He grinned at her over the rim of a huge tea cup. “We’re going to have to, though, aren’t we? There has to be some solution to satisfy both sides.”
“Right,” she said cautiously.
5
In any given month, there would be between two and seven armada storms rampaging across Earth’s surface, a relentless assault they’d persevered with for over five hundred years. Like so many things, their name had become everyday currency. Few knew or cared about its origin.
It had begun with chaos theory: the soundbite assertion that one butterfly flapping its wings in a South American rain forest would start a hurricane in Hong Kong. Then in the Twenty-first Century came cheap fusion, and mass industrialisation; entire continents elevated themselves to Western-style levels of consumerism within two decades. Billions of people found themselves with the credit to buy a multitude of household appliances, cars, exotic holidays; they moved into new, better, bigger homes, adopting lifestyles which amplified their energy consumption by orders of magnitude. Hungry to service their purchasing power, companies built cities of new factories. Consumer and producer alike pumped out vast quantities of waste heat, agitating the atmosphere beyond the worst-case scenarios of most computer models.
It was after the then largest storm in history raged across the Eastern Pacific in early 2071 that a tabloid newscable presenter said it must have taken a whole armada of butterflies flapping their wings to start such a brute. The name stuck.
The storm which had swept up from mid-Atlantic to swamp New York was ferocious even by the standards of the Twenty-seventh Century. Its progress had been under observation for hours by the arcology’s anxious weather defence engineers. When it did arrive, their response systems were already on line. It looked as though a ragged smear of night was sliding across the sky. The clouds were so thick and dense no light could boil throughout to illuminate their underbelly—until the lightning began. Then the rotund tufts could sometimes be distinguished, streaked with leaden grey strata as they undulated overhead at menacing speed. The energy levels contained within would prove fatal for any unprotected building. Consequently, the ability to deflect or withstand the storms was the prime requirement of any design brought before the New York civil engineering review board for a building permit. It was the one criterion which could never be corroded by backhanders or political pressure.
The tip of every megatower was crowned with high-wattage lasers, whose beams were powerful enough to puncture the heart of the heavy clouds. They etched out straight channels of ionized air, cajoling the lightning to discharge directly into the superconductor grids masking the tower structure. Every tower blazed like a conical solar flare above the dome residents, spitting out residual globules of violet plasma.
Amid them fell the rain. Fist-sized drops hurled out by a furious wind to hammer against the domes. Molecular binding force generators were switched on to reinforce the transparent hexagons against a kinetic fusillade which had the force to abrade raw steel.
The noise from this barrage of elements drummed through the dome to shake the gridwork of carbotanium struts supporting the metro transit rails. Most above-ground traffic had shut down. Right across the arcology, emergency crews were on full standby. Even the shield of lasers and superconductors were no guarantee against power spikes in such conditions. In such times, sensible people went home or to bars, and waited until sharp slivers of pewter light started to carve up the clouds, signalling the end of the deluge. A time when fear was heightened. When more primitive thoughts were brought to the fore.
A good time. Useful.
Quinn looked up at the old building which was home to the High Magus of New York.
Under cover of the storm, sect members were piling out of the vans behind him. Only ten possessed so far: a manageable number for what he had in mind. The rest, the acolytes and initiates, followed obediently, in awe of the apostles of evil who now commanded them.
Faith, Quinn mused, was a strange power. They had committed their lives to the sect, never questioning its gospels. Yet in all of that time, they had the reassurance of routine, the notion that God’s Brother would never actually manifest himself. The bedrock of every religion, that your God is a promise, never to be encountered in this life, this universe.
Now the souls were returning, owning the power to commit dark miracles. The acolytes had fallen into stupefaction rather than terror, the last doubt vanquished. Condemned as the vilest outcasts, they now knew they’d been right all along. That they were going to win. Whatever they were ordered to do, they complied unquestioningly.
