“What year is this, little one?”
Genevieve considered protesting about being called “little one,” but he didn’t seem to mean it in a nasty way. “Year 102 since settlement. But those are Norfolk years; they’re four Earth years long. So back on Earth it’s 2611.”
“Twenty-six hundred and eleven years since Our Lord was born,” Titreano said in awe. “Dear Heaven. So long? Though the torment I endured felt as if it were eternal.”
“What torment?” Genevieve asked with innocent curiosity.
“The torment all us damned souls face after they die, little one.”
Genevieve’s jaw dropped, her mouth forming a wide O.
“You’ve been dead?” Louise asked, not believing a word of it.
“Yes, Lady Louise. I was dead, for over eight hundred years.”
“That’s what you meant by possession?” Carmitha said.
“Yes, my lady,” he said gravely.
Carmitha pinched the top of her nose, wrinkling her brow. “And how, exactly, did you come back?”
“I do not know, except a way was opened into this body’s heart.”
“You mean that’s not your body?”
“No. This is a mortal man by the name of Eamon Goodwin, though I now wear my own form above his. I hear him crying inside me.” He fixed Carmitha with a steady eye. “That is why the others pursue you. There are millions of souls lost in the torment of beyond. All seek living bodies so they may breathe again.”
“Us?” Genevieve squeaked.
“Yes, little one. You. I’m sorry.”
“Look, this is all very interesting,” Carmitha said. “Complete drivel, but interesting. However, just in case you haven’t caught hold, right now we are drowning in deep shit. I don’t know what you freaks really are, possessed zombies or something nice and simple like xenocs with psychic powers. But when that green bastard reaches Colsterworth he’s going to be coming back with a lot of friends. I’ve got to unhitch my horse, and we three”—her gesture took in the sisters—“have got to be long gone.” She arched an eyebrow. “Right, Miss Kavanagh?”
“Yes.” Louise nodded.
Titreano glanced at the passive cob, then the stallion. “If you are serious in your intent, you should travel together in your caravan. None of you has a saddle, and this mighty beast has the look of Hercules about him. I’ll wager he can maintain a steady pace for many hours.”
“Brilliant,” Carmitha snorted. She hopped down onto the hard-packed dirt of the road and slapped the side of her ruined caravan. “We’ll just wait here for a wheelwright to come along, shall we?”
Titreano smiled. He walked over to the ditch where the wheel had fallen in.
Carmitha’s next acidic phrase died unspoken as he righted the wheel and pushed it (one-handed!) up out of the ditch, treating it as though it were a child’s hoop. The wheel was five feet in diameter, and made of good, heavy tythorn wood. Three strong men would struggle to lift it between them.
“My God.” She wasn’t sure if she should be thankful or horrified at such a demonstration. If all of them were like him, then hope had deserted Norfolk long ago.
Titreano reached the caravan and bent down.
“You’re not going to . . .”
He lifted it by the front corner—two, three feet off the road. Carmitha watched as the broken axle slowly straightened itself. The splintered fracture in the middle blurred, then for a brief moment the wood appeared to run like a liquid. It solidified. And the axle was whole again.
Titreano jemmied the wheel back onto the bearing.
“What are you?” Carmitha whispered weakly.
“I have already explained, my lady,” Titreano said. “What I can never do is bring you to believe what I am. That must come of its own accord, as God wills.”
He went over to the stallion and held his arms up. “Come on, little one, down you come.”
Genevieve hesitated.
“Go on,” Louise said quietly. Plainly, if Titreano had wanted to harm them, he would have done it by now. The more she saw of these strange people, the more her heart blackened. What could possibly fight such power?
Genevieve smiled scampishly and swung a leg over the stallion. She slithered down his flank into Titreano’s grip.
“Thank you,” she said as he put her down. “And thank you for helping us, too.”
“How could I not? I may be damned, but I am not devoid of honour.”
Louise got most of the way down the stallion before she accepted his steadying hand. She managed a fast, embarrassed grin of thanks.
“I’m sore all over,” Genevieve complained, hands rubbing her bottom.
