Two miles away.
“Sweet Jesus, please let him be there.”
They chained Fletcher to the altar with manacles that had an electric current running through them, nullifying his energistic power. They ripped his clothes off, and cut obscene runes into his flesh. They shaved him. They burned a pile of Bibles and prayer books at his feet, and used the ash to smear a pentagon around his body. They hung an inverted cross above his skull, dangling by a rope that was fraying and rotting.
Ghosts slithered past, offering their desolate expressions in sympathy.
“Sorry,” was their only whisper. “So sorry.” Past heroes, humbled and degraded by their emasculation. The possessed spat at them, jeering them out of the way.
St Paul’s was illuminated with the mealy light from smoking iron braziers and racks of candles, leaving the vaulting ceiling invisible. Its new incense was the smell of sweaty bodies and fried burgerbap onions. Prayers had been supplanted by rock music coming from a ghetto blaster, with the sounds of copulation heard between tracks. With his head forced back awkwardly against the stone, Fletcher could see several young possessed scrambling monkey-fashion over the stained glass windows, painting them over with sticky black fluid. A dark shape moved into his limited field of view.
Quinn bent over him. “Nice to see you again.”
“Enjoy your taunts while you can, you inhuman monster. You will issue them no longer once this day is through.”
“You’re good. I admire that. You got off Norfolk in time, which wasn’t easy. And you got down to Earth, which is fucking impossible. Very good. What did you do? Make a deal with the supercops?”
“I know naught of what you speak.”
“Shit. Okay, I’ll put it in real slow retard-speak for you. Who brought you down to Earth?”
When Fletcher didn’t answer, Quinn ran his hand over the iron band securing the man’s forehead. “I can have them increase the voltage you know. It can get a lot lot worse.”
“Only while I remain in this body.”
“Not such a dumb asshole after all.” Quinn crawled sinuously onto the altar beside Fletcher and moved his hooded head right up close. “Before we go any further,” he whispered, “what’s she like to fuck? Come on, you can tell me. Is she hot stuff? Or does she just lie there and take it like a corpse? Just between us. I won’t tell anyone. Does she give good head? Does she like it up the ass?”
“You are unfit to live, sir. I shall relish your fall, for it will be a great one from the height of your arrogance.”
“Don’t tell me you never tried her out? That Louise? She was with you for weeks and weeks. All that time. You must have.” Quinn withdrew a fraction, vaguely puzzled. “Shit, you’re the one that’s not human.”
“Your judgements have neither value nor relevance to me.”
“Oh yeah? There’s one judgement I might interest you in. I’m gonna find out what she’s like. My people will bring her here for me, and then you can watch me and Courtney go to work on her. I’ll make you watch. See how long you can keep that assholing superiority going then. Motherfucker!”
“You will have to find her first.”
“Oh I will. Believe it. Even if the morons I’ve got out there now don’t do it, His army will bring her to me. And then that last little thread of defiance you treasure will snap. You’ll scream and plead and cry, and curse your shitty false Lord for his divine inaction.”
“The Lord moves in mysterious ways His wonders to perform. The age of miracles may be past, but His messengers still walk amongst us. You will fail. It is written.”
“Bollocks. There are no messengers. And I’m busy burning the book it’s written in. It’s my Lord who comes, not yours. And He doesn’t move mysteriously. God’s Brother is very blunt, as you’re going to find out. Unless I spare you.”
“I would never be sullied by your mercy, sir.”
“No? Then how about sparing Louise? Join us. Get on the winning side. I’ll give her straight back to you. Won’t touch a hair on her head. Promise. And that’s a lot of hair.”
Fletcher gave a short, bitter laugh.
“I mean it,” Quinn said smoothly. “You’re smart, tough. I could use people like you. You were some sort of officer, right? Half these shitbrains I’ve got working for me can’t find their own ass with both hands. I could put you in charge of a whole bunch of them. You can make out any way you like, then. Marry Louise. Live in a palace. It can’t get any better.”
