Nearby processors and sensors came back on-line. Thermal alerts flashed into Valisk’s net, along with a security call. Ceiling-mounted fire suppression nozzles swivelled around, and squirted retardant foam at the blaze.
The thick streams made little difference. Ross’s stolen body was dimming now, sinking to its charred knees, flakes of carbonated flesh crumbling away.
Rubra activated the audio circuit on in the shop’s net processor. “Out!” he commanded.
The manager cringed at the shout.
“Move,” Rubra said. “It’s the possessed. Get out.” He instructed all the net processors on the seventeenth floor to repeat the order. Analysis routines began correlating all the information from the starscraper’s sensitive cells. Even with his principal personality pattern directing the procedure, he couldn’t see what was happening inside the Tacoul Tavern. Then bizarre figures started to emerge from the tavern’s doorway into the vestibule.
He’d found them, the whole damnable nest.
White fireballs shot through the air, pursuing the terrorized delicatessen manager as he ran for the lifts. One of them caught him, clinging to his shoulder. He screamed as black, rancid smoke churned out of the wound.
Rubra immediately cancelled the floor’s autonomic routines and shunted himself into the operating hierarchy. The vestibule’s electrophorescent cells went dead, dropping the whole area into darkness, except for the confusing strobe of white fire. A muscle membrane door leading onto the stairwell snapped open, sending out a single fan of light. The manager altered course, put his head down, and charged straight at it.
Chips of polyp rained down on the vestibule floor. All across the ceiling the atmosphere duct tubules were splitting open as Rubra contracted and flexed the flow regulator muscles in directions they were never designed for. Thick white vapour poured out of the jagged holes. Warm, dank, and oily, it was the concentrated water vapour breathed out of a thousand lungs, which the tubules were supposed to extract from the air and pump into specialist refining organs.
The possessed wished it gone. And the muggy fog obeyed, rushing aside to let them pass. But not before it reduced their fireballs to impotent wispy swirls of fluorescing mist.
The manager reached the stairwell. Rubra closed the muscle-membrane door behind him, clenching it tight as several balls of white fire slammed into the surface, burrowing in like lava worms.
Kiera Salter ran out into the vestibule just as the last of the stinking mist vanished. Red emergency lights had come on, bringing an antagonistic moonlight glow to the broad chamber. She saw the stairwell’s muscle-membrane door slap shut ahead of the vengeful mob.
“Stop!” she yelled.
Some did. Several threw white fire at the muscle membrane.
“Stop this right now,” she said, this time there was an edge in her voice.
“Fuck you, Kiera.”
“He zapped Ross, goddamnit.”
“I’m gonna make him suffer.”
“Maybe.” Kiera strode into the centre of the vestibule and stood there, hands on her hips, staring around at her precariously allied colleagues. “But not like this.” She gestured at the smoking muscle membrane door, which was still shut. The grey surface was visibly quivering. “He knows now.” She tipped her head back, calling out at the ceiling. “Don’t you, Rubra?”
The ceiling’s electrophorescent cells slowly came back on, illuminating her upturned face. Lines of darkness flowed across them, taking shape. YES.
“Yes. See?” She dared any of the possessed to challenge her; a couple of her more powerful new lieutenants, Bonney Lewin and Stanyon, came forward to stand beside her for emphasis. “We’re playing a different game now, no more skulking about. Now we take over the entire habitat.”
NO, printed the ceiling.
“That wasn’t a deal, Rubra,” she shouted up at him. “I’m not offering to make you a partner. Got that? If you’re real, real lucky, then you get to live on. That’s all. If you don’t piss me off. If you don’t get in my way. Then maybe we’ll have a use for your precious Valisk afterwards. But only if you behave. Because once I’ve taken over your population it’s going to be easy to fly away. Only before we go, I’ll use the starships to cut you into little pieces; I’ll split your shell open, I’ll bleed your atmosphere out, I’ll freeze your rivers solid, I’ll blast your digestive organs out of the endcap. It’ll take a long time hurting for you to die completely. Decades, maybe. Who knows. You want to find out?”
