“You have to stop it, Charlie. There are more people in London than there are on the whole of Norfolk. You can stop it, can’t you? B7 can’t let them all die. You rule Earth. That’s what you said.”
“We can stall the order for a few hours, at most. Crash the command communication circuits, have SD officers refuse to carry out their orders. But ultimately, a direct order from the President will get through and be obeyed. The platforms will fire gamma-ray lasers into the arcologies. Every living cell inside the domes will be exterminated.”
“No. You have to stop them.”
“Louise, get yourself to one of the outer domes. You’ve got the anti-memory. You can use it against anyone who tries to stop you.”
“No!” she yelled out loud. Her hand smashed down on the table, making the meal trays and glasses bounce. “No. No. No.” She picked up the communications block and hurled it against the wall. Its casing cracked, sending plastic splinters skittling along the floor. “I won’t.”
Andy had frozen in his chair, staring at her in consternation. She whirled round to face him. “They’re going to kill everybody. The President’s going to fire SD weapons into the dome.”
He got up and put his arms round her, trying to calm her angry shaking. Even in bare feet she was half a head taller, he had to look up to see the dismay in her eyes.
“We have to stop him,” she said.
“The President?”
“No, Dexter.”
“The possessed one? The maniac?”
“Yes.”
“How?”
“I don’t know. Tell him. Warn him! Get him to dispose of the red cloud. He’ll understand that if he has no followers left alive then he’s nothing.”
“Then what?”
“I don’t know!” she shouted. “But it will stop everyone from being killed, isn’t that worth something to you?”
“Yes,” he stammered.
She went over to her pile of clothes and dug out the anti-memory weapon. “Where are my shoes?”
Andy took one look at the neat black tube she was holding with such determination, and realized just how serious she was. His first thought was to lock the door, prevent her from leaving. He was too scared even to do that. “Don’t go out there.”
“I have to,” she snapped back. “None of those monsters care about people.”
Andy dropped to his knees. “Louise, I’m begging you. They’ll catch you. You’ll be tortured.”
“Not for long. After all, we’re all going to be slaughtered.” She pushed her foot into one shoe and fastened the side clips.
“Louise. Please!”
“Are you going to come with me?”
“That’s London out there,” he said, waving an arm at the window. “You’ve got a couple of hours to find one person. It’s impossible. Stay here. We’ll never know when it happens. Not an SD weapon, they’re so powerful.”
She glared down at him. “Andy, haven’t you followed any news? You have a soul. You’ll know exactly when it happens. There’s a good chance you’ll be stuck into the beyond.”
“I can’t go out there,” he moaned. “Not where they are. Don’t go.”
She pulled her other shoe on. “Well, I can’t stay here.”
Andy looked up at her as she stood over him, tall, beautiful, and resolute. Utterly glorious. He’d spent all night making love to her, punishing his body with a dangerous level of stimulant programs so she would be completely overwhelmed. And it meant nothing to her. She would never be his, for she’d seen the real him. They were further apart now than they had been before he knew she lived.
His hand wiped over his nose, an attempt to cover up his sniffling. “I love you, Louise.” He heard the pitiful words come out of his mouth, and despised himself for everything he was, everything he could never become.
Exasperation mingled with embarrassment. Louise didn’t know if she wanted to shove him aside or kiss him. “I still enjoyed last night, Andy. I wouldn’t want it any different.” A pat on his bowed, trembling head would be too awful. She moved round him, and went out of the door, closing it quietly behind her.
Loud voices and banging doors woke Jay. She sat up in bed and yawned extravagantly, stretching her arms wide. It was night outside, she could just hear the gentle windrush sound of waves rolling onto the beach above the noises in the chalet. People were moving through the rooms, talking in excited tones. Footsteps trundled up the creaky wooden steps to the veranda, and the front door banged again.
