Naked God: Faith

Chapter 01

It was a foul job, but better than scouting round the starscrapers. Tolton and Dariat were driving a truck slowly over Valisk’s grass plains in search of servitor bodies. Food was becoming a critical commodity within the enfeebled habitat. During Kiera’s reign the possessed had simply helped themselves to existing supplies with little thought devoted to replenishing them. Then after plunging into the dark continuum, the survivors had turned to butchering the wild terrestrial animals that had fallen into unconsciousness. Large cooking pits had been dug outside the northern endcap caverns, where the Starbridge tribes took charge of trussing the beasts on long poles to be roasted over the flames as if for a medieval banquet. It was a predictably monotonous diet of goat, sheep, and rabbits; but nourishing enough. None of the other lethargic survivors complained.

Now that operation was being accelerated. The animals were gradually slipping from their strange comas into death. Their carcasses had to be recovered and cooked before they started to decay. If it was hung in the coolest caverns, properly cured meat could be stored for several weeks and still remain edible. Building up a stockpile of food was also a logical precaution to be undertaken in times of war. Rubra’s regiment of descendants all knew about the visitor, and had been surreptitiously supplementing their armaments ever since. The remaining survivors hadn’t been told.

Tolton wondered if that was why he and Dariat had been given this particular task, so he wouldn’t have much contact with the refugees occupying the caverns.

“Why should the personality distrust you?” Dariat asked as the street poet drove them along the side of a stream in one of the shallow valleys meandering through the southern grasslands. “You’re one of the real survivors of the possessed occupation. You’ve proved yourself as an asset as far as it’s concerned.”

“Because of what I am; you know I’m on the side of the underclass, that’s my nature. I might warn them.”

“Do you think warning them is helping them? They’re in no fit state to put up any resistance if that thing comes back. You know damn well my illustrious relatives are the only ones who stand a chance of stopping it. Go ahead and tell the sick there’s some kind of homicidal ice dragon stalking us, see how much you improve their morale. I don’t want to preach homilies, but class distinction has been suspended for the duration. We’re divided into effectives and dependants, now. That’s all.”

“All right, damn it. But you can’t keep them in ignorance forever.”

“They won’t be. If that thing ever gets inside, everyone’s going to know about it.”

Tolton gripped the top of the steering wheel with both hands, and slowed so he could watch Dariat’s answer. “You think it will come back?”

“The opinion is a resounding yes. It wanted something the first time, and all we did was make it mad at us. Even assuming it has the wackiest psychology possible, it’ll come back. The only questions are: when? And: will it be alone?”

“Bloody hell.” Tolton twisted the throttle again, and sent the truck splashing through a shallow section of the stream. “What about the signalling project? Can we call the Confederation yet?”

“No. There’s still a team working on it, but most of my relatives are doing what they can to beef up the habitat defences.”

“We still have some?”

“Not many,” Dariat admitted.

Tolton saw a suspicious avocado-green lump amid the wispy tips of pink xenoc grass, and slowed the truck to a halt. The body of a large servitor lizard was lying curled up on the ground. A tegu, geneered for agronomy maintenance, it measured one and a half metres from nose to tail, with long rake-like fingers on its hands. There were hundreds of them in Valisk, patrolling the streams where they were employed to clear jams of dead grass and twigs that built up along rocky snags.

Dariat stood and watched as his friend bent over and gingerly touched the creature’s flanks.

“I can’t make out if it’s alive or not,” Tolton complained.

“It’s dead,” Dariat told him. “There is no life energy left in the body.”

“You can tell that?”

“Yeah. It’s like a little internal glow; all living things have it.”

“Hell. You can see that?”

“It’s similar to seeing, yes. I guess my brain just interprets it as light.”

“You haven’t got a brain. You’re just a ghost. A whole bunch of thoughts strung together.”

“There’s more to me than that, if you don’t mind. I’m a naked soul.”

“Okay. There’s no need to get touchy about it.” Tolton grinned. “Touchy. Get it? A ghost, touchy.”

“I hope your poetry is better than your humour. After all, you’re the one that’s got to pick it up.” His translucent foot nudged the dead lizard.

Tolton’s grin crumpled. “Bugger.” He went round to the back of the truck, and lowered the tailgate. There were already three dead servitor chimps lying on the metal floor. “I didn’t mind the goats so much, but this is like cannibalism,” he grumbled.

“Monkeys were a delicacy in several pre-industrial societies back on Earth.”

“No wonder they all died out, then; their kids ran off to the city and lived happily ever after on Chinese takeaway.” He put his hands under the lizard’s body, disgruntled by the dry-slippery feel of the scales and the way they shifted so easily over protuberant bones. Muttering about the truck’s lack of a winch, he started to drag the body over to the tailgate. The lizard was quite a weight, needing several stages to haul it up the steep ramp. Tolton was flushed by the time he finally skewed it over the chimps. He jumped down and shoved the tailgate back up, shoving the latches home.

“Good job,” Dariat said.

“Just as long as I don’t have to butcher them, I don’t care.”

“We should get back. That’s a big load already.”

Tolton grunted in agreement. The trucks had been stripped down to the minimum number of systems; there were no governing processors, no power steering, no collision alert radar, nor impact-triggered seat webs. A power cell was wired directly to the wheel hub motors, with the throttle as the only control. Such an arrangement gave the vehicles a modicum of reliability, though even that was far from a hundred per cent. Switching them on was always a lottery. And if they had too much weight in the back they wouldn’t work at all.

Dariat,the personality called. The visitor is back, and it’s not alone.

Oh Thoale. How many?

A couple of dozen, I think. Maybe more.

Once again, Dariat knew how much mental effort it took for the personality to focus on the approaching specks. Even then, he wasn’t sure it was observing all of them. As before, pale streaks of turquoise and burgundy were fluxing within the strands of the dusky nebula outside. A scattering of wan grey dots swished between the ragged strands, curving sharply at each turn, but always coming closer. Their movements were confusing, but even so the personality should have been able to track them.

Dariat looked through the truck’s grimed windscreen. The Northern endcap was thirty kilometres away, suddenly a huge distance across the rolling grasslands and scrub desert. It would take them at least forty minutes to get there, assuming the cloying blades of pink grass didn’t get any thicker before they reached one of the rough tracks. And that was a long time to be alone in this continuum. Not that the caverns would offer much sanctuary.

It was ironic, Dariat thought: he who had managed to isolate himself for thirty years, now wanted to surround himself with people. He could never forget that debilitating cold the visitor had inflicted on him last time. His soul was unprotected in this realm. If he was going to truly die, he preferred to do it in the company of his own kind. He turned to Tolton, making sure his lips were exaggerating his words. “Does this thing go any faster?”

The street poet gave him a panicked glance. “Why?”

“Because now would be a good time to find out.”

“The bastard’s come back?”

“More than one.”

Tolton twisted the throttle urgently, nudging the speed up to over forty kilometres an hour. The wheel hub motors started making erratic buzzing sounds—normally they were completely silent. Dariat used affinity to watch the visitors’ approach. The personality had activated the seven lasers and two masers emplaced around the rim of the counter-rotating spaceport. As before, there was no radar return from any of the visitors.

The first ones began their final dash from the shifting fringe of the nebula through the clear space to the habitat’s shell. They were condensing the darkness around themselves now, twirling sharp horns of light in kaleidoscopic arcs. Optical sensors locked on, aligning the energy weapons on one of the giveaway distortion swirls. Nine intense energy beams pinioned the visitor. Its sole response was to spin faster, wriggling wildly along its trajectory as it plummeted in towards the shell. The radial spires of distorted luminescence flared brighter and higher. Then it was falling behind the tips of the starscrapers, beyond the weapons’ elevation. They slid back to find another target. It, too, was unaffected by the energy strike.

The personality stopped firing. Anxiety spread like a mental virus among Rubra’s descendants as they waited to see what the visitors would do next. The personal weapons they’d prepared were distributed and primed. Not that anyone held out much hope. If the spaceport lasers couldn’t harm them, then rifles (however large the calibre) were going to be completely useless. Not that anybody refused them. Having a hefty chunk of destructive hardware you could grip in your hands was always a nice psychological boost.

The Orgathé led a swarm of its eager kith towards the giant living object, soaking up the blaze of heat which it threw away so casually. They had come to pre-empt the absorption that was the fate of all beings in the dark continuum, gorging on as much of its life-energy as they could before it reached the mélange. Once that happened, so many of the entities entombed within would be empowered to resurrection and individuality that the whole mélange would be loosened, possibly even breaking apart for a short while. But there would never be enough energy to return them all to the place from which they’d fallen. That privilege could only be granted to those who empowered themselves before the dispersal.

