We are generally more law abiding than Adamists, Oxley said. And there are more of them than us. That’s bound to produce a weighted picture.
Don’t make excuses for them, Caucus said.
Lack of education, and fear, Syrinx said. That’s what’s doing it. We have to make allowances, I suppose. But at the same time, their attitude is going to be a real problem in the long term. In fact, it might mean there won’t even be a long term as far as they’re concerned.
Apart from the Kulu Kingdom, and one or two other of the more disciplined societies, Ruben’s suggestion was infected with irony.
She delayed her answer as she became aware of a growing unease in Golomo’s Consensus. Voidhawks from the local defence force were popping in and out of wormholes, filling the affinity band with an excited buzz. What is the problem? she inquired.
We are confirming that the Ethenthia asteroid settlement has fallen to possession, Consensus informed Oenone and its crew. We have just received a message from its Confederation Navy Bureau concerning the arrival of a CNIS captain, Erick Thakrar, from Kursk. According to the bureau chief, Thakrar had obtained information of an extremely important nature. A voidhawk was requested to carry the captain and his prisoner to Trafalgar. Unfortunately there is a fifteen-hour delay to Ethenthia. In the intervening time the possessed appear to have . . .
Along with everyone else attuned to Consensus, Syrinx and her crew were immediately aware of the incoming message. Habitat senses perceived it as a violet star-point of microwaves, shining directly at Golomo from Ethenthia.
“This is Erick Thakrar, CNIS captain; I’m the one Emonn Verona told you about. Or at least I hope he did. God. Anyway, the possessed have taken over Ethenthia now. You probably know that by now. I managed to make it to a starship, the Tigara, but they’re on to me. Listen, the information I’ve got is vital. I can’t trust it to an open com link; if they find out what I know, it’ll become useless. But right now this ship is totally fucked, and I’m not much better. I’ve got a partial alignment on the Ngeuni system, but there’s barely anything about it in this almanac. I think it’s a stage one colony. If I can’t transfer to a flightworthy starship there, I’ll try and slingshot back here. God, the SD platform is locking on. Okay, I’m jumping now—”
Ngeuni is a stage one colony, Oenone responded immediately.
Syrinx was automatically aware of its spatial location eleven light years away. When correlated with Ethenthia’s current position the alignment must have been very tenuous indeed. If Thakrar’s ship was as bad as he implied . . .
The colony is still in its start-up stage, Oenone continued. However, there may be some starships available.
This is something I should follow up, Syrinx told Consensus.
We concur. It will be another day before Thakrar returns here, assuming his ship remains flightworthy.
We’ll check Ngeuni to see if he got there. Even as she spoke, energy was flowing through the voidhawk’s patterning cells.
* * *
Stephanie heard a loud mechanical screeching sound followed by a raucous siren blast. She grinned around at the children sitting at the kitchen table. “Looks like your uncle Moyo has found us some transport.”
Her humour faded when she reached the bungalow’s front porch. The bus which was parked on the road outside was spitting light in every spectrum; its bodywork a tight-packed mass of cartoon flowers growing out of paisley fields. LOVE, PEACE, and KARMA flashed in nightclub neon on the sides. The darkest areas were its gleaming chrome hubcaps.
Moyo climbed down out of the cab, busily radiating embarrassment. The doors at the back of the bus hissed open, and another man climbed down. She’d never seen anyone with so much hair before.
The children were crowding around her, gazing out eagerly at the radiant carnival apparition.
“Is that really going to take us to the border?”
“How do you make it light up?”
“Please, Stephanie, can I get inside?”
Stephanie couldn’t say no to them, so she waved them on with a casual gesture. They swarmed over the small front lawn to examine the wonderment.
“I can see how this should help us avoid any undue attention,” she said to Moyo. “Have you lost your mind?”
A guilty finger indicated his new companion. “This is Cochrane, he helped me with the bus.”
“So it was your idea?”
“Surely was.” Cochrane bowed low. “Man, I always wanted a set of wheels like this.”