YOU ARE COMPLETELY ALONE. POLICE AND COMBAT-BOOSTED MERCENARIES ON THEIR WAY. SURRENDER NOW.
Kiera laughed brutally. “No, we’re not alone, Rubra. There are billions of us.” She looked around at the possessed in the vestibule, not seeing any dissenters (except ones like Dariat and Canaan, who really didn’t count). “Okay, people, as from now we’re going overt. I want procedure five enacted this minute.” A casual click of her fingers, designating tasks. “You three, override the lift supervisor processors, have them ready to take us up into the parkland. Bonney, track down that little shit who wiped Ross, I want him creatively hurt. We’ll set up our command centre in Magellanic Itg’s boardroom.”
The first lift arrived at the seventeenth floor. Five of the possessed hurried in, anxious to show Kiera their eagerness to obey, anxious to reap the rewards. The doors slid shut. Rubra overrode the starscraper’s power circuit safeguards, and routed eighty thousand volts through the metal tracks which lined the lift shaft.
Kiera could hear the screams from inside the lift, feel the agony of forced banishment. The silicon rubber seal between the doors melted and burned, allowing the fearsome light of the bodies’ internecine flame to spew out of the crack.
NOT SO EASY, IS IT?
For about twenty seconds she stood absolutely still, face a perfect cage around any emotion. Then her finger lined up on a spindly youth in a baggy white suit. “You, open the muscle membrane; we’ll use the stairs.”
“Told you so,” the youth said. “We should have gone for him first.”
“Do it,” Kiera snapped. “And the rest of you, Rubra’s demonstrated what he can do. It’s not much compared to our ability, but it’s an irritant. We’ll cut through the neural strata’s connections with the starscrapers eventually, but until then, proceed with caution.”
The muscle-membrane door parted smoothly, allowing the now slightly subdued possessed to troop up the seventeen flights of stairs to the parkland above.
It wasn’t a pure affinity command, Rubra told the Kohistan Consensus. I felt what was almost like a power surge through the neural cells around the muscle membrane. It came in with the affinity command, just wiped all my routines completely. But it’s localized, an area roughly five metres in diameter; it can’t reach into the main neural strata.
Laton claimed that Lewis Sinclair had that same kind of supercharged affinity when he took over Pernik island, the Consensus replied. It works through brute strength, and as such can be subverted. But should one of them succeed in transferring his personality into you, the energistic ability increases in proportion to the number of cells subsumed. You must not allow that to happen.
Fat chance. You know Valisk’s neural cells were sequenced from my DNA, they will only process my thought routines. I guess that’s similar to what Laton did to Pernik when he altered the island’s neural strata with his proteanic virus. The affinity-capable possessed might be able to knock out some functions like the muscle membranes, but their personalities wouldn’t function as independent entities in the neural strata, not unless they operate as a subsection of my pattern. I’d have to let them in.
Excellent news. But can you protect your general population from possession?
It’s going to be tricky, Rubra admitted reluctantly. And I’ll never save all of them, not even a majority. I’m going to have to take a whole load of internal damage, too.
We sympathise. We will help you rebuild afterwards.
If there is an afterwards.
8
Culey asteroid was an almost instinctive choice for André Duchamp. Located in the Dzamin Ude star system, a healthy sixty light-years from Lalonde, it acted as a ready haven for certain types of ships in certain circumstances. As if in reaction to its Chinese-ethnic ancestry, and all the clutter of authoritarian tradition which came with that, the asteroid was notoriously lax when it came to enforcing CAB regulations and scrutinizing the legitimacy of cargo manifests. Such an attitude hadn’t done its economy any harm. Starships came for the ease of trading, and the astroengineering conglomerates came to maintain and support the ships, and where the majors went there followed a plethora of smaller service and finance companies. The Confederation Assembly subcommittee on smuggling and piracy might routinely condemn Culey’s government and its policies, but nothing ever altered. Certainly in the fifteen years he’d been using it, André never had any trouble selling cargo or picking up dubious charters. The asteroid was virtually a second home.
