“You’re the most insensitive poet I’ve ever met.”
“Street poet. I don’t do the roses and chocolates routine, I’m too much of a realist.”
“I bet roses and chocolates pay more.” When there was no answer, Dariat took a close look at Tolton’s face. He was still breathing, but very slowly, air whistling past the fangs of ice crusting his mouth. There were no shivers any more.
Dariat rolled back onto his own acceleration couch and waited patiently. It took another twenty minutes before Tolton’s ghost rose up out of the bloated bundle of fabric. He took one astounded look at Dariat, then put his head back and laughed.
“Oh shit, will you grab a load of this. I’m the soul of a poet.” The laughter degenerated into sobbing. “The soul of a poet. Get it? You’re not laughing. You’re not laughing and it’s fucking funny. It’s the last funny thing you’ll ever know for the rest of all eternity. Why aren’t you laughing? ”
“Shush.” Dariat’s head came up. “Do you hear that?”
“Hear them? There’s a billion trillion souls out there. Of course I can fucking hear them.”
“No. Not the souls in the mélange. I thought I heard someone calling. A human voice.”
Chapter 14
It had been a long night for Fletcher Christian. They’d kept him chained to the altar with electricity coursing through him while the madness whirled all around. He’d seen Dexter’s followers chopping up the beautifully crafted wooden model of St Paul’s which Sir Christopher Wren had built to show off his dream, throwing splintered fragments into the iron braziers which now illuminated the building. The silent slaughter as people were dragged up to the altar where Dexter waited with the anti-memory weapon. Fletcher wept as their souls were destroyed in readiness for their bodies to be replenished by those from the beyond, personalities more compliant to the dark Messiah’s wishes. Salty tears leaked into the runes mutilating his cheeks, stinging like acid. Courtney’s crazed shrieking laugh as Dexter ravaged her until blood flowed and skin blistered.
Sacrilege. Murder. Barbarism. It never stopped. Each act pounding away at the few senses he had remaining. He recited the Lord’s Prayer over and over until Dexter heard him, and the possessed closed in, screaming some obscene chant in counter. Their cruel words slipped into him with the force of daggers, their joy in evil tormenting him into silence. He feared his mind would snap from the pressure of such depravity.
Throughout it all, the font of energistic power increased along with their numbers, spreading out to engulf mind and matter alike. This was not the shared longing he’d known on Norfolk, the genuine appetite to hide from emptiness. Here Dexter absorbed what strength his followers offered and forged its shape with his own damned desires.
As the sullied red light crept through the open door, mocking the night, Fletcher finally heard the cries of the fallen angels. On top of everything else, their diabolical poignancy nearly broke his resolve. Surely not even Dexter could think of letting such beasts loose upon the earth.
“No,” Fletcher wailed. “You cannot bring them forth. It is madness. Madness. They will consume us all.”
Dexter’s face slid into view above him, coldly radiant with satisfaction. “About fucking time you understood.”
Lady Macbeth emerged from her jump deep in interstellar space, one thousand nine hundred light years from the Confederation. The sensation of isolation and loneliness among those on board was nothing to how small that distance made them feel.
Star tracker sensors slid out of their recesses, gathering up the faint harvest of photons. Navigation programs correlated what was there, defining their position.
Joshua triangulated on their target, an unremarkable point of light only thirty-two light-years away now. Their next jump coordinate sprang into his mind, blinking purple at the end of a long neuroiconic tube of orange circles. The star was slightly to one side of it, a distance that represented relative delta-V. Starship and star were still moving at very different velocities as they orbited the galactic core.
“Stand by,” he said. “Accelerating.”
There were groans across the bridge. They dried up soon enough as he activated the antimatter drive. Four gees pushed everyone down into their couches except for Kempster Getchell; the old astronomer had gone into a zero-tau pod after the second jump. “Too much for my bones,” he’d complained gamely. “Fetch me out when we get there.”
