“I’ve got two things to offer,” Ralph said. He looked at Bernard Gibson, and gave him a penitent smile. “Your squads are going to have to take the brunt of this, especially to start with.”
The police AT Squad commander grinned. “What we get paid for.”
“Okay, here it is then. First off, contact with someone who is carrying the energy virus doesn’t necessarily mean you contract it yourself. Will and Dean are excellent proof of that. They captured Skibbow, they manhandled him, they were in very close proximity to him for hours, and they’re both fine. Also, I was on the Ekwan with the embassy trio for a week, and I wasn’t infected.
“Secondly, despite their power they can be intimidated into submission. But you have to be prepared to use ultraviolence against them, and they have to know that. One hint of weakness, one hesitation, and they’ll hit you with everything they’ve got. So when we do find the first one, it’ll be me and my team which heads the actual assault. Okay?”
“I’m not arguing so far,” Bernard Gibson said.
“Good. What I envisage is spreading the experience of an assault in the same fashion the virus is spread. Everyone who is with me on the first assault will be able to familiarise themselves with what has to be done. After that you assign them to head their own squads for the next round of captures, and so on. That way we have your whole division brought up to speed as swiftly as possible.”
“Fine. And what do we do with them once we’ve subdued them?”
“Shove them into zero-tau.”
“You think that’s what got rid of Skibbow’s virus?” Admiral Farquar asked sharply.
“I believe it’s a good possibility, sir. He was extremely reluctant to enter the pod in Ekwan. Right up until then he was quite docile. When he found out we were going to put him in the pod, he became almost hysterical. I think he was frightened. And certainly when he came out of the pod at this end the virus was gone.”
“Excellent.” Warren Aspinal smiled at Ralph. “That course of action is certainly more palatable than lining them all up against a wall and shooting them.”
“Even if zero-tau isn’t responsible for erasing the virus, we know it can contain them the same way it holds ordinary people,” Ralph said. “We can keep them in stasis until we do find a permanent solution.”
“How many zero-tau pods have we got available?” Landon asked Diana.
The technology division chief had a long blink while her neural nanonics chased down the relevant files. “Here in the building there are three. Probably another ten or fifteen in the city in total. They tend to be used almost exclusively by the space industry.”
“There’s five thousand unused pods in the Ekwan right now,” Ralph pointed out. “That ought to be enough if this AI correlation program works. Frankly, if we need more than that, we’ve lost.”
“I’ll get some maintenance crews to start disconnecting them straight away,” Admiral Farquar said. “We can send them down to you in cargo flyers on automatic pilot.”
“That just leaves us with forcing infected people into them,” Ralph said. He caught Bernard’s gaze. “Which is going to be even worse than capturing them.”
“Possible trace,” Diana announced without warning as she received a datavise from one of the AIs. Everyone sitting at Hub One turned their attention on her. “It’s a taxi which left the spaceport twenty minutes after the embassy trio’s spaceplane arrived. The vehicle’s processor array started suffering some strange glitches five minutes later. Contact was lost after a further two minutes. But it can’t have been a total shutdown, because traffic control has no record of a breakdown in that sector this afternoon. It simply dropped out of the route and flow control loop.”
* * *
The warehouse which housed Mahalia Engineering Supplies was sealed up tight, one of twenty identical buildings lined up along the southern perimeter of the industrial park, separated from its neighbour by strips of ancient concrete and ranks of spindly trees planted to break the area’s harshness. It was seventy metres long by twenty-five wide, fifteen high; dark grey composite panels without a single window. From outside it looked inert; innocuous if somewhat spurned of late. Furry tufts of Ombey’s aboriginal vegetation were rooting in the gutters. Denuded chassis of ancient farm vehicles were stacked three or four deep along one wall, sleeting rust onto the concrete.
