The Naked God

by Peter F. Hamilton

  “We now have the power of life and death over the possessed under siege, especially now the Confederation navy is working on anti-memory. By concluding the sieges with their capitulation, we’re wasting our position, our tactical advantage. Ekelund said this crisis will never be decided here on Ombey, by us. I used to believe her. But today changed that. We are in a unique position to force the possessed to cooperate and help us find a solution. There is a solution—the Kiint found one, the crystal entities found one, we even think the Laymil found one—not that mass suicide would be valid for humans. So give the remaining possessed food, let them recover, and then start negotiating. We can use the Ketton island veterans to go in and open up a dialogue for us.”

  “You mean the serjeants, the ex-possessors?”

  “Who better. They have first-hand experience that the sanctuary realm is nothing of the sort. If anybody can convince them, those serjeants can.”

  “Good God. First you want the kingdom to adopt bitek, now you’d have me allied with the lost souls themselves.”

  “We know what being antagonistic to them brings us. A fifth of a continent devastated, thousands of deaths, hundreds of thousands of cancer victims. This has been suffering on a scale we’ve not had since the Garissa genocide. Make it mean something, ma’am, make some good come out of it. If it’s possible, if there is the slightest chance that this might work, you cannot ignore it.”

  “Ralph, you are going to be the death of my senior advisors.”

  “Then they can come back from the beyond and persecute me. Am I free to give the order?”

  “If any of these possessed use this as an opportunity to try and break out, I want them in zero-tau within a day.”

  “Understood.”

  “Very well, General Hiltch, give your order.”

  Al had moved to a suite a couple of floors up the Hilton where all the utilities still worked. The doctors needed a reliable electrical supply, fancy phone lines, clean air, that kind of crap. They’d turned the new suite’s bedroom into a treatment room, raiding Monterey’s hospital for equipment and medical packages. More stuff had been flown up from San Angeles. Stuff that gave Al the creeps: bits of other people, living organs and muscles and veins and skin. Emmet had run a planet-wide search for a pair of compatible eyes, eventually tracking them down to a storage vault in Sunset Island. A priority flight had brought them up to Monterey.

  The doctors said it was going well. Jez was out of danger. They’d replaced her blood and grafted on skin and tissue where Kiera had burned down to the bone, implanted the new eyes. Once the operations were over, they’d covered her in medical packages. Now it was just a question of time until she healed over, they’d assured him.

  They didn’t like Al visiting too much. Jez looked so helpless smothered in that green plastic substance he got all worked up, which screwed up the packages. So he didn’t get too near, just hung out by the door and watched over her. Like a guy should do for his dame. It gave him time to think a lot.

  Mickey, Emmet, and Patricia came into the suite’s lounge. Al had one of the stewards hand round drinks as they sat round the low brass and marble table, then ordered everyone else out of the room.

  “Okay, Emmet, how long till they get here?”

  “I figure some time in the next ten hours, Al.”

  “Fair enough.” Al lit a Havana and blew a long trail of smoke at the high ceiling. “On the level, can we fight them off?”

  Emmet took a sip of the bourbon and replaced the glass on the table, studying it keenly. “No, Al, we’re going to lose. Even if they only use the same level of force as they did against Arnstadt, we’ll lose. And they’ll be carrying enough combat wasps to fire two or three times as many at us. Everything in orbit above New California will be wiped out.

  The ships can jump away. But they’ve got nowhere to go except for the last couple of planets we infiltrated. And I’m not too sure they’ll even manage that. We think the Navy’s voidhawks pursued a lot of our guys from Arnstadt and blew them up after they’d jumped away. There weren’t too many made it back here.”

  “Thanks, Emmet, I appreciate you being straight with me. Mickey, Patricia, what’s the word among the soldiers?”

  “They’re getting jumpy, Al,” Patricia said. “No two ways about it. There’s been enough time for what that bitch Kiera said to start registering. The Organization’s put us on top, but that makes us a target. We know we can’t take over another planet again, New California is all we’ve got. A lot of them want to go down there.”

