The man’s thoughts were becoming weaker, smaller, as Rocio pushed and wriggled himself deeper into the brain’s neural pathways. As he did so, more of the old human experiences made their eminently welcome return, the air rushing into his lungs, thud of a heart. And all the while his new host was diminishing. The way Rocio pushed him down, confining his soul, was almost instinctive, and becoming easier by the second.
He could hear the other lost souls of the beyond shrieking their outrage that he was the one to gain salvation. The bitter threats, the accusations of unworthiness.
Then there was just his host’s feeble protests, and a second oddly distant voice begging to know what was happening to its beloved. He squeezed the host’s soul away, expanding his own mind to fill the entire brain.
“That’s enough,” a woman’s voice said. “We need you for something more important.”
“Leave me!” he coughed. “I’m almost in, almost—” His strength was growing, the captive body starting to respond. Tear-drowned eyes revealed the wavery outline of three figures bending over him. Figures which must surely be angels. A gloriously pretty girl clad only in a resplendent white corona.
“No,” she said. “Get into the blackhawk. Now.”
There must have been some terrible mistake. Didn’t they understand? This was the miracle. The redemption. “I’m in,” Rocio told them. “Look, see? I’m in now. I’ve done it.” He made one of his new hands rise, seeing blisters like big translucent fungi hanging from every finger.
“Then get out.”
The hand disintegrated. Blood splattered across his face, obliterating his sight. He wanted to scream, but his vocal cords were too coarsened to obey.
“Get into the blackhawk, you little pillock, or we’ll send you right back into the beyond again. And this time we’ll never let you return.”
Another burst of quite astonishing pain, followed by equally frightening numbness, told him his right foot had been destroyed. They were gnawing away at his beautiful new flesh, leaving him nothing. He raged barrenly at the unfairness of it all. Then strange echoey sensations blossomed into his mind.
See? Dariat asked. It’s simple, apply your thoughts like this.
He did, and affinity opened, joining him with the Mindor.
What is happening? the frantic blackhawk asked.
Rocio’s entire left leg was obliterated. White fire engulfed his groin and the stumpy remnant of his right leg.
Peran! the blackhawk called.
Rocio superimposed the captain’s mind tone over his own thoughts. Help me, Mindor.
How? What is happening? I could not feel you. You closed yourself to me. Why? You have never done that before.
I’m sorry. It’s the pain, a heart attack. I think I’m dying. Let me be with you, my friend.
Come. Hurry!
He felt the affinity link broaden, and the blackhawk was there waiting for its captain, its mind full of love and sympathy; a gentle and trusting creature for all its size and indomitable power. Kiera Salter exerted still more of her own particular brand of pressure.
With a last curse at the devils who left him no choice, Rocio abandoned that cherished human body, sliding himself along the affinity link. This transfer was different from the one which had brought him back from beyond. That had been a forced entry, this was a welcome embrace from an unsophisticated lover, drawing him in to secure him from harm.
The energistic nexus which his soul engendered established itself within the waiting neural cells at the core of the blackhawk, and the linkage which connected him to the captain’s body snapped as the skull was smashed apart by Kiera’s triumphant fist.
The Mindor sat on its pedestal on the second of Valisk’s three docking ledges, patiently sucking nutrient fluid into its storage bladders. Beyond the eclipse of the habitat’s non-rotating spaceport, the gas giant Opuntia was a pale cross-hatching of lime-green storm bands. The sight was a comforting one to the blackhawk. It had been birthed in Opuntia’s rings, taking eighteen years to grow into the lengthy hundred-and-twenty-five-metre cone of its mature form. Even among blackhawks, whose profiles varied considerably from the standard voidhawk disk shape, it was an oddity. Its polyp hull was a dusky green speckled with purple rings; three fat finlike protuberances angled up out of its rear quarter. Given its squashed-missile appearance, the only option for the life support module was a swept-back teardrop, which sat like a metallic saddle over the midsection of its upper hull.