Quinn motioned the first team forward. Led by Wener, the three eager acolytes scampered down a set of steps at the base of the wall, and clustered round the disused basement door at the bottom. A codebuster block was applied, then a programmable silicon probe was worked expertly into the crack between the door and the frame. The silicon flexed its way under the ageing manual bolts, then began to reformat its shape, pushing them back. Within thirty seconds, the way in was open. No alarms, and no give away use of energistic power.
Quinn stepped through.
The difference between the headquarters and the dingy centre on Eighty-Thirty street surprised even Quinn. At first he even thought he might have the wrong place, but Dobbie, who now possessed magus Garth’s body, reassured him this was indeed where they should be. The corridors and chambers were an inverse mirror of the Vatican’s splendour. Rich fittings and extravagant artwork, but sybaritic rather than warmly exquisite, celebrating depravity and pain.
“Fuck, look at this place,” Wener muttered as they marched down one of the corridors. Sculptures took bestiality as their theme, featuring both mythical and xenoc creatures, while paintings showed the saintly and revered from history being violated and sacrificed on the altars of the Light Bringer.
“You should take a good look,” Quinn said. “It’s yours. Those hours ripping off citizens and pushing illegals on the street, that paid for all this. You live in shit, so the High Magus can live like a Christian bishop. Nice, isn’t it.”
Wener and the other acolytes glowered round at the perverse grandeur, envious and angry. They split up, as arranged. One of the possessed leading each group of acolytes, securing the exits and strategic areas, the weapons cache. Quinn went straight for the High Magus. Three times, he encountered acolytes and priests scurrying along the corridors. They were all given the same simple choice: Follow me, or be possessed.
They took one look at the black robe, listening to the voice whispering out of the seemingly empty hood, and capitulated. One of them even gave a mad little laugh of relief, a strong sense of vindication flooding his mind.
The High Magus was taking a bath when Quinn strode into his quarters. It could have been the penthouse of some multistellar corporation president, certainly there was little evidence of idolatrous worship amongst the opulence. Much to Wener’s disappointment he didn’t even have naked servant girls to wash him. Slimline domestic mechanoids stood quietly among the white and blue furnishings. His one concession to turpitude appeared to be the goblet he was drinking a seventeen-year-old red wine out of, its vulvic influences impossible to ignore. Islands of lime-green bubbles drifted round his round frame, giving off a scent of sweet pine.
He was already frowning as Quinn glided over the gold-flecked marble to the sunken bath, presumably forewarned by the failure of his neural nanonics. His eyes widened at the invasion, then narrowed as the eccentric delegation stared down at him.
“You’re a possessed,” he said directly to Quinn.
There was no panic in the mind of the High Magus, which surprised Quinn, if anything the old man appeared curious. “No, I am the Messiah of our Lord.”
“Really?”
The mocking irony of the tone caused the hem of Quinn’s robe to stir. “You will obey me, or I will have your fat shit body possessed by someone more worthy.”
“More compliant, you mean.”
“Don’t fuck with
me.”
“I have no intention of fucking with you or anyone else.”
Quinn was puzzled by this whole exchange. The original calmness he could sense in the High Magus was slowly replaced by weariness. The High Magus took another sip of the wine.
“I’m here to bring Night to the Earth as Our Lord bids,” Quinn said.
“He bids nothing of the sort, you pathetic little prick.”
Quinn’s ashen face materialized to thrust out of his hood.
The High Magus laughed out loud at the shock and anger he saw there, and committed suicide. Without any noise or hysterics, his body froze, then slowly slithered down the side of the bath. It rolled to one side, and floated inertly on the surface, white bloated rims of fat bobbing among the green bubbles. The wine goblet sank, a red stain marking where it had vanished.
“What are you doing?” Quinn shouted at the departing soul. He sensed a final sneer as the retreating wisps of energy evaporated amid dimensional folds. His claw hands shot out of the voluminous sleeves, as if to pull the essence of the High Magus back to face judgement. “Shit!” he gasped. The magus must have been demented. Nobody. Nobody went into the beyond, not now they knew for sure what awaited them there.