That was why it had called upon the others, the strongest of their kind, able to fly far and long from the mélange. Together they might successfully storm the object where one had failed. To be rewarded with enough energy to elevate themselves out of the dark continuum was worth any risk.

The Orgathé swooped closer. Huge waves of thought rippled through the layer of life energy below the object’s surface, focusing on it. Pillars of energy lashed out from the dead section at the far end; a kind unusable by the Orgathé. It closed its boundary against the flow, letting the power splash apart harmlessly. The pillars of energy vanished when it dove down close to the surface. Its kith were following it down, hungered by the abundant energy, crying victoriously among themselves.

Ahead now were the hollow spindles protruding from the object’s midsection. The Orgathé increased its speed, hardening itself with a reckless expenditure of energy. It remembered the sheet of transparent matter it had landed on before. Easy to identify amid the thousands of other identical sheets inlaid along the length of the spindle, a dead section, drained of life-energy and heat. This time, the Orgathé didn’t slow down.

The window of Horner’s bar detonated inwards with a terrifyingly violent explosion. Craggy shards of crystal blasted into the bar, scything through the furniture. Frozen, ice-cloaked tables and chairs disintegrated into billowing clouds of glossy silvery fragments. Then the entire maelstrom reversed its flow, and howled out through the shattered window. The badly shredded main door into the vestibule buckled and collapsed, allowing the air to rush through.

Emergency pressure locks all across the twenty-fifth storey started to slide shut. They were mechanical systems, self-powered, activated by simple failsafe pressure sensors. The majority of them were unaffected by the malaise inflicted by the dark continuum. Only a minority of the starscraper’s muscle membranes reacted to the potentially lethal development.

The personality concentrated hard, ensuring that the muscle membranes around the Djerba’s lobby were shut, then tried to reach the floors immediately below that. Its thought routines encountered a tide of exhaustion that grew worse the further it inserted itself into the starscraper. Only the vaguest images from the twenty-fifth floor were available.

The Orgathé gripped the rim of the bar’s window with several appendages, waiting until the gale subsided. Bottles detonated in mid flight as they were swept across the room, their exotic liquor solidifying in weird bulbous shapes the instant they broke free of the glass. Anything which struck the Orgathé simply bounced off, gyrating away into the void outside. As soon as the roar of air began to ebb, it moved into the starscraper. The wall around the empty door simply burst apart as it went through.

Still there was no clear image of it as it moved along the vestibule; all the sensitive cells could discern before they died was a tumour of darker shadow within the lightless chamber. And now the habitat personality was having to divert its attention to the rest of the Orgathé swarm that were slamming their way through other starscraper windows. Emergency pressure locks and muscle membranes were closing throughout the deserted structures, desperately trying to contain the atmospheric breaches.

The Orgathé continued to surge forward into the starscraper, hunting round for concentrations of life-energy to consume. It was spread thinly here, nothing like as rich as the layer beneath the object’s outer surface. Instinctively, the Orgathé barged upwards towards that mammoth source. Flat planes of matter splintered as it hammered through them. Further harsh gusts of gas whistled past. Then it found what it wanted, a solid stream of liquid suffused with life-energy pouring along the core of the starscraper. It moved as close as it could, siphoning the heat out of the thick wall of matter surrounding the stream until the outside began to crack. Then it bored through with a couple of appendages, and immersed their tips in the current. Sweet, vital life-energy flowed back into the Orgathé, replenishing it after its considerable exertions. It settled down and began consuming the apparently infinite torrent, growing in a way impossible before.

Three trucks approached the ring of dilapidated hovels encircling the Djerba’s lobby. Each vehicle had two people inside, a nervous driver and an even more nervous lookout armed with a heavy calibre rifle. They began to nudge along the muddy tracks between the precarious walls, heavy wheels squelching cans and empty sachet wrappers into the ground.

Past the hovels, they pulled up short of the lobby. As with all Valisk’s internal buildings, it was an elaborate edifice, a dome shape from gradually inclined tiers of long white polyp window arches with a circular apex of amber-tinted crystal. Inside, it had the kind of furniture nests and large marble floors endemic to any human travel station. A few cracked windows along the bottom tier, and smashed furniture smeared across the floor, was the only evidence of past battles between Kiera and Rubra.

Tolton gave it all a jaundiced look. “God, I really didn’t expect to be coming back here,” he grumbled.

“You’re not alone,” Dariat told him.

Erentz climbed down out of the passenger seat, keeping her rifle trained squarely on the lobby. The visitors had been in Valisk for thirty hours now. In all that time, not one of them had emerged from a starscraper, nor made any hostile move. If it hadn’t been for the broken windows and closed emergency locks there would be no evidence of their incursion at all. After their desperate efforts to gain entry, such inactivity had everyone troubled and confused. The personality was determined to discover what nefarious activity they were cooking up in the starscrapers.

The lifts were clumped together in the centre of the lobby, a broad column of grey polyp reaching half way to the amber crystal above. Its curving wall was inset with silvery mechanical doors. One of them slid open as the group approached. Erentz put down the large case of equipment she was carrying, and inched over to the rim so she could snatch a look down. The top of the lift was out of sight, leaving a dark circular shaft with vertical rails that faded from sight after a few metres. She shone a torch into the gulf. All that did was show her more of the rails, and another set of emergency fire-control doors on the inside. If she leaned right over, she could just make out the door below.

From what I can discern, the visitor is now on the twenty-second floor,the personality said. I have managed to seal off the floors below, so the twenty-second remains fully pressurized. The twenty-third is the same. Twenty-four is partially pressurized. Twenty-five is now in a vacuum. Your only escape route, Erentz, is up. Dariat, I imagine you can use the lower floors. A vacuum really shouldn’t bother you.

Dariat nodded thoughtfully. Let’s try not to put that theory to the test, okay? Besides, where would I go once I reach the bottom?

It took twenty minutes to prepare. Three of the group started to rig up a winch they’d brought, securing it on the lobby floor with large bolts. The rest helped Erentz into the silver-grey suit which she was going to wear for the reconnaissance. They’d chosen a thermal emission suit, capable of protecting its wearer from extreme temperatures. It had a thick layer of insulation with a molecular structure similar to the nulltherm foam used by starships. The one drawback to that particular property was that the heat generated by a living body’s organs and muscles couldn’t escape. Any wearer would cook themselves to death inside thirty minutes. So before getting into it, Erentz had to put on a tight-fitting regulator overall made from heat absorber fabric. It was capable of soaking up and storing her body’s entire output for seven hours before having to be drained.

“Are you sure this is going to work?” Tolton asked as he sealed the outer gauntlets to her sleeves. The suit’s puffy appearance was making her look like an arctic skier.

“You were down there with it before,” she answered. “It has some kind of active heat-sink ability. I’ve got to have something to shield me from that if I get too close. And I can’t risk wearing an SII suit, not in this continuum; there’s no guarantee it’ll even work below the first floor.”

“All right. If you’re happy . . .”

“I’m not.” She slipped the suit’s breathing mask on, fiddling with it until it was comfortable. The suit wasn’t pressurized, but the mask maintained her air supply at a constant temperature.

Tolton handed her the electron rod. Its spiked tip was capable of giving off a ten thousand volt shock. “This should stop it getting too close. Electricity seems to be our one constant these days. It can blast the possessed back into the beyond, and it certainly scared the visitor.”

She held up the rod, then slipped it into her belt next to a laser pistol and a fission blade. “I feel like I’m off to poke the tiger,” she mumbled round the mask.

I’m sorry,said the personality. But we really do need to know what these things are up to.

Yeah yeah.she pulled the helmet visor down, a transparent material thick enough to give the world a gentle turquoise shade. You ready?she asked dariat.

Yes.his affinity voice might have said it, but his mind didn’t.

The winch cable had been looped round a pulley at the top of the lift shaft. It ended in a couple of simple straps which Erentz clipped onto a harness around her torso. Above the straps, there was a simple control box on a flexible stalk, with four buttons to govern the winch. She tugged at the thin cable, testing its strength.

It’s a linked molecule silicon fibre,explained one of the engineers who’d rigged it up. Totally reliable; it can support a hundred times your body weight.he indicated a small toggle-like handle nesting in the junction between the two straps. This is your fast retrieval handle. The winch drum is recoil-wound, like a spring. The further you go down, the tighter the tension. So if you need to get back up here in a hurry, forget the control box, simply twist and pull. It’ll reel you in fast. And the whole mechanism is mechanical, so no demon spook can mess with it.