“I apologize, for I am mistaken. I had thought you dangerous. I see now you are merely small. Our Lord Jesus was offered the kingdoms of the world, and refused. I believe I can resist coveting another man’s wife and some fine living. Have you not yet learned that in this wretched state we can create anything we desire for ourselves? You can offer nothing of any value; you may only rain down empty threats.”
“Empty!” Quinn shouted in rage. “He is coming. My Lord, not yours. If you don’t believe me, ask the ghosts. They can hear the dark angels draw near. His Night will fall. That is the new miracle.”
“Day follows night, as it is now and always will be. Amen.”
Quinn backed off the altar and stood up. He held an anti-memory weapon in front of Fletcher’s face. “Okay, fun-time’s over, dickhead; tell me what this is.”
“I do not know, sir.”
“You were shooting it about pretty freely before. Was it meant for me? Is that why the supercops let you down here? Were you trying to find me for them?” Quinn beckoned.
Frenkel stepped forwards and dumped Billy-Joe’s body on the altar next to Fletcher. The young man’s head flopped about. His eyes were open, unfocused, and he was still breathing.
“We found him like this down at the bottom of the Archway tower. The big black dude managed to shoot him with one of these gadgets before my troops took him out. Now, I can understand a weapon that forces possessors out of their host body. Every fucking scientist in the Confederation must be working on that right now. But this is a little more powerful, isn’t it? Billy-Joe wasn’t a possessed, but it still kicked his soul’s ass out of there.” Quinn smiled, fangs pressing up into white lips as he sensed the worry trickle into Fletcher’s thoughts. “Or did it do more than that? Huh? Those supercops play for the highest stakes there are. They know I can just come back in another body and start the whole crusade up again. Because I can’t die, now can I? We’re all immortal now.”
Fletcher’s face became a mask of stubborn determination.
“Ah,” Quinn said softly. He held the weapon up, regarding it with a new respect. “Let’s try a little experiment, shall we?” His hand made a pass over Billy-Joe, applying energistic force to open a pathway to the beyond. A soul struggled its way up into Billy-Joe’s body. He sat up, wheezing for breath, looking round avidly.
“How about that?” Quinn marvelled. “No strain, no pain. We can speed up the whole resurrection game.” He grinned down at Fletcher. “You know what, in the wrong hands this little toy you brought me could be really dangerous.”
The tenement on Halton Road consisted of three low-cost apartment towers intended for the poor and the elderly. A third of the residents still fell into that category, the rest worked in the black cash economy or lived off the dole, spending their days stimmed out on cheap activant programs and home-synthesised drugs. There were no other amenities for them. The ground between the twenty-storey towers was a concrete yard walled in by rows of small garages. Fading white lines marked out baseball and football pitches, though the baskets and goal posts had been torn out of the ground decades ago. Despite its classical urban erosion demeanour, it was a perfect site for The Disco At The End Of The World.
Andy had been dancing on the worn concrete since sundown, embracing the communal madness. Out of all London’s residents, the type that lived in the tenement had the least to lose when the possessed came marching out of the darkness. So . . . sod it. If you are absolutely going to get captured by the evil dead/tortured/your body consumed
by ghouls/live the rest of eternity as a zombie slave, you might as well have one last decent party before it happens.
The underground trax jammers had set up their ageing speaker stacks as twilight fell. When the sun left the sky, out came the pounding rhythm to rattle the windows and sneer an utterly worthless defiance at the arcology’s new overlords. Everyone had dressed for it. That’s what Andy loved. Disco divas in their sequinned micro dresses, hot funk dancers in leather and infra-white shirts, jive masters in sharp suits. All grooving and swaying in one huge dense mass of hot bodies, doing the stupid moves to stupid old songs.
Andy wriggled his hips, and waved his hands, and generally boogied on down like he’d never done before. No need to be self-conscious now, there wouldn’t be a tomorrow morning for people to laugh at him and his coordination. He swigged from the bottles passed round. He snogged a couple of girls. He sang along at the top of his voice. He made up his own cool moves. He cheered and laughed and wanted to know why the hell he’d wasted his life.
