The Night's Dawn Trilogy

by Peter F. Hamilton

  The airlock tube was five metres long, and narrower than the corridor, barely two metres wide. She manoeuvred herself into it, only to find the hatch at the far end was shut.

  At last, an excuse to use the energistic ability.

  There was a surge of electricity around the hatch. She could sense the main power cables behind the azure blue composite walls, thick lines that burnt with an ember glow of current. There were other cables too, smaller and dimmer. It was one of those which had come alive, connected to a small communications block set into the rim of the hatch.

  “It’s Loren, isn’t it?” a voice from the block asked. “Loren Skibbow, I’m sure it’s you. My name is Dr Riley Dobbs. I was treating Gerald before you took him away.”

  She stared at the block in shock. How the bloody hell had he figured that out?

  The power flowed through her body, twisting up from the beyond like a hot spring; she could feel it squirting through every cell. Her mind shaped it as it rose inside her, transforming it into the pattern she wanted, a pattern which matched her dreamy wish. It began to superimpose itself over reality. Sparks shivered over the surface of the hatch.

  “Loren, I want to help, and I’ve been given the authority which will allow me to help. Please listen. Gerald is my patient, I don’t want him harmed. I believe the two of us agree on that.”

  “Go to hell, Doctor. Better still, I’ll take you there personally. You damaged my husband’s mind. I’m not going to forget that.”

  There were noises in the corridor behind her, soft scraping, clinking sounds. When she focused, she could perceive the minds of the marines closing on her. Cold and anxious, but very determined.

  “Gerald was damaged by the possession,” Dobbs said. “I was trying to cure him. I want to continue that process.”

  The sparks had begun to swirl around the composite of the airlock tube, penetrating below the surface as if they were swimming through the material.

  “Under the muzzle of a gun?” she asked scathingly. “I know they’re behind me.”

  “The marines won’t shoot. I promise that, Loren. It would be pointless. Shooting would just cost the life of the person you’ve possessed. Nobody wants that. Please, come and talk to me. I’ve already obtained huge concessions from the authorities. Gerald can be taken down to the planet. He’ll be looked after properly, I’ll continue his therapy. Perhaps someday he can even see Marie again.”

  “You mean Kiera. That bitch won’t let my daughter go.”

  “Nothing is certain. We can discuss this. Please. You can’t leave on the spaceplane. Even if you get in you can hardly pilot it down through the SD network. The only way Gerald can get down to the planet is if I take him.”

  “You won’t touch him again. He’s safe in my hiding place now, and you never found me, not in all the time I was there.”

  The airlock walls gave out a small creak. All the sparks had blurred together to form a glowing ring of composite encircling her. She smiled tightly. The subterfuge was nearly complete. Dobbs’s intervention had turned out to be a beautiful bonus.

  Loren could sense the marines holding back just past the edge of the airlock tube. She took a deep breath, attempting to deflect the knowledge of what was about to come. White fire burst out of her feet with a terrible screeching sound. It fountained into the corridor and broke apart into an avalanche of individual fireballs which careered into the waiting marines.

  “No, Loren, don’t, I can help. Please—”

  She exerted herself to the full. Dobbs’s voice fractured into a brassy caterwaul before vanishing altogether as the energistic effect crashed every processor within twenty-five metres.

  “Don’t,” Pou Mok pleaded from the heart of Loren’s mind. “I won’t tell them where he is. I promise. They’ll never know. Let me live.”

  “I can’t trust the living,” Loren told her.

  “Bitch!”

  The wall of the airlock tube gleamed brighter than the fireballs, then the composite vaporised. Loren flew out of the widening gap, impelled by the blast of air which stampeded away into the vacuum.

  “Dear God,” Admiral Farquar grunted. The spaceport’s external sensors showed him the jet of air diminishing. Three marines had followed Loren Skibbow out into space. Their armour suits would provide some protection against decompression, and they had a small oxygen reserve. The duty officer had already dispatched some MSVs to chase after them.