Thanks.erentz touched the little toggle reverently, the way she’d seen Christians stroking a crucifix. She walked over to the rim of the lift shaft, switching on her helmet and wrist lights. We’re on.

Dariat nodded and came over to stand behind her. He put his arms round her chest. His legs he bent so they were wrapped round hers, his feet hooking together between her ankles. It felt like a solid hold. I think I’m secure.

Erentz stepped off into space, and swung out into the shaft. She dangled over black emptiness, rotating very slowly. Dariat weighed nothing at all. The only way she knew he was still there was the faintest glow coming from his arms as they clung to her. All right, let’s go see what it’s up to.she pressed the descent button, and the cable started to play out, lowering her. The last she saw of the lobby was three people crowded shoulder to shoulder in the bright doorway, craning down to watch her. Twenty-two floors is a long way to go when you’re hanging on the end of an invisible cable in absolute darkness.

The shaft’s horizontal pressure seal on the thirtieth storey is closed,the personality said. The drop is not as fearsome as you imagine it.

I’m really trying not to imagine it at all,she shot back waspishly.

Dariat didn’t say anything. He was too busy fighting the fatigue trembles in his legs. The awkward position he was in made his muscles prone to cramps. Stupid for a ghost, he told himself repeatedly.

The lift doors kept sliding by, buff silver panels affixed to the polyp by a web of support rails and actuator cabinets. Dariat kept trying to use the sensitive cells on each floor to survey the vestibule as they dropped past, but the neural strata was badly affected by the dark continuum’s enervation. The thought routines inside were confused and slow, providing meagre pictures of the darkened corridors. Even those had vanished by the twenty-first storey. Real worry began to seep into Dariat’s thoughts. It was the visitor who was causing this part of the affliction. Almost an anti-presence, soaking up life and heat like some hazy event horizon. This was alien at its extreme.

Here we are,erentz said. she slowed their descent until they were level with the doors to the twenty-second floor vestibule.

I don’t think I can hold on for much longer,dariat said. My arms are starting to ache.

Erentz’s mind was moderately incredulous, but she spared him a direct comment. She started to sway, building up pendulum momentum, carrying them closer to the shaft wall each time. Catching hold of the struts and conduits beside the door was easy, and she steadied them against the polyp, feet resting on a latch motor casing. There was an emergency release handle on the top rail, which she turned through ninety degrees. The door slid open with a quiet hiss of compressed air.

With one hand poised ready on the retrieval toggle, she shuffled along the lower rail and swung round the edge of the door. Okay so far,she told the personality and all her relatives who were monitoring her progress. The vestibule was as dark as the lift shaft. Even the emergency lights had failed. Frost glinted everywhere her lights touched. The suit’s environment sensor reported the air was fifty degrees below freezing. So far here electronic systems were functioning close to their operational parameters.

Erentz slowly unclipped the winch cable, and secured it on a strut just inside the rim of the door; easily available in a hurry. She and Dariat shared an affinity layout of the floor, with the visitor’s approximate position indicated by a black blob. It wasn’t very precise, and they both knew that since the floor’s bitek and electronics had failed, it could have moved without the personality knowing.

That was one of the reasons the personality had wanted Dariat along on the reconnaissance. They knew he was affected by the visitor, implying he might just be able to sense it while Erentz in her insulated suit would remain unaware. As theories went, it wasn’t the most inspiring. In the end, Dariat only agreed to accompany Erentz because he knew more than most just how grim their position was. The personality held nothing from him, treating him almost as an adjunct of itself, like an exceptionally mobile observation sub-routine (or favourite pet, he thought on occasion). They desperately needed quantifiable data on the dark continuum if they were going to get a message out to the Confederation. So far the probes and quantum analysis sensors had returned next to zero information. The visitor was the only source of new facts they’d encountered. Its apparent ability to manipulate energy states could prove valuable.

“Earth’s recipe for omelettes,” Dariat murmured silently. “First steal some eggs.”

Let’s go,erentz said.

Try as he might, Dariat couldn’t find true fear in her mind. Apprehension aplenty, but she genuinely believed they would be successful.

They set off along the gently curving vestibule, heading for the visitor. Fifteen metres from the lift, a massive hole had been punched through the floor. It was as if a bomb had detonated, smashing the neat layers of polyp into a jumble of large slabs and pulverised gravel. Nutrient fluid, water, and sludge had leaked out from various severed tubules, oozing down the piles of detritus before turning to rucked tongues of dull grey ice. They stood at the broken rim, and looked down.

We won’t stand a chance against this thing,dariat said. Holy Anstid, look at what it can do; the strength of the fucking thing! That polyp’s over two metres thick, look. We’ve got to get out of here.

Calm down,the personality replied. Whoever heard of a ghost being frightened?

Well, hear it and weep. This is suicidal.

Physical strength alone didn’t do this,erentz said. It was helped by the cold. If you lower the polyp’s temperature far enough it becomes as brittle as glass.

That’s a real comfort to know,dariat retorted scathingly.

The personality is right, we shouldn’t balk just because of this. It demonstrates that the visitor uses cold the same way we use heat, that’s all. If we’d wanted to break through a wall, we’d heat it with lasers or an induction field until it weakens. This is an example of how logic progresses in this continuum; concentrating enough energy to heat something is fantastically difficult here, so the visitors simply apply the inverse.

But we don’t know how they apply it,dariat said. So we can’t defend ourselves against it.

Then we need to find out,erentz said simply. And you have to admit, if this is how it moves about, we’ll definitely hear it coming.

Dariat cursed as she started to pick her way over the loose debris bordering the hole. He knew now why the personality had picked her. She had more gung-ho optimism than a whole squadron of test-pilots. Reluctantly, he started to follow.

There were deep gouge marks in the floor that had torn the scarlet and lemon carpet into crumpled waves. The naked polyp underneath was pocked with small craters in a triangular pattern every couple of metres. Dariat had no trouble picturing them as talon marks. The visitor had bulldozed its way along the vestibule, cracking the walls and shredding the furniture and fittings. Then it had veered off deeper into the interior of the starscraper. According to the personality, it was resting right against the core. The door to a large apartment suite was missing, along with a considerable chunk of the surrounding wall. Erentz halted several of metres short, and ran her suit’s wrist beams around the big aperture.

The vestibule on the other side is undamaged,she said. It has to be in there.

I agree.

Can you tell for certain?

I’m a ghost, not a psychic.

You know what I mean.

Yeah. But I feel okay so far.

She knelt down and began unhooking sensors from her belt, screwing them onto a telescopic pole. I’ll just run a visual and infrared scan first, with spectral and particle interpretation programs hooked in, no active sweeps.

Try a magnetic scan as well,the personality suggested.

Right.erentz added one last sensor to the small clump, then looked round at Dariat. Okay?

He nodded. She extended the pole cautiously. Dariat used affinity to receive the results directly from the bitek processor governing the sensors, seeing a pale image of the frosted wall sliding past. It was superimposed with translucent sheets of colour that shimmered with defraction patterns, the results of the analysis programs, which Dariat fully failed to understand. He shifted the focus, cancelling everything but the raw visual and infrared image.

He watched the edge of the smashed wall go past. Then there was nothing. Is it still working?he asked.

Yes. There’s absolutely no light in there. No electromagnetic emissions at all. That’s odd, the walls should register on the infrared no matter how cold they are. Its like the visitor has thrown some kind of energy barricade across the hole.

So go for an active scan,dariat said. Laser radar, perhaps.

Simpler if you just go and take a peek,the personality said.

No bloody way! You don’t know it’s an energy barricade; that might be the visitor itself hiding round the corner.

If it was that close, you really would sense it.

We don’t know that for sure.

Stop farting about like an old woman and go stick your head round the edge.

Erentz had already pulled the telescopic pole back. She wasn’t going to give him any support at all.

Okay, I’ll look.the whole notion was even worse than when he’d taken that suicide pill back in Bospoort’s apartment. At least then he’d had a pretty good idea what he was letting himself in for. Shine as much light over here as you can,he told erentz.

She put the last sensor back on her belt, then pulled out the laser pistol and a small tubular flare launcher. Ready.

They both moved over to the other side of the vestibule, giving Dariat a better angle. Erentz focused her helmet beams on the gap as he crept towards it. There was nothing to see. The beams could have been trying to illuminate a cold neutron star for all the effect they had.

Dariat was standing opposite the gap now. Shit. Maybe it is an event horizon. I can’t see a bloody thing in there.it was as if the universe ended inside the apartment. an uncomfortable analogy, given their circumstances.

Stage two, then,erentz said. she brought her flare launcher up, aiming it at the gap. Let’s see if this exposes anything.