  “But we’re holding them, Al,” Mickey said. His nervous tic was palpitating away. “I don’t take no shit from any of my people. They’re loyal. You made us, Al, we’ll stay with you.”

  His blind enthusiasm made Al smile faintly. “I ain’t asking no one to commit suicide for me, Mickey. They wouldn’t do it anyway; they all came out of the beyond, remember. They ain’t gonna go back just because I ask nice. Party’s over, guys. We had fun for a while, but we’ve reached the end of the road. I got a bum rap from history once, I ain’t having that again. This time people are gonna say I did the best for everyone. They’re gonna show me some genuine respect.”

  “How?” Patricia asked.

  “Because we’re going out in style. It’s gonna be me who stops the slaughter. I’m gonna make the Navy an offer they can’t refuse.”

  The Ilex was one of the voidhawks who had taken up an observation position two million kilometres out from New California in the wake of the mass hellhawk defection from the Organization. The Yosemite Consensus had soon found out about Almaden. Hellhawks had been delivering non-possessed survivors to the habitats, a repatriation deal for rebuilding the asteroid’s nutrient refinery, they said. Consensus hadn’t finished reviewing the implications of that yet; it seemed unlikely that they could maintain the machinery for more than a few years. However, that the hellhawks so actively sought to avoid combat was a particularly welcome development. Capone’s actual motives for allowing and even assisting such an action were highly questionable.

  Whatever the true reason, it left Yosemite with an excellent opportunity to re-establish its observation of New California and the Organization fleet. Ilex had been assigned to review the low-orbit SD network in preparation for the arrival of Admiral Kolhammer’s attack force. They deployed their spyglobes and waited for them to complete the long fall down below geostationary orbit. There was still an hour to go before the little sensors started to return useful data when a communication beam from Monterey was aligned on them.

  “I wanna talk to the captain,” Al Capone said.

  Auster immediately informed the Yosemite habitats. Their Consensus came together, reviewing the situation through his eyes and ears. “This is Captain Auster. What can I do for you, Mr. Capone?”

  Al grinned, and turned to someone out of view. “Hey, you got that on the dime, they’re as prissy as the Limeys. Okay, Auster, we all reckon that the Navy is due here any minute now. Right?”

  “I can neither confirm nor deny such an event.”

  “Bullshit, they’re on their way.”

  “What do you want, Mr. Capone?”

  “I need to talk to the guy in charge, the admiral. And I need to do that before he starts shooting. Can you fix that for me?”

  “What do you wish to talk to him about?”

  “Hey, that’s between me and him, pal. Now can you set that up, or do you wanna sit back and let a whole load of people get slaughtered? I thought that was against your religion or something.”

  “I’ll see what I can do.”

  Illustrious emerged in the centre of the voidhawk defence sphere formation, 300,000 kilometres above New California. Admiral Kolhammer waited impatiently for the tactical display, cursing the delay while the warship’s sensors deployed.

  Lieutenant Commander Kynea, the voidhawk liaison staff leader, called out: “Sir, local voidhawks have received a communications request. Al Capone wants to talk to you.”

 
; It wasn’t something Motela Kolhammer was expecting, but the probability was always there. Capone didn’t have to be a genius to work out where the attack force was heading after Arnstadt.

  The tactical display was coming on line, supplemented by information from the Yosemite voidhawks. The news that the hellhawks had departed was extremely welcome. Though even without them New California had a prodigious defence network; its strength had determined the ultimate size of the attack force. So far, none of the platforms had fired.

  “I’ll listen to him,” Kolhammer said. “But I want our deployment to continue as planned.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  The Illustrious aligned one of its communication dishes on Monterey.

  “So you’re the admiral, huh?” Al Capone asked once the link was established.

  “Admiral Kolhammer, Confederation Navy. Currently commanding the attack force emerging above New California.”

  “I guess I must have frightened you people, huh?”

  “Guess again.”

  “I don’t think so. I got it right first time, pal. There’s one fuck of a lot of you. That means you’re running scared.”

