Jay grinned at it, then shielded her eyes with a hand and looked round. She was standing on a circle of the same ebony material as before, but this time there was no encircling wall or watching Kiint. The only artefact was a bright orange cylinder, as tall as she was, standing next to the edge. Scatterings of sand were drifting onto the circle.
Behind her, a thick barricade of trees and bushes lined the rear of the beach. Long creeper tendrils had slithered out of them over the hard-packed sand, knitting together in a tough lacework that sprouted blue and pink palm-sized flowers. The only noise was the waves and some kind of honking in the distance, almost like a flock of geese. When she searched the cloudless sky, she could see several birds flapping and gliding about in the distance. The arch of planets was a line of silver disks twinkling away into the horizon.
“Where are we now?” Jay asked.
“Home.” Tracy’s face managed to produce even more wrinkles as she sniffed distastefully. “Not that anywhere is really home after spending two thousand years swanning loyally round Earth and the Confederation planets.”
Jay stared at her in astonishment. “You’re two thousand years old?”
“That’s right, sweetie. Why, don’t I look it?”
Jay blushed. “Well . . .”
Tracy laughed, and took hold of her hand. “Come along, let’s find you that bed. I’ll think I’ll put you in my guest quarters. That’ll be simplest. Never thought I’d ever get to use them.”
They walked off the ebony circle. Up ahead of them, Jay could see some figures lazing on the beach, while others were swimming in the sea. Their strokes were slow and controlled. She realized they were all as old as Tracy. Now Jay was paying attention, she could make out several chalets lurking in the vegetation behind the beach. They were strung out on either side of a white stone building with a red tile roof and a sizeable, well-manicured garden; it looked like some terribly exclusive clubhouse. Still more old people were sitting at iron tables on the lawns, reading, playing what looked like a board game, or just staring out to sea. Mauve-coloured globes, the size of a head, were floating through the air, moving sleekly from table to table. If they found an empty glass or plate they would absorb it straight through their surface. In many cases they would extrude a replacement; the new glasses were full, and the plates piled with sandwiches or biscuit-type snacks.
Jay walked along obediently at Tracy’s side, her head swivelling about as she took in the amazing new sights. As they approached the big building, people looked their way and smiled encouragingly, nodding, waving.
“Why are they doing that?” Jay asked. All the excitement and fright had worn off now she knew she was safe, leaving her very tired.
Tracy chuckled. “Having you here is the biggest event that’s happened to this place for a long time. Probably ever.”
Tracy led her towards one of the chalets; a simple wooden structure with a veranda running along the front, on which stood big clay pots full of colourful plants. Jay could only think of the pretty little houses of the Juliffe villages on the day she and her mother had started sailing upriver to Aberdale. She sighed at the recollection. The universe had become very strange since then.
Tracy patted her gently. “Almost there, sweetie.” They started up the steps to the veranda.
“Hi there,” a man’s voice called brightly.
Tracy groaned impatiently. “Richard, leave her alone. The poor little dear’s dead on her feet.”
A young man in scarlet shorts and a white T-shirt was jogging barefoot across the sands towards them. He was tall with an athletic figure, his long blond hair tied back into a ponytail by a flamboyant leather lace. He pouted at the rebuke, then winked playfully at Jay. “Oh, come on, Trace; just paying my respects to a fellow escapee. Hello, Jay, my name’s Richard Keaton.” He gave a bow, and stuck his hand out.
Jay smiled uncertainly at him, and put out her own hand. He shook it formally. His whole attitude put her in mind of Joshua Calvert, which was comforting. “Did you jump out of Tranquillity as well?” she asked.
“Heavens, no, nothing like that. I was on Nyvan when someone tried to drop a dirty great lump of metal on me. Thought it best I slipped away when no one was looking.”
“Oh.”
“I know everything is real weird for you right now, so I just wanted you to have this.” He produced a doll resembling some kind of animal, a flattish humanoid figure made from badly worn out brown-gold velvet; its mouth and nose were just lines of black stitching, and its eyes were amber glass. One semicircular ear had been torn off, allowing tufts of yellowing stuffing to peek out of the gash.