“Asshole,” Wener grunted. Along with the other acolytes, he was perturbed by the death. Trying not to show it.
Quinn knelt down at the side of the bath, searching the corpse with eyes and eldritch senses for the mechanism of its demise. There were the usual weapons implants, he could perceive those all right, hard splinters among the softer grain of organic matter, even the neural nanonics were discernible. But Quinn’s energistic power had nullified them. What then? What instrument could effect an instantaneous and painless suicide? And more curiously, why was the High Magus equipped with it?
He straightened slowly, retracting his head and arms back within his cloak’s veil of night. “It doesn’t matter,” he told his agitated followers. “God’s Brother knows how to deal with traitors, the beyond is not a refuge for those who fail Him.”
A dozen heads nodded in eager acceptance before him. “Now go and bring them to me,” he said.
The acolytes scattered to do his bidding. They rounded up everyone in the headquarters, and herded them into the temple. It was a vaulting chamber nestled at the core of the Leicester, a baroque fabrication of gilded pillars and crude cut stone blocks. Six giant pentagons were etched on the curving ceiling, emitting a dull crimson glow. The grumble of the storm was just audible, a bass reverberation sneaking through the Leicester to give the floor a faint vibration.
Quinn stood beside the altar as the captives were ushered up to him one at a time. Every time, he repeated the simple choice of futures: follow me, or be possessed. Merely claiming you would submit was no use. Quinn interrogated their innermost beliefs and fears before passing his final decree. He wasn’t surprised by how many failed. Inevitably, this far up the sect hierarchy, they had grown soft. Still evil, still exploiting the soldiers below them, but not for the right reasons. Maintaining their own status and comforts had evolved into their dominant urge, not a willingness to further the cause of the Light Bringer. Traitors.
He made them suffer for their crime. Over thirty were chained to the altar and vanquished. By now he had become proficient in opening a fissure back into the beyond; but more importantly he’d learned how to impose his own presence around the opening, valiantly guarding the gateway from the unworthy. Even in their utter desperation for escape, many souls turned aside from such a custodian. Those who did emerge conformed to Quinn’s ideal. Nearly all of them had been sect members while they were alive.
He gathered them together after the ceremony, explaining what God’s Brother had decided for them. “We need more than one arcology to bring Night to this world,” he told them. “So I’m leaving you this one for yourselves. Don’t piss this opportunity away. I want you to take it over, but carefully, not like the way the possessed do on other planets, even Capone. Those dickheads just rush up and head butt every town they come across. And each time, the cops swoop down and pick them off. This time it’s gonna be different. You’ve got the acolytes worshipping the ground you shit on. Use them. Moving around is what lets those fucking AIs sniff you out. You mess with processors and power cables just by being near them. So don’t go near them. Stay in the sect centres and get the acolytes to bring people to you.”
“Which people?” Dobbie asked. “I understand how we don’t gotta move about. But, shit, Quinn, there’s over three hundred million people in New York. The acolytes can’t bring them all to us.”
“They can bring the ones that count, the police captains and technical guys, the ones gonna cause you grief. Or at least knock them out, stop them from reporting that you’ve arrived in town. That’s all I want from you right now. Get yourselves established. There’s a sect centre in every dome, take them over and hole up there for a while. Live like a fucking king, I’m not saying don’t enjoy yourself. But I want you ready, I want you to build up a coven of possessed in each dome. Loyal ones, you all know how fucking important discipline is. We’re going strategic. Learn where the major fusion generators are, hunt down the fresh water stations, and the sewage plants, see which intersections the transport system depends on, track down critical nodes in the communication net. The acolytes will know all this crap, or they can find out. Then when I give the word, you smash each of those sites into lava. You paralyse the whole fucking arcology with terrorism, bring it to its knees. That way the cops won’t be able to organize any resistance when we emerge to claim glory for Him. You come out into the open and start possessing others, and you turn them loose. Nobody can run, there’s nowhere to go, no outside. Possessed always win on asteroids, this is no different, just bigger, is all.”