“Where to?” Louise asked Carmitha.
“I’m not sure,” the Romany replied. “There should be a lot of my folk in the caves above Holbeach. We always gather there if there’s any kind of trouble abroad. You can hold those caves for a long time; they’re high in the cliffs, not easy to reach.”
“It would be a short siege this time, I fear,” Titreano said.
“You got a better idea?” she snapped back.
“You cannot stay on this island, not if you wish to escape possession. Does this world have ships?”
“Some,” Louise said.
“Then you should try to buy passage.”
“To go where?” Carmitha asked. “If your kind really are after bodies, exactly where would be safe?”
“That would depend on how swiftly your leaders rally. There will be war, many dreadful battles. There can be nothing less. Both our kinds are fighting for their very existence.”
“Then we must go to Norwich, the capital,” Louise said decisively. “We must warn the government.”
“Norwich is five thousand miles away,” Carmitha said. “A ship would take weeks.”
“We can’t hide here and do nothing.”
“I’m not risking myself on some foolhardy errand, girl. Fat lot of good you precious landowners will be, anyway. What has Norfolk got which can fight off the likes of him?” She waved a hand towards Titreano.
“The Confederation Navy squadron is still here,” Louise said, her voice raised now. “They have fabulous weapons.”
“Of mass destruction. How’s that going to help people who have been possessed? We need to break the possession, not slaughter the afflicted.”
They glared at each other.
“There’s an aeroambulance based at Bytham,” Genevieve said brightly. “That could reach Norwich in five hours.”
Louise and Carmitha stared at her. Then Louise broke into a grin and kissed her sister. “Now who’s the clever one?”
Genevieve smiled around pertly. Titreano made a face at her, and she giggled.
Carmitha glanced down the road. “Bytham’s about a seven hour journey from here. Assuming we don’t run into any more problems.”
“We won’t,” Genevieve said. She took hold of Titreano’s hand. “Not with you with us.”
He grinned halfheartedly. “I . . .”
“You’re not going to leave us alone,” a suddenly stricken Genevieve asked.
“Of course not, little one.”
“That’s that, then.”
Carmitha shook her head. “I must be bloody mad even thinking of doing this. Louise, tether your horse to the caravan.”
Louise did as she was told. Carmitha climbed back up on the caravan, regarding it suspiciously as she put her weight on the driver’s seat. “How long is that repair going to last for?”
“I’m not quite sure,” Titreano said apologetically. He helped Genevieve up beside Carmitha, then hoisted himself up.
When Louise clambered up, the narrow seat was cramped. She was pressed against Titreano, and not quite sure how she should react to such proximity. If only it were Joshua, she thought wistfully.
Carmitha flicked the reins, and Olivier started forwards at an easy trot.
Genevieve folded her arms in satisfaction and cocked her head to look up at Titreano. “Did yo
u help us at Cricklade as well?”
“How’s that, little one?”
“One of the possessed was trying to stop us from riding away,” Louise said. “She was hit by white fire. We wouldn’t be here otherwise.”
“No, Lady Louise. It was not I.”
Louise settled back into the hard seat, unhappy the mystery hadn’t been solved. But then by today’s standards it was one of the lesser problems confronting her.
Olivier trotted on down the road as Duke finally disappeared below the wolds. Behind the caravan, more of Colsterworth’s buildings had started to burn.
* * *
Guyana’s navy spaceport was a standard hollow sphere of girders, almost two kilometres in diameter. Like a globular silver-white mushroom on a very thin stalk, it stuck out of the asteroid’s rotation axis; the massive magnetic bearings on the end of the connecting spindle allowed it to remain stationary while the colossal rock rolled along its orbital track. The surface was built up from circular docking bays linked together by a filigree of struts and transit tubes. Tanks, generators, crew stations, environmental maintenance machinery, and shark-fin thermo dump panels were jumbled together in the gaps between bays, apparently without reference to any overall design logic.