Jay gave the battered old thing a suspicious look, it wasn’t anything like the animatic dolls back in Tranquillity’s paediatric ward. In fact, it looked even more primitive than any toy on Lalonde. Which was pretty hard to believe. “Thank you,” she said awkwardly as he proffered it. “What is it?”
“This is Prince Dell, my old Teddy Bear. Which dates me. But friends like this were all the rage on Earth when I was young. He’s the ancestor of all those animatic dolls you kids have these days. If you hold him close at night he keeps troubles away from your dreams. But you have to keep cuddling him tight for him to be able to do that properly. Something to do with earth magic and contact; funny stuff like that. He used to sleep with me until I was a lot older than you. I thought he might be able to help you tonight.”
He sounded so serious and hopeful that Jay took the bear from him and examined it closely. Prince Dell really was very tatty, but she could just picture him in the embrace of a sleeping boy with blond hair. The boy was smiling blissfully.
“All right,” she said. “I’ll hold on to him tonight. Thank you very much.” It seemed a bit silly, but it was kind of him to be so considerate.
Richard Keaton smiled gladly. “That’s good. The Prince hasn’t had much to do for a long time. He’ll be happy to have a new friend. Make sure you treat him nicely, he’s a bit delicate now, poor thing.”
“I will,” Jay promised. “Are you really old, as well?”
“Older than most people you’ve ever met, but nothing like as antique as good old Trace, here.”
“Huh,” Tracy sniffed critically. “If you’re quite finished.”
Richard rolled his eyes for Jay’s benefit. “Sweet dreams, Jay. I’ll see you tomorrow, we’ve got lots to talk about.”
“Richard,” Tracy asked reluctantly. “Did Calvert do it?”
A huge smile flashed over his face. “Oh yeah. He did it. The Alchemist is neutralized. Just as well, it was a brute of a weapon.”
“Typical. If they’d just devote ten per cent of their military budget and all that ingenuity into developing their social conditions.”
“Preaching to the converted!”
“Are you talking about Joshua?” Jay asked. “What’s he done?”
“Something very good,” Richard said.
“Amazingly,” Tracy muttered dryly.
“But . . .”
“Tomorrow, sweetie,” Tracy said firmly. “Along with everything else. I promise. Right now, you’re going to bed. Enough delaying tactics.”
Richard waved, and walked away. Jay held Prince Dell against her tummy as Tracy’s hand pressed into her back, propelling her up the steps and into the chalet. She glanced down at the ancient bear again. His dull glass eyes stared right back at her, it was an incredibly melancholic expression.
* * *
The first hellhawk came flashing out of its wormhole terminus twelve thousand kilometres from Monterey asteroid. New California’s gravitonic detector warning satellites immediately datavised an alert to the naval tactical operations centre. The high pitched audio alarm startled Emmet Mordden, who was the duty officer in the large chamber. At the time he was sitting with his feet up on the commander’s console, reading through a four-hundred-sheet hard copy guide of a Quantumsoft accountancy program in preparation for his next upgrade to the Treasury computers. With most of the Organi
zation fleet away at Tranquillity, and the planet reasonably stable right now, it was a quiet duty, just right to catch up on his technical work.
Emmet’s feet hit the floor as the AI responsible for threat analysis squirted a mass of symbols and vectors up on one of the huge wall-mounted holoscreens. In front of him, the equally surprised SD network operators scrambled to interpret what was happening. There weren’t many of them among the eight rows of consoles in the centre, nothing like the full complement which the Organization had needed at the height of the Edenist harassment campaign. Right now, spaceflight traffic was at a minimum, and the contingent of Valisk hellhawks on planetary defence duty had done a superb job of clearing Edenist stealth mines and spy globes from space around the planet.