And then there she was. Louise, standing in front of him. Clothes wet and dishevelled. Her beautiful face deathly serious.
She’d generated her own space among the exuberant dancers. People instinctively avoided her, knowing that whatever private hell she was in they didn’t want any part of it.
Her lips parted, shouting something at him.
“What?” he yelled back. The music was incredibly loud.
She mouthed: Help.
He took her hand and led her across the yard. Through the ring of elderly people around the edge of the dancing throng, happily clapping along and doing a small shuffle. Into the brick-wall lobby, and up the stone stairs to his flat.
When the door shut behind them, Andy thought he was dreaming, because Louise was in his flat. Louise! On the last night of existence, they were together.
His window looked out over the street not the yard, so the music was muted down to a constant bass drumming. He reached for a lightstick; the grid power supply had failed early that morning.
“Don’t,” Louise said.
Without air conditioning, condensation had settled thickly on the glass panes, but there was enough coloured light from the disco creeping in to reveal the outline of the small room. A bed at one end, sheets unwashed for a while now. Apart from one vinyl-top table littered with electronic tools, the furniture was cardboard boxes. The kitchen fitted into an arched alcove with a plastic curtain drawn across it.
Andy hoped she wouldn’t look at it all too closely. Even in this light it was seedy. His delight at seeing her was fading as his real life began to seep back to claim him.
“Is this the bathroom?” she asked, indicating the one other door. “I got drenched. I’m still cold.”
“Um, sorry, it’s supposed to be the bedroom. I just use it to keep stuff in. Bathroom’s down the hall. I’ll show you.”
“No.” Louise stepped up to him and put her arms round him, nestling her head against his. He was so startled he didn’t respond for a couple of seconds, then he gingerly returned the hug.
“There’s been so much horror in my life today,” she said. “So many vile things. I’ve been so frightened. I came here to you because I have to. There’s no one else left for me now. But I want to be with you as well. Do you understand that?”
“Not really. What’s happened to you?”
“It doesn’t matter. I’m still me. For now.” She kissed him, urgency arousing her in a way she hadn’t experienced before. The desperate need to be held, and adored, to be promised that the whole world was a fine and good place after all.
She demanded all that from Andy on his small disorderly bed. Spending the night being worshiped, listening to his ecstatic cries twist away into the disco music while the hazy dapple of iridescent light played across the ceiling. Air in the small confined room grew stifling from the heat and sweat evaporating off their skin. It made them oblivious to the Westminster dome’s giant air circulation systems shutting down.
By the time the first tendrils of thin mist were rising from the Thames to squat listlessly above the riverside buildings, their bursts of orgasmic pleasure had become close to pain as program abuse forced already overdriven flesh to continue. Finally, with the exquisite narcotic of desperation spent, they clung to each other, too senseless to know that a thin layer of cloud had started glowing red above the heart of the ancient city outside.
Chapter 12
Liol piloted Lady Mac right up to the big spacedock globe on the diskcity rim where the MSV was parked, locking position twenty metres outside the yawning hatch. Joshua was very insistent they didn’t come inside.
Working out a procedure for bringing Quantook-LOU and five of his entourage inside the starship had taken up the entire trip from the transparent bubble to the rim airlock hatch. They eventually agreed that two of Joshua’s crew, Quantook-LOU, and another Mosdva would ride the MSV out to the starship first. There would be three shuttle flights in all, and Joshua would be the last over. That way the distributor of resources would be satisfied that the starship wouldn’t fly away as soon as its captain was on board, leaving him behind. The idea that Joshua, as commander, wouldn’t desert any crew was obviously foreign to him. An interesting outlook, the humans agreed, and a good marker for future behaviour.
The xenocs were assigned the lower lounge in capsule D, which had its own bio-isolation environmental circuit. Sarha modified it to provide a mix of gas to match Tojolt-HI’s atmosphere, not that they carried a great deal of argon, and she had to omit the hydrocarbons altogether.