Like all blackhawks and voidhawks its distortion field was folded around the hull, barely operative while it was docked. A condition which ended as soon as Rocio Condra’s soul invaded its neural cells. The number of neurones he now possessed was considerably larger than a human brain, increasing the amount of energistic power produced by the transdimensional twist. He extended himself out from the storage cluster Mindor had designated, breaking straight through the sub-routines designed to support him.
The startled blackhawk managed to ask: Who are you? before he vanquished its mind. But he couldn’t assume control of a blackhawk’s enormously complex functions as easily as he could a human body. There was no instinct to guide him, no old familiar nerve impulse sequences to follow. This was an alien territory, there hadn’t been any starships at all during his life, let alone living ones.
The autonomic routines, those regulating the Mindor’s organs, were fine, he just left them operating. However, the distortion field was controlled by direct conscious thought.
A couple of seconds after he gained possession it was billowing outwards uncontrollably. The blackhawk tipped back, pulling the pedestal feed tubes from their orifices. Nutrient fluid fountained out, flooding across the ledge until the habitat hurriedly closed the muscle valves.
Mindor rocked forwards, then rose three metres above the mushroom-shaped pedestal as Rocio frantically tried to contain the oscillating fluxes running wild through his patterning cells. Unfortunately he couldn’t quite coordinate the process. Mass detection, the blackhawk’s primary sense, came from a sophisticated secondary manipulation of the distortion field. Rocio couldn’t work out where he was, let alone how to return to where he’d been.
What the hell are you doing? an irate Rubra asked.
Mindor’s stern swept around in a fast arc, lower fins almost scraping the ledge surface. The driver of a service vehicle slammed on the brakes, and reversed fast as the huge bitek starship swished past less than five metres in front of her cabin’s bubble windscreen.
Sorry, Rocio said, frenziedly searching through the blackhawk’s confined memories for some kind of command routine. It’s a power flux. I’ll have it choked back in a second.
Two more blackhawks had started similar gyrations as returned souls invaded their neurones. Rubra shot them vexed questions as well.
Rocio managed to regulate the field somewhat more effectively, and tie in the mass forms he was sensing to the images from the sensor blisters. His hull was slithering dangerously close to the rim of the docking ledge.
He reconfigured the distortion field to impel him in the other direction. Which was fine, until he realized exactly how fast he was heading for the shell wall. And another (non-possessed) blackhawk was sitting in the way.
Can’t stop, he blurted at it.
It rose smooth and fast, shooting sixty metres straight up, protesting most indignantly. The Mindor skidded underneath, and just managed to halt before its rear fins struck Valisk’s shell.
The remaining two blackhawk captains in the Tacoul Tavern were finally sacrificed to Kiera’s strategy; and their ships shot off their respective pedestals like overpowered fireworks. Rubra and the other blackhawks fired alarmed queries after them. Three of the unpossessed blackhawks, thoroughly unnerved by their cousins’ behaviour, also launched themselves from the ledge. A collision appeared imminent as the giant ships cavorted in the kilometre gap between the two ledges. Rubra began broadcasting flight vectors at them to try to steer them apart, demanding instant obedience.
By now, Rocio had mastered the basics of distortion field dynamics. He manoeuvred his prodigious bulk back towards the original pedestal. After five attempts, edging around in jerky spirals, he managed to settle.
If you’ve all quite finished, Rubra said as the agitated flock of blackhawks settled nervously.
Rocio sheepishly acquiesced to the admonishment. He and the other four possessed blackhawks exchanged private acknowledgements, swapping snippets of information on how to control their new bodies.
After experimenting for half an hour Rocio was pleasantly surprised with what he could see and feel. The gas giant environ was bloated with energy of many types, and a great deal of loose mass. There were overlapping tides of magnetic, electromagnetic, and particle energy. Twenty moons, hundreds of small asteroids. They all traced delicate lines across his consciousness, registering in a multitude of fashions: harmonics, colours, scents. He had far more sensations available than those produced by a human sensorium. And any sense at all was better than the beyond.
The affinity band fell into a subdued silence as they waited to see what would happen next.
