The crew were all at their bridge stations, ready to cope with any contingency the red giant threw at them. Samuel and Monica were down in the main lounge in capsule B, sharing it with Alkad, Peter, and Oski, who were accessing the sensor data. Oenone ’s results were being delivered directly to Parker, Kempster, and Renato. Both ships were exchanging their data in real time, allowing the experts to review it simultaneously.
The image of local space built up quickly, charting the strong riot of particles flowing past the hull. Outside didn’t quite qualify as a vacuum.
“Calmer than Jupiter’s environment,” Syrinx commented. “But just as dangerous.”
“Not as much hard radiation as we predicted,” Alkad said.
“The hydrogen bulk must be absorbing it before it reaches the surface.”
Their optical and infrared sensors were performing slow scans of space away from the red giant’s surface. Analysis programs searched for shifting light-points which would indicate asteroids or moonlet-sized bodies, even a planet. Oenone ’s distortion field could find little local mass bending space-time’s uniformity. The brawny solar wind seemed to have blown everything away. Of course, they were looking at less than one per cent of the equatorial orbit track.
The first result came from a simple microwave frequency sensor that picked up an unidentified pulse lasting less than a second. It was coming from somewhere closer to the surface.
“Kempster?” Oski datavised. “Is there any way a red giant could emit microwaves?”
“Not with any of our current theories,” the surprised astronomer replied.
“Captain, can we take a closer look at the source, please?”
On the bridge, Joshua gave Dahybi a warning look. Intuition fluttered his heart. “Node status?”
“We can jump clear, Captain,” Dahybi said quietly.
“Liol, keep monitoring our electronic warfare detectors, please. I want to play this very safe indeed.”
The flight computer reported the sensors had picked up another microwave pulse.
“That’s very similar to radar,” Beaulieu said. “But not a recognizable Confederation signature. It’s nothing like the Tyrathca ships used, either.”
“Oski, I’m switching our sensor focus area for you now,” Joshua said.
Both passive and active sensor clusters rotated on the end of their booms to study the direction from which the pulse had come. The flight computer assembled their results into a generalized neuroiconic image in accordance with its governing graphic-generation programs, approximating the physical structure which the image enhancement subroutine was delivering and combining it with a thermal and electromagnetic profile.
“Remind me again,” Sarha said in a subdued breath. “In our expert team’s professional opinion, we’re here for an aeons-dead civilization whose relics are going to be extremely difficult to find. That’s what you sold us, wasn’t it?”
The most powerful telescopes Oenone and Lady Mac carried were quickly aligned on the structure which the sensor clusters had located, amplifying and clarifying the first low-resolution image. Orbiting twenty million kilometres ahead of the starships, a city was flying unperturbably above the slow-churning blooms of the convection currents which contoured the red giant’s surface. Spectrography confirmed the presence of silicates, carbon compounds, light metals, and water. Microwaves buzzed across its turrets. Butterfly wing magnetic fields flapped in a steady heartbeat. A forest of rapier spines rose from its darkside, gleaming at the top of the infrared spectrum as they radiated away its colossal thermal load.
It was five thousand kilometres in diameter.
Chapter 07
Quinn used simple timing rather than risk sending his orders out through London’s communication net. No matter how innocuous the message, there was always a chance the supercops would pick up the chain. Even though they thought they’d eliminated him in the Parsonage Heights strike, they would be watching for signs of other possessed in the arcology. Standard procedure. Quinn would have done the same in their place. However, their paranoia had been quenched amid the flames and death engulfing the tower’s penthouse. With that came a slight relaxation of effort, falling back to established routine rather than determined proactive searches. It gave him the interlude he desired.
By necessity, London was now destined to be the capital of His empire on Earth. Such honour would be visited upon the ancient city and its outlying domes only by using possessed as disciples to deliver His doctrine. But there were inherent problems recruiting them. Even they were reluctant to follow the gospel of God’s Brother to its exacting, painful letter. As he’d learned on Jesup, violent coercion was often required to obtain the wholehearted cooperation of non-sect members. Even Quinn was limited in the number of people he could intimidate at once. And without that strict adherence to His cause, the possessed would do what they always did and snatch this world from the universe. Quinn couldn’t allow that, so he’d adopted a more tactical strategy, borrowing heavily from Capone’s example, exploiting the hostility and avarice most possessed exhibited on their return to the universe.
The possessed from the Lancini had been carefully and stealthily scattered throughout the arcology and provided with very detailed instructions. Speed was the key. Come the appointed hour, each one would enter a preselected building and open the night staff to possession. When the day workers arrived, they would be possessed one by one, jumping the numbers up considerably but stopping short of exponential expansion. Quinn wanted about 15,000 by ten o’clock in the morning.
After that had been achieved, they would surge out of their buildings and physically disperse across the arcology. By then, there would be little the authorities could do. It took an average of five to ten well-armed police officers to eliminate one possessed. Even if they could track them via electronic glitches, they simply didn’t have the manpower available to deal with them. Quinn was gambling that Govcentral wouldn’t use 15,000 SD strikes against London. The rest of the population would be his hostages.
