The Dying Light
Page 28
“I know he doesn’t,” he said.
“So?” Roche pressed. “Can I count on you not screwing things up until we’ve at least tried to talk?”
Disisto sighed again. “Okay,” he said. “If it means a possible peaceful solution, then I’ll see what I can do.”
“Good. Because you’re coming in the landing party with us, and I didn’t want to have to drag you around like a big sack of rocks.” Roche smiled, relieved to have finally reached some sort of compromise with him. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to try and turn a bunch of outriggers into something resembling a fighting force.”
Disisto leaned back into his seat with a half-smile on his face, but before he could say anything, the alarm Roche had installed in the communications systems sounded through her implants.
She turned back to the console and examined the surge. It seemed no different from the other, except this time it was incoming. A reply from the larger part of the Box, perhaps?
Disisto had said something about Mavalhin, but she wasn’t listening.
She cast an eye across the instruments. There it was: a sharp spike only slowly trailing off. As she watched, it peaked again, higher than before.
Another spike, more powerful, again registered on the courier’s neutrino detectors.
The tone of the Box’s voice was leading Roche in the same direction.
Sixty hours? Roche turned the figure over in her head. Just three days to get the outriggers to Galine Four, across a distance of over five billion kilometers, break in, rescue Maii and Cane, find out what Rufo knew, and get out again. Then get out of the system before the envelope collapsed completely...
“Roche?” said Disisto from behind her; irritably she waved him to silence.
She ignored the Box’s flippancy and quickly spoke into a mike on the console.
“Auditor Byrne,” she said. “I’m going to need your people ready to move in two hours. I repeat: two hours.”
“I hear you.” The auditor’s voice came on instantly. “But why the sudden urgency?”
“I just found out that the collapse of the envelope is being brought forward,” she said. “We now have just three days to do what we have to do and get the hell out of here.”
“Can we do it?”
“We can try,” Roche said. “Beyond that, I’m not making any promises...”
PART FOUR:
SEBETTU
INTERLUDE
He woke in a panic: someone was talking to him!
At first he thought it was one of the attendants in the Shadow Place. But the voice was cold and slippery, sharp as a hypodermic needle and as flexible as wire. It slid through his defenses and pierced his brain like a fishhook.
He struggled for a reference point. When he found none—only void—he remembered where he was.
The abomination!
He tried desperately to think. When had he fallen asleep? How had he allowed himself to become so vulnerable?
: HELP
He felt the technician start at the voice issuing from his monitors.
: HELP
: ME
: ABOMINATION
: HERE
He gave up, defeated yet again by spatial coordinates. And anyway the voice had gone, faded into some dark recess like a bad dream. Maybe he had dreamt it...
His body jackknifed in shock, its epsense organ flailing from the back of his skull like an electric eel in a thunderstorm; every cell in his body screamed at the insidious touch of that voice. An alarm sounded somewhere, heard and felt secondhand through the technician. What was this? Fear for his well-being? Or fear he might be trying to escape? He couldn’t tell which. Perhaps it was both.
: KILL
: HER
: HELP
: ME
The voice ceased. He waited breathlessly, hardly daring to believe that he had rid himself of her so easily.
Sharp-tipped tendrils encircled his mind. He relaxed minutely. If this was how attack would come, he was safe.
The tentacles slipped; their tips failed to find purchase.
Deep within him, he fashioned a private place in which he could think, a shelter not even she could reach. The Cruel One’s servant had underestimated her threat, and he lacked the skills to warn him. Fear flooded through him. The abomination could not hurt him directly, but she could still do him harm. For him, death’s sting was none the worse for being someone else’s. Indeed, his own might come as something of a relief if she were to break completely free.
Still, there was hope. She was only a child. Without the mind of an adult to direct it, her raw talent was mostly wasted. With luck she would never realize exactly what she was capable of—as long as he kept the thought buried deep, away from her prying mind.
He had no idea what to do next, but he knew he would accomplish little hidden in his private space. He had to come out eventually to do the bidding of the Cruel One’s servant. If he didn’t come out, the abomination would only try all the harder to smash her way in....
He wondered why he should enter into a bargain with someone like her.
There was nowhere to escape to.
So why didn’t she?
The abomination thrust an unwieldy slab of thou
ght at him, and he recoiled automatically.
: NO
He didn’t answer. The technician was examining him more closely now. His odd twitches and utterances were not going unnoticed. He needed to be careful lest someone think he was up to something.
Of course he was. More things than she would ever know.
In his private place, he realized that she too had been fooled by the Shining One’s camouflage. That was something. She wasn’t as perceptive as he had feared.
That wasn’t necessarily so. The Cruel One’s servant had numerous sensors and singleship scouts on the lookout for the two fugitive vessels. It was only a matter of time before one of them turned up.
He reacted with surprise to the certainty in the abomination’s mental voice. Come back? The enigma would be insane to do such a thing!
The abomination’s thoughts slid across each other like shining metal sheets, polished by friction. Her screen was good, but not perfect. Occasional insights slipped through the gaps, and he gathered them up, hoping to learn as much as he could about her. Leverage might come in handy, later.
The question surprised him. The Surin bred for epsense; they were not without experience in the field. Surely she knew that minds like hers should not exist?
He supposed she was too young to understand. Long-term maintenance of epsense ability required either built-in genetic disposition or intense discipline. If she had been made and raised around others like her, or around natural reaves who lacked the proper training—
Abominations like her were prone to self-destruction. There was no place for them in the galaxy; they never fit in. It wasn’t that they were rejected, more that they could not be accepted. In time, they always disintegrated.