  Loren Skibbow was a different matter. For a while she had glowed from within, a fluorescent figure spinning around and around as she left the ruptured dock behind. Now the glow was fading. After a couple of minutes it winked out. The body exploded far more violently than it should have done.

  “Locate as much as you can of her, and bring the pieces back,” Admiral Farquar told the duty officer. “We can take a DNA sample; the ISA ought to be able to identify her for us.”

  “But why?” Dr Dobbs asked, mortified. “What the hell made her do that?”

  “Perhaps they don’t think quite like us, after all,” the admiral said.

  “They do. I know they do.”

  “When we find Skibbow, you can ask him.”

  It was a task which proved harder than expected. There was no response from his debrief nanonics, so the Royal Navy began a physical search of Guyana, monitored by the AI. No room, no service tunnel, and no storage chamber was overlooked. Any space larger than a cubic metre was examined.

  It took two and a half days. Pou Mok’s room was opened and searched thirty-three hours after it began. Because it was listed as being rented (currently unoccupied) by someone on Ombey, and the diligent search turned up nothing, it was closed up and codelocked.

  The cabinet meeting which followed the end of the search decided that one missing mental patient could not justify keeping the navy’s premier defence base isolated, nor could Ombey do without the products of Guyana’s industrial stations. The asteroid was stood down to a code three status, and the problem of the woman’s identity and Skibbow’s whereabouts handed over to a joint ISA ESA team.

  Three and a half days after its original departure time, the Quadin left for Pinjarra. Gerald Skibbow wasn’t aware of it, he had been in zero-tau an hour before Loren’s final diversion.

  16

  The Bar KF-T wasn’t up to much, but after a fifty-hour trip squashed into the two-deck life support capsule of an inter-orbit cargo tug with just the captain’s family to talk to, Monica Foulkes wasn’t about to closet herself away in a barren hotel room. A drink and some company, that’s what I need. She sat on a stool up at the bar sipping an imported beer while Ayacucho’s meagre nightlife eddied around her. The economic downturn from the quarantine was affecting every aspect of Dorados life, even here. It was ten-thirty P.M. local time and only five couples were braving the dance floor, there were even some tables free. But the young men were still reassuringly on the prowl; she’d already had three offers of a drink.

  The only cause for concern was how many of them were wearing red handkerchiefs around their ankles, boys and girls. She couldn’t be entirely sure if they wanted to seduce her or simply convert her. Deadnight was becoming an alarming trend; the ESA’s head of station in Mapire estimated twenty per cent of the Dorados’ teenage population was getting sucked in. Monica would have put it nearer to fifty per cent. Given the blandness of existence among the asteroids she was surprised it wasn’t even higher.

  Her extended sensory analysis program plotted the tall man’s approach, only alerting her to his existence when he was two metres away and his destination obvious.

  “Can I get you another bottle?”

  Her intended reply perished as soon as she saw the too-long greying hair flopping over his brow. “Sure,” she said, grinning whimsically.

  He sat on the empty stool beside her and signalled the barmaid for a couple of bottles. “Now this is far more stylish than our last encounter.”

  “True. How are you, Samuel?”

  “Overworked and
underpaid. Government employees get the same deal the Confederation over.”

  “You forgot unappreciated.”

  “No I didn’t,” he said cheerfully. “That’s the benefit of Edenism, everyone contributes to the greater good, no matter what area we excel in.”

  “Oh, God.” She accepted her new beer from the barmaid. “An evangelical Edenist. Just my luck.”

  “So, what are you doing here?”

  “Negotiating armament manufacturing contracts; it actually says I’m a rep for Octagon Exports on my passport.”

  “Could be worse.” Samuel tried his beer, and frowned at the bottle with some dismay. “Take me, I’m supposed to be part of the delegation from this system’s Edenist habitats, discussing mutual defence enhancement arrangements. I specialize in internal security procedures.”