We shouldn’t rush into this,dariat said quickly.

Fine,the personality interjected. As you can’t see anything from outside, and you don’t want to use the flare, why don’t you just go in there and take a look around.

It might think the flare is some kind of weapon,dariat said.

Then what do you suggest?

I’m just saying, that’s all. It doesn’t hurt to be prudent.

We’ve taken every precaution we can. Erentz, use the flare.

Wait!right out on the very edge of visibility, there was a perturbation in the curtain of darkness. Faint shadow-shapes moved sinuously, the surface distortion of something stirring deep inside. The blackness started to recede from him with the leisurely speed of an outgoing tide, uncovering the edges of the apartment.

His mind was aware of Erentz’s finger tightening on the launcher’s release trigger. Determination in her mind not to come back without some useful information on the visitor.

No. Don’t . . .

The flare streaked across the vestibule, a searing-white magnesium blaze that punctured the pseudoveil across the gap. Dariat looked directly into the shattered apartment.

Paradoxically, the new strength it had gained was weakening the Orgathé as a whole. As it absorbed the life-energy contained within the stream of liquid, its once-quiescent riders began to rise out of their unity. It was no longer a singleton. The collective which had originally formed the Orgathé was separating. Before, they had bound their meagre scraps of life-energy together, a synergistic combination which had allowed them to fly free of the mélange. Together, they had been strong. Now there was more than enough life-energy to make them strong individually. They had no real need for each other any more.

Physically, they remained in the same place. There was no reason to move. Quite the opposite. They needed to stay and consume the life-energy which would finally allow them their independence. That ultimate condition hadn’t yet been achieved, though it was very close now. Already the Orgathé’s physical composition was changing in anticipation of the splendid moment. Internally, it had begun to compartmentalise; dividing in a mockery of biological cell multiplication, with each section attaining a unique shape. The Orgathé had become a womb for a dozen different species.

Then it sensed the two entities approaching. Their flames of life-energy were too small and weak to be worthy of any active intervention. The liquid supply of life-energy was far more enriching than any it would gain by devouring individuals. The Orgathé simply coiled the darkness protectively around itself and carried on consuming.

And Erentz fired the flare into the apartment. Dariat saw the vast bulk of the Orgathé clinging to the far wall, a sagging glossy-black membrane with flabby protuberances that pulsed in discordant rhythms, as if something was scrabbling round underneath. Tentacle-like bands of raw muscle were wound round it so tightly they quivered with tension.

The flare smacked into a wall, bounced, dropped to the frost-sprinkled carpet where its started to burn through into the polyp. Heat and light drenched the apartment in equal proportions. The Orgathé could ward off the light, but not the heat. That penetrated right through its fractions, bringing a wave of pain with it.

Dariat watched the Orgathé peel apart like segments of rotting fruit as it fell off the wall. A torrent of ice-frothed sludge poured out of two puncture holes it had been suckling from. The thick bubbling tide swept a grotesque menagerie of malleable creatures across the floor before it. They tottered and rolled chaotically in the dimming light, churning up the slough. Multi-jointed legs scrabbled round in the same fashion as a newborn deer attempting to stand. Damp wings fluttered ineffectually, flinging off fantails of sticky droplets. Mouths, beaks, and gullets pumped and gasped in silence.

Oh fuck,dariat moaned. the habitat’s affinity band was stunned into mortified silence as he shared his vision with everybody.

Erentz started to back down the vestibule, fear sending cold shivers along her limbs. The flare sputtered and died, sending up a final spiral wisp of smoke. Just before the light vanished, Dariat thought the creatures were solidifying, their skin hardening. In the darkness, he heard a clack as might be made by teeth in an excessively large jaw snapping shut. Dizziness struck him like a rubber truncheon. He staggered away from the apartment, almost unaware of Erentz’s suit lights bobbing about wildly as she started running.

Move, Dariat!the level of worry in the personality’s plea goaded him into taking a few shaky steps. Come on, boy. Get the fuck out of there.he took a few more steps, sobbing in frustration at the weakness that had infected his spectral limbs. Lodging in his mind, though not through the gateway of affinity, was an awareness of the visitor’s stupendous hunger.

Dariat had stumbled on for several metres before he even realized he was going the wrong way. Wretched despair produced a pitiful growl in his throat. “Anastasia, help me.”

Come on boy. She wouldn’t want you to give up, not now.

Angry at the injustice of her memory being used against him, he glanced over his shoulder. Erentz’s lights were almost out of sight as she raced away. He saw a halo of darkness eclipse the thin slices of fading light behind him. His legs almost gave out at the sight.

Keep going. I’ve got you a way out.

He took a couple more fumbling steps before the personality’s words even registered. Where?

Next lift shaft. The door is jammed open.

Dariat could see very little now. It wasn’t just the lack of light, his vision was misted with grey. Only his memory placed the lift shaft for him, and that was being reinforced by the personality. Four or five metres ahead, and on his left.

How’s that going to help?he asked

Simple, the lift is stalled ten stories down. You just jump. Land on top, and walk through the door. You can do that, you’re a ghost.

I can’t,he wailed. You don’t understand. Solid matter is hideous.

While the visitor right behind you is . . . what?

Sobbing he ran his hand along the wall, and found the open lift door. The visitor was sliding smoothly and silently towards him; chilling him further. He sank to his knees, perched right on the edge as if in prayer.

Not ten stories. That’ll kill me.

Exactly which of those solid bones in your transparent body do you think you’ll break? Listen to us you little shithead, if you had any scarp of decent imagination at all you’d just float up to the lobby. Now JUMP!

Dariat could actually sense the polyp dying all around him as the visitor swept towards him. Lady Chi-ri, help me.he topped over the lip and into the eternal lift shaft.

Erentz sprinted as hard as she could back down the vestibule. Something was stopping her frantic muscles from delivering their best. She felt feeble. She felt nauseous. The rucked carpet did its devious best to trip her.

Keep going,the personality implored passionately.

She didn’t actually look round. Didn’t need to. She knew something was coming after her. The floor was vibrating as a heavy body pounded along. Strident screeches were repeated again and again as some claw or fang ripped across the polyp. And cold was penetrating her suit as if there was no insulation at all. Without ever looking back, she waved the laser pistol behind her and fired off a series of wild shots. They had no apparent effect on her pursuer.

Affinity showed her the group up in the lobby. Her relatives were snatching up their weapons, thumbing the safeties. Tolton, in ignorance from his lack of affinity, was becoming frantic, shouting: “What? What?”

You are approaching the hole in the floor,the personality warned.

“Shit!” She intended it as a defiant bellow. It came out as a whimper. Her body was twice its proper weight. The weakness seemed to amplify her fear, clotting her mind with dread.

An easy jump,the personality promised. Don’t stop running. It’s just a question of timing and sure footing.

Where’s Dariat?she asked suddenly.

Four more paces. Concentrate.

It was as though she was already losing her balance, leaning too far forward and having to windmill her arms to keep upright. The edge wobbled towards her. Her knees were bending and she didn’t know why.

Now!

The personality’s command fired her muscles. Erentz leapt across the hole, flinging her arms forward. She hit the floor on the other side, and collapsed, tumbling painfully. Elbows and knees managed to hit every jutting chunk of rubble.

Get up. You’re almost there. Come on!

Groaning in anguish, she staggered to her feet. As she turned, her wrist beams shone back across the hole. Erentz screamed. The Orgathé itself had come after her. Still the largest and strongest of all the dissociated collective, it clawed its way along the vestibule after the small fleeing entity. There was no way it could fly in here. Even though it was diminished in physical size by the separation of the others, the vestibule was too narrow for its wings to be extended. As it was, the Orgathé had to hunch in on itself to avoid the ceiling.

Fury powered it now. Fury at being ripped from the nourishment. It had been so close to achieving the energy level it wanted. To have that triumph burned away was excruciating. It didn’t care about feeding again, it didn’t even care about breaking out of the dark continuum. It wanted vengeance.

Erentz jerked into motion again. Pure adrenaline-rush terror overrode her recalcitrant leg muscles. She sprinted for the open lift door. A gust of buffeting air told her the Orgathé had sprung across the hole behind her. There wasn’t going to be enough time to fasten the cable straps to her harness.

She slammed into the wall at the side of the lift doors, spinning round to face the Orgathé. It had obscured itself in folds of darkness again. Only the purposeful ripples slithering across the nebulous surface hinted at the terrible menace contained within. She fired the laser pistol, simply to see the darkness stiffen around the beam’s impact point. A wavering dawn of pink light bloomed behind the Orgathé, making a mockery of the weapon.

