“Thank you, Father. There now, you have the word of a man of the cloth. What more do you want?”
“Ten of them on open ground,” Reza said. “That’s nothing like as bad as Pamiers. I think we can take care of them. Are you going to add your fire-power to ours, Mr. Wallace?”
“Ah now, my fire-power is a poor weak thing compared to yours, Mr. Malin. But even if it were capable of shifting mountains, I would not help you in that way.”
“That makes you a liability, Mr. Wallace.”
“I don’t think much of a man who asks another to kill his cousins in suffering, Mr. Malin. Not much at all.”
Horst took a pace forwards. “Perhaps you could mediate for us, Mr. Wallace? Nobody wants to see any more death on this world, especially as those bodies still contain their rightful souls. Could you not explain to the homestead family that attacking the mercenaries would be foolhardy in the extreme?”
Shaun Wallace stroked his chin. “Aye, now, I could indeed do that, Father.”
Horst glanced expectantly at Reza.
“Suits me,” the mercenary leader said.
Shaun Wallace grinned his wide-boy grin. “The priests back in Ireland were all wily old souls. I see nothing’s changed in that department.”
Nobody had noticed the balmy smile growing on Kelly’s face during the exchange. She let go of Russ, and slapped her hands together with surefire exultation. “Yes! I can get Joshua back here. I think. I’m sure I can.”
They all looked at her.
“Maybe even by this afternoon. We won’t have to worry about going through the mountains. All we’ll have to do is get clear of the red cloud so that Ashly can land.”
“Spare us how wonderful you are, Kelly,” Reza said. “How?”
She dived into her bag and pulled out her communication block, brandishing it as though it were a silver trophy. “With this. The LDC’s original geosynchronous communication platform had a deep-space antenna to keep in touch with the Edenist station orbiting Murora. If the platform didn’t get hit in the orbital battle, we can just call him up. Send a repeating message telling him how badly we need him. Murora is about nine hundred million kilometres away, that’s less than a light-hour. If he leaves as soon as he receives it, he could be here inside three or four hours. Lady Mac might not be able to jump outsystem, but if she can jump to Murora she can jump back again. At least we’d be safely off Lalonde.”
“Can you get the platform computer to send a message?” Reza asked. “Terrance Smith never gave us any access codes for it.”
“Listen, I’m a bloody reporter, there’s nothing I don’t know about violating communication systems. And this block has quite a few less than legal chips added.”
She waited for an answer, her feet had developed a life of their own, wanting to dance.
“Well, get on with it then, Kelly,” Reza said.
She ran for the hole in the door, startling Fenton and Ryall lying on the grass outside. The sky over the savannah was split into two uneven portions of redness as the cloud band clashed with the dawn sun. She datavised an instruction into the block and it started scanning across the dissonant shades above for the platform’s beacon.
Joshua dozed fitfully in his cabin’s sleep cocoon. The envelope was a baggy lightweight spongy fabric, big enough to hold him without being restrictive. Sarha had offered to sleep with him, but he’d tactfully declined. He was still feeling the effects of that eleven-gee thrust. Even his body hadn’t been geneered with that much acceleration in mind. There were long bruise crinkles on his back where the creases on his ship-suit had pressed into his skin, and when he looked into the mirror his eyes were bloodshot. He and Sarha wouldn’t have had sex anyway, he really was tired. Tired and stressed out.
Everyone had been so full of praise for the way he had flown Lady Mac . If only they knew the emotional cold turkey that hit him once the danger was over and he stopped operating on nerve energy and arrogance. The fear from realizing what one—just one—mistake would have spelt.
I should have listened to Ione. What I had before was enough.
He held her image in his mind as he fell asleep, she made it a lot easier to relax, floating away on the rhythm of night. When he woke, drowsy, warm, and randy, he accessed a memory of their time back in Tranquillity. Out in the parkland, lying on the thick grass beside a stream. The two of them clinging together after sex; Ione on top, sweaty and dreamily content, light glinting an opulent gold off her hair, skin warm and soft against him, kissing him oh so slowly, lips descending along his sternum. Neither spoke, the moment was too perfect for that.