“Good. Well now you’ve had it, you can say goodbye. I have to take these children out of here, and they’re not going in that thing. We’ll change it into something more suitable.”
“Won’t do you no good.”
“Oh?”
“He’s right,” Moyo said. “We can’t sneak about, not here. You know that. Everybody can sense everything in Mortonridge now.”
“That’s still no reason to use this . . . this—” She thrust an exasperated arm out towards the bus.
“It’s like gonna be a mobile Zen moment for those with unpure thoughts,” Cochrane said.
“Oh, spare me!”
“No really. Any cat catches sight of that bus and they’re gonna have to confront like their inner being, you know. It’s totally neat, a soul looking into its own soul. With this, you’re broadcasting goodness at them on Radio Godhead twenty-four hours a day; it’s a mercy mission that makes mothers weep for their lost children. My Karmic Crusader bus is going to shame them into letting you through. But like if you hit on people with a whole heavy military scene, like some kind of covert behind-the-lines hostility raid, you’ll waste all those good vibes your karma has built up. It’ll make it easy for all the cosmically uncool redneck dudes running loose out there to make it hard for us.”
“Humm.” He did make an odd kind of sense, she admitted grudgingly. Moyo gave her a hopeful shrug, a loyalty which lent her a cosy feeling. “Well, we could try it for a few miles I suppose.” Then she gave Cochrane a suspicious look. “What do you mean, us?”
He smiled and held his arms out wide. A miniature rainbow sprang up out of his palms, arching over his head. The children laughed and clapped.
“Hey, I was at Woodstock, you know. I helped rule the world for three days. You need the kind of peaceful influence I exert over the land. I’m a friend to all living things, the unliving, too, now.”
“Oh, hell.”
* * *
Erick still hadn’t activated the life-support capsule’s internal environmental systems. He was too worried what the power drain would do to the starship’s one remaining functional fusion generator. There certainly wasn’t enough energy stored in the reserve electron matrix cells to power up the jump nodes.
Ngeuni’s star was a severe blue-white point a quarter of a light-year away. Not quite bright enough to cast a shadow on the hull, but well above first magnitude, dominating the starfield. His sensor image was overlaid with navigation graphics, a tunnel of orange circles which seemed to be guiding the Tigara several degrees south of the star. After five jumps he was still matching delta-v.
Thankfully, the clipper’s fusion drive was capable of a seven-gee acceleration, and they weren’t carrying any cargo. It meant he had enough fuel to align the ship properly. Getting back to Golomo was going to be a problem, though.
The flight computer warned him that the alignment manoeuvre was almost complete. Tigara was flashing towards the jump coordinate at nineteen kilometres per second. He started to reduce thrust and ordered the fusion generator to power up the nodes. As soon as the plasma flow increased he started receiving datavised caution warnings. The confinement field which held the ten-million-degree stream of ions away from the casing was fluctuating alarmingly.
Erick quickly loaded an emergency dump order into the flight computer, linking it to a monitor. If the confinement field fell below five per cent the generator would shut down and vent.
For some reason he was devoid of all tension. T
hen he realized his medical program was flashing for attention. When he accessed it, he saw the packages were filtering out a deluge of toxins and neurochemicals from his bloodstream at the same time as they were issuing chemical suppressors.
He grinned savagely around the SII suit’s oxygen tube. Neutering his own reflexes at precisely the time he needed them the most. Too many factors were building up against him. And still it didn’t really bother him, not snug in the heart of his semi-narcotic hibernation.
The flight computer signalled that the jump coordinate was approaching. Sensors and heat dump panels began to sink down into their recesses. The main drive reduced thrust to zero. Erick fired the ion thrusters, keeping the Tigara on track.
Then the energy patterning nodes were fully charged. Finally he felt a distant sense of relief, and reduced the fusion generator output. The straining confinement field surged as the plasma stream shrank by ninety per cent inside half a second. Decaying failsoft components didn’t respond in time. An oscillation rippled along the tokamak chamber, tearing the plasma stream apart.