The flare,the personality urged. Fire the flare at the bugger.

Erentz had nothing else left. All there could be now was a jump into the shaft, and hope the fall killed her before the Orgathé caught her. She brought the slim launcher tube up, pointing it at the centre of the ethereal darkness, and pulled the trigger.

A pathetically small spark of incandescence plunged into the vast Orgathé. It spasmed uncontrollably, appendages writhing to thrash against the walls and ceiling. Huge splinters of polyp were sent whirling in dangerous cascades from the force of the blows. Erentz stared at the monster as it bucked about, incredulous that a tiny flare could induce such an awesome result. The whole vestibule was shaking violently.

Yeah, fascinating,said the personality. Now get out of there while it’s distracted.

She snatched the straps from the strut where she’d secured them. Only one was attached to the harness when she yanked down on the toggle. The power of the rewind made her yip in shock as she went hurtling upwards. Unexpected gee forces tore the laser pistol and the flare launcher from her hands. The narrow band of the shaft wall illuminated by her lights was a continuous blur of grey.

Brace yourself,the personality said.

Abruptly she was in freefall, still rocketing up. Coils of cable floated sedately around her. The lobby door was visible above: blank white rectangle. It expanded at a frightening rate. Then she was slowing, reaching the top of her arc, level with the door. The slack loops of cable sped through the pulley just as she started to fall, and she was wrenched to a halt. Hands reached out to haul her in through the door. She sank down on the black and white marble tiles of the lobby floor, taking fast gulps of air. Her helmet was removed. Annoying voices buzzed querulously in her ears.

“Where is he?” Tolton demanded. “Where’s Dariat?”

“Down there,” she panted miserably. “He’s still down there.” Her mind sent out a desperate affinity call to the ghost. All she could perceive in return was a faint incoherent cry of consternation.

A brutal howl of tearing metal and disintegrating polyp reverberated out of the lift shaft’s open doors. The whole group froze, then looked at the gap as one.

“It’s coming up,” Erentz stammered. “Holy shit, it’s coming after me.”

They scattered, racing for the lobby doors and the trucks outside. Erentz’s exhaustion and bulky suit slowed her to little more than a hobble. Tolton grabbed her arm and pulled her along.

The Orgathé exploded out of the top of the lift shaft at near-sonic velocity, a comet of anti-light. It punched through the lobby roof without even slowing down. Big, lethal shards of amber crystal slashed down, shattering on the marble tiles. Erentz and Tolton both dived for cover under one of the upturned couches as a surf of crystal fragments skittered around them.

The personality watched the visitor curve round and flatten out; perceptive cells strained to keep it in focus. It was a roughly triangular patch of slippery air, surrounded by black diffraction rainbows similar to a magnified heat shimmer effect. Big iron-hard hailstones pattered onto the grass below it. A kilometre above the parkland, it started to curve round, heading back for the Djerba’s lobby. Tolton and Erentz had reached his truck. Both of them were squinting up against the reddish glare of the axial light-tube, trying to spot the visitor. He squeezed the throttle round as far as it would go, and the wheels grumbled into life. They trundled towards the wall of shanty huts at less than ten kilometres per hour.

“Faster!” Erentz yelled frantically.

Tolton reset the throttle. It made no difference to their speed. Another of the trucks was rocking lazily over the ground twenty metres away, going even slower than they were. “This is all the juice we’ve got,” Tolton barked.

Erentz was staring at a thin line of wavering silver-black air that was sliding through the sky towards them. Pellucid streamers were unfurling below it, like long coiling jellyfish tendrils. She knew what they were intended for, and what they were going to grab. “This is it. Endgame.”

No it’s not,the personality said. Get in amongst the shacks. Forget the trucks, and make sure you take all your lasers and flares with you.

With the rest of the personality’s plan expanding into her mind, she shouted: “Come on,” to Tolton.

He braked the truck just short of the first rickety hut of plastic sheeting and lashed-up composite poles. They started running down the muddy alley between precarious walls. High above them, the Orgathé had started its approach run, a cascade of hail falling all around it.

Erentz and her relatives started firing their lasers round wildly. “Incinerate it!” she bellowed at Tolton. “Burn it all.” Bright scarlet beams slashed at walls and roofs, scorching long lines in the plastic. Edges smouldered and started to burn, curling and dripping. Flames spat along junctions, pumping out jets of black smoke.

The group had congregated in one of the larger open yards between the flimsy buildings. Tolton was shrinking back from the apparent madness, shielding his face from the heat that the eager, leaping flames were throwing out. “What are you doing?” he cried.

Erentz started firing her flare launcher at piles of rubbish. There were several spectacular bursts of flame as bundles of packaging and abandoned containers ignited. Sooty flakes wafted round in the microthermals. “It can’t stand the heat,” she shouted at the bewildered street poet. “The flames can beat it back. Come on, help us!” Tolton aimed his own laser, adding to the melee.

The Orgathé was just visible, a lenticular patch of shaded, rippling air, itself distorted by the heat gushing upwards from the tips of the flames. It held its course, arrowing down towards them, until the last possible moment. The long scrabbling tendrils hanging from its underbelly parted furiously as they skimmed the flames.

Tolton couldn’t see it anymore. His eyes were smarting from the bitter chemical smog billowing out from the roaring plastic. Lush ebony smoke was swirling round his legs, obscuring the ground. Heat seared the skin over the back of his hands as he held them up to defend his face. He could smell singeing hair. A puissant blast of air sent him staggering to his knees, whipping the smoke round into a blinding cyclone. For a second the heat vanished, replaced by its absolute opposite. Glistening sweat transmuted into frost right across his body. He thought his blood was going to turn solid inside his veins, the cold was so frighteningly intense. Then it was gone.

Smoke was rolling itself into vortex spirals as hail stung his face.

“Yes!” erentz shouted up at the retreating Orgathé. “We beat the bastard. It’s frightened.”

It’s repelled,the personality chided. There’s a big difference.

Sensitive cells showed her the airborne monster coming round back to the shanty village in a long curve. The flames from the first buildings they’d fired were shrinking.

Move to a new section,the personality said. Let’s hope the bugger gives up before you run out of things to burn.

The Orgathé made another five attempts to assail Erentz and her group before it finally withdrew and flew deeper into the habitat interior. Over half of the shanty village had been razed by then. Tolton and the others were caked in grime, and retching badly from the smoke and fumes. Their exposed skin was cracked and bleeding from the heat. Only Erentz, with her suit and mask, was unaffected.

You’d better start walking towards the caverns,the personality said. We’ll have a couple of trucks sent to pick you up.

Erentz slowly surveyed the blackened ruins with their slowly solidifying lakes of molten plastic. Couldn’t we just wait here? These guys have been through hell.

Sorry, more bad news. We think the other sections of the visitor are coming up from the Djerba. The last few functioning systems we’ve got in there are being extinguished floor by floor. It can’t be anything else.

Shit.she gave the lobby an apprehensive look. What about Dariat?

Nothing.

Damnit.

We are he. In us he lives on.

He’d argue that.

Yes.

There must have been fifty of those brutes down there.

No,the personality said. The glimpse we were given of the visitor without its visual shield was a brief one, but detailed memory analysis of the scene indicates twelve, at most fifteen, were birthed from the mother creature. We don’t believe they are anything like the size of the one which has pursued you.

Well that’s a real big relief.

They started picking their way through the sulphurous, carbonized wreckage of the buildings, heading for the track that wound its way across the scrub desert to the northern endcap. Tolton balked until Erentz started explaining the reason for urgency. “So we can’t get down there to find what happened to him?” he asked.

“Not until we know it’s clear. And then . . . what do the remnants of a ghost look like? It’s not as if there are going to be any bones.”

“Yeah,” Tolton gave the lobby a final, remorseful look over his shoulder. “I suppose not.”

The Orgathé cruised through the air, scanning the inside of the object for the nearest source of life-energy. The interior was even worse than the external shell. Here the living layers were protected by many metres of dead matter with just the thinnest sprinkling of cells smeared on top. Plants, that had a pitiful content of life-energy. No use to the Orgathé, it needed to regain the true richness which lay beneath. There were several entrances back down to the protruding spindles, which it ignored. This time it wanted a more secure feeding place.

For a while it scouted round over the pink grasslands before eventually turning towards the strip of liquid. Just above the beaches and coves of the far side the surface was riddled with large cave entrances, leading deep into the solid mantle of matter. In there, large currents of the life-energy burned brightly, flowing through vast layers of living cells stacked one on top of the other. Tunnels of living fluids formed complex warrens, thousands of tributary channels connecting to the town-sized organs encased within the endcap.

