That was why they’d acquiesced to her rule and that of the council, because she’d been right. At the start. Now though, they had increased their numbers, Kiera had flown off to negotiate their admission to a dangerous war, and Bonney committed them against Rubra to satisfy her personal vendettas.
No more. No more risks. No more foolhardy adventures. No more sick savagery of hunting. The time had come to leave it all behind.
The truck raced along the hardened track which countless wheels had compacted across the semi-arid plain surrounding Valisk’s northern endcap. Bonney had the throttle at maximum, the axial motors complemented by her energistic power. Small flattened stones and cracked ridges which lay along the track sent the vehicle flying through the air in long shallow hops.
Bonney didn’t even notice the jouncing, which would have caused whiplash injuries to any non-possessed riding beside her. Her mind was focused entirely on the endcap whose base was five kilometres in front of her.
She imagined her beefy old vehicle beating the sleek tube capsule slicing along its magnetic rail in the tunnel below her. The one she knew he would be riding.
Up ahead she could just make out the dark line of the switchback road which wound up to the small plateau two kilometres above the plain. If she could only reach the passageway entrance before Dariat got out of the sewer tunnels and into a tube carriage she might conceivably reach the axis chamber before him.
A feeling of contentment began to seep into her mind. An insidious infiltration which called on her to respond, to generate her own dreamy satisfaction, to pledge it to the whole.
“Bastards!” She slapped furiously at the steering wheel, anger insulating her from the loving embrace which was rising up all around her. They had begun it, the gathering of power, the sharing, linking their wills.
They’d submitted, capitulated, to their craven fear. Valisk would soon sail calmly out of this universe, sheltering them from any conceivable threat, committing them to a life of eternal boredom.
Well not for her. One of the hellhawks could take her off, away where there was struggle and excitement. Only after she’d dealt with Dariat, though. There would be time. There had to be.
The truck’s speed began to pick up. Her stubborn insistence was diverting a fraction of the prodigious reality dysfunction which was coalescing around the habitat. The utterly implausible was becoming hard fact.
Bonney laughed gleefully as the truck shot along the track, ripping up a churning cloud of thick ochre dust behind it. While all around her, the tiny clumps of scrub grass, cacti, and lichen sprawls were sprouting big adventitious flower buds. The bland desert was quietly and miraculously transforming itself into a rich colour-riot garden as Valisk’s new masters prepared to enact their vision of paradise.
The Kohistan Consensus had a thousand and one questions on the nature of possession and the beyond. Dariat sat quietly in the tube carriage taking him to the axis chamber and tried to supply answers for as many as he could. He even let them hear the terrible cries of the lost souls that infested his every thought. So that they’d know, so they’d understand the dreadful compulsion driving each possessor.
<> Rubra announced. <
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Blue smoke spouted out of the truck’s tyres as Bonney skid-braked the vehicle outside the passageway’s dark entrance. When she jumped down from the driver’s seat her sharp upper teeth were protruding over her lower lip, producing a permanent feral grin. Her painfully red-rimmed eyes narrowed to lethargic slits as she gazed up at the steepening cliff of grey polyp in front of her, as if puzzled by its appearance. Every movement took on a dullard’s slowness. Breath wheezed heavily out of her nostrils.
She ignored the passageway and stood perfectly still, bringing her arms to rest in front of her so her hands crossed above her crotch. Her head drooped, bowing deeply, the eyes closing completely.
<
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The tube carriage reached the base of the endcap and started to sweep up the slope towards the hub. An urgent whining sound permeated the inside.
Dariat could feel it slowing, then it accelerated again.
<
<
Bonney’s khaki suit was darkening, at the same time its texture changed to a glossier aspect. She was starting to hunch up, her legs bowing out and becoming spindly. Pointed ears emerged from a shortening crop of hair. There was no suit anymore, only a black pelt.
She suddenly raised her rodent head and emitted an ear-piercing screech through a circular mouth caged by fangs. Eyes glittered a devilish red.
She opened what had been her arms to spread her new wings wide. The leathery membrane was thin enough to be translucent, revealing a lacework of minute black veins beneath the dark amber surface.
<
<
Bonney ran a couple of paces across the plateau, then her wings gave a fast downwards sweep, and she was airborne. She beat her wings steadily, rising quickly, her triumphant screeching echoing over the blank polyp.