Then her head lifted and it was Louise Kavanagh, all trusting and adoring in that way only the very innocent can achieve. She smiled hesitantly as she rose up, then laughed in rapturous celebration as she was impaled once again, luscious dark hair tossed about as she rode him. Thanking him. Praising him. Promising herself for ever his.
And loving a girl hadn’t been that sweet since he was her age.
Jesus! He cancelled the memory sequence. Even his neural nanonics were playing him dirty.
I do not need reminding. Not right now.
The flight computer datavised that Aethra was requesting a direct channel. Joshua acknowledged the distraction with guilty relief. Space warfare was easy.
Sarha had done a good job interfacing the bitek processor to Lady Mac ’s electronics. He had talked to the habitat yesterday, which was engrossing; it came across as a mixture of child and all-knowing sage. But it had been very interested in hearing about Tranquillity. The images he received from its shell’s sensitive cells were different to the Lady Mac ’s sensor clusters. They seemed more real, somehow, bestowing a texture of depth and emptiness which space had always lacked before.
Joshua unsealed the side of the sleep cocoon and swung his legs out. He opened a locker for a fresh ship-suit. There were only three left. Sighing, he started to pull one on. “Hello, Aethra,” he datavised.
“Good morning, Joshua. I hope you slept well.”
“Yeah, I got a few hours.”
“I am picking up a message for you.”
He was instantly alert, without any stimulus from his neural nanonics. “Jesus. Where from?”
“It is a microwave transmission originating from the civil communication platform orbiting Lalonde.”
He was shown the starfield outside. The sun was a white glare point, nine hundred and eighty-nine million kilometres distant; to one side Lalonde shone steadily, if weakly, a sixth-magnitude star. It had now become a binary, twinned with a violet glint.
“You can see microwaves?” he asked.
“I sense, eyes see. It is part of the energy spectrum which falls upon my shell.”
“What is the message?”
“It is a voice-only transmission to you personally from a Kelly Tirrel.”
“Jesus. Let me hear it.”
“ ‘This is Kelly Tirrel calling Captain Joshua Calvert. Joshua, I hope you’re receiving this OK; and if not, could someone at Aethra’s supervisory station please relay this to him immediately. It’s really important. Joshua, I’m not sure if the possessed can overhear this, so I won’t say anything too exact, OK? We got your message about returning. And the time-scale you mentioned is no use to us. Joshua, virtually everyone down here has been possessed. It’s like the worst of the Christian Bible gospels are coming true. Dead people are coming back and taking over the living. I know that sounds crazy to you; but believe me it isn’t sequestration, and it isn’t a xenoc invasion. I’ve talked to someone who was alive at the start of the twentieth century. He’s real, Joshua. So is their electronic warfare ability, only it’s more like magic. They can do terrible things, Joshua, to people and animals. Truly terrible. Shit, I don’t suppose you believe any of this, do you? Just think of them as an enemy, Joshua. That’ll help make them real for you. And you saw the red cloud-bands over the Juliffe basin, you know how powerful that enemy is.
“ ‘Well, the red cloud is swelling, Joshua,
it’s spreading over the planet. We were heading away from it. Just like you said we should, remember? But we’ve found someone who has been in hiding since the possession started, a priest. He’s been looking after a bunch of young children. There’s twenty-nine of them. And now they’re trapped under that cloud. They’re near the village that was our original target, so that gives you a rough idea where we are. We’re going back for them, Joshua, we’ll be on our way by the time this message reaches you. They’re only children, for Christ’s sake, we can’t leave them. The trouble is that once we’ve got them we won’t be able to run far, not with our transport. But we’re pretty sure we can get the children out from under the cloud by this afternoon. Joshua . . . you have to pick us up. Today, Joshua. We won’t be able to hold out for long after sunset. I know your lady friend wasn’t feeling too well when you left, but bandage her up as best you can, as soon as you can. Please. We’ll be waiting for you. Our prayers are with you. Thank you, Joshua.’ ”
“It is repeating,” Aethra said.