The Orgathé landed on a broad expanse of platinum sand that formed one of the trim little coves. Elaborate filigrees of glacial frost sprang out from its feet as it clawed its way up to the nearest cave. As soon as it reached the buff, grass and bushes perished instantly, their leaves turning a rancid brown and freezing into shape. It barely scraped through the cave entrance. Mock-stalactites snapped off as its hardened carapace brushed against them, shattering as they clattered to the floor. The Orgathé’s appendages were modified then hardened by further expenditures of energy to help it bulldoze its way past constrictions and awkward bends. Contact with the hot matter bruised its body, but it was slowly acclimatising to the heat endemic within the habitat.

After a while it came up against a huge tunnel conveying the living fluid. It broke through the thick wall and eased its entire body into the driving torrent. For the first time since it had slipped into the dark continuum it knew contentment. With that came the shiver of expectation.

The trucks still hadn’t reached Erentz and the others, though she could just see a small dark speck moving somewhere out there on the scrub desert ahead of them. Walking had become an automatic trudge while her mind followed the flight of the visitor. Valisk’s general affinity band was filled with speculation and comment as the personality and Erentz’s relatives discussed what was to be done next.

Coverage once the Orgathé moved into the cave wasn’t so easy. Tracking its movement was a question of following the null-zone surrounding it by the trail of dead polyp left in its wake.

The damn thing has definitely broken into the nutrient artery feeding my mineral digestion tract,the personality said. It’s creating severe flow pressure problems.

What’s it actually doing to the nutrient fluid?erentz asked. Can you sense any change?

The fluid has been chilled down considerably, which is understandable given what we know of the visitor’s intrinsic capability. And over ninety per cent of the corpuscles are dead. A strange outcome, the fluid temperature alone is not sufficient to kill them.

When Dariat and I disturbed it down in the Djerba, it’d broken into one of the starscraper’s nutrient fluid tubules. That must be what it’s after. It’s feeding on your nutrient fluid.

An excellent hypothesis. However, it is not digesting the fluid, we would have been alerted to the loss of volume. And we strongly doubt we have a compatible biochemistry.

It must need something the nutrients contain. Can you run an analysis on the fluid in the Djerba and the other starscrapers where you have visitors squatting?

One moment.

Erentz felt the personality’s principal thought routines focusing on the vast network of tubules and conduits that wormed through Valisk’s gigantic mitosis layer, probing for aberrations. A big part of the problem in locating any interference was the way the nutrient fluid was pumped into and around the starscrapers. For a start there were many different types. Some just fed the mitosis layer and the muscle membranes, others fed the environmental filter organs down in the basement floors. Specialist fluids supplied the food synthesis organs in each apartment. And all of them underwent a long cycle from the digestive and treatment organs of the southern endcap to the starscrapers and back again, taking several days to complete the circuit. The entire process was autonomic, with the governing sub-routines and specialist monitoring cells inside the tubule walls watching for known toxins seeping into the fluid. They weren’t looking for whatever kind of corruption was being inflicted by the visitor.

With the bitek systems inside the starscrapers currently functioning erratically at best, the return flow was sluggish. Some of the corpuscles had been naturally depleted by the organs they were intended to replenish, while a fair quantity returned still carrying the fresh molecules and oxygen they were originally bound with. It made a review of the fluid that was emerging from the starscrapers inordinately difficult. Eventually, though, the personality said: We concur that the visitors are all somehow consuming the nutrient fluids. The proportion of dead corpuscles is approaching ninety per cent in some tubules. The nature of the consumption is unclear. We can only conclude it is somehow connected with their heat-sink ability; certainly there is no detectable physical digestion involved.

They’re ghouls,she said. Dinosaur-sized parasites. We’ve got to find some way of stopping them.

Fire is the only effective method we’ve discovered so far. It will take time to manufacture flame throwers.

It’ll have to be done. They’ll eat you alive otherwise.

Yes. Until we can build the appropriate weapons hardware, we’re shutting down the supply of nutrient fluid to the starscrapers.

Good idea.she could see the trucks growing out of the scrub desert, trundling along the hard-packed dirt track. Maybe that’ll stop them multiplying. If we can’t, the bastards will evolve into a plague.

Fifty light-years from Hesperi-LN, Lady Mac and the Oenone moved tentatively towards each other. Joshua had to use radar for the manoeuvre, while Syrinx utilized the voidhawk’s distortion field. This deep in interstellar space there wasn’t enough starlight to illuminate a white gas-giant. Two small technological artefacts coated in non-reflective foam were simply zones of greater darkness. The only clue to their existence an observer might have had was when they occasionally eclipsed a distant star.

When Joshua did fire Lady Mac ’s ion thrusters to lock attitude, Syrinx had to blink water from her eyes in reflex. The blue flames were completely dazzling to Oenone ’s deep space acclimatised optical sensor blisters. Both ships extended their airlock tubes and docked. Joshua led Alkad, Peter, Liol, and Ashly into the voidhawk’s crew toroid. They’d come for a conference to review the data from Tanjuntic-RI and determine the next stage of the flight. The two physicists were obviously required. Joshua had brought Ashly because of his wide experience and delight in new and strange cultures, which might be useful. Liol’s presence was a little harder to justify. Out of all of them, he’d seen the least of the universe. It was just that . . . Joshua was getting used to having him around, someone he didn’t have to explain everything to. They thought the same way about the same things. That made Liol useful back-up if he wanted to argue a point of contention.

Syrinx was waiting for them at the inner airlock hatch, a sly reminiscence in her mind at the last time Joshua had come aboard when the two ships were docked. If she’d ever had any lingering doubts about him, they’d ended at Hesperi-LN. Now she was glad it was he accompanying Oenone rather than some gruesomely efficient Confederation Navy captain from Meredith Saldana’s Deathkiss squadron.

She led the party into Oenone ’s main lounge. The long compartment was furnished with plain autumn-red couches which matched the gentle curvature of the walls. Glass-fronted shelves displayed a large, varied collection of objects the crew had collected during their flights, ranging from simple pebbles to antique carvings, even examples of unusual consumer products.

Monica was sitting with Samuel in one of the couches. Joshua took the one next to theirs, which put him opposite Renato, Oski, and Kempster. Alkad and Peter sat with Parker, who gave his former colleague a simple polite greeting, as if he had no feelings about her activities and motives. Joshua didn’t believe that for a second.

Syrinx claimed a seat next to Ruben, and smiled round. “Now we’re all here: Oski, did we retrieve everything from the arkship?”

The electronics specialist glanced at the slim processor block on the rosewood table in front of her. “Yes. We managed to datavise all the files stored in the Planetary Habitation terminal into our processors. They’re all translated now. There’s a lot of information on the five planets they colonized prior to Hesperi-LN.”

“And I’ve been accessing some of the files,” Monica said. “I was right, one of those planets was inhabited by a sentient species. They were at an early industrial age.” She datavised the lounge’s processor. An AV lens on the ceiling came alive, projecting a laser-like cone of light down into the compartment. A series of two dimensional pictures materialized at the base, just above the decking. Aerial reconnaissance shots of grey, dirty towns, their brick and stone buildings sprawled across a landscape of blue-green vegetation. They all had rows of factories clustering around the outskirts, tall drab chimneys squirting thick smoke into the azure sky. Small vehicles moved along narrow stone roads, puffing out exhaust fumes. Cultivation was extensive, with human-style checkerboard squares of fields cutting into forests and lapping against the steeper hills.

Tyrathca spaceplanes started to feature in the pictures, landing in the fields and meadows outside towns. Crowds of the four-armed bipeds Monica had found in the archive display cube were shown running from armed soldier-caste Tyrathca. Close-ups of the quirky alien buildings with their arched roofs. They didn’t have windows in the outer walls, instead a funnel-like light well delivered illumination to the interior. The architectural arrangement was obvious: many of them had been struck by Tyrathca missiles, exposing the burnt-out structure.

At some time, what passed as the xenocs’ army had rallied. Crude artillery pulled by lumbering eight-legged horse-analogue beasts had been deployed against the spaceplanes. Masers reduced them to smouldering ruin.

“Jesus,” Joshua muttered when the file had finished. “A genuine invasion by bug-eyed space aliens. The whole thing looked like snatches from a low budget adaptation of The War of the Worlds .”

“I’m afraid it was inevitable,” Parker said in regretful tones. “I’m beginning to learn the hard way just how rigidly individual species stick to their own philosophies and laws, and how different that philosophy can be to ours.”