7
The overloaded spaceplane ascended cleanly enough through Lalonde’s stratosphere, racing away from Amarisk’s mountainous eastern coastline. It wasn’t until the craft reached an altitude of a hundred kilometres, where the ions had thinned out to little more than a static-congested vacuum, that Ashly Hanson had to switch from the induction rams to the reaction drive. That was when their problems began. He had to redline the twin rocket engines in the tail, shunting up the voltage from the power cells, boosting the plasma temperature to dangerous heights. Coolant shunts emitted caution warnings, which he balanced against the craft’s performance, heeding some, ignoring others. The job was his personal milieu: true piloting, knowing just how far he could push the systems, when to take calculated risks.
Power reserves, fuel levels, and safety margins formed fabulously elaborate interacting multitextural graphics inside Ashly’s mind as he continued the magic juggling act. The factors were slowly coming together, enabling him to decide on his best case option: escape velocity at a hundred and twenty kilometres altitude. In theory that would leave seven kilos of reaction mass in the tanks. “But not a nice height,” he muttered to himself. Never mind, it gave them the ability to rendezvous with Lady Mac.
The reasons for the spaceplane’s overstressed loading parameters, all twenty-nine of them, were chattering and whooping happily behind him, impervious to the efforts of Father Elwes and Kelly Tirrel to shush them. It wouldn’t last, Ashly thought with an air of inevitable gloom, kids always threw up in zero-gee, especially the ones as young as these.
He datavised the flight computer for a channel to Lady Mac. It took a while for the communications processor to lock on to Lalonde’s satellite, and even then the bandwidth was reduced. Sore evidence of the malicious forces swirling invisibly around the doomed planet.
“Joshua?”
“Tracking you, Ashly.”
“You’re going to have to manoeuvre to make rendezvous. I’m even having to expend my RC thruster reaction mass to achieve orbit. This is the vector.” Ashly datavised over the file from the spaceplane’s flight computer.
“Jesus, that’s cutting it fine.”
“I know. Sorry, but the kids weigh too much. And you’re going to have to replace the reaction engines altogether when we reach port. I had to pump them over the safeties. A full structural stress test probably wouldn’t hurt, either.”
“Ah well, our no claims bonus got blown to shit in the battle anyway. Stand by for rendezvous in twelve minutes.”
“Thank you, Joshua.”
The contented babble coming from the spaceplane’s cabin was quieting considerably. Acceleration had now declined to a twentieth of a gee as the orbital injection burn was finalized. Both rocket engines cut out. The flight computer reported four kilos of reaction mass were left in the tanks.
Then the first damp groan could be heard from the rear of the cabin. Ashly braced himself.
* * *
Acceleration warnings sounded in the Lady Macbeth’s cabins. The Edenists working under the direction of Sarha Mitcham and Dahybi Yadev to prepare for the influx of some thirty children hurried to the couches and temporary mattresses. They all wore variants of the same grey, haunted expression on their faces. Given what they’d been through in the last thirty hours, such consternation was understandable. The high-pitched hooting conjured up all the wrong associations.
“Don’t worry,” Joshua announced. “No killer gees this time, we’re just manoeuvring.”
He was alone on the bridge, lights reduced to a pink glimmer, sharpening the resolution of the console hologram displays and AV projections. Strangely enough, the solitude felt good. He was now what he had always wanted to be—or thought he did—a starship captain, devoid of any other responsibility. Overseeing the flight computer and simultaneously piloting the big vessel along their new course vector towards the inert spaceplane didn’t leave him with much time to brood on the consequences of their recent actions: Warlow dead, the mercenary team lost, the planet conquered, the rescue fleet broken. The whole shabby disaster really wasn’t one he wanted to reflect on, nor the wider implications of having the possessed loose in the universe. Better to function usefully, to lose oneself in the mechanics of the problem at hand.
In a way his emotional climb-down was akin to a sense of release. The battles which they’d personally fought in, they’d won. Then they’d rescued the Edenists, the children, and now Kelly. And in a little while they were going home.
At the end, what more could you ask?
The unsuppressible guilt was his silent answer.
Joshua stabilized Lady Mac a kilometre above the spaceplane, allowing orbital mechanics to bring the two together. Both craft had fallen into the penumbra, reducing the planet below to a featureless black smear. They were visually dead, only radar and infrared could distinguish between oceans and continents.