“What is it?” Emmet asked automatically; by which time another three wormholes had opened. The precariously-stacked pile of hard copy avalanched off his console as he determinedly cleared his keyboard ready to respond.
The AI had acquired X-ray laser lock on for the first four targets, and was requesting fire authority. Another ten wormholes were opening. Jull von Holger, who acted as the go-between for the Valisk hellhawks and the operations centre, leapt to his feet, shouting: “Don’t shoot!” He waved his arms frantically. “They’re ours! They’re our hellhawks.”
Emmet hesitated, his fingers hovering over the keys. According to his console displays, over eighty wormholes had now opened to disgorge bitek starships. “What the fuck do they think they’re doing busting in on us like that? Why aren’t they with the fleet?” Suspicion flowered among his thoughts; and he didn’t care that von Holger could sense it. Hellhawks were dangerously powerful craft, and with the fleet away they could make real trouble. He’d never really trusted Kiera Salter.
Jull von Holger’s face went through a wild panoply of emotion-derived contortions as he conducted fast affinity conversations with the unexpected arrivals. “They’re not from the fleet. They’ve come here directly from Valisk.” He halted for a moment, shocked. “It’s gone. Valisk has gone. We lost to that little prat Dariat.”
* * *
“Holy shit,” Hudson Proctor gasped.
Kiera stuck her head round the bathroom door as the beautician tried to wrap her sopping wet hair in a huge fluffy purple towel. The Quayle suite in the Monterey Hilton was a temple to opulence and personal luxury. As Rubra had denied everyone access to the Valisk starscrapers, along with their apartment bathrooms, Kiera had simply groomed herself with energistic power alone. She had forgotten what it was to sprawl in a Jacuzzi with a selector that could blend in any of a dozen exotic salts. And as for having her hair styled properly rather than forcing it into shape . . .
“What?” she snapped in annoyance; though the beacon-bright dismay in her associate’s mind tempered any real fury at being interrupted.
“The hellhawks are here,” he said. “All of them. They’ve come from Valisk. It’s . . .” He flinched in trepidation. Delivering bad news to Kiera was always a desperately negative career move. Just because she had the kind of teenage-sweetheart looks which could (and had) suckered in non-possessed kids from right across the Confederation didn’t mean her behaviour matched. Quite the opposite—she took a perverse enjoyment from that, too. “Bonney chased after Dariat, apparently. There was a big fight in one of the starscrapers. Plenty of our people got flung back into the beyond. Then she forced him to ally with Rubra, or something.”
“What happened?”
“They, er—Valisk’s gone. The two of them took the habitat out of the universe.”
Kiera stared at him, little wisps of steam starting to lick out of her hair. She’d always bitterly regretted that Marie Skibbow didn’t have some kind of affinity faculty; its absence had always put her at a slight disadvantage in Valisk. But she’d coped, the entire worldlet and its formidable starships had belonged to her. She’d been a power to contend with. Even Capone had sought out her help. Now—
Kiera gave the non-possessed beautician girl a blank-eyed glance. “Get lost.”
“Ma’am.” The girl curtseyed, and almost sprinted for the suite’s double doors on the other side of the lounge.
Kiera allowed herself a muted scream of fury when the doors closed. “That fucking Dariat! I knew it! I fucking knew he was a disaster waiting to happen.”
“We’re still in charge of the hellhawks,” Hudson Proctor said. “That gives us a big chunk of Capone’s action; and the Organization is in charge of a couple of star systems, with more on the way. It’s not such a loss. If we’d been inside the habitat it would be one hell of a lot worse.”
“If I’d been inside, it would never have happened,” she snapped back. Her hair was abruptly dry, and her robe blurred, running like hot wax until it became a sharp mauve business suit. “Control,” she murmured almost to herself. “That’s the key here.”
Hudson Proctor could sense her focusing on him, both her eyes and her mind.
“Are you with me?” she asked. “Or are you going to ask good old Al if you can sign on as one of his lieutenants?”
“Why would I do that?”
