She did as she was told with insultingly measured slowness; descending the rungs welded on to the side of the conditioner. When she reached the ground five marines advanced on her.
“On the ground,” Murphy repeated.
Sighing at how she’d been wronged she lowered herself to her knees, and slowly bent forward. “I trust this makes you feel safe?” she enquired archly.
The first marine to reach her shouldered his machine gun and took a holding stick from his belt. It telescoped out to two metres, and he closed the pincer clamp around Couteur’s neck.
“Scan and secure the rest of the hall,” Murphy instructed. “We’re still missing three bodies.”
He walked over to where Jacqueline Couteur was being held fast. The pincer was riding high on her neck, tilting her jaw back. It was an uncomfortable position, but she never showed any ire.
“What are you doing?” Murphy asked.
“I believe you’re in charge.” The tone was calculated to annoy, superior and amused. “You tell me.”
“You mean this is all you’ve achieved? Two hours’ liberty and you’re sulking about down here? That’s pathetic, Couteur.”
“Two hours tying up your resources, frightening your squad. And you, I can see the fear clouding your mind. Then I also eliminated several key CNIS science personnel. Possibly I engendered some more possessed to run loose in your precious asteroid. You’ll have to find that out for yourself. Do you really regard that as insignificant, lieutenant?”
“No, but it’s beneath you.”
“I’m flattered.”
“Don’t be. I’ll find out whatever scam you’re pulling, and I’ll blow it out the fucking airlock. You don’t fool me, Couteur.” Murphy pushed up his visor, and shoved his face centimetres from hers. “Zero-tau for you. You’ve abused our decency for way too long. I should have shot you back on Lalonde.”
“No you wouldn’t,” she sneered. “As you said, you’re too decent.”
“Get her up to the lab,” Murphy snarled.
Gilmore was waiting for them at the top of the stairs; he directed them to professor Nowak’s laboratory where a couple of technicians had prepared a zero-tau pod. Jacqueline Couteur hesitated slightly when she saw it. Two machine guns prodded into the small of her back, urging her forwards.
“I ought to say sorry for any suffering you’ve undergone,” Gilmore said awkwardly. “But after the courtroom, I feel completely vindicated.”
“You would,” Jacqueline said. “I shall be watching you from the beyond. When your time comes to join us, I’ll be there.”
Gilmore gestured at the zero-tau pod, as if getting in was voluntary.
“Empty threats, I’m afraid. By that time, we shall have solved the problem of the beyond.”
Couteur gave him a final withering glance, and climbed into the pod.
“Any final message?” Murphy asked. “Children or grandchildren you want to say something to? I’ll see it’s passed on.”
“Go fuck yourself.”
He grunted and nodded to the technician operating the pod. Couteur was immediately smothered beneath the jet-black field.
“How long?” Murphy asked tensely. He still couldn’t believe this was all there was to it.
“Leave her in for at least an hour,” Gilmore said with bitter respect. “She’s tough.”
“Very well.” Murphy refused to allow the door connecting the secure laboratory with the rest of the asteroid to be re-opened, not with three people still unaccounted for. The marines continued their sweep of the utility caverns. As well as people, Murphy had them examine the fusion generators. Since the loss of the external heat exchangers, they’d been operating in breakeven mode, shunting their small thermal output into the emergency heat storage silo. Couteur couldn’t rig them to explode, but the plasma could do a lot of damage if the confinement field had been tampered with.
The technicians reported back that they were untouched. After another forty minutes one of the missing bodies was found, dead, and stuffed behind an air conditioning vent. Murphy ordered the squad to go back through the rooms they’d covered and open all the remaining grilles, no matter what size. A possessed could easily hollow out a small nest for themselves in the rock.
He waited seventy minutes before ordering the zero-tau pod to be switched off. The woman inside was wearing a tattered and burnt laboratory tunic with the CNIS insignia on her shoulder. She was weeping fervently as she tottered out, clutching at a bloody wound across her abdomen. Murphy’s characteristics recognition program identified her as Toshi Numour, one of the weapons section’s biophysics researchers.
“Shit,” Murphy groaned. “Dr Gilmore,” he datavised. There was no reply.
“Doctor?” The communications processors in the secure laboratory complex reported they couldn’t acquire Dr Gilmore’s neural nanonics.
Murphy burst out into the main corridor, and shouted at his squad to follow. With ten suited figures clattering along at his heels, he sprinted for Gilmore’s office.
As soon as the black shell of the zero-tau field had snapped up around Jacqueline Couteur, Pierce Gilmore headed back for his office. He didn’t protest at Hewlett’s continuing restrictions in preventing them from leaving the secure laboratory complex. In fact, he rather approved. He’d received a nasty shock when Couteur escaped, on top of the asteroid physically shaking in the wake of the antimatter blast. Under the circumstances, such precautions were both logical and sensible.