Everyone else stuck it out. Not that the crew had a choice. Seventeen jumps in twenty-three hours, each one fifteen light-years long. In itself, probably a record. Nobody was counting now; they’d devoted themselves entirely to keeping the systems functioning smoothly, a professionalism not many could match. Pride had increased to accompany an edgy anticipation as the Sleeping God star grew closer.
Joshua remained in his acceleration couch, piloting them to each coordinate with his usual sublime competence. Nothing much was said as the Orion Nebula shrank away behind them. It was smaller in every star tracker scan, dwindling down to a diminutive fuzzy patch of light the last familiar astronomical feature left in the universe. Every fusion generator was running at maximum capacity, recharging the nodes fast. That was why Joshua used high gees between coordinates, instead of the usual one tenth. Time. It had become the most precious commodity left to him.
Instinct drove him on. That enigmatic, bland star holding steady at the apex of the sensor lock was giving out the same siren song as those strikes in the Ruin Ring once had. So much had happened on this flight. So much of his own hope had been invested now. He couldn’t, didn’t, believe that it had all been for nothing. The Sleeping God existed. A xenoc artefact, powerful enough to interest the Kiint. They’d been right all along, the discoveries made throughout the flight continually emphasising its importance.
“Nodes charged and ready, Captain,” Dahybi reported.
“Thanks,” Joshua said. He automatically ran a vector check. The old girl was performing well. Three more hours, two more jumps, and they’d be there. The flight would be over. That was the part he found hard to credit. There were so many roots elevating the Lady Mac to this encounter. Kelly Tirell and the mercs back on Lalonde. Jay Hilton and Haile (wherever they were now). Tranquillity escaping the Organization fleet. Further back than that, a single message being passed across 1,500 light-years of empty space, loyally relayed from star to star by a species that never should have escaped their sun’s expansion in the first place. And Swantic-LI, finding the Sleeping God originally. Improbable chances in an event chain 15,000 years long linking that single unlikely meeting to the fate of an entire species.
He didn’t believe in odds that long. That just left destiny, divine intervention.
Interesting, given what they were supposedly flying towards.
Louise awoke in some confusion. A young man was lying on top of her. Both of them were naked.
Andy, she remembered. It was his flat: small, grubby, cluttered, and so warm the air itself seemed to have thickened. Condensation had licked every surface to glisten in the dark-pink light of dawn that drizzled through the fogged window.
I will not regret what we did last night, she told herself firmly. I have no reason to feel guilty. I did what I wanted to. I am entitled to do that.
She tried to ease him to one side and slip out from underneath, but the bed simply wasn’t big enough. He stirred, frowning as he focused on her. Then he flinched in shock.
“Louise!”
She gave him a brave smile. “At least you remembered my name.”
“Louise. Oh God.” He lurched back into a kneeling position. His eyes stared down greedily at her body, and his mouth twisted into a beatific smile. “Louise. You’re real.”
“Yes. I’m real.”
His head darted forward, and he kissed her. “I love you, Louise. Darling, my darling, I love you so much.” He lowered himself against her, kissing her face urgently; his hands cupped her breasts, fingers teasing her nipples exactly the way she’d cherished last
night. “I love you, and we’re together at the end.”
“Andy.” She shifted round, wincing at how sore her breasts were. For someone so skinny, he was surprisingly strong.
“Oh God, you’re so beautiful.” His tongue was licking over her lips, desperate to be inside her mouth.
“Andy, stop.”
“I love you, Louise.”
“No!” She pushed herself up. “Listen to me. You don’t love me, Andy, and I don’t love you. It was just sex.” Her mouth parted in a small smile, softening the blow as much as she could. “All right, it was very good sex. But nothing else.”
“You came to me.” His pleading voice came close to cracking, there was so much hurt in the words.
Louise’s guilt was awful. “I told you that everyone else I know has either left the arcology or been captured by the possessed. That’s why I’m here. As for the rest . . . well, we both wanted that. There’s no reason not to now.”
“Don’t I mean anything to you?” he asked in desperation.