  “Interpret our emergence how you choose. It is of no relevance to me. Did you wish to surrender?”

  “Blunt son of a bitch, ain’t you?”

  “I’ve been called many things, that’s one of the milder observations.”

  “You killed a lot of people on Arnstadt, Admiral.”

  “No. You did. You backed us into a position where we had no alternative but to respond appropriately.”

  Al grinned brightly. “Like I said, I frightened you. That’s a big tough decision your Assembly must have made, sacrifice an entire planet just to whack me. Taxpayers ain’t gonna like that, no sir. You’re supposed to be protecting them. That’s your duty.”

  “I’m very aware of my duty to the Confederation, Mr. Capone. I don’t need you to tell me that.”

  “Have it whatever way you want. Thing is, I’ve got an offer for you.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “You’re gonna shoot off a shitload of artillery at us, right. I mean, it’s gonna be like the fucking Alamo in here.”

  “You’ll discover my intentions soon enough.”

  “We’ve got over a million people up here, more if you count all us poor lost souls; but certainly a million flesh-and-blood bodies. Plenty of women and children, too. I can prove that; there’s stuff my technical guys can send you, lists and records and such. Do you really want to kill them all?”

  “No, I do not wish to kill anybody.”

  “That’s good, we can talk about that.”

  “Talk quickly.”

  “Pretty simple; I ain’t gonna jive-ass you. You’ve already decided you’ll give up New California just to get rid of me. Well, I gotta tell you, I’m real flattered. That’s one hell of a price to put on a single guy’s head, you know. So in return, I’m gonna do you a favour. I’ll send all my people down to the planet, all the possessed here in Monterey and the other asteroids, everyone in the fleet, the whole goddamn lot of them.

  Then when we’re all down on the ground, we’ll take the planet away. This way nobody gets hurt, and you get back all the hostages I’m keeping up here. I’ll even throw in the antimatter as well. How does that grab you, Admiral?”

  “It grabs me as fundamentally unbelievable.”

  “Hey shit-for-brains, you want a bloodbath that bad and maybe I’ll just give the order to butcher all the hostages right now, before your weapons ever reach us.”

  “No. Please don’t. I apologise. What I should have asked was, why? Why are you making this offer?”

  Al leaned in closer to the sensor transmitting his image to the Illustrious. “Look, I’m just trying to do what’s right here. You’re going to kill people. Maybe I pushed you into that, maybe not. But now it’s here, I’m trying to stop it, I ain’t no goddamn maniac. So I offer you a way out that leaves both of us looking good.”

  “Let me get this straight, you are proposing to ferry every possessed down to the planet, disarm your fleet and hand back the asteroids?”

  “Hey, slow but smart. You got it. In return for letting us keep our bodies, we leave and don’t bother you again. That’s it. End of story.”

  “Moving that many people down to the planet would take some time.”

  “Emmet, my guy, he says about a week.”

  “I see. So while my ships sit out here doing nothing, what guarantee can you make that you’re not simply trying to pull another Trafalgar strike against us under cover of this withdrawal?”

  Al gave him the look. “That’s fucking low, pal. What’s to stop you shooting when we’re halfway through evacuating and I got fewer ships to give my people covering fire?”

  “In other words, we have to trust each other.”

  “Bet your ever-loving ass.”

  “Very well. My ships will not launch any offensive while your evacuation is in progress. And Mr. Capone?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Thank you.”

  “No problem. You just be sure and tell everyone back home that I ain’t no cracker-barrel fishball. I got me some style.”

  “Of course you have. I wouldn’t be here otherwise.”

  Al leaned back in his chair and switched off the super telephone machine.

  “No, guess you wouldn’t,” he said contentedly.

  Jezzibella stood in the bedroom doorway. She wore a blue towelling gown loosely over her green wrappings, helping to make her look slightly more human and not so much like a plastic version of the Tin Man out of Oz.

  He shot to his feet. “Hey, you shouldn’t be out of bed.”