She found Prince Dell and tiptoed into the short hallway. There’d never been such a commotion in the chalet before, not even when the old-timers were planning the new colony. Whatever was going on must be terribly important, which could make eavesdropping interesting.
The voices stopped.
“Come in, Jay,” Tracy called from the lounge.
Jay did as she was told. It was impossible to get away with anything when Tracy was around. Seven of the ancient adults had joined Tracy, sitting and standing round the lounge. Jay kept her head down as she hurried over to the big armchair Tracy was sitting in, too shy to say anything.
“Sorry, poppet,” Tracy said as Jay slithered up onto the cushions beside her. “Did this noisy rabble wake you?”
“What’s the matter?” Jay asked. “Why’s everyone here?”
“We’re trying to decide if we should petition Corpus for intervention,” Tracy said. “Again!”
“Something’s happening on Earth,” Arnie said. “We didn’t realize it at first, but Quinn Dexter might be about to do something extremely dangerous.”
“Corpus won’t intervene,” Galic said dejectedly. “There’s still no reason. You know the rules: only if another, unaware species is endangered. Quinn Dexter, according to the textbooks, qualifies as human. Therefore this will be self-inflicted.”
“Then the textbook should be rewritten,” Arnie grumbled. “I wouldn’t classify him as anything close to human.”
“Corpus won’t intervene because the President will use SD weapons, that barbarian.”
“Not in time to stop Dexter, he won’t,” Tracy said. “Especially if B7 intervenes and delays the fire command.”
Jay snuggled up closer to Tracy. “What’s Dexter going to do?”
“We’re not absolutely sure. It might be nothing.”
“Ha,” Arnie grunted. “Just you wait and see.”
“Are you watching it?” Jay asked, suddenly not at all sleepy.
Tracy glared at Arnie. There was a mental exchange, too. Jay could feel it even if she couldn’t make out individual words. She’d been getting good at that lately.
“Please!” Jay begged. “It’s my world.”
“All right,” Tracy said. “You can stay up and watch for a little while. But don’t think you’re getting to see any gory bits.”
Jay beamed at her.
The adults settled down on the other chairs, packing three onto the settee. Tracy’s television was switched on, showing a deserted street of ancient buildings. A tight tapestry of red clouds were glowing overhead. Jay shuddered at the sight. They were just like the ones on Lalonde.
“That’s London,” Tracy said. She handed Jay a mug of hot chocolate.
Jay propped Prince Dell up against her tummy so he’d have a good view, and took a contented sip of the creamy drink. Someone was walking down the middle of the street.
Lady Mac emerged a hundred million kilometres out from the F-class star, five degrees above the ecliptic. As it was an uncharted system, Joshua ordered the combat sensors to deploy and conduct a fast preliminary sweep. Their response time was quicker than the more comprehensive standard array, if there was anything out there on a collision course, they’d hopefully discover it soon enough to jump away.
“Clean space,” Beaulieu reported.
For the first time in thirty hours, Joshua managed to relax, sagging back into the cushioning. He hadn’t realized how tight his neck and shoulder muscles had become, they were line
s of hot stone under his skin.
“We did it!” Liol whooped.
Amid the noisy round of self-congratulation, Joshua ordered the flight computer to extend the standard sensor booms. They slid out of the fuselage along with the thermo-dump panels. “Alkad,” he datavised. “Get Kempster out of zero-tau, please. Tell him we’ve arrived.”
“Yes, Captain,” she replied.
“Beaulieu, Ashly, activate the survey sensors, please. The rest of you, let’s get Lady Mac into standard orbital configuration. Dahybi, I still want to be able to jump, we’ll keep the nodes charged.”
“Aye, Captain.”
“Fuel status?” Joshua asked.
“Sufficient,” Sarha told him. “We have forty per cent of our fusion fuel left, and fifty-five per cent of the antimatter remaining. Given we burned fifteen per cent of the antimatter to move Lalarin-MG, we’ve got enough to get us back to the Confederation. We can even jump around this system, providing you don’t want to explore every moonlet.”