This time, though, when the Villeneuve’s Revenge performed its ZTT jump into the designated emergence zone, Culey spaceport was unusually reticent in granting docking permission. During the last three days the system had received first the reports of Laton’s re-emergence, and secondly the warning from Trafalgar about possible energy virus contamination. Both designated Lalonde as the focus of the trouble.
“But I have a severely injured man on board,” André protested as his third request to be allocated a docking bay was refused.
“Sorry, Duchamp,” the port control officer replied. “We have no bays available.”
“There’s very little traffic movement around the port,” Madeleine Collum observed; she’d accessed the starship’s sensor suite, and was viewing the asteroid. “And most of that is personnel commuters and MSVs, no starships.”
“I am declaring a first-degree emergency,” André datavised to the port officer. “They have to take us now,” he muttered to Madeleine. She simply grunted.
“Emergency declaration acknowledged, Villeneuve’s Revenge,” the port control officer datavised back. “We would advise you set a vector for the Yaxi asteroid. Their facilities are more appropriate to your status.”
André glared at the almost featureless communications console. “Very well. Please open a channel to Commissioner Ri Drak for me.”
Ri Drak was André’s last card, the one he hadn’t quite envisioned playing in a situation such as this, not over the fate of a crew member; the likes of Ri Drak were to be held in reserve until André’s own neck was well and truly on the line.
“Hello, Captain,” Ri Drak datavised. “We would seem to have a problem evolving here.”
“Not for me,” André answered. “No problems. Not like in the past, eh?”
The two of them switched to a high-order encryption program. Much to Madeleine’s annoyance, she couldn’t access the rest of the conversation. Whatever was said took nearly fifteen minutes to discuss. The only giveaway was André’s clumsy face, registering a sneaky grin, intermingled with the sporadic indignant frown.
“Very well, Captain,” Ri Drak said at last. “The Villeneuve’s Revenge is cleared to dock, but at your own risk should you prove to be contaminated. I will alert the security forces to your arrival.”
“Monsieur,” André acknowledged gracelessly.
Madeleine didn’t press. Instead she began datavising the flight computer for systems schematics, assisting the captain with the fusion drive’s ignition sequence.
Culey’s counter-rotating spaceport was a seven-pointed star, its unfortunate condition mirroring the asteroid’s general attitude to spaceworthiness statutes. Several areas were in darkness: silver-white insulation blankets were missing from the surface, creating strange mosaic patterns, and at least three pipes were leaking, throwing up weak grey gas jets.
The Villeneuve’s Revenge was assigned an isolated bay near one of the tips. That at least was fully illuminated, internal spotlights turning the steep-walled metal crater into a shadowless receptacle. Red strobes around the rim flashed in unison as the starship descended onto the extended cradle.
An armed port police squad were first through the airlock tube when it sealed. They rounded up André and the crew, detaining them on the bridge while a customs team examined the ship’s life-support capsules from top to bottom. The search took two hours before clearance was granted.
“You put up a hell of a fight in here,” the port police captain said as he slid through the open ceiling hatch into the lower deck lounge where the possessed had stormed aboard. The compartment was a shambles, fittings broken and twisted, blackened sections of composite melted into queer shapes, dark bloodstains on various surfaces starting to flake. Despite the best efforts of the straining environmental circuit there was a nasty smell of burnt meat in the air which refused to go away. Nine black body bags were secured to the hatch ladder by short lengths of silicon fibre. Stirred by the weak columns of air which was all the broken, vibrating conditioning duct could muster, they drifted a few centimetres above the scorched decking, bumping into each other and recoiling in slow motion.
“Erick and I saw them off,” André said gruffly. It earned him a filthy glance from Desmond Lafoe, who was helping the spaceport coroner classify the bodies.
“You did pretty well, then,” the captain said. “Lalonde sounds as if Hell has materialized inside the Confederation.”