Ralph focused his shell helmet’s sensors on the broad roll-up door in the centre of the end-wall fifty meters in front of him. It had taken him and his team four minutes to get here from police headquarters in one of the force’s hypersonics, following the city-wide trail of route and flow processor dropouts located by Diana and the AIs. Three police Armed Tactical Squads had also been dispatched to the industrial park, under orders from Bernard Gibson. In total, eight of the little planes had landed, encircling the warehouse at a five-hundred-metre distance.
There wasn’t a single crack of light leaking around the door. No sign of life. Infrared didn’t reveal much, either. He scanned along the side of the building again.
“The conditioning unit is on,” Ralph observed. “I can see the motor’s heat, and the grille’s venting. Someone’s in there.”
“Do you want us to infiltrate a nanonic sensor?” Nelson Akroid asked. He was the AT Squad’s captain, a stocky man in his late thirties, barely coming up to Ralph’s shoulder. Not quite the image one expected from someone in his profession, but then Ralph was used to the more bulky G66 troops. Ralph suspected Nelson Akroid would be a healthy opponent in any hand-to-hand fighting, though; he had the right kind of subdued competence.
“It’s a big building, plenty of opportunities for ambush,” Nelson Akroid said. “We’d benefit from positioning them exactly. And my technical operators are good. The hostiles would never know they’d been infiltrated.” He sounded eager, which could be a flaw given this situation. Ralph couldn’t imagine him and his squad seeing much active duty on Ombey. Their lot was more likely endless drills and exercises, the curse of any specialist field.
“No nanonics,” Ralph said. “We could never depend on them anyway. I want the penetration team to deploy using standard search and seizure procedures. We can’t believe any information from a sensor, so I want them going in fully alert.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Diana?” he datavised. “What can the AIs tell me?”
“No change. There are no detectable glitches in the warehouse processors it can access. But there’s very little electronic activity in there anyway, the office and administration systems are all switched off, so that doesn’t mean much.”
“What’s the taxi’s maximum capacity?”
“Six. And the Industry Department says Mahalia employs fifteen staff. They service and distribute parts for agricultural machinery right across the continent.”
“Okay, we’ll assume the worst case. A minimum of twenty-one possible hostiles. Thanks, Diana.”
“Ralph, the AIs have discovered another two possible glitch traces in the city’s route and flow network. I instructed them to concentrate on vehicle traffic around the spaceport in the period after the embassy trio arrived. Another taxi suffered a lot of problems, and the other’s a freight vehicle.”
“Shit! Where are they now?”
“The AIs are running search routines; but these two are proving harder to find than the first taxi. I’ll keep you updated.”
The channel closed. Ralph reviewed the AT Squad as they closed in on the warehouse, black figures who seemed more mobile shadows than solid people. They know their job, he admitted grudgingly.
“Everyone’s in place, sir,” Nelson Akroid datavised. “And the AIs have taken command of the security cameras. The hostiles don’t know we’re here.”
“Fine.” Ralph didn’t tell him that if Tremarco or Gallagher were in there they’d know for sure that the AT Squad was outside. He wanted the squad charged up and professional, not shooting at phantoms.
“Stand by,” Ralph datavised to the Squad.
“Status of the assault mechanoids, please?”
“On-line, sir,” the AT Squad’s technical officer reported.
Ralph gave the roll-up door another scan. Like Pandora’s box, once it was open there would be no going back. And only he, Roche Skark, and Admiral Farquar knew that if the virus carriers got past the AT Squad, then the industrial park would be targeted by SD platforms.
He could feel the low-orbit observation satellite sensors focusing on him.
“Okay,” he datavised to the squad. “Go.”
* * *
The assault mechanoid which Ombey’s AT Squads employed looked as if the design team had been accessing too many horror sensevises for inspiration. Three metres high at full stretch, it had seven plasmatic legs, resembling tentacles with hooves, which could move it over the most jumbled terrain at a sprint that even boosted humans couldn’t match. Its body was a segmented barrel, giving it a serpentine flexibility. There were sockets for up to eight specialist limb attachments, varying from taloned climbing claws to mid-calibre gaussrifles. Control could be either autonomous, operating under a preloaded program, or a direct waldo datavise.