He ordered the flight computer to establish communications circuits with the small number of low-orbit observation satellites remaining. The image they provided built up quickly.
Amarisk had emerged completely into the daylight hemisphere now. He could see the continent was completely dominated by the huge red cloud. The vast patch must already cover nearly a quarter of the land; and it was expanding rapidly out from the Juliffe basin, its leading edges moving at hurricane velocities. Yet it still retained its silky consistency, a uniform sheet through which no glimpse of the ground below was possible. The grey blemish which had hung above the Quallheim Counties during the mercenaries’ brief campaign had also vanished. Even the mountains where the Tyrathca lived proved no barrier; the cloud was bubbling around them, sealing over valleys. Only the very tallest peaks were left unclaimed, their jagged snow caps sticking up from the red veil, icebergs bobbing through a sea of blood.
The sight had repelled Joshua before. Now it frightened him. The sheer potency it intimated was appalling.
Joshua flicked back to the images coming in from the Lady Mac’s extended sensor clusters. The spaceplane was five hundred metres away, its wings already folded back. He played the starship’s equatorial ion thrusters, and moved in, bringing the docking cradle around to engage the latches in the spaceplane’s nose cone.
Sitting in his pilot’s seat, watching the performance through the narrow windscreen, Ashly was, as ever, amazed by Joshua’s ability to control the huge spherical starship’s motions. The docking cradle which had telescoped out of the hangar bay swung around gracefully until it was head-on, then slid over the squashed-bullet nose. Naturally the alignment matched first time.
Various clunking sounds were transmitted through the stress structure, and the spaceplane was slowly drawn inside the Lady Mac’s narrow cylindrical hangar. Ashly shuddered as another warm, sticky, smelly globe of fluid landed on his ship-suit. He didn’t make the mistake of trying to swat it, that just br
oke the larger portions into smaller ones. And you could inhale those.
“Eight of you are going to have to stay inside the spaceplane cabin,” Sarha datavised as the hangar’s airlock tube mated to the spaceplane.
“You’re kidding me,” a dismayed Ashly replied.
“Bad luck, Ashly. But we’re maxing out our life support with so many people on board. I really need the spaceplane’s carbon dioxide filters.”
“Oh, God,” he said miserably. “Okay. But send in some handheld sanitizer units, and quickly.”
“They’re already in the airlock waiting for you.”
“Thanks.”
“Send out the smallest children first, please. I’m going to cram them into the zero-tau pods.”
“Will do.” He datavised the flight computer to open the airlock hatch, then left his seat to talk with Father Elwes about which children should go where.
Lady Macbeth’s two undamaged fusion drive tubes ignited as soon as the spaceplane was stowed inside the hull. She rose away from the planet at a steady one gee, heading up towards a jump coordinate which would align her on Tranquillity’s star.
Far behind her, the middle section of the red cloud rippled and swirled in agitation. A tornado column swelled up from the centre, extending a good twenty kilometres above the twisting currents of cumulus. It flexed blindly for several minutes, like a beckoning—or clawing—finger. Then the Lady Macbeth’s sensor clusters and thermal dump panels began to retract into their jump positions below the hull. Her brilliant blue-white fusion exhaust shrank away, and she coasted onwards and upwards for a brief minute until an event horizon claimed her.
The questing finger of cloud lost its vigour, and slowly bowed over in defeat, its glowing vapour reabsorbed into the now quiescent centre of the shroud. The leading edges continued their advance.
* * *
The view from Monterey’s Hilton was as spectacular as only a three-hundred-and-fifty-million-dollar building could provide. Al Capone loved it. The Nixon suite was on the bottom floor of the tower, giving it a standard gravity. New California glided slowly past the curving, radiation-shielded window which made up an entire wall of the master bedroom. The planet gleamed enticingly against the jet-black starfield. His one disappointment was that from here the stars didn’t twinkle like they used to when he watched them at night above his summer retreat cottage at Round Lake. That aside, he felt like a king again.
The Night's Dawn Trilogy Page 149