Narrow rivers of twinkling star-specks looped around it all, twining in elaborate, interlocked figure-eights. The rivers had a current, their points of light drifting in the same direction at the same speed; cargo tugs, personnel commuters, and MSVs, firing their reaction drives to maintain the precise vectors fed to them by traffic control. Ombey’s code three defence alert had stirred the spaceport into frantic activity for the second time in twenty-four hours. But this time instead of preparing to receive a single craft, frigates and battle cruisers were departing. Every few minutes one of the big spherical Royal Kulu Navy ships would launch from its docking bay, rising through the traffic lanes of smaller support craft with an arc-bright glare of secondary fusion drives. They were racing for higher orbits, each with a different inclination; Strategic Defence Command positioned them so they englobed the entire planet, giving full interception coverage out to a million kilometres. If any unidentified ship emerged from a ZTT jump within that region, it would be engaged within a maximum of fifteen seconds.
Amid the departing warships a lone navy flyer rose from the spaceport. It was a flattened egg-shape fuselage of dark blue-grey silicolithium composite, fifty metres long, fifteen wide. Coherent magnetic fields wrapped it in a warm golden glow of captured solar wind particles. Ion thrusters fired, manoeuvring it away from the big frigates. Then the fusion tube in the tail ignited, pushing it down towards the planet seventy-five thousand kilometres below.
The one-gee acceleration sucked Ralph Hiltch gently back into his seat, making the floor stand to the vertical. On the seat next to him, his flight bag rolled over once to lie in the crook of the cushioning.
“This vector will get us to Pasto spaceport in sixty-three minutes,” Cathal Fitzgerald datavised from the pilot’s seat.
“Thanks,” Ralph replied. He widened the channel to include the two G66 troopers. “I’d like you all to access the briefing that Skark gave me. This kind of information could be critical, and we need all the breaks we can get around here.”
That earned him a grin and a wave from Dean Folan, a noncommittal grimace from Will Danza. They were both sitting on the other side of the aisle. The sixty-seater cabin seemed deserted with just the four of them using it.
None of his little team had complained or refused to go. Privately he’d made it quite clear they could pull out without any indiscipline action being entered on their file. But they’d all agreed, with varying degrees of enthusiasm. Even Dean who had the best excuse of all. He’d been in surgery for seven hours last night; the asteroid’s navy clinic had to rebuild sixty per cent of his arm. The boosted musculature, ruined by the hit he’d taken in Lalonde’s jungle, had to be completely replaced with fresh artificial tissue, along with various blood vessels, skin, and nerves. The repair was still wrapped in a green sheath of medical nanonic packaging. But he was looking forward to levelling the score, he’d said cheerfully.
Ralph closed his eyes and let the briefing invade his mind, neural nanonics tabulating it into a sharply defined iconographic matrix. Details of the Xingu continent: a sprawl of four and a half million square kilometres in the northern hemisphere, roughly diamond-shaped, with a long mountainous ridge of land extending out from its southern corner. The ridge crossed the equator; and Ombey’s broad tropical zones meant the entire continent was an ideal farming region, with the one exception of the semi-desert occupying the centre. So far only two-fifths of it was inhabited, but with a population of seventy million, it was the second-most prosperous continent after Esparta, where the capital Atherstone was situated.
After Xingu came the embassy trio, Jacob Tremarco, Savion Kerwin, and Angeline Gallagher. Their career files contained nothing exceptional, they were all regular Kulu Foreign Office staffers: loyal, boring bureaucrats. Visuals, family histories, medical reports. It was all there, and none of it particularly useful apart from the images. Ralph stored them in a neural nanonics memory cell, and spliced them with a general characteristics recognition program. He hadn’t forgotten that strange image-shifting ability the sequestrated had demonstrated back on Lalonde. The recognition program might give him a slight edge if one of them attempted a disguise, though he didn’t hold out much hope.
The most promising part of the datapackage was the series of measures Admiral Farquar and Leonard DeVille, Xingu’s Home Office minister, had implemented to quarantine the continent and trace the embassy trio. All civil traffic was being systematically shut down. Search programs were being loaded into the continent’s data cores, watching for a trail of unexplained temporary glitches in processors and power circuits. Public-area security monitor cameras had been given the visual pattern of the trio, and police patrols were also being briefed.