  Monica laughed, and tipped her bottle at the middle-aged Edenist. “Good luck.” The humour ended. “You must have seen them?”

  “Yes. I’m afraid the possessed are definitely inside the barricades.”

  “Shit! I meant the Deadnight kids.”

  “Ah. Monica, please take care. Our . . . examination of the Dorados has shown up several cadres of possessed. They’re here, and they are expanding. I do not advise you return to Mapire. Our estimation is that it will fall within another three days, probably less.”

  “Did you tell the governing council?”

  “No. We decided it would cause too much panic and disorder. The council would institute quite draconian measures, and be completely unable to enforce them, which would only worsen the situation. The Dorados do not have the usual civil government structure; for all their size and economic importance, they remain company towns, without adequate law enforcement personnel. In short, the possessed will take over here anyway. We need time to search in peace before they do. I’m afraid Mzu comes before everything, including alerting the population.”

  “Oh. Thanks for the warning.”

  “My pleasure. Have your assets located Daphine Kigano yet?”

  Monica crinkled her face up in distaste. I shouldn’t be discussing this, not with him. Standard agency doctrine. But the universe wasn’t exactly standard anymore. And the ESA didn’t have too many resources here. “No. But we know it’s her.”

  “Yes. That’s what we concluded.”

  “A chartered starship carrying one passenger was rather unsubtle. Our station accessed the Department of Immigration’s file on the Samaku’s docking: one hundred per cent visual confirmation. God knows what she was doing in the Narok system, though.”

  “Just trading ships, we hope. An interdiction order has gone out for the Samaku, all voidhawks and Confederation Navy ships are alert for it.”

  “Good. Look, Samuel, I don’t know what your orders are—”

  “Originally: find Mzu, prevent her from handing over the Alchemist to the Garissan partizan movement, retrieve the Alchemist. That’s the soft option. If we can’t do that, then I was instructed to terminate her and destroy her neural nanonics. If we don’t get the Alchemist, no one else must have it.”

  “Yeah. Pretty much the same as mine. Personally I think the second option would be best all round.”

  “Possibly. I must admit that even after seventy-five years in the job I am reluctant to kill in cold blood. A life is a life.”

  “For the greater good, my friend.”

  Samuel smiled sadly. “I know both the arguments and the stakes involved. However, there is also a new factor to consider. We absolutely cannot allow her or it to fall into the hands of the possessed.”

  “God, I know that. Capone with antimatter is bad enough; give him the Alchemist and the Confederation Navy might not be able to contain him.”

  “Which means, we really don’t want to expedite option two, do we?”

  Facing him was the same as receiving a stern glance from a loving grandfather who was dispensing homely wisdom. How infuriating that she had to have the obvious pointed out to her in such a fashion. “How can I argue against that?” She grunted miserably.

  “Just as long as you appreciate all the factors.”

  “Sure. Consider my wrist firmly smacked. What have your lot got planned for her, then?”

  “Following acquisition, Consensus recommended placing her in zero-tau. At the very least until the possessed situation is resolved. Possibly longer.”

  “How long?” Monica almost didn’t want to ask, or know.

  “Consensus thought it prudent that she remains there until we have a requirement for the Alchemist. It is a large galaxy, after all; there may be other, more hostile xenocs than the Kiint and Tyrathca out there.”

  “I was wrong, you’re not an evangelist, you’re a paranoid.”

  “A pragmatist, I sincerely hope; as are all Edenists.”

  “Okay, Samuel, so pragmatically, what do you want to do next? And please bear in mind that I am a loyal subject of my King.”

  “Concentrate on finding her first, then get her away from the Dorados. The argument over custody can come later.”

  “Nine-tenths of the law,” she muttered. “Are you offering me a joint operation?”