“Of course you do, Andy.” She stroked his arm, and leaned in closer, making the contact more intimate. “You don’t think I’d do that with just anyone, do you?”
“No.”
“Remember what we did?” she whispered in his ear. “How bad we were?”
Andy blushed, unable to look at her. “Yes.”
“Good.” She kissed him lightly. “This is one night we’ll keep with us forever. Nobody can ever take it away from us, no matter what happens to us now.”
“I still love you. I have ever since I saw you. That’ll never change.”
“Oh Andy.” She cradled him against her chest, rocking gently. “I didn’t want to hurt you. Believe me, please.”
“You haven’t hurt me. You couldn’t. Not you.”
Louise sighed. “Funny how different life could be, so many things that make you take one route instead of another. If only we could live them all.”
“I’d live them all with you.”
She hugged him tighter. “I think I’m going to envy the girl who winds up with you. She’s going to be so lucky.”
“Won’t happen now, will it?”
“No. I suppose not.” She gave the opaque window a resentful look, hating the day outside, the way time was advancing and what it would invariably bring. There was something else coming through the glass, riding the crimson light: a sense of rancour. It made her uneasy, almost fearful. And that red light was very deep for a dawn sun, it reminded her of Duchess.
She let go of Andy and padded over to the high window. Standing on one of the boxes brought her face up level with it. She smeared the condensation away.
“Oh dear Jesus.”
“What’s the matter?” Andy asked. He hurried across and peered over her shoulder.
It wasn’t dawn shining in, that was still two hours away. A large circular swirl of red cloud hung in the centre of the Westminster dome, a few hundred yards above the ground. Its malign glow glimmered off the geodesic crystal above, turning the struts to a lattice of burnished copper. The underside shone a blood-red light down on the roofs and walls of the city, staining them all an unhealthy magenta. Its leading edge was less than a mile away from the tenement, undulating gently.
“Shit!” he hissed. “We’ve got to get out of here.”
“There’s nowhere to go, Andy. The possessed are all around us.”
“But . . . Oh shit. Why isn’t somebody doing something? New York is still holding them off. We should organize ourselves and fight back like them.”
Louise walked back to the bed and sat down carefully. After last night, some movements were quite difficult. She used her neural nanonics to run a physiological review, making sure the baby was all right. It was, and she had nothing worse than a few tender areas. The medical nanonic package infused some biochemicals into her bloodstream which should help. “We did try to do something,” she said. “But it failed last night.”
“You did?” Andy was standing in front of her, sweat pricking his skin. He rubbed his forehead, brushing damp hair from his eyes. “You mean you’re involved in this?”
“I came to Earth to warn the authorities about a possessed called Quinn Dexter. I needn’t have bothered, they already knew. He’s the one behind all this. I was helping them to find him, because I’ve seen him before.”
“I thought the Capone Organization had infiltrated us.”
“No, that’s just what Govcentral told the media. They didn’t want anyone to know what they were actually up against.”
“Bloody hell,” he groaned, badly downcast. “Fine excuse for a net don I make. Can’t even find that out for myself.”
“Don’t worry about it. GSDI is a lot smarter than people think.” She stood up, the reminder of B7 making her restless. “I need the bathroom. You said it was at the end of the hall?”
“Yes. Er, Louise.”
“What?”
“I think you’ll need something to wear.”
She looked down at herself, and grinned. Totally unselfconscious standing naked in front of a boy, and not just any boy, a casual sex partner. Maybe I have lost some of my Norfolk past after all. “I think you’re right.”
Her own clothes were in the pile where she’d thrown them, still damp and badly crumpled. Andy leant her a pair of grey jeans and a smartish navy-blue Jude’s Eworld sweatshirt, pulling them out of a box where they’d been partially protected against the humidity.
When she got back he’d just finished wiring a couple of power cells into his air conditioner. The galvanised box started shuddering as the motor spun up, then sent out a clammy stream of cold air. Louise stood in front of it trying to get her hair dry.
“I’ve got some food stockpiled,” Andy said. “Do you want breakfast?”