Her flight curved around sharply as she gained altitude, evolving into a spiral as the beats became smoother, more insistent.
<
Tatiana stared at him in fright, not understanding.
<
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<
Bonney was already three hundred metres above the plateau, swooping upwards on a tempestuous thermal, when she noticed the change. The light was altering, which it could never do in a habitat. She shifted her balance, twisting on a wingtip, howling at the sheer exhilaration of the wind buffeting her face. The cylindrical landscape stretched out in front of her, dabbed with curving smears of flushed red cloud. For the first time, the lively sparkle coming off the circumfluous reservoir was absent. The entire band of water seemed to be darkened; she could barely see a si
ngle feature on the southern endcap. Yet around her the light was growing. That should never be. Both endcaps were always maintained in a dappled shade. The effect was due entirely to the nature of the light tube, a slender cylindrical mesh of organic conductors which mimicked the shape of the habitat itself. At each end the mesh narrowed to a near solid bundle of cable which suspended the main segment between the two hubs. The plasma it contained dwindled to a mild violet haze eight hundred metres from the hub itself.
She could now see that horn of ions retreating from the southern hub as Rubra increased the power flowing through the cables at that end. The magnetic field was expanding to squeeze the plasma along the tube. At the northern end, he cut the power completely to one specific section of the mesh. Plasma rushed out of the gap, inflating flamboyantly as it liberated itself from the constricting flux lines.
From Bonney’s position it was as if a small fusion bomb had detonated above her, sending its billowing mushroom cloud hurtling downwards.
“All this,” she cried disbelievingly, “for me?”
The air caught in the cup of the endcap was torn asunder by the racing plasma, sending her spinning madly, broken wings wrapping her body like a velvet cloak. Then the wave front of inflamed atoms swept across her like the breath of an enraged sungod. It had none of the fury and strength of a genuine fusion explosion; by the time it reached her the plasma was nothing more than a tenuous electrically charged fog that was rapidly losing cohesion. But nevertheless, it was moving five times faster than any natural tornado, and with a temperature of tens of thousands of degrees. Her body disintegrated into splinters of vivid copper light which trailed contrails of black smoke all the way down to the resplendent desert far below.
A siren started to whistle as soon as Dariat broke the hatch seal; half of the corridor lighting panels turned red, flashing urgently. He ignored the clamour and floated through the small metallic airlock chamber.
The escape pod was a simple one-deck sphere, four metres in diameter, with twelve thickly padded acceleration couches laid out petal fashion.
Dariat emerged from a hatch set at their centre. There was only one instrument panel, barely more than a series of power-up switches. He flicked them all on, watching the status schematics turn green.
Tatiana hauled herself gingerly through the airlock, looking dangerously queasy. Her dreadlocks swarmed around her head, their beads making tiny clacking sounds as they knocked against each other.
“Take any couch,” Dariat instructed. “We’re coming on line.”
She rotated herself carefully into one of the couches. Webbing unfurled from its sides to creep over her.
Dariat took the couch opposite to her, so that they were feet to feet. <
<
<> He reached up and pressed the launch sequencer. The airlock hatch hinged down. “I’m going to leave soon, Tatiana. Horgan will be back in charge of his own body again. Take care of him, he’s only fifteen. He’s going to be suffering.”
“Of course I will.”
“I … I know Rubra only forced us together to put pressure on me. But I’m still glad I met you.”
“Me too. It laid a lot of old demons to rest. You showed me I was wrong.”
“How?”
“I thought she’d made a mistake with you. She hadn’t. The cure just took a very long time. She’s going to be proud of you when you finally catch up with her.”
Two-thirds of Valisk’s shell was now fluorescing a lambent crimson; dazzling dawn-red light shone out of the starscraper windows. Inside, the possessed were united, they could perceive the entire habitat now. The flow of its fluids and gases through the plexus of tubules and pipes and ducts was as intimate to them as the blood pumping around their own veins and arteries. Rubra’s flashing thought routines, too, were apparent, snapping through the neural strata like volleys of sheet lightning. Under their auspices his thoughts were slowing and dimming, retreating down the length of the cylinder as their will to banish the curse of him from their lives grew dominant.