“Let’s hope we don’t have to,” he said. The Swantic-LI message hadn’t mentioned where in the system the Sleeping God was; in orbit around a planet or orbiting the star by itself.
The crew loosened up as Lady Mac changed from flight mode to her less demanding orbital status. They drifted around the bridge, used the washroom. Ashly went down to the galley and fetched a meal. Prolonged exposure to high gees was severely tiring. And eating anything substantial during the acceleration was unwise. The mass put a lot of pressure on internal organs, even with artificially strengthened membranes. They devoured the spongy pasta cakes eagerly, chasing runaway squirts of hot cheese sauce round the bridge.
“So if it sees the whole universe,” Liol said, talking round a mouthful, “Do you reckon it knows we’re here?”
“Every telescope sees the whole universe,” Ashly said. “That doesn’t necessarily mean they can all see us.”
“Okay, it detected our gravitonic distortion when we jumped in,” Liol said, unperturbed.
“Where’s your evidence?”
“If it knows about us, it’s keeping quiet,” Beaulieu said. “Sensors haven’t found any electromagnetic emissions out there.”
“How did the Tyrathca find it then?”
“Easily, I would think,” Dahybi said.
Under the direction of Kempster and Renato, Beaulieu launched their survey satellites. Sixteen of them were fired, racing away from Lady Mac at seven gees. They were arranged in a globular formation, keeping the starship at their centre. After two minutes their solid rockets jettisoned, leaving them flying free. The main section was an omniphase visual-spectrum sensor array, a giant technological fly’s eye, looking every way at once. Between them, they formed an ever-increasing telescope baseline, capable of huge resolution. Its only real limit was imposed by the amount of processing power available to correlate and analyse the incoming photonic data.
The sweep was conducted by registering every speck of light with a negative magnitude (in standard stellar classification the brightest visible star is labelled magnitude one, while the dimmest is a six—anything brighter than a one has to be a planet and is assigned a negative value). Their positions were then reviewed five times a second to see if they were moving.
Once the planets had been located, the telescope could be focused on them individually to see if the extensive spatial disturbance Swantic-LI had referred to was in orbit around them. They were assuming it was a visible phenomena; the Tyrathca didn’t have gravitonic detector technology. If nothing was found, a more comprehensive sweep of the system would have to be conducted.
“This is most unusual,” Kempster datavised after the first sweep was completed. He and Renato were using the main lounge in capsule C, along with Alkad and Peter. Their specialist electronics had been installed, transforming it into a temporary astrophysics lab.
Joshua and Liol swapped a look shading between surprise and amusement. “In what way?” Joshua asked.
“We can only detect a single negative-magnitude source orbiting this star,” the astronomer said. “There’s simply nothing else out there. No planets, no asteroids. Lady Macbeth ’s sensors can’t even find the usual clouds of interplanetary dust. All matter has been cleared away, virtually down to a molecular level. The only normal occurrence is solar wind.”
“Cleared away, or just sucked into the spatial disturbance,” Sarha muttered.
“So what is the source?” Joshua datavised.
“A moon-sized object, orbiting three hundred million kilometres from the star.”
Joshua and the rest of the crew accessed the sensor array. It showed them a very bright point of light. Completely nondescript.
“We can’t get any sort of spectral reading,” Kempster said. “It’s reflecting the sun’s light at essentially a hundred per cent efficiency. It must be clad in some kind of mirror.”
“You did say: easy,” Ashly told Dahybi.
“That’s not easy,” Joshua said. “That’s obvious.” He loaded the object’s position into the flight computer and plotted a vector to a jump coordinate which would bring them out one million kilometres away from the enigmatic object. “Stand by. Accelerating in one minute.”
The impulsive anger which had pushed Louise out of Andy’s flat had faded by the time she reached Islington High Street. Walking down the empty streets had given her far too much time to think, mainly about how headstrong and stupid this idea was. At the same time that original reason held fast. Somebody had to do something, however futile. It was the getting captured and facing Dexter part that was making her legs all wobbly and recalcitrant.