The office door slid shut behind him, and some of the lighting came on.
Current power rationing permitted him only four of the ceiling panels, the kind of light provided by a cold winter afternoon. None of the holographic windows were active.
He walked over to the percolator jug, which was still bubbling away contentedly, and poured himself a cup. After a moment of regret, he switched it off. There probably wouldn’t be enough space in his evacuation allocation to take it or any of the bone china cups with him.
Assuming there would be any allocation for personal effects. With over three hundred thousand people to evacuate in a week, the amount of baggage they could take with them would be minimal to zero.
The small solaris tube running above his orchids was also off. Several of the rare pure-genotype plants were due to flower, their fleshy buds had almost burst. They never would now. There would be no light and fresh air, and the heat would arrive soon. The secure laboratory was closer to the surface than most of the asteroid’s habitable sections, it would receive the worst of the inward seepage. Furniture, equipment, it would all be lost. The only thing to survive would be their files.
Pierce sat behind his desk. In fact, he really ought to be drawing up procedures to safeguard the information ready for when they transferred to their secondary facility. He put his cup down on the leather surface, next to an empty cup. That hadn’t been there before.
“Hello, Doctor,” Jacqueline Couteur said.
He did flinch, but at least he didn’t jump or yelp. She didn’t have the satisfaction of witnessing any disconcertion, which in the game they played was a big points winner. His eyes locked on an empty section of wall directly ahead, refusing to turn round and look for her.
“Jacqueline. You have no feelings. Poor Lieutenant Hewlett really won’t enjoy being outsmarted in this manner.”
“You can stop trying to datavise for help now, Doctor. I disabled the room’s net processors. Not with my energistic power, either, there was no glitch to alert the AI. Kate Morley had some knowledge of electronics, a couple of old didactic courses.”
Pierce Gilmore datavised the comprehensive processor array installed in his desk. It reported that its link with Trafalgar’s communication’s net had been removed.
Jacqueline chuckled softly as she walked round the desk into his line of sight. She was carrying a processor block, its small screen alive with graphics that monitored his datavises. “Anything else you’d like to try?” she enquired lightly.
&nb
sp; “The AI will notice the processors have gone off line. Even if it isn’t caused by a glitch, a marine squad will be sent to investigate.”
“Really, Doctor? A lot of systems were damaged by the EM pulse. I’ve apparently been caught and shoved into zero-tau, and the marines have already cleared this level. I think that gives us time enough.”
“For what?”
“Oh dear me. Is that finally a spike of fear I sense in your mind, Doctor? That has got to be the first arousal of any kind you’ve had for many a year. Perhaps it’s even a hint of remorse? Remorse for what you put me through.”
“You put yourself through it, Jacqueline. We asked you to cooperate; you were the one who chose to refuse. Very bluntly, as I recall.”
“Not guilty. You tortured me.”
“Kate Morley. Maynard Khanna. Should I go on?”
She stood directly in front of the desk, staring at him. “Ah. Two wrongs making a right? Is that what I’ve reduced you to, Doctor? Fear does things to the most brilliant of minds. It makes them desperate. It makes them pitiful. Is there any other excuse you’d like to offer?”
“If I was facing a jury, good and true, I could offer several justifications. Such arguments would be wasted on a bigot.”
“Petty, even for you.”
“Cooperate with us. It’s not too late.”
“Not even clichés change in five hundred years. That says quite a lot about the human race, don’t you think? Certainly everything I need to know.”
“You’re transferring onto an abstract concept. Self-hatred is a common aspect of a diseased mind.”
“If I’m the one that’s ill and incapable, how come you’re the one in terminal trouble?”
“Then stop being the problem, and help us with a solution.”
“We are not problems.” Her hand slammed down on the front of the desk, making the two coffee cups jump. “We are people. If that simple fact could ever register in that fascist bitek brain of yours then you might be able to look in a different direction, one that would help bring an end to our suffering. But that is beyond you. To think along those lines you have to be human. And after all these weeks of study, the one definite conclusion I have come to, is that you are not human. Nor can you ever become human. You have nothing, no moral foundation from which to grow out of. Laton and Hitler were saints compared to you.”
“You’re taking your situation far too personally. Understandably, after all, you can hardly retreat from it. You lack the courage for that.”
“No.” She straightened up. “But I can make my last noble stand. And depriving the Confederation Navy of your so-called talent will be a satisfactory achievement for me. Nothing personal, you understand.”
“I can put an end to this, Jacqueline. We’re so very close to an answer now.”
“Let’s see how your rationality endures the reality of the beyond. You will now experience every facet of it. Being possessed by one of its inhabitants; living within it, and if you’re really fortunate, as a possessor, forever terrified that some lucky living bastard is going to rip you out of your precious new prize and send you back screaming. What will your answer be then, I wonder?”