Five of them charged across the parking yard outside the warehouse, covering the last thirty metres in two seconds. Long, whiplike cords lashed out from the top of their bodies, slashing against the door’s centimetre-thick composite. Where they hit, they stuck, forming a horizontal crisscross grid four metres above the ground. A millisecond later the cords detonated; the shaped electron explosive charge was powerful enough to cut clean through a metre of concrete. The ruined door didn’t even have time to fall. All five assault mechanoids slammed against it in a beautiful demonstration of synchronized mayhem. What was left of the door buckled and burst apart, sending jagged sections tumbling and bouncing down the warehouse’s central aisle.
With a clear field of fire established, the mechanoids sent a fast, brutal barrage of short-range sense-overload ordnance blazing down the length of the building. Sensors instantly pinpointed the designated-hostile humans flailing around in panic, and concentrated their fire.
Behind the assault mechanoids, the AT Squad flashed through the smoking doorway. They scuttled for cover between the stacks of crates, scanning the deeper recesses of the warehouse for hidden hostiles. Then, with the mechanoids taking point duty down the central aisle, they began to fan out in their search and securement formation.
Mixi Penrice, proprietor of Mahalia Engineering Supplies, had been struggling to remove the linear motor from the stolen taxi’s rear axle when the assault mechanoids crashed into the warehouse door. The noise of the shaped electron explosive charges going off was like standing next to a lightning strike.
Shock made him jump half a metre in the air, not an easy feat given he was about twenty kilos overweight. Terrible lines of white light flared at the far end of the warehouse, and the door bulged inwards briefly before it disintegrated. But he wasn’t so numbed that he didn’t recognize the distinctive silhouette of the assault mechanoids sprinting through the swirl of smoke and composite splinters. Mixi shrieked and dived for the floor, arms wrapping around his head. The full output of the sense-overload ordnance struck him. Strobing light which seemed to shine through his skull. Sound that was trying hard to shake every joint apart. The air turned to rocket exhaust, burning his tongue, his throat, his eyes. He vomited. He voided both his bladder and his bowels; a combination of sheer fright and nerve short-out pulses.
Three minutes later, when pain-filled consciousness returned, he found himself lying flat on his back, shaking spastically, with disgustingly thick liquids cooling and crusting across his clothes. Five large figures wearing dark armour suits were standing over him, horribly big guns trained on his abdomen.
Mixi tried to clasp his hands together in prayer. It was the day which in his heart he’d always known would come, the day when King Alastair II dispatched all the forces of law and order in his Kingdom to deal with Mixi Penrice, car thief and trader in stolen parts. “Please,” he babbled weakly. He couldn’t hear his own voice; too much blood was running out of his ears. “Please, I’ll pay it all back. I promise. I’ll tell you who my fences are. I’ll give you the name of the bloke who wrote the program which screws up the road network processors. You can have it all. Just, please, don’t kill me.” He started sobbing wretchedly.
Ralph Hiltch slowly pulled back his shell helmet’s moulded visor. “Oh, fuck!” he yelled.
* * *
The white plaster and stone interior of Cricklade’s family chapel was comfy and sober without the exorbitant lavishness prevalent throughout the rest of the manor. Its history was cheerful, anyone walking into it for the first time was immediately aware of that; you only had to close your eyes to see the innumerable christenings, the grand marriage ceremonies of the heirs, Christmas masses, choral evenings. It was as much a part of the Kavanaghs as the rich land outside.
Now though, its gentle sanctity had been methodically violated. Icon panels defaced, the dainty stained-glass windows broken, the statues of Christ and the Virgin Mary smashed. Every crucifix had been inverted; red and black pentagrams daubed on the walls.
The despoiling soothed Quinn as he knelt at the altar. Before him an iron brazier had been set up on top of the thick stone slab. Avaricious flames were busy consuming the Bibles and hymn books it contained.