Her neural nanonics crashed when she started off along St John Street. Not that she really needed her map file any more. He wouldn’t be far from the centre of the red cloud; all she had to do was walk straight down to the Thames, only a couple of miles. She knew she’d never actually get that far.
The edge of the cloud, a frayed agitated boundary, was still creeping slowly out towards the skyscrapers behind her. It had already reached Finsbury, barely a quarter of a mile ahead of her now. A gruff sonorous thunder reverberated down from its quaking underside, echoing along the deserted streets. Leaves on the tall evergreen trees trembled in disharmony as erratic gusts of warm air blew out from the centre. Birds rode the thermals high overhead. She could see the tiny black flecks streaming together into huge flocks, all of them heading in the same direction: out.
They were smarter than people. She was amazed that she hadn’t encountered anyone fleeing the cloud’s advance. The inhabitants were all staying barricaded behind their doors. Was everyone paralysed by fear like Andy?
She passed under the cloud, the sleet of redness closing in on her like a perverted nightfall. It wasn’t just the humid air blowing against her now: the feeling of dismay strengthened, slowing her pace. The rumbles of thunder above her thickened, never quite dying away. Forked slivers of blackness crackled between the roiling tufts: black lightning, draining photons out of the sky.
When they’d said goodbye, Genevieve had offered her Carmitha’s silver pendant of earth. Louise had refused. Now she wished she hadn’t. Any totem against the evil would be welcome. She decided to think about Joshua, her real talisman against the harsh truth of life beyond Norfolk. But that just made her slip into the memory of Andy. She still didn’t regret that—quite. As if it mattered.
Louise had made it down Rosebery Avenue and turned into Farringdon Road when the possessed walked out into the street in front of her. There were six of them, moving with unhurried indolence, dressed in austere black suits. They lined up between the pavements and stood facing her. She walked up to the one in the middle, a tall thin man with a flop of oily brown hair.
“Girl, what the fuck are you about?” he asked.
Louise pointed the anti-memory weapon straight at him, its end barely a foot from his face. He stiffened, which meant he knew what it was. It wasn’t much of a comfort to her; somebody else had one. She knew who.<
br />
“Take me to Quinn Dexter,” she told him.
They all started laughing. “To him?” the one she was threatening said. “Girl, are you twisted, or what?”
“I’ll shoot if you don’t.” Her voice was very close to cracking. They would know that, and the reason why, them and their devilish senses. She gripped the weapon tighter to stop it shaking about.
“My pleasure,” he said.
She jabbed the weapon forward. His head recoiled in synchronization.
“Don’t push it, bitch.”
The possessed started walking down the road. Louise took a couple of hesitant paces.
“Follow us,” the tall one told her. “The Messiah is waiting for you.”
She kept the weapon up, not that it would do much good, they all had their backs to her now. “How far is it?”
“Close to the river.” He glanced back over his shoulder, lips stretched into a thin smile. “Do you have any idea what you’re doing?”
“I know Dexter.”
“No you don’t. You wouldn’t be doing this if you did.”
The pictures transmitted from Swantic-LI had been accurate after all. From a distance of a million kilometres, the shape of the Sleeping God was quite unmistakable: two concave conical spires end to end, three and a half thousand kilometres in length. The perfectly symmetrical geometry betrayed its artificial origin. The central rim was sharp, appearing to taper down to an edge whose thickness was measured in molecules; its tips had an equally rapier-like profile. There wasn’t anyone on board Lady Mac who didn’t have an uncomfortable vision of the starship being impaled on one of those sleek spikes.
Beaulieu launched five astrophysics survey satellites towards it. Fusion-powered drones with multi-discipline sensor arrays, they arched away from the starship on trajectories that would position them in a necklace around the Sleeping God.
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