“Oh, Jesus.” Possession. The dead returned. Child refugees on the run. “Jesus fucking wept. She can’t do this to me! She’s mad. Possession? She’s fucking flipped.” He stared aghast at the ancient Apollo computer, arms half in his sleeves. “No chance.” His arms were rammed into the ship-suit sleeves. Sealing up the front. “She needs locking up for her own good. Her neural nanonics are looped on a glitched stimulant program.”
“You said you believed the red cloud effect was fundamentally wrong,” Aethra said.
“I said it was a little odd.”
“So is the notion of possession.”
“When you’re dead, you’re dead.”
“Twelve who died when the station was destroyed are stored within me. You make continual references to your deity, does this not imply a degree of belief in the nature of spirituality?”
“Je—Shit! Look, it’s just a figure of speech.”
“And yet humans have believed in gods and an afterlife since the day you gained sentience.”
“Don’t you fucking start! Your lot are supposed to be atheists, anyway.”
“I apologize. I can sense you are upset. What are you going to do about rescuing the children?”
Joshua pressed his fingers to his temple in the vain hope it would halt the dizzy sensation. “Buggered if I know. How do we know there really are any children?”
“You mean it is just a bluff to trick you into returning to Lalonde?”
“Could be, yeah.”
“That would imply that Kelly Tirrel has been possessed.”
Very calmly, he datavised: “Sequestrated. It implies she has been sequestrated.”
“Whatever has befallen her, you still have a decision to make.”
“And don’t I know it.”
Melvyn was alone on the bridge when Joshua came gliding through the hatch from his cabin.
“I just heard the message,” the fusion expert said. “She can’t mean it.”
“Maybe.” Joshua touched his feet to a stikpad beside his acceleration couch. “Call the crew in, and Gaura as well. I suppose the Edenists are entitled. It’s their arses on the line as well.”
He tried to think in the short time it took for them to drift into the bridge, make some kind of sense out of Kelly’s message. The trouble was she had sounded so convincing, she believed what she said. If it was her. Jesus. And it was a very strange sequestration. He couldn’t forget the chaos in orbit.
He accessed the navigation display to see just how practical any sort of return flight was. It didn’t look good. Maranta and Gramine had confined their search to the section of ring which was electrically charged, which meant one of them was always within three thousand kilometres of Lady Mac . The jump coordinate for Lalonde was a third of the way round the gas giant, over two hundred and seventy thousand kilometres from their present position. Out of the question. He started to hunt round for options.
“I think it’s a load of balls,” Warlow said when they were all assembled. “Possession! Kelly’s cracked.”
“You said it yourself,” Ashly said. “It’s a bad form of sequestration.”
“Do you believe in the dead coming back?”
The pilot grinned at the huge ochre cosmonik clinging to a corner of an acceleration couch. “It would make life interesting. Admit it.”
Warlow’s diaphragm issued a sonic boom snort.
“It doesn’t matter what name we choose to call the process,” Dahybi said. “The sequestration ability exists. We know that. What we have to decide is whether or not Kelly has been taken over by it.” He glanced at Joshua and offered a lame shrug.
“If she hasn’t then we’re all in a great deal of trouble,” Sarha said.
“If she hasn’t ?” Melvyn asked.
“Yes. That will mean there are twenty-nine children we have to get off that planet by this afternoon.”
“Oh, hell,” he mumbled.
“And if she has been sequestrated then she knew we were coming back anyway. So why try and get us to come back earlier? And why include all that crap about possession, when all it would do was make us more cautious?”
“Double bluff?” Melvyn said.
“Come on!”
“Sarha’s right,” Ashly said. “We always planned to go back; as far as Kelly knew, in a couple of days. There’s no logical reason to hurry us. And we know they try and hijack the spaceplanes which land. It’s not as if we wouldn’t have taken precautions. All this has done is make us even more cautious. My vote says she is in trouble, and they have found these stray children.”
“And me,” Dahybi said. “But it’s not our decision. Captain?”