The Tigara jumped.
It emerged deep inside the Ngeuni system; at that instant a perfect inert sphere. The poise was shattered within an instant as the raging plasma tore through the tokamak’s casing and ripped out through the hull, loosing incandescent swords of ions in all directions. A chain reaction of secondary explosions began as cryogenic tanks and electron matrices detonated.
The ship disintegrated amid a blaze of radioactive gases and ragged molten debris. Its life-support capsule came spinning out of the core of the explosion; a silvered sphere whose surface was gashed by veins of black carbon where energy bursts and tiny fragments had peppered the polished nultherm foam.
As soon as it was clear of the boiling gases, emergency rockets fired to halt the capsule’s wild tumbling motion, a solid kick into stability. The beacon began to broadcast its shrill distress call.
23
Like most enterprises mounted by governments and institutions on Nyvan, the Jesup asteroid was chronically short of finance, engineering resources, and qualified personnel. The rock’s major ore reserves had been mined out a long time ago. Ordinarily, the revenue would have been invested in the development of the asteroid’s astroengineering industry. But the New Georgia government had diverted the initial windfall income to pay for more immediate and voter-friendly projects on the ground.
After the ore was exhausted, Jesup spent the next decades limping along both economically and industrially. Fledgling manufacturing companies shrank back to service subsidiaries and small indigenous armament corporations. Its aging infrastructure was maintained one degree from breakdown. Of the three planned biosphere caverns only one had ever been completed, leaving a vast number of huge empty cavities spaced strategically throughout the rock which would have been the kernels of fresh mining activity.
It was when Quinn was striding along one of the interminable bare-rock tunnels linking the discarded cavities that he sensed the first elusive presence. He stopped so abruptly that Lawrence almost bumped into him.
“What was that?”
“What?” Lawrence asked.
Quinn turned full circle, slowly scanning the dust-encrusted rock of the wide tunnel. Dribbles of condensation ran along the curving walls and roof, cutting small forked channels through the ebony dust as they generated fragile miniature stalactites. It was as if the tunnel were growing a fur of cactus spikes. But there was no place for anyone to hide, only the waves of shadow between the widely spaced lighting panels.
His entourage of disciples waited with nervous patience. After two days of slickly brutal initiation ceremonies the asteroid now belonged to him. However, Quinn remained disappointed with the number of true converts among the possessed. He had assumed that they of all people would despise Jesus and Allah and Buddha and the other false Gods for condemning them to an agonizing limbo. Showing them the path to the Light Bringer ought to have been easy. But they continued to demonstrate a bewildering resistance to his teachings. Some even interpreted their return to be a form of redemption.
Quinn could find nothing in the tunnel. He was sure he had caught a wisp of thought which didn’t belong to any of the entourage; it had been accompanied by a tiny flicker of motion, grey on black. First reaction was that someone was sneaking along behind them.
Irritated by the distraction, he strode off again, his robe rising to glide above the filthy rock floor. It was cold in the tunnel, his breath turning to snowy vapour before his eyes. His feet began to crunch on particles of ice.
A frigid gust of air swept against him, making an audible swoosh. His robe flapped about.
He stopped again, angry this time. “What the fuck is going on here? There’s no environmental ducts in this tunnel.” He held up a hand to feel the air, which was now perfectly still.
Someone laughed.
He whirled around. But the disciples were looking at each other in confusion. None of them had dared mock his bewilderment. For a moment he thought of the unknown figure at the spaceport on Norfolk, the powerful swirl of flames he had unleashed. But that was light-years away, and no one else had escaped the planet except the Kavanagh girl.
“These tunnels are always acting erratically, Quinn,” Bonham said. Bonham was one of the new converts, possessing Lucky Vin’s body, which he was twisting into a ghoul-form, bleaching the skin, sharpening the teeth, and swelling the eyes. Thick animal hair was sprouting out of his silver skull. He said he had been born into a family of Venetian aristocrats in the late nineteenth century, killed before his twenty-seventh birthday in the First World War, but only after having tasted both the decadence and blind cruelty of the era. A taste which had become a voracious appetite. He had needed no persuading to embrace Quinn’s doctrines.
