to hear. Keeping the hellhawks in line must take up a big part of your day.”

  “I don’t have any trouble coping. They know I’m in charge of them.”

  “Yeah, you got some interesting moves, there,” Al said. “Emmet was full of praise for what you did. Said it was smart. Coming from him, that’s quite a compliment. I’ll have to remember them in case I’m ever in a similar situation.”

  Kiera removed a champagne saucer from one of the waiters, her gaze searched the room like a targeting laser until she found Emmet. “You won’t be in a similar situation, Al. I’m covering that flank for you. Very thoroughly.”