“The new possessed, they won’t worship God’s Brother,” someone said. “We can choose a few who will to start with, but if we turn them loose, there’s no way millions of them is going to do like we say.”
“Of course not,” Quinn said. “Not at first, anyway. They have to be forced into this, like I did to Nyvan. Haven’t you worked it out yet? What’s going to happen to an arcology with three hundred million possessed living in it?”
“Nothing,” Dobbie said in puzzlement. “It won’t work.”
“Right,” Quinn purred. “Nothing’s going to work. I’m going to visit as many arcologies as I can, and I’m going to seed all of them with possessed. And they’re all going to collapse, because energistic power breaks the machinery. The domes won’t be able to hold off the weather any more, there isn’t going to be any food, or water. Nothing. Not even forty billion possessed wishing at once are going to be able to change that. They’ll shift Earth into another realm, but it still won’t make any difference. Just being somewhere else isn’t going to put food on the table, won’t restart the machines. That’s when it will happen. The revelation that they have nowhere else to turn. Our Lord will have won their minds.” He lifted his hands, and allowed a pallid smile to show from his hood. “Forty billion possessors, and the forty billion they possess. Eighty billion souls screaming into the Night for help. Don’t you see? It’s a cry so strong, so full of anguish and fear, that it will bring Him. Finally, He will emerge from the Night, bringing light to those who have come to love Him.” Quinn laughed at the astonishment on their faces, and dark delight in their minds.
“How long?” Dobbie asked avidly. “How long we gotta wait?”
“A month, maybe. It’ll take me a while to visit all the arcologies. But I’ll penetrate them all in the end. Wait for my word.” The silhouette of his robe began to fade. Outlines of the furniture behind him started to show through. Then he was gone. A cold breeze drifted across the chamber, perturbing the shallow gasps of consternation that echoed from the dismayed disciples.
* * *
The Mindori approached Monterey at a steady half gee acceleration. Two hundred kilometres ahead, the asteroid’s features were resolving, crumpled dust-grey rock
speared by metallic spires and panels. It was surrounded by a swarm of pearl-white specks that flashed and glinted in the tenacious sunlight. The Organization fleet: over six hundred Adamist warships floating in attendance while small service craft flitted among them. Each one a unique knot in Rocio Condra’s distortion field.
Gliding among them were the more subtle interference patterns of other distortion fields. Valisk’s hellhawks were here. Rocio called out in welcome. Those who bothered to acknowledge his arrival were subdued. The emotional content simmering within most of his fellows was one of grudging acceptance. Rocio accepted it reluctantly. It was what he’d been expecting.
Glad to see you found your way back to us, Hudson Proctor said. What have you got?
The affinity link provided Rocio an opening to the man’s eyes. He was in one of the docking ledge lounges, overlooking the pedestals where several hellhawks were perched. The room had been altered into an executive-style office. Kiera Salter was sitting at a broad desk, her head coming up to give him a hard, enquiring stare.
Deadnight kids, Rocio said. I haven’t told them Valisk has gone.
Good, good.
“The Organization hasn’t got any real use for that kind of waster trash,” Kiera said as Hudson repeated his silent conversation. “Dock here and disembark them. They’ll be dealt with appropriately.”
And what about us? Rocio asked mildly. What do the hellhawks do now?
“I’ll have you assigned to fleet support duties,” Kiera said impassively. “Capone is preparing another invasion. The hellhawks are becoming essential to ensure viability.”
I don’t wish to fly combat duties any more, thank you. This starship is proving an excellent host for my soul, I have no intention of endangering it, especially now that you have no reserve body for me to inherit.
Kiera’s answering smile portrayed regret. It wasn’t an emotion Hudson relayed via affinity, keeping the exchange scrupulously neutral.
The Night's Dawn Trilogy Page 268