“Because if I can’t keep control of the hellhawks, I’m nothing to the Organization.” She smiled thinly. “You and I would have to start right back at the beginning again. With the hellhawks obeying us, we’ll still be players.”
He glanced out of the big window, searching space for a sight of the bitek starships. “We’ve got no hold on them any more,” he said dejectedly. “Without the affinity-capable bodies stored in Valisk, there’s no way they’ll do as they’re ordered. And there aren’t any more of Rubra’s family left for us to replace them with. We’ve lost.”
Kiera shook her head impatiently. Considering she’d coopted the ex-general to her council for his ability to think tactically, he was doing a remarkably poor job of it. But then, maybe a politician’s instinct was naturally quicker at finding an opponent’s weakness. “There’s one thing left which they can’t do for themselves.”
“And that is?”
“Eat. The only sources of their nutrient fluid which they’ll be able to use are on Organization-held asteroids. Without food, even bitek organisms will wither and die. And we know our energistic power can’t magic up genuine food.”
“Then Capone will control them.”
“No.” Kiera could sense his anxiety at the prospect of losing his status, and knew she could rely on him. She closed her eyes, focusing on assignments for the small number of her people she’d brought with her to Monterey. “Which is the most reliable hellhawk we’ve got on planetary defence?”
“Reliable?”
“Loyal, idiot. To me.”
“That’ll probably be Etchells in the Stryla. He’s a regular little Nazi, always complaining hellhawks never see enough battle action. Doesn’t get on too well with the others, either.”
“Perfect. Call him back to Monterey’s docking ledges and go on board. I want you to visit every Organization asteroid in this system with a nutrient fluid production system. And blow it to shit.”
Hudson gave her an astounded look, trepidation replacing the earlier anxiety. “The asteroids?”
“No, shithead! Just the production systems. You don’t even have to dock, just use an X-ray laser. That’ll leave Monterey as their only supply point.” She smiled happily. “The Organization has enough to do right now without the burden of maintaining all that complicated machinery. I think I’ll go down there right now with our experts, and relieve them.”
* * *
It wasn’t dawn which arose over the wolds, inasmuch as there was no sun to slide above the horizon any more, but none the less the darkened sky grew radiant in homage to Norfolk’s lost diurnal rhythm. Luca Comar felt it developing because he was a part of making it happen. By coming to this place he had freed himself from the clamour of the souls lost within the beyond, their tormented screams and angry pleas. In exchange he had gained an awareness of community.
Born at the tail end of the Twenty
-first Century he’d grown up in the Amsterdam arcology. It was a time when people still clung to the hope that the planet could be healed, their superb technology employed to turn the clock back to the nevertime of halcyon pastoral days. In his youth, Luca dreamed of the land returned to immense parkland vistas with proud white and gold cities straddling the horizon. A child brought up by some of the last hippies on Earth, his formative years were spent loving the knowledge that togetherness was all. Then he turned eighteen, and for the first time in his existence reality had bitten, and bitten hard; he had to get a job, and an apartment, and pay taxes. Not nice. He resented it until the day his body died.
So now he had stolen a new body, and with the strange powers that theft had bestowed, he’d joined with the others of this planet to create their own Gaia. Unity of life was a pervasive, shroud-like presence wrapping itself around the planet, replacing the regimented order of the universe as their provider. Because the new inhabitants of Norfolk wished there to be a dawn, there was one. And as they equally desired night, so the light was banished. He contributed a little of himself to this Gaia, some of his wishes, some of his strength, a constant avowal of thanks to this new phase of his existence.
Luca sat on the edge of the huge bed in the master bedroom to watch the light strengthen outside Cricklade; a silver warmth shining down from the sky, its uniformity leaving few shadows. With it came the sense of anticipation, a new day to be treasured because of the opportunity it might bring.
A dull dawn, bland and boring, just as the days have become. We used to have two suns, and revelled in the contrast of colours they brought, the battle of shadows. They had energy and majesty, they inspired. But this, this . . .
The Night's Dawn Trilogy Page 256