“They committed genocide,” Monica said, glaring at the old project director. “If there’s any of those xenocs left alive, they’ve probably been enslaved. And you’re calling it a philosophy? For fuck’s sake!”

“We regard genocide as one of the worse crimes a person or government can commit,” Parker said. “The massive extermination not only of life, but an entire way of living. Such an act repels us, and rightly so, because that’s the way we are. We have emotion and empathy, some would say they govern us. I remind you the Tyrathca do not have these traits. The nearest they come to emotion is the protectiveness they extend to their children and their clan. If you put a breeder caste into a human war crimes court to answer for this atrocity it would never be able to understand what it was doing there. They cannot be judged by our laws, because our laws are the embodiment of our civilization. We cannot condemn the Tyrathca, however much we despise what they do. Human rights are precisely that: human.”

“They took over an entire planet, and you don’t think they’ve done anything wrong?”

“Of course they have done wrong. By our standards. And by our standards, so have the Kiint in continually refusing to give us the solution to possession which we know they have. What are you proposing, that we file charges against Jobis as well?”

“I’m not talking about filing charges, I’m talking about the whole Tyrathca situation. We have to reconsider our mission in view of what we’ve uncovered.”

“What do you mean, reconsider?” Joshua asked. “The original circumstances haven’t changed, and our goal certainly hasn’t. Okay, the Tyrathca committed a terrible crime thousands of years ago. We personally, these two ships, can’t do anything about that. But we do know to treat them more cautiously than before. When we get back, the Confederation Assembly can work out what to do about the genocide.”

“If they’re allowed to take that initiative,” Monica said quietly. “I admit I’m angry about the genocide. But I’m more worried about the present day implications.”

“How can that affect us?” Alkad asked. “And I speak of someone with direct experience of a genocide. What we’ve seen is awful, yes. But it was a long time ago, and a long way off.”

“It affects us,” Monica said, “Because it shows us the Tyrathca in their true light. Consider, we’ve now established that there were a thousand arkships.”

“One thousand two hundred and eight,” Renato said. “I rechecked the flightpath files.”

“Great, even worse,” Monica said. “Even assuming each of them was less successful than Tanjuntic-RI, say they only founded a couple of colonies apiece, that gives them a population at least two to three times greater than the Confederation.”

“Spread over a huge volume of space,” Kempster said. “And not a cohesive political entity like our civilization.”

“Only because there’s been no need for them to achieve unity,” Monica said. “So far. Look, I’m in intelligence; Samuel and I both spend our time assessing potential risk, it’s what we’re trained for. We catch problems in their embryonic stage. And that’s the situation we have here. We’ve discovered a massive threat to the Confederation, in my opinion at least as dangerous as possession.”

“Physically dangerous,” Samuel interjected. He smiled for the interruption. “I do concur with Monica that the Tyrathca present us with an unexpected problem.”

“Crap,” Joshua said. “Look at what we did to them back at Hesperi-LN. You and the serjeants defeated an entire regiment of the soldier caste. And Lady Mac flew circles round their ships. Confederation technology means we outclass them by an order of magnitude.”

“Not quite, Joshua,” Ashly said. The pilot was still gazing at the last picture projected by the AV lens, an apprehensive expression on his face. “What Monica is saying is that we’ve stirred up the proverbial hornets’ nest. The potential of the Tyrathca threat is a serious one. If all those thousands of colony worlds joined together, sheer numbers would present us with a huge problem. And they do have Confederation technology, we sold them enough weapons in the past. They could retro-engineer combat wasps if they had to.”

“You saw how they used them against Lady Mac ,” Joshua said. “The Tyrathca can’t handle space warfare, they don’t have the right kind of neural wiring for that kind of activity.”

“They could learn. Trial and error would improve them. Granted they’ll probably never be as good as us. But that’s where their superior numbers come in, and it works against us. In the very long haul they could wear us down.”

“Why should they?” Liol asked. He spread his arms wide in appeal. “I mean, Christ, you’re sitting here talking like we’re at war with them. Sure they’re narked we jumped into their system and raised a little hell. But this flight is totally deniable, right? Nobody’s going to admit to sending us. You don’t commit your entire race to a conflict that will kill billions because we beat up a chunk of wreckage they’d already abandoned.”

“We tend to overlook what they are so that we can maintain our preferred policy of diplomatic tolerance,” Samuel said. “We like to see them as slightly simple, and stubborn; the ultimate big lummox. A species we can feel superior to, without them ever being aware of our complacent condescension. While in fact, they are a species so aggressive and territorial that they have evolved a soldier caste. Evolved one. We can barely comprehend the drive behind such a phenomena. Such a thing requires tens of millennia to achieve. Throughout all that time on their homeworld the social climate maintained the pressures necessitating such a development. Their history is a solid monoculture of conflict.”

“I still don’t see how that makes them a danger,” Liol persisted. “If anything it works in our favour. We provided the Hesperi-LN Tyrathca with the ZTT drive over two hundred years ago. And what do they do with it? Do they rush off to contact their long-lost relatives on the first five colony worlds? Bollocks. They’ve founded more colony worlds for themselves, so their immediate relatives could benefit. They didn’t want to share that little technological gem with anybody else.”

“You’re right,” the Edenist said. “Providing you add one qualifier: to date. As Monica said, we are dealing with the concept of potential here. In one respect, the Tyrathca are like us; an external threat will unite them. The arkships themselves are proof of that.”

“We’re not a threat to them!” Liol was almost shouting.

“We haven’t been until now,” Monica said. “Until now they didn’t know we could become elemental. They were so disturbed by the prospect of human possessed they immediately opted for isolation. We have become a danger. Possessed humans have attacked Tyrathca settlements. Our already superior military strength has been multiplied by an unknown amount. Remember they do not see humanity divided between possessed and non-possessed. We are one species, that has suddenly and dramatically changed for the worse.” She pointed to the projection. “And now we’ve seen what happens to xenoc species which come into dispute with the Tyrathca.”

Liol lapsed back into silence. Scowling, worried now rather than angered by losing the argument.

“All right,” Joshua said. “There’s a potential for conflict between the Tyrathca and the Confederation, assuming we survive possession intact. It still doesn’t affect our mission.”

“The Confederation should be warned of this development,” Monica said. “We have learned more about Tyrathcan nature than anyone has before. And with their isolation policy, nobody else is likely to find out. That knowledge is now of considerable strategic importance.”

“You’re not seriously suggesting we turn back already?” Joshua asked.

“I have to concur with Monica, that’s now a factor we should consider,” Samuel said.

“No no,” Joshua said. “You’re blowing this out of all proportion. Look, we’re forty-two light-years from Yaroslav, which is the nearest Confederation star system. Lady Mac would have to expend a lot of delta-V to match velocities. We’d take over a day to get there, and the same to get back here. And right now, time is the biggest critical factor we have. Who knows what the possessed are cooking up behind us? They might even have taken over the Yaroslav system.”

“Not the Edenist habitats,” Monica said. “Voidhawks could distribute our warning.”

“The Oenone would only need a day to get to Yaroslav and back,” Ruben said. “That’s not so much of a delay.” He gave Syrinx an encouraging smile.

She didn’t return it. “I really don’t want us to separate at this point,” she said. “Besides, we haven’t even established how the search for the Sleeping God is progressing. I think we should at least hear the status review from Parker’s team before we go making that kind of decision.”

“Agreed,” Joshua said quickly. Monica glanced at Samuel, then shrugged. “Okay.”

Parker leaned forward, permitting himself a small smile. “At least I have one piece of good news for us: we have confirmed the Sleeping God does exist. There’s a reference in one of the Tyrathca files.”

There were smiles all round the lounge. Ashly clapped his hands together, and let out an exhilarated: “Yes!” He and Liol grinned broadly at each other.

“The file didn’t tell us what the bloody thing was,” Kempster said gruffly. “Just what it did. And that’s really weird.”

“Assuming it’s true,” Renato said.

“Don’t be such a depressive, my boy. We’ve already been through that aspect. The Tyrathca don’t invent stories, they can’t.”

“So what can it do?” Joshua asked.

“From what we can determine, it transported one of their arkships a hundred and fifty light-years. Instantaneously.”

“It’s a stardrive?” Joshua asked in disappointment.

“I don’t think so. Oski, would you put this in perspective for us, please.”