While that was going on, Quinn himself would be establishing a core of loyalists who would venture forth to exert a little discipline: again, a hierarchy based on the Organization. The newly emerged possessed would be taught that they had to maintain the status quo, and encouraged to target the police and local government personnel—anyone who could organize resistance. A second stage would see them shutting down the transport routes, then going on to seize power, water, and food production centres. A hundred new fiefdoms would emerge, whose only obligation was obedience and tribute to the new Messiah.
With his empire founded, Quinn intended to put the non-possessed technicians to work on secure methods of transport that would enable him to carry the crusade of God’s Brother to fresh arcologies. Eventually, they would gain access to the O’Neill Halo. From there, it was only a matter of time until His Night fell across this whole section of the galaxy.
The night after the Parsonage Heights incident, patrol constables Appleton and Moyles were cruising their usual route in central Westminster. It was quiet at two o’clock in the morning when their car passed the old Houses of Parliament and turned down Victoria Street. There were few pedestrians to be seen walking along outside the blank glass facades of the government agency office buildings which transformed the start of the street into a deep canyon. The constables were used to that; this was a bureaucrat district after all, with few residents or nightlife to attract anyone after the shops and offices closed.
A body fell silently out of the black sky above the lighting arches to smash into the road thirty metres ahead of Appleton and Moyles. The patrol car’s controlling processor automatically reversed power to the wheel hub motors, and turned the vehicle sharply to the right. They braked to a halt almost directly beside the battered body. Blood was flowing out of the jump-suit’s sleeves and trouser legs to spread in big puddles across the carbon-concrete surface.
Appleton datavised a priority alert to his precinct statio
n, requesting back-up; while Moyles ordered Victoria Street’s route and flow processors to divert all traffic away from them. They emerged from the patrol car with their static-bullet carbines held ready, holding position behind the armoured doors. Retinal implants scanned round in all spectrums, motion detector programs in primary mode. There was nobody on the pavements within a hundred metres. No immediate ambush potential.
Cautiously, they started scanning the sheer cliffs of glass and concrete on either side, hunting for the open window from which the body had come. There wasn’t one.
“The roof?” Appleton asked nervously. His carbine was swinging about in a wide arc as he tried to cover half the arcology.
The precinct station duty officers were already accessing the Westminster Dome’s sensor grid, looking down from the geodesic structure to see the two officers crouched down beside their car. Nobody was on the roofs of the buildings flanking the road.
“Is he dead?” Moyles yelled.
Appleton licked his lips as he weighed up the risks of leaving the cover of the door to dash over to the body. “I think so.” Assessing severely battered and bloody flesh it was an old bloke, really old. There was no movement, no breathing. His enhanced senses couldn’t detect a heartbeat, either. Then he saw the deep scorch marks branding the corpse’s chest. “Oh bloody hell!”
The civil engineering crew had repaired the hole in the Westminster Dome with commendable speed. A small fleet of crawler pods had traversed the vast crystal edifice, winching a replacement segment along with them. Removing the old hexagon and sealing the new segment into place had taken twelve hours. Molecular bonding generator tests were initiated, making sure it was now firmly integrated with the rest of the dome’s powered weather defences.
Checking the superstrength carbon lattice girders and beefing up suspect strands of the geodesic structure was still going on as darkness fell; work continued under the pods’ floodlights.
Far below them, the clearing up of Parsonage Heights tower was an altogether messier affair. Fire service mechanoids had extinguished the flames in the shattered stub of the octagonal tower. Paramedic crews hauled the injured out of the remaining seven towers of the development project that had been bombarded with a blizzard of shattered glass and lethal debris. Smaller fires had broken out on the two skyscrapers next to the one hit by the SD strike. Council surveyors had spent most of the day examining the damaged buildings to see if they could be salvaged.
There was no doubt that the remnants of the tower struck by the X-ray laser would have to be demolished. The remaining eight floors were dangerously weak; metal reinforcement rods had melted to run out of the carbon-concrete slabs like jam from a doughnut. It was the local coroner’s staff who went in there after the fire mechanoids were pulled back and the walls had cooled down. The bodies they recovered were completely baked by the X-ray blast.
It was London’s biggest spectator event, drawing huge crowds which spilled over into the open market and surrounding streets. Civilians mingled with rover reporters, gawping at the destruction and the knot of activity on the dome high above. It was the crawler pods which proved that some kind of SD weapon had been used, despite the original denials of the local police chief. By early morning a grudging admission had come from the mayor’s office that the police had suspected a possessed to be holed up in the Parsonage Heights tower. When pressed how a possessed had infiltrated London, the aide pointed out that a sect chapel was established in the warehouse below the tower. The acolytes, she assured reporters, were now all under arrest. Those that had survived.
Londoners grew jittery as more facts were prised out of various Govcentral offices over the long morning and afternoon, a lot of the information contradictory. Several lawyers acting for relatives of the tower’s vaporized residents lodged writs against the police for the use of extremely excessive force and accused the Police Commissioner of negligence in not attempting an evacuation first. Absenteeism all over the arcology grew steadily worse during the day. Productivity and retail sales hit an all-time low, with the exception of food stores. Managers reported people were stocking up on sachets and frozen meat bricks.