Maybe they’d get lucky, Ralph thought. Lalonde was a backwards colony on the arse edge of nowhere, without any modern communications or much in the way of civil authority. But Ombey was part of the Kingdom, the society he’d sworn to defend with his life if need be. Years ago at university, when he’d discreetly been offered a commission in the agency, he’d considered Kulu a worthwhile society. The richest in the Confederation outside Edenism, it was strong economically, militarily; a technology leader. It had a judicial system which kept the average citizen safe on the streets, and was even reasonably fair by modern standards. Medical care was socialized. Most people had jobs. Admittedly, ruled by the Saldanas, it was hardly the most democratic of systems, but then short of the Edenist Consensus few democratic societies were truly representative. And there were a lot of planets which didn’t even pretend to be egalitarian. So he’d swallowed any niggling self-suspicion of radicalism, and agreed to serve his King until his death.
What he’d seen of the galaxy had only served to strengthen his conviction that he’d done the right thing in taking the oath. The Kingdom was a civilized place compared to most; its citizens were entitled to lead their lives without interference. And if that meant the ESA occasionally having to get its hands dirty, then so be it, as far as Ralph was concerned. A society worth having is worth protecting.
And thanks to its own nature, Ombey should definitely be able to cope better than Lalonde. Although the very systems which made it more able also gave the enemy a greater opportunity to spread its subversion. The virus carriers had been slow to travel on Lalonde. Here they would suffer no such restrictions.
Cathal Fitzgerald cut the flyer’s fusion drive when they were two hundred kilometres above Xingu. Gravity took over, pulling the flyer down. Its magnetic field expanded, applying subtle pressures to the tenuous gases pushing against the fuselage. Buoyant at the centre of a sparkling cushion of ions, the flyer banked to starboard and began a gentle glide-spiral down towards the spaceport below.
They were a hundred and fifty kilometres high
when the flight computer datavised a priority secure signal from Roche Skark into Ralph’s neural nanonics.
“We might have a problem developing,” the ESA director told him. “A civil passenger flight from Pasto to Atherstone is having trouble with its electronic systems, nothing critical but the glitches are constant. I’d like to bring you in on the Privy Council security committee to advise.”
“Yes, sir,” Ralph acknowledged. The datavise broadened to a security level one sensenviron conference. Ralph appeared to be sitting at an oval table in a plain white bubble room with walls at an indeterminate distance.
Admiral Farquar was sitting at the head of the table, with Roche Skark and the ISA director Jannike Dermot flanking him. Ralph’s neural nanonics identified the other three people present. Next to the ISA director was Commander Deborah Unwin, head of Ombey’s Strategic Defence network; Ryle Thorne, Ombey’s national Home Office minister, was placed next to her. Ralph found himself with Roche Skark on one side, and Leonard DeVille on the other.
“The plane is seven minutes from Atherstone,” Deborah Unwin said. “We have to make a decision.”
“What is the plane’s current status?” Ralph asked.
“The pilot was instructed to turn back to Pasto by my flight controllers as part of the quarantine procedures. And that’s when he reported his difficulties. He says he’ll be endangering the passengers if he has to fly all the way back to Pasto. And if it’s a genuine malfunction he will be.”
“We can hardly go around using our SD platforms on civil aircraft just because they have a dodgy processor,” Ryle Thorne said.
“On the contrary, sir,” Ralph said. “In this situation we have to maintain a policy of guilty until proven innocent. You cannot allow that plane to land in the capital, not under any circumstances. Not now.”
“If he has to fly back to Xingu he may well kill everyone on board,” the minister protested. “The plane could be downed in the ocean.”
“Atherstone has a high proportion of military bases in the surrounding district,” Admiral Farquar said. “If necessary the plane can simply sit on a landing pad surrounded by marines until we work out a satisfactory method of detecting if the virus is present.”
The Night's Dawn Trilogy Page 127