Once Quantook-LOU was inside and Joshua was back on the bridge, the Mosdva would provide the coordinates of their destination.
Mosdva spacesuits were made from a tight-fitting fabric and woven with heat regulator ducts. Only the upper two sets of limbs were given sleeves, the lower legs were tucked up next to the body, making the lower section look as if it was the end of a giant stocking. The helmet was chunky, with internal mechanisms bulging up like warts and a forward glass visor that had several protective slide-down shields. Their life-support backpack was a cone whose tip flared out into a fringe of small jet-black fins. A single, thick armoured cable linked it to the helmet. An oversuit web carried electronic modules and canisters the same way as their torso jackets.
Beaulieu and Ashly watched the xenocs through a ceiling sensor as they came through the connecting airlock into the lounge. They didn’t move with quite the same ease as they did back in the diskcity, lacking the fronds to give them stability. But they were adapting fast to grab hoops and the inter-deck ladders.
When the last one was inside, Ashly closed the hatch and let the new atmosphere in. Quantook-LOU waited in the middle of the lounge, while the others conducted a detailed examination. Most of the fittings had been stripped out for this flight anyway, leaving a spartan cabin. It didn’t leave them much technology to probe, and there was certainly nothing critical they could damage. The Mosdva satisfied themselves that the lounge wasn’t actively hostile, and confirmed the atmosphere was compatible before removing their suits. They quickly transferred the electronic modules from their oversuits to their usual jackets.
Beaulieu had used a neutrino-scattering detector when they were in Lady Mac ’s airlock to scan the hardware they’d brought with them. Alkad and Peter joined her in analysing the function of various components. They were carrying small cylinders of chemical explosive, lasers, spooled diamond wire, and a gadget which Alkad and Peter thought would give off a powerful EM pulse. The internal molecular binding force generators could maintain the lounge decking’s integrity against any of their weapons should they get hostile.
More interesting were the number of implants each of them was loaded with. The central nervous column, running through the centre of the body, had a number of attachments spliced into it, artificial fibres spread out through the tissue to form a secondary nervous system. Biochemical devices were grafted on to glands and circulatory networks, supplementing organ funct
ions. Compact weapons cylinders were buried in limb muscles.
“The weapons I can understand,” Ruben said when Beaulieu displayed the images over the general communication link. “But the rest seem redundant. Perhaps their organs still haven’t fully evolved to freefall conditions.”
“I disagree,” Cacus said. “Quantook-LOU doesn’t have the same degree of enhancements as the other five. I’d say his escort are the Mosdva equivalent of our boosted mercenaries. They’ll be able to keep functioning even when they’re badly damaged.”
“It’s probably significant that Quantook-LOU’s physiological condition is generally superior to the others’,” Parker said. “His bone structure is certainly thicker, and from what we can understand of his internal organs their biochemical functions have a higher degree of efficiency. That suggests to me that he was actually bred. Fifteen thousand years isn’t long enough for a full genetic evolutionary adaptation to freefall, there are just too many changes from a gravity environment to incorporate.”
“If you’re right, that would confirm an aristocracy-based social structure,” Cacus said. “Their whole administration class would be an elite.”
“He does have a large amount of processors hardwired into what passes for his cortex,” Oski said. “A lot more than the soldiers. They augment his memory and analytical abilities to a similar level as neural nanonics.”
“Physical and mental superiority,” Liol said. “That’s very fascist.”
“Only in human terms,” Ruben chided. “Imposing our values on xenocs and then going on to judge them is the height of conceit.”
“Pardon me,” Liol mumbled. He checked round the bridge to find Ashly and Dahybi grinning at the Edenist’s snobbery; Sarha gave him a thumbs up.
“An aristocracy is historically arrogant,” Syrinx said. “If all the dominions are structured the same way, it would explain why they are so quick to escalate their disagreements into war. The administration class would regard the soldiers as expendable. Like everything else here, they are resources to be exploited to the advantage of the dominion.”
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