All the while, images of the broken tower with its blackened, distended, mildly radioactive fangs of carbon-concrete were pushed out by the news companies. Bodybags being carried over the rubble remained the grim background for everybody’s day, talked over by new anchors and their specialist comment guests.
A police forensic team was sent in with the coroner’s staff. Their orders weren’t terribly precise, just to search for anomalies. They were backed up by three experts from the local GISD office, who managed to remain anonymous amid everyone else poking round the restricted area.
The crowd went home before nightfall, leaving just a simple police cordon, patrolled by officers who fervently wished they’d drawn a different duty that evening.
A preliminary forensic report was compiled before midnight by the GISD experts, who had been following their police colleagues’ tests and analyses. It contained nothing of the remotest relevance to Banneth or Quinn Dexter.
“One was just going through the motions anyway,” Western Europe told Halo and North America after he’d accessed the report. “Although I’d dearly like to know how Dexter pulled that invisibility stunt.”
“I think we should just count ourselves fortunate that none of the other possessed seem capable of it,” Halo said.
“That SD strike has caused quite a stir,” North America said. “The honourable senators are demanding to know who gave SD command the authority to fire on Earth. Trouble is, this time the President’s office is screaming for the same answer. They may try to launch a commission of inquiry. If the executive and the representatives both want it, we might have trouble blocking them.”
“Then don’t,” Western Europe said. “I’m sure we can appoint someone appropriate to chair it. Come on, I shouldn’t have to explain basic cover-your-arses procedure. That strike request is logged from the Mayor’s civil defence bureau to SD command. It was a legitimate request. Senior Govcentral officers have the right to call for back up from Earth’s military forces in emergency. It’s in the constitution.”
“SD Command should have requested fire authority from the President,” Halo said bluntly. “The fact they can actually fire on Earth without the appropriate political authorization has raised a few eyebrows.”
“South Pacific isn’t stirring this, is she?” Western Europe asked sharply.
“No. Frankly, she has as much to lose as the rest of us. The current Presidential defence advisor is hers; he’s doing a good job in damage limitation.”
“Let’s hope it’s sufficient. I’d hate to pull the plug on the President right now. People are looking for leadership stability to get them through this.”
“We’ll ensure the news agencies will mute the story however loud the senators shout,” Halo said. “Shouldn’t be a problem.”
“Jolly good,” Western Europe said. “That just leaves us with the problem of the ordinary possessed.”
“New York’s a mess,” North America admitted glumly. “The remaining non-possessed citizens are defending themselves, but I expect they’ll lose eventually.”
“We’ll have to call another full B7 meeting,” Western Europe concluded without enthusiasm. “Decide what we’re going to do in that eventuality. I for one have no intention of being carried off to this realm where the other planets have vanished to.”
“I’m not sure we’ll get a full turnout,” Halo said. “South Pacific and her allies are pretty pissed with you.”
“They’ll come round,” Western Europe said confidently.
He never did get a chance to find out if he was right. London’s deputy Police Commissioner datavised him at quarter past two with the news of the body in Victoria Street.
“There’s was no identification on the old boy,” the deputy commissioner reported. “So the constables took a DNA sample. According to our files, it’s Paul Je
rrold.”
“I know the name,” Western Europe said. “He was quite wealthy. You’re sure the burn marks were caused by white fire?”
“They match the configuration. We’ll know for sure when the forensic team gets there.”
“Okay, thank you for informing me.”
“There’s something else. Paul Jerrold was a zero-tau refugee. He transferred his holdings to a long-term trust and went into stasis last week.”
“Shit.” Western Europe sent a fast inquiry into his AI, which ran an immediate search. Paul Jerrold had entrusted himself to Perpetuity Inc., one of many recently formed companies specialising in providing zero-tau for the elderly wealthy. The AI’s review of the company’s memory core established Jerrold had been sent to an old department store called Lancini which Perpetuity Inc. was renting until more suitable premises could be built.
Under Western Europe’s direction, the AI shifted its attention to the department store, reactivating ancient security sensors on every floor. Hall after hall filled with bulky zero-tau pods jumped into blue-haze focus. The AI switched to the only scene of activity. Perpetuity Inc. had set up a monitor centre in the manager’s old office; a couple of night-shift technicians were sitting by their desks, drinking tea and keeping an eye on an AV projector squirting out a news show.
“Datavise them,” Western Europe ordered the deputy commissioner. “Tell them to switch off Paul Jerrold’s pod and see who’s in there.”
It took a short argument before the technicians agreed to do as they were asked. Western Europe waited impatiently as the ancient cage lift creaked it way up to the fourth floor and they walked over to the Horticulture section. One of them switched the pod off. There was no one inside.
Thoroughly unnerved, they now did exactly as they were told, and went along the row of zero-tau pods switching them off. All of them were empty.
“Clever,” Western Europe acknowledged bitterly. “Who’s going to notice they were missing?”
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