He felt perversely sorry for her; after all, it wasn’t her fault she’d been made this way. But he could not—and would not—allow feelings of sympathy to intrude on what he had to do.
There had to be a way.
she said.
Nonexistent, he would’ve thought.
For a moment, in his private retreat, he was tempted to accept her challenge. Not that there was any risk of her getting what she wanted that way. No matter how strong she was, he would not fall to a direct assault; his very nature forbade it. He was more like a channel than a vessel; the hole in the fabric of n-space that was his mind could be filled and overflow, but that would not harm him directly. It would simply spill onto those around him, including the one attacking him, and thereby neutralize the threat.
No, he decided, letting his thoughts rise back to the surface. It would be more interesting to give her what she wanted. That would get her off his back, temporarily, and perhaps enable him to see what she made of it into the bargain.
Dialogue was possible even between enemies, especially when the conflict was not diametrically polarized. If they both perceived a common foe, mightn’t it seem sensible to exchange information?
He opened his mind. Not totally, and not all at once. And not, he had to admit, without doubt—for all he had learned was necessarily colored by the minds that had given it to him. But he himself did not add anything. He offered her no deceptions.
He showed her his home. He showed her how he had come to be snatched from it and brought here. He showed her the Cruel One. He showed her the complex web of intrigue and machinations woven around him. He showed her why it was unlikely he would ever be allowed to return to his people.
Then he showed her the dark hole at the heart of the Shining One. He showed her the secret fear breeding in the Cruel One’s servant’s mind. He showed her the difference between what the enigma thought to be true, and what he had garnered from those closer to the heart of the matter.
Mostly what he hoped to show her was her ignorance....
The abomination’s voice was strained.
He assured her that he wasn’t—but she was already gone. She had fled rather than endure the truth.
He barely had time to feel satisfaction when—
Pain!
He struggled to orient himself. Agony tore through every nerve in his body. What had gone wrong?
His mind strained. Wider, wider. Desperate to stop the pain.
: SLEEPING
: DREAMING
He looked; it was true. He could see them now rising out of the mist of the Shining One, numerous minds all focused on one place, one challenge.
: MANY
: MANY
: COMING
He peered closer, harder, through the light, at another.
: SHINING
: RESONANCE
And there, at the forefront, he saw it. He didn’t know why he was surprised, and perhaps even a little relieved. He knew the Cruel One’s servant would feel very differently. But at least now he would be able to keep an eye on her.
Just as the abomination had said, the enigma had returned...
7
COEI Daybreak
‘955.01.23 EN
1840
The outrigger fleet came in fast. After twenty hours of hard acceleration and deceleration on the back of the spines, then riding on momentum alone for the last hour to hide the emissions of their tiny drives, they burst into the sky around Galine Four like the absent stars. Seventy-six all-suits in total, more than half of them empty and teleoperated either by their original owners or the Box, while the spines remained hidden far away; behind the outriggers, six lumbering prowling mines—big tanklike masses of metal designed to overtake sluggish asteroids and slowly tear them to pieces; and hidden among them, carefully camouflaged as another prowling mine, the Ana Vereine—using its shields to protect as many of the outriggers as possible until they were within firing range.
Roche occupied the copilot’s chair of Daybreak, fully suited and ready to disembark at a moment’s notice. Her suit had come from the holds of the Ana Vereine and was a substantial improvement on the old one: cool air circulated across every part of her body; silent servo-assists gave her increased strength and agility; hidden weapons awaited her slightest mental prompt to attack. Information flowed across eyes-up displays and through her implants; she could see from a dozen different viewpoints simultaneously, and could eavesdrop as needed on the outriggers’ exchanges. She was like an angry insect queen surrounded by her warriors, swooping in for the kill.
Beside her, Haid sat similarly dressed. Mavalhin and Disisto wore the COE
suits that had come with the courier vessel, but they weren’t armed. Roche had promised Mavalhin a hand weapon when they boarded Galine Four, but she still hadn’t decided whether to keep that promise or not.
Behind them waited four empty combat suits from the Ana Vereine. These would accompany them onto Galine Four, to be directed by the Box if that proved to be possible. There was no guarantee that they would be able to communicate with the fleet outside. It was worth taking the chance, though, Roche thought. If the drones did work, they would effectively double their numbers.
It seemed to take the Galine Four defenders a moment to believe what they were seeing. By the time the first shots were fired, the outriggers were almost in range. As soon as they were, the formation dissolved and return fire began to come in.
“How’s your status?” she asked the Ana Vereine.
“Just waiting on your signal, Morgan.” Roche could hear the elation in the ex-captain’s voice. After days of running and hiding, the prospect of action had Uri barely able to contain his excitement.
Roche studied the views before her. The station gunners were concentrating on the prowling mines—not surprising considering their mass. If just one of them rammed, the battle would effectively be over. Roche had no intention of doing this, but the station gunners weren’t to know that.
“Your shields are holding?”
“They’re doing okay,” reported Kajic. “I’m displaying signs of damage in order to preserve the illusion.”
“Could you also feign disablement?”
“Shouldn’t be difficult.”
“Then do so after the next particularly heavy battery. Don’t head for the station, though; tumble so you’d miss. That way they should leave you alone. As soon as the shields are back to full strength, join the battle properly.”