“Please.”
He pulled some preprepped meal trays out of a box and slid them into the oven. Louise started examining the flat in detail. He really was an electronics fanatic, just as he’d claimed at the Lake Isle restaurant. None of his wages had been spent on furnishings, or even clothes by the look of it. Gadgetry lay everywhere: ageing tools and blocks, spools of wire and fibre, microscopic components in lens cases, delicate test rigs; one wall was a rack of fleks. When she peeked into the other room, it was jumbled high with ancient domestic units. He scavenged them for components, he said. Repair work brought in some handy cash. She smiled at the familiar dinner jacket which was hanging up on the back of the door in its own plastic sheath, so obviously out of place.
The oven ejected their meal trays. Andy pushed a flat orange juice carton into the nozzle on his water dispenser; bubbles gurgled up through the big glass bottle. The carton expanded outwards as the juice constituted itself.
“Andy?” Louise stared at the conurbation of electronics, suddenly cursing herself. “Have you got a working communications block here, something that can reach a satellite?”
“Of course. Why?”
“Louise, my God, I thought we’d lost you,” Charlie datavised. “The sensor satellite says you’re at a tenement on Halton Road. Ah, I see, that’s Andy Behoo’s address. Are you all right?”
“I survived,” she datavised back. “Where are you?”
“I’m up in the Halo. It was a bit of a mad dash, but I thought it expedient after last night’s debacle. Do you know if Fletcher got out?”
“I’ve no idea. I didn’t see anyone else once I started running. What about Ivanov?”
“Sorry, Louise. He didn’t make it.”
“There’s just me, then.”
“Looks like I underestimated you again, Louise. My one consistent error.”
“Charlie, there’s a red cloud under the dome.”
“Yes, I know. Clever move on Dexter’s part. It means the SD electron beams can’t strike it unless they blow the dome as well. It also means I’ve got virtually no sensor coverage underneath now. I tried sending my affinity-bonded birds and rats through to see if they could pinpoint him for me, but I lose
contact with them every time. And we all thought their energistic power didn’t affect bitek.”
“Fletcher says they’re aware of everything that happens under their cloud. Dexter probably kills the animals.”
“Very likely. That doesn’t leave us with much, does it.”
“This red cloud is different,” she datavised. “I thought you should know that. It’s why I called, really.”
“What do you mean?”
“I was under one in Norfolk as it was gathering together, that was nothing like this. I can feel this one, it’s like a really low vibration, one that you can’t quite hear. It’s not just here to shut away the sky, it’s really evil, Charlie.”
“That’ll be Dexter. He must have gathered quite a few possessed together now. Whatever he intends to do, it started with that cloud.”
“I’m frightened, Charlie. He’s going to win, isn’t he?”
“Can you and Andy get to one of the outer domes? I have operational agents in place there. I can get you out.”
“The cloud’s growing, Charlie. I don’t think we’ll make it.”
“Louise, I want you to try. Please.”
“Guilty, Charlie, you?”
“Perhaps. I did get Genevieve to Tranquillity. The blackhawk captain swears he’ll never accept another charter from my company.”
Louise grinned. “That’s my sister.”
“Will you leave the tenement now?”
“I don’t think so. Andy and I are happy where we are. And who knows what’ll happen when Earth is taken out of the universe? It might not be so bad.”
“It won’t happen, Louise. That’s not what Dexter’s about. He wants to obliterate the universe, not leave it. And there are people on Earth who can stop him from doing anything at all.”
“What do you mean? You’ve never been able to stop him.”
“The red cloud’s appearance has finally given our wondrous President some backbone. He’s worried it means the possessed are ready to take Earth out of the universe. The senate have now given him approval to use SD weapons against the arcologies, and eliminate the possessed. It’s the new fatalism, Louise. The Confederation abandoned Arnstat and New California so they could be rid of Capone. The President will sacrifice a minority of the republic’s citizens to save the majority. Not that history will remember him kindly for it, though I expect the survivors in the other arcologies will be quietly grateful.”
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