His body’s lusts satiated by Lawrence, fed on gourmet food, and overindulged on the bottles of vintage Norfolk Tears from the cellar, he felt miraculously calm. Behind him, the ranks of novices stood to attention as they waited to be inducted into the sect. They would stand there, motionless, for all of eternity if necessary. They were that scared of him.
Luca Comar stood in front of them, like some masterful drill sergeant. His dragon armour glinted dully in the firelight, small plumes of orange smoke snorting from his helmet’s eye slits. He had worn the guise almost continually since possessing Grant Kavanagh’s body. Compensating for some deep psychological fracture, Quinn thought. But then everyone returning from beyond was flaky to some degree.
Quinn allowed his contempt to rise, the raw emotion bubbling into his brain. The hem of his robe gave a small flutter. Here on Norfolk such pitiful masquerades would triumph, but on few other worlds. Most Confederation planets would fight back against the incursions of the possessed, and those were the planets which counted. The planets where the real war would be fought, the universal war for belief and devotion between the two celestial brothers. Norfolk was irrelevant to that struggle, it could contribute nothing, no weapons, no starships.
He lifted his gaze above the flames darting out of the brazier. A vermillion sky was visible through the gaping rents in the broken window. Less than a dozen first magnitude stars twinkled above the wolds, the rest of the universe had been washed out in the red dwarf’s sullied glow. The tiny blue-white lights seemed so delicate and pure.
Quinn smiled at them. His calling was finally revealed. He would bring his divine gift of guidance to the lost armies which God’s Brother had seeded throughout the Confederation. It would be a crusade, a glorious march of the dead, folding the wings of Night around every spark of life and hope, and extinguishing it for ever.
First he would have to raise an army, and a fleet to carry them. A frisson of his own, very personal desire kindled in his mind. The serpent beast speaking right into his heart. Banneth! Banneth was at the very core of the Confederation, where the greatest concentration of resources and weapons lay.
The obedient novices never moved when Quinn rose to his feet and turned to face them. There was an amused sneer on his snow-white face. He jabbed a finger at Luca Comar. “Wait here, all of you,” he said, and stalked down the aisle. Dark magenta and woad moire patterns skipped across the black fabric of his robe, reflections of his newfound determination. A click of his fingers, and Lawrence Dillon scurried after him.
They passed quickly through the ransacked manor, and down the portico’s stone steps to the farm rangers parked on th
e gravel. A smudge of smoke on the horizon betrayed Colsterworth’s position.
“Get in,” Quinn said. He was on the verge of laughter.
Lawrence clambered into the front passenger seat as Quinn switched the motor on. The vehicle sped down the drive, sending pebbles skidding onto the grass verge.
“I wonder how long they’ll stay in there like that?” Quinn mused.
“Aren’t we coming back?”
“No. This crappy little world is a dead end, Lawrence. There’s nothing left for us here, no purpose. We have to get off; and there aren’t many navy starships in orbit. We’ve got to reach one before they all leave. The Confederation will be waking to the threat soon. They’ll recall their fleets to protect the important worlds.”
“So where are we going if we do get a frigate?”
“Back to Earth. We have allies there. There are sects in every major arcology. We can gnaw at the Confederation from within, corrupt it completely.”
“Do you think the sects will help us?” Lawrence asked, curious.
“Eventually. They might need a little persuading first. I’ll enjoy that.”
* * *
The AT Squad had the exclusive shop completely surrounded. Moyce’s of Pasto occupied a more hospitable section of the city than the Mahalia warehouse. The building’s design was an indulgent neo-Napoleonic, overlooking one of the main parks. It catered to the aristocracy and the wealthy, trading mainly on snob value. The shop itself was only a fifth of the business; Moyce’s main income came from supplying goods and delicacies to estates and the upwardly mobile clear across the continent. There were eight separate loading bay doors at the back of the building to accommodate the fleet of lorries which were dispatched every night. Their feed roads merged into a single trunk road which led down into a tunnel where it joined one of the city’s three major underground ring motorways.
The Night's Dawn Trilogy Page 130