“It has,” André said. “Pure hell. We were lucky to escape. I’ve never seen a space battle more ferocious than that.”
The police captain nodded thoughtfully.
“Captain?” Madeleine datavised. “We’re ready to take Erick’s zero-tau pod down to the hospital now.”
“Of course, proceed.”
“We’ll need you there to clear the treatment payment orders, Captain.”
André’s cheerfully chubby face showed a certain tautness. “I will be along, we’re almost through with the port clearance procedures.”
“You know, I have several friends in the media who would be interested in recordings of your mission,” the police captain said. “Perhaps you would care for me to put you in touch with them? There may even be circumstances where you wouldn’t have to pay import duty; these matters are within my discretion.”
André’s malaised spirit lifted. “Perhaps we could come to some arrangement.”
Madeleine and Desmond accompanied Erick’s zero-tau pod to the asteroid’s hospital in the main habitation cavern. Before the field was switched off, the doctors went through the flek Madeleine had recorded as she stabilized Erick.
“Your friend is a lucky man,” the principal surgeon told them after the initial review.
“We know,” Madeleine said. “We were there.”
“Fortunately his Kulu Corporation neural nanonics are top of the range, very high capacity. The emergency suspension program he ran during the decompression event was correspondingly comprehensive; it has prevented major internal organ tissue death, and there’s very little neural damage, the blood supply to his cranium was sustained almost satisfactorily. We can certainly clone and replace the cells he has lost. Lungs will have to be completely replaced, of course, they always suffer the most from such decompression. And quite a few blood vessels will need extensive repair. The forearm and hand are naturally the simplest operation, a straightforward graft replacement.”
Madeleine grinned over at Desmond. The flight had been a terrific strain on everyone, not knowing if they’d used the correct procedures, or whether the blank pod simply contained a vegetable.
André Duchamp appeared in the private waiting room they were using, his smile so bright that Madeleine gave him a suspicious frown.
“Erick’s going to be all right,” she told him.
“Très bon. He is a beautiful enfant. I always said so.”
“He can certainly be restored,” the surgeon said. “There is the question of what kind of procedure you would like me to perform. We can use artificial tissue implants to return h
im to full viability within a few days, these we have in store. Following that we can begin the cloning operation and start to replace the AT units as his organs mature. Or alternatively we can simply take the appropriate genetic samples, and keep him in zero-tau until the new organs are ready to be implanted.”
“Of course.” André cleared his throat, not quite looking at his other two crew. “Exactly how much would these different procedures cost?”
The surgeon gave a modest shrug. “The cheapest option would just be to give him the artificial tissue and not bother with cloned replacements. AT is the technology which people use in order to boost themselves; the individual units will live longer than him, and they are highly resistant to disease.”
“Magnifique.” André gave a wide, contented smile.
“But we’re not going to use that option, are we, Captain?” Madeleine said forcibly. “Because, as you said when Erick saved both your ship and your arse, you would buy him an entire new clone body if that’s what it took. Didn’t you? So how fortunate that you don’t have to clone a new body, and all the expense that entails. Now all you are going to have to pay for is some artificial tissue and a few clones. Because you certainly don’t want Erick walking around in anything less than a perfectly restored and natural condition. Do you, Captain?”
André’s answering grin was a simple facial ritual. “Non,” he said. “How right you are, my dear Madeleine. As ever.” He gave the surgeon a nod. “Very well, a full clone repair, if you please.”
“Certainly, sir.” The surgeon produced a Jovian Bank credit disk. “I must ask for a deposit of two hundred thousand fuseodollars.”
“Two hundred thousand! I thought you were going to rebuild him, not rejuvenate him.”
“Sadly, there is a lot of work to be done. Surely your insurance premium will cover it?”
“I’ll have to check,” André said heavily.
Madeleine laughed.
“Will Erick be able to fly after the artificial tissue has been implanted?” André asked.
The Night's Dawn Trilogy Page 152