  “It doesn’t make any difference if I’m lying down or not. The packages work either way.” She walked slowly across the lounge, barely flexing her knees. Lowering herself into the chair was difficult. Al made a real effort not to go over and help, he could see how much doing it all by herself meant. Toughest girl in the galaxy.

  “So what have you been doing?” she asked. The voice was muffled through the slit in her mask package.

  “Putting a stop to all this crap. My guys, they can scoot down to the planet and get home free.”

  “I thought so. That’s very statesmanlike of you, baby.”

  “I got a reputation to keep, you know.”

  “I know. But Al, what happens when the Confederation finds out how to bring planets back? I mean, that’s what all this was about, wasn’t it? Standing up to them on their home ground.”

  He reached over the table and gripped her hands. The fingers were sticking out from the end of the packages, allowing him some genuine contact with her skin. “We lost, Jez. Okay? We were so goddamn good, we lost. Go figure. We frightened them too much. I had to make a choice. The fleet can’t fight this admiral off. No way. So letting the planet go is the smart way to deal with it. The way I see it, my guys get years more living in their bodies. At least. And the Confederation longhairs ain’t gonna risk bringing them back until they’ve found a way of giving us new bodies, or something. They’d just start the whole thing over. Who knows, maybe New California can vanish from the next universe, too. There’s a lot of things can happen. This way, nobody dies, we all win.”

  “You’re the best, baby. I knew it right from the start. When do we go down?”

  Al squeezed her fingers a little tighter, looking into her face. He could just see her new eyes through the green package, like she was wearing swimming goggles, only they were full of liquid. “You can’t, Jez. Christ, your medical stuff only just works up here. Where New California’s headed, who knows what’s going to go bust. You’re healing up real good now, all the docs say so. But you need more time to get perfect. I ain’t gonna allow nothing to interfere with that.”

  “No, Al, I’m going with you.”

  “Wrong. I’m staying here. See, we’ll still be together.”

  “No.”

  “Yeah.” He sat back, and waved an arm round i
n a gesture that took in the whole asteroid. “Done deal, Jez. Someone’s got to stay here and keep the space weapons going while the guys fly down to the planet. I don’t trust that motherhumping admiral none.”

  “Al, you can’t operate the SD platforms. For fuck’s sake, you don’t even know how to work the hotel air conditioner.”

  “Yeah. But the admiral don’t know that.”

  “They’ll catch you. They’ll expel you from that body. It’ll be the beyond for the rest of time. Please, Al. I’ll work the SD platforms. Be safe. I can live as long as I know you’re safe.”

  “You’re forgetting something, Jez: everyone forgets, except maybe good old brown-nose Bernhard. I’m Al Capone. I ain’t scared of the beyond. Never was. Never will be.”

  The voidhawk from New California arrived just as First Admiral Aleksandrovich’s flyer touched down. It meant he could walk into the Polity Council meeting primed with some good news—always a good negotiating position to be in.

  His first surprise came at the Polity Council chamber door. Jeeta Anwar was waiting outside for the navy delegation.

  “The President has asked me to inform you that no aides are required for this session,” she said.

  Samual Aleksandrovich gave Keaton and al-Sahhaf a bemused glance.

  “They’re not that dangerous,” he said jovially.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” Jeeta said.

  Samual considered making a fuss; he didn’t like that kind of surprise being thrown at him. If nothing else, it told him the coming meeting was going to be unusual, and probably disagreeable. Having his aides with him couldn’t stop that. “Very well.”

  The second surprise was how few ambassadors were sitting around the big circle of antique sequoia in the council chamber. Three in total, representing New Washington, Oshanko, and Mazaliv. Lord Kelman Mountjoy was also present. Samual Aleksandrovich gave him a cautious nod as he sat to the left of Olton Haaker.

  “I don’t believe you have a quorum here,” he said mildly.

  “Not of the Polity Council, no,” President Haaker said.

  Samual didn’t like the man’s stilted voice; something was making the President very nervous. “Then please tell me what this meeting is.”