They knew now of all the remaining non-possessed Rubra had hidden throughout the interior. Twenty-eight had survived Bonney’s pursuit, cowering in obscure niches and alcoves dotted about the shell structure, frightened and uncertain at the ruby glimmer that was emerging within the polyp. The possessed didn’t care about them, not anymore. That struggle was over. They even perceived Dariat and Tatiana lying prone on the escape pod’s acceleration couches as the computer counted down the seconds. Nobody objected if they wanted to leave.
Profound changes were propagating outside the habitat. Nanonic-sized interstices flicked open, only to decay within milliseconds. The incessant foam of fluctuations was creating distortion waves similar to those generated by voidhawks. But these lacked any sort of order or focus. Chaos had visited local space-time, weakening the fabric around the shell.
Furious hellhawks swarmed above the northern endcap. Harpies and hyperspace starships spun and swooped around each other at hazardous velocities, their flights dangerously unstable as the massive distortion effects buffeted them as a tempest treated leaves.
<
<
Combat sensors deployed as the hunger for retribution reverberated across the affinity band. Activation codes were loaded into combat wasps.
<
The only functional thought routines Rubra had left were those in the northern endcap. Everything else was blank to him, his senses amputated.
A few mysterious images were still reaching him from those bitek processors which interfaced him with the electronic architecture of the counter-rotating spaceport. Wavering sepia pictures of empty corridors, stationary transit capsules, and barren external grid sections. With them came the data streams from the spaceport’s communications network.
And he’d almost lost interest in it. Dariat, he thought, had left the transfer too late; the boy was too caught up in his obsession and guilt.
The end is here, night is finally eclipsing me after all these centuries.
A shame. A crying shame. But at least they’ll remember my name with a curse as they vegetate their way through eternity.
He jettisoned every escape pod in the spaceport.
<
Twelve gees rammed him down into the acceleration couch. His vision disappeared into a purple sparkle. And after thirty years the neural strata no longer resisted him.
Two entities—two egos—collided. Memories and personality patterns merged at a fundamental level. Hostility, antipathy, anger, regret, shame, an abundance of it all pouring out from both sides, and there could be no hiding from it anymore. The neural strata thrummed from collective moments of outraged pique as secrets long hidden were exposed to searing scrutiny. But the indignation cooled as the two differing strands of thought began the process of twining and integrating into a functional whole.
One half brought size to the mating, the huge neural strata, alive yet quiescent under the spell of the reality dysfunction; from the other half came the energistic effect, small in a single human, but with unlimited potential. For the first five seconds of the transfer, Dariat’s essence was operating within a section of the neural strata only a few cubic metres in volume. At that level it was sufficient to halt the reality dysfunction of the possessed from paralysing any more of the neural strata. As the integration progressed and the thought routines amalgamated and multiplied it began to expand. More and more of the neural strata awoke to accommodate it.
The horrified possessed, quite literally, watched their dreams shatter around them.
<
As soon as the escape pods launched, a hundred voidhawks from the Kohistan Consensus swallowed in. Their appearance ten kilometres from Valisk’s counter-rotating spaceport startled the already frantic hellhawks. The gulf between the two antagonistic swarms of bitek starships was slashed by targeting lasers and radar pulses.
<
Two hellhawks immediately launched a salvo of combat wasps. Solid rockets had barely propelled them clear of their launch cradles before they were struck by X-ray lasers from the voidhawks. It was a perfect demonstration of the disadvantage the hellhawks suffered in any short-range combat situation. The energistic effect downgraded their electronic systems to a woefully inferior state.
Wormhole interstices sprang open, and the hellhawks dived down them, eluding any further conflict, abandoning their erstwhile abode with nothing more dangerous than a backwash of obscenities and threats.
Over two hundred escape pods were plunging away from Valisk’s spaceport.
Solid fuel rockets burned a glaring topaz, gifting the drab grey gridiron of the spaceport with an unrivalled dawn. As the distended skirts of flame and smoke died away, a cluster of five voidhawks surged forwards to intercept a single pod.
Tatiana knew Dariat had gone; his body had shrunk somehow, not in size, but certainly in presence. It was as if the terrible crush of acceleration had left him behind, diminishing the teenage boy lying on the couch. Horgan began to wail. She released her webbing and floated over to him. Her own free-fall nausea forgotten in the face of someone whose suffering was far worse.
The Neutronium Alchemist Page 106