“I asked one of the maintenance chappies, and he said it’s because there aren’t any ducts in the tunnels to regulate them properly. There are all sorts of weird surges.”
Quinn wasn’t satisfied. He was sure he’d sensed someone sneaking about. A dissatisfied grunt, and he was on his way once more.
No further oddities waylaid him before he reached the cavity where one of the teams was working. It was an almost spherical chamber, with a small flat floor, acting as a junction to seven of the large tunnels. A single fat metal tube hung downwards from the apex, rattling loudly as it blew out a wind of warm dry air. Quinn scowled up at it, then went over to the knot of five men working to secure the fusion bomb to the floor.
The device’s casing was a blunt cone, seventy centimetres high. Several processor blocks had been plugged into its base with optical cables. The men stopped working and stood up respectfully as Quinn approached.
“Did anyone come through here earlier?”
They assured him no one had. One of them was non-possessed, a technician from the New Georgia defence force. He was sweating profusely, his thoughts a mixture of dread and outrage.
Quinn addressed him directly. “Is everything going okay?”
“Yes,” the technician murmured meekly. He kept glancing at Twelve-T.
The gang lord was in a sorry state. Tiny jets of steam spluttered out of his mechanical body parts. Rheumy crusts were building up around the rim of bone in which his brain was resting, as though candle wax were leaking out. The membrane that clothed his brain had thickened (as Quinn wished) but was now acquiring an unhealthy green tint. He was blinking and squinting constantly as he fought the pain.
Quinn followed the man’s gaze with pointed slowness. “Oh, yeah. The most feared gangster on the planet. Real hard-arsed mother who isn’t gonna believe in God’s Brother no matter what I do to him. Pretty dumb, really. But the thing is, he’s useful to me. So I let him live. As long as he doesn’t stray too far from me, he keeps on living. It’s sort of like a metaphor, see? Now, you going to be a hard-arse?”
“No, sir, Mr Quinn.”
“That’s fucking smart.” Quinn’s head came forward slightly from the umbra of the ho
od to allow a faint light to strike his ashen skin. The technician closed his eyes to hide from the sight, lips mumbling a prayer.
“Now is this bomb going to work?”
“Yes, sir. It’s a hundred megaton warhead, they all are. Once they’re linked into the asteroid’s net we can detonate them in sequence. As long as there are no possessed near them, they’ll function properly.”
“Don’t worry about that. My disciples won’t be here when Night dawns in the sky.” He turned back to the tunnel, giving it a suspicious look. Again he had the intimation of motion, a flicker no larger than the flap of a bird’s wing, and twice as fast. He was sure that someone had been watching the incident. A spoor of trepidation hung in the air like the scent of a summer flower.
When he stood at the entrance he could see the line of light panels shrink into distance before a curve took them from sight. The gentle sound of pattering water was all that emerged. He was half expecting to see that same blank human silhouette which had appeared at the hangar on Norfolk.
“If you are hiding, then you are weaker than me,” he told the apparently empty shaft. “That means you will be found and brought before me for judgement. Best you come out now.”
There was no response.
“Have it your way, shithead. You’ve seen what happens to people I don’t like.”
* * *
The rest of Quinn’s day was spent issuing the instructions that would cause Night to fall on the innocent planet below. He commanded New Georgia’s SD network now. It would be a simple matter for the platforms to interfere with Nyvan’s two other functional networks, and various national sensor satellites. Under cover of this electronic warfare barrage, spaceplanes would slide down undetected to the surface. Every nation would be seeded by a group of possessed from Jesup. And Nyvan’s curse of national antagonism would prevent a unified planetary response to the problem, which was the only response that could ever stand a chance of working.
The Night's Dawn Trilogy Page 212