It was the kind of oblique compliment about his status Joshua could really have done without. “Kelly would never call unless she really was desperate,” he said slowly. “If she has managed to avoid sequestration, or whatever, she would never have mentioned possession unless it was true. You all know what she’s like: facts no matter what it costs. And if she had been possessed, she wouldn’t tell us.” Oh, Jesus, be honest, I know she’s in deep shit. “They need to be picked up. Like she said: today.”
“Joshua, we can’t,” Melvyn said. He looked desperately torn. “I don’t want to abandon a whole bunch of kids down there any more than you. Even if we don’t know exactly what’s going on below those bloody cloudbands, we’ve seen and heard enough to know it ain’t good. But we’re never going to get past the Maranta and the Gramine . And I’ll give you good odds they’ve picked up Kelly’s message as well. They’ll be extra vigilant now. Face it, we’ve got to wait. They’ll spot us the second we turn our drive on.”
“Maybe,” Joshua said. “Maybe not. But first things first. Sarha, can our environmental systems cope with thirty kids and the mercenaries as well as the Edenists?”
“I dunno how big the kids are,” Sarha said, thinking out loud. “Kelly did say young. There’s probably room for four more in the zero-tau pods if we really cram them in. We can billet some in the spaceplane and the MSV, use their atmospheric filters. Carbon dioxide build-up is our main problem, the filters could never scrub the amount seventy people produce. We’d have to vent it and replace it from the cryogenic oxygen reserve.” Neural nanonics ran a best and worst case simulation. She didn’t like the margins on the worst case, not one bit. “I’ll give you a provisional yes. But thirty is the absolute limit, Joshua. If the mercenaries run into any other worthy cause refugees, they’re just going to have to stay down there.”
“OK. That leaves us with picking them up. Ashly?”
The pilot gave one of his engaging grins. “I told you, Joshua, I promised them I’d go down again.”
“Fine. That just leaves you, Gaura. You’ve been very quiet.”
“It’s your ship, Captain.”
“Yes, but your children are on board, and your friends and family. They’ll be exposed to a considerable risk if Lady Mac attempts to go back to Lalonde. That entitles you to a say.”
“Thank you, Joshua. We say this: if it was us stranded on Lalonde right now, we would want you to come and pick us up.”
“Very well. That’s settled then. We’ll try and rescue the mercenaries and the children.”
“One small point, Joshua,” Melvyn said loudly. “We’re stuck in the rings, with one combat wasp left, forty thousand kilometres from the edge of Murora’s gravity field. If we stick our heads up, they’ll be shot to buggery.”
“I was in a similar situation to this a year ago.”
“Joshua!” Sarha chided.
He ignored her. “It was the Ruin Ring, when Neeves and Sipika were coming after me. Look at where the Maranta and the Gramine are right now.”
They all accessed the navigational display, neon-sharp graphics unfurling in their minds. The two searching starships extruded curved yellow orbital trajectory plots paralleling the thick gauzy green slab of the ring which filled the bottom half of the projection. Lady Macbeth lurked below the ring surface like some outlandish slumbering marine creature.
“Maranta and Gramine are now six thousand kilometres apart,” Joshua said. “They’ve got a reasonable idea of the general area where we have to be hidden, and they’ve changed altitude twice in the last fifteen hours to cover different sections of the ring. If they stick to that pattern they’ll change again in another four hours.” He ordered the display to extrapolate their positions. “Gramine will be about three hundred kilometres from us, she actually passes over us in another ninety minutes; and Maranta is going to be right out at the extreme, about seven and a half thousand kilometres away. After that they’ll swap orbital tracks and begin a new sweep.
“So if we can break out when Maranta is seven and a half thousand klicks away, we’ll be far enough ahead of it to escape.”
“And Gramine ?” Melvyn asked. He didn’t like Joshua’s quiet tone, as if the young captain was afraid of what he was going to say.
“We know where it’s going to be, we can leave one of the megaton nukes from the combat wasp waiting for it. Mine the ring where it will pass overhead, attach the nuke to a large rock particle. Between them, the emp pulse, the plasma wave, and the rock fragments should disable it.”
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