  “Yes, if you’re willing. We have more resources here, I think, which gives us the greater chance of launching a successful extraction mission. But neither of us can afford to dismiss any avenue which will locate her. I am sure your Duke of Salion would approve of any action which guaranteed her removal from the scene right now. You can accompany her on our evacuation flight; and afterwards we would allow a joint custody to satisfy the Kingdom we have not acquired Alchemist technology. Is that reasonable?”

  “Yeah, very. We have a deal.”

  They touched bottles.

  “The local partizan leadership has been called to a meeting here tonight,” she said. “Unfortunately, I don’t know exactly where that is in the asteroid. I’m waiting for our asset to get in touch as soon as it’s over.”

  “Thank you, Monica. We don’t know where it is, either. But we’re assuming she will be there.”

  “Can you track any of the partizans?”

  “It is not easy. But we’ll certainly make every effort.”

  * * *

  For three days the rented office suite which had become the new Edenist intelligence service headquarters in Ayacucho had been the centre of a remarkable breeding program. When the agents of the “defence delegation” team arrived they brought with them seventy thousand geneered spider eggs. Every arachnid was affinity-capable, and small enough to clamber through grilles and scurry through the vast mechanical plexus of lift shafts, maintenance passages, environmental ducts, cable conduits, and waste disposal pipes which knitted the asteroid’s rooms and public halls together into a functional whole.

  For over seventy hours the tiny infiltrators were coaxed and manipulated along black pipes and through chinks in the rock, slipping around cracks in badly fitted composite panels. Thousands never made it to their required destination. Victims of more predatory creatures, of working insect grids, of security barriers (most common in the corporate areas), sluices of strange liquids, smears of sticky fluids, and the most common failing of all: being lost.

  But for every one which didn’t make it, five did. At the end of the deployment period the Edenists had visual coverage of sixty-seven per cent of Ayacucho’s interior (which was how Samuel found Monica Foulkes so easily). The three voidhawks perched on Ayacucho’s docking ledges, along with the ten armed voidhawks holding station inside Tunja’s particle disk, and the agents reviewed the spiders on a snapshot rotor, managing a complete sweep every four hours. As a method of locating one individual it was horribly inefficient. Samuel knew that it would only be pure chance if Mzu was spotted during one of the sweeps. It was up to the agents on the ground to lower the odds by procedural work; their dull routine of researching public files, bullying assets, bribing officialdom, and on occasion outright blackmail.

  * * *

  For thirty years the Garissan partizan movement
had pursued a course of consistently lacklustre activity. It funded several anti-Omuta propaganda campaigns to keep the hatred alive among the first of a new generation born to the refugees. Mercenaries and ex-Garissan navy marines were recruited and sent on sabotage missions against any surviving Omutan interests. There were even a couple of attempts to fly into the Omuta system and attack asteroid settlements, both of which were snuffed by CNIS before the starships ever left dock. But for the last decade the leadership had done little except talk. Membership had dropped away steadily, as had funding, along with any real enthusiasm.

  With such shoddy organization and defunct motivation it was inevitable that any intelligence agency which had ever shown an interest in the partizans had collated files on every person who had been a member, or even attended a fringe meeting. Their leadership was perfectly documented, long since consigned to the semi-crank category and downgraded to intermittent monitoring. A status which was now abruptly reversed.

  There were five people making up the executive of Ayacucho’s partizan group. In keeping with the movement’s deterioration none of them followed the kind of security procedures they had obeyed so rigorously in the early days. That sloppiness in conjunction with an encyclopedic knowledge of their daily activity patterns allowed the Edenists to position spiders where they could provide a comprehensive coverage of the leadership’s movements in the hours leading up to the meeting.

  Samuel and the voidhawks were presented with eyeblink pictures of the partizan leaders making their way through the asteroid. Respectable middle-age professionals now, they all had escorts of bodyguards, keen for any sign of trouble. These entourages were unmistakable, making them easy to follow.