“Unchanged.” He gave her a sad defeated smile. “It’s called resolution, the ability and determination to see things through to the end. However unexpected or disappointing that end turns out to be. Not that anyone will ever know now. But I held true to myself.”
Alarmed by his mind tone, Jacqueline started to point her right arm.
Slivers of white fire licked up from her wrist.
In Gilmore’s mind the alternatives were stark. That she would torture him was inevitable. He would be possessed, or more likely damaged so badly that his body died, banishing his soul to the beyond. That was where logic broke down. He believed, or thought he did, that there was a way out of the beyond. Doubt undermined him, though. Factious, unclean human emotion, the type he hated so. If a way through the beyond existed, why did the souls remain trapped? There was no certainty any more. Not for him, not there. And he couldn’t stand that. Facts and rationality were more than the building blocks of his mind, they were his existence. If the beyond was truly a place without logic, then Pierce Gilmore had no wish to exist there. And his own sacrifice would advance human understanding by a fraction. Such knowledge was a fitting last thought.
He datavised the processor array for the latest version of the anti-memory. Jacqueline’s hand was already lining up desperately on him when the desktop AV projection pillar silently pumped a blindingly pervasive red light across the office.
Sixty minutes later Murphy Hewlett and his squad blew the office door out with an EE charge, and rushed in to the rescue. They found Gilmore slumped over his desk, and Kate Morley lying on the floor in front of it.
Both of them were alive, but completely unresponsive to any kind of stimulus the squad medic could apply. As Murphy said later during his debriefing, they were nothing but a pair of wide awake corpses.
Chapter 04
From the safety of the little plateau, a quarter of the way up the northern endcap, Tolton trained his telescope on the lobby of the Djerba starscraper. Another swirl of darkness was pushing up through the dome of white archways. Pieces of the structure tumbled across the crumpled lawn circling the forlorn building. He kept expecting to hear the sound of breaking glass reach across the distance. The telescope provided a good, sharp image, as if he was just a few metres away. He shivered at that errant thought, still able to feel the wave of coldness that had swept through him every time the flying monster passed overhead.
“This one’s a walker.” He moved aside and let Erentz use the telescope’s eyepiece.
She studied it for a minute. “You’re right. It’s picking up speed, too.” The visitor had shoved its way through the smouldering ruins of the shanties, leaving a deep furrow in its wake. Now it was traversing the meadows beyond. The wispy pink grass stalks around it turned black, as if they’d been singed. “Moving smoothly enough; fast, too. It should reach the southern endcap in five or six hours at that rate.”
<
Eight of the dire visitors had now emerged from the Djerba, three of them taking flight. Without fail, they had headed for the southern endcap, just as the first and largest had done. Those that moved over the land had left a contrail of dead vegetation behind them. When they reached the endcap, they bored their way through the polyp and into the arteries which fed the giant organs, suckling the nutrient fluid.
“We should be able to burn them out soon,” she said. “The flame throwers and incendiary torpedoes are coming on fine. You’ll be okay.”
The look Tolton gave her made his lack of affinity irrelevant. He bent over the telescope again. The visitor was crunching its way through a small forest. Trees swayed and toppled, broken off at the base. It seemed incapable of going round anything. “That thing is goddamn strong.”
“Yeah.” Her worry was pronounced.
“How’s the signal project coming?” He asked the question several times every day, frightened he might miss out on some amazing breakthrough.
“Most of us are working on developing and producing our weapons right now.”
“You can’t give up on that. You can’t!” He said it loud for the benefit of the personality.
“Nobody’s giving up. The physics core team is still active.” She didn’t tell him it was down to five theorists who spent most of their time arguing about how to proceed.
“Okay then.”
<
Erentz gave the street poet a swift glance. He was engrossed with the telescope again, tracking the movements of the visitors still loose on the grass plains. <
<
The creatures had been arriving at the rate of nearly one every half hour ever since Erentz’s disastrous foray into the Djerba. The personality was now worried about its ability to maintain the habitat’s environmental integrity. Each new arrival invariably smashed its way into a starscraper, then proceeded to hammer the tower’s internal structure. So far the emergency inter-floor pressure seals had held. But if the invasion continued at this rate a breach was inevitable.
<
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Tolton straightened up. “What next?”
“We’d better get back down to the others. The visitors aren’t immediately threatening.”
“That can change.”
“If it does, I’m sure we’ll know about it real soon.”
They walked into the small cave at the back of the plateau. It housed a tunnel which spiralled down through several chambers to the caverns at the base of the endcap. Wave escalators and stairs were arranged in parallel down each level. Most of the wave escalators had stopped, so the descent took them quite a while.
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