“Certainly.” She datavised the processor block on her table, clearing the final picture of the Tyrathca invasion from the AV projection. “This is a simulation of Tanjuntic-RI’s flightpath from Mastrit-PJ to Hesperi-LN, based on what we’ve discovered in the files from the arkship.” The AV lens projected a complex starchart centred on the colourful smear of the Orion nebula. A red star on the opposite side of the nebula from the Confederation was surrounded by a swarm of informational icons. “Mastrit-PJ is now either a red giant or supergiant, and it has to be quite close to the far side of the nebula, which is why we’ve never seen it before. Now, the Tanjuntic-RI flew right round the nebula. We don’t know which way round; the Tyrathca have never revealed the location of their other colonies to us, and we didn’t extract enough information from their terminals to determine them. However, we know for certain that it stopped eleven times en route, eventually finishing up at Hesperi-LN. Five of those stops were to found colonies; the others were in star systems without a biocompatible planet, so they just refuelled and repaired Tanjuntic-RI, and carried on.” A thin blue line extended out from Mastrit-PJ, linking eleven stars in a rough curve going around on the galactic South side the luminescent nebula. “This course is important, because it actually cut the arkship off from direct line of sight to Mastrit-PJ. Their communication laser simply wasn’t powerful enough to penetrate the dust and gas that makes up the nebula. So after the fourth star they visited, all messages to and from Mastrit-PJ had to be relayed through the colonies. Which is also why the latter communiqué files were stored in the Planetary Habitation terminal.”

“We think Mastrit-PJ’s stellar expansion must account for the eventual fall off in message traffic,” Renato said eagerly. “Towards the end of the flight, Tanjuntic-RI was communicating with the colonies alone. Some messages were also forwarded from colonies established by other arkships, but there was nothing coming from Mastrit-PJ at all.”

“I’m surprised there ever was,” Alkad said. “If it detonated into a red giant, nothing should have survived. The star’s planets would have been consumed.”

“They must have set up some kind of redoubt in the cometary halo,” Renato said. “Their astroengineering resources were quite considerable by that time, after all. The Tyrathca who didn’t get to leave on arkships would have made some kind of survival attempt.”

“Fair assumption,” Alkad acknowledged.

“But that civilization would be finite,” Renato said. “They have no new resources to exploit, they can’t replenish themselves like the arkships do at every new star system. So eventually, they died off. Hence the lack of messages in the last five thousand years.”

“But one of the last communiqués from Mastrit-PJ was the one concerning the Sleeping God,” Parker said. “A century later, they finally went off air. Tanjuntic-RI had beamed a message back, asking for further details, but by then they were eight hundred light-years away. The Mastrit-PJ civilization was probably extinct before the first colony world received the original communiqué.”

“Can we see it, please?” Ruben asked.

“Of course,” Oski said. “We isolated the relevant text from the message, there’s a lot of softbloat garbage about source and compression. And they repeat each message thousands of times over about a fortnight to ensure the entire chunk is eventually received intact.” She gave them a file code. When they accessed it, the processor showed a simple text sheet.

INCOMING SIGNAL RECEIVED

DATE 75572-094-648

SOURCE FALINDI-TY RELAY

MASTRIT-PJ REPORTS

FLIGHTSHIP SWANTIC-LI SIGNAL RE-ACQUIRED DATE 38647-046-831.

LAST SIGNAL RECEIVED DATE 23867-032-749.

INCLUDED

TRANSMISSION DETAILS

SWANTIC-LI REPORTS

DATE 29321-072-491. PLASMA BUFFER FAILURE WHILE DECELERATING INTO STAR SYSTEM **********. MULTIPLE IMPACT DAMAGE. 1 HABITATION RING DEPRESSURIZED. 27 INDUSTRIAL SUPPORT CHAMBERS DEPRESSURIZED WITH ASSOCIATED EQUIPMENT LOSS. 32% POPULATION KILLED. LIFE-SUPPORT FUNCTIONS UNSUSTAINABLE. TOTAL LIFE-SUPPORT CESSATION EXPECTED WITHIN 7 WEEKS. NO INHABITABLE PLANETS IN STAR SYSTEM. SENSORS LOCATED AN EXTENSIVE SPATIAL DISTURBANCE ORBITING THE STAR. IT IS A DORMANT SOURCE OF GODPOWER. IT SEES THE UNIVERSE. IT CONTROLS EVERY ASPECT OF PHYSICAL EXISTENCE. ITS REASON IS TO ASSIST PROGRESS OF BIOLOGICAL ENTITIES. OUR ARRIVAL WOKE IT. WHEN WE ASKED FOR ITS HELP IT TRANSPORTED SWANTIC-LI TO THIS STAR SYSTEM 160 LIGHT-YEARS AWAY, WHERE THERE IS A HABITABLE PLANET. TO ANY WHO COME AFTER US, WE DEEM IT AN ALLY OF ALL TYRATHCA.

DATE 29385-040-175. SWANTIC-LI POPULATION TRANSFERRED TO HABITABLE PLANET. COLONY GOERTHT-WN ESTABLISHED.

Tagged on to the end of the file were three pictures. The quality was uniformly low, even after passing through discrimination and amplification filter programs. All of them showed a silver-grey smear against a stellar background. Whatever the object was, the Tyrathca of Coastuc-RT had reproduced its shape almost exactly: a broad disk with conical spires rising from each side. Its surface was smooth, without any visible markings or structures, a constant metallic sheen.

“How big is it?” Joshua asked.

“Unknown,” Renato said. “And unknowable. We don’t have any references. There was no focal length given for any of the pictures, so there’s no way we can put a number on the beast. It could be gas-giant sized, or a couple of kilometres across. The only clue I have to go on is their claim that it comes complete with an extensive spatial disturbance, which I’m assuming is some kind of intense gravity field. That would tend to prohibit anything too small. The one object that can qualify as coming near to filling the parameters we’ve got so far is a small neutron star, but that couldn’t have this shape.”

Joshua gave Alkad a long look. “Neutron stars of whatever size don’t have the properties described by the Tyrathca in that communiqué,” she said. “Nor do they look like that. I think we have to conclude it’s an artefact.”

“I’m not going to quibble with anyone’s theories,” Kempster said. “Plain and simple, we don’t have enough information to determine its nature. Sitting here trying to second guess what five fuzzy pictures are showing us is completely pointless. What we have established, is the existence of something with some very strange properties.”

“The term ‘godpower’ is fascinating,” Parker said. “Especially as we’re not dealing with spoken nuances. Plain text gives our translation a much higher level of accuracy.”

“Ha!” Kempster waved a dismissive hand at the director. “Come off it, we don’t even have an accurate definition of God in our own language. Every culture assigns different values to God. Humanity has used the term to mean everything from creator of the universe to a group of big angry men who have nothing better to do than mess about with the weather. It’s a concept, not a description.”

“However you want to squabble over semantics, God implies an extraordinary amount of power in any language.”

“Godpower, not God,” Ruben corrected pointedly. “That has to be significant, too. It’s definitely an artefact of some kind. And as the Tyrathca didn’t build it, we’ve probably got as much chance as anyone of switching it back on.”

“It was dormant, and their approach woke it up,” Oski said. “Sounds like you don’t even have to press the button to activate it.”

“I say it still sounds like a stardrive to me,” Liol said, with a nod to Joshua. “The communiqué said it assists the progress of biological entities, and it shunted that arkship a hundred and sixty light-years. That seems pretty clear cut. No wonder the Tyrathca thought it was bloody miraculous. They don’t have FTL technology. And a stardrive big enough to transport an arkship is going to be built on one hell of an impressive scale. It was bound to astonish them, even with their fatalistic phlegmatism.”

“They said a lot of things about it,” Joshua said. “None of which quite match up. What I mean is, none of the qualities they’ve given it are aspects of a single machine. Stardrives don’t observe the universe, nor do they control physical existence.”

“I could add several questions,” Syrinx said. “Like what is it doing in a star-system with no biocompatible planet? It would also appear that there’s some kind of controlling sentience. Remember the Tyrathca asked it for help, they didn’t just switch it to stardrive function and fly away.”

“They couldn’t have anyway,” Samuel said. “It sent Swantic-LI to a system with an inhabitable planet. In other words, it knew there was one there when the Tyrathca didn’t.”

“That makes it benign, as well,” Kempster said. “Or at least, friendly; presumably to biological entities. And I’m just arrogant enough to believe that if it was co-operative with the Tyrathca it really ought to extend the same courtesy to us.”

Joshua looked round the group. “If no one has anything to add about its abilities or nature, I think we’ve learned enough to confirm we should continue with this mission. Monica, you want to say no?”

The ESA agent pressed her head into her hands and stared at the decking. “I agree this thing sounds pretty impressive, but I wasn’t just drawing attention to the Tyrathca to be a pain. They do worry me.”

“Not on any timescale we have to worry about,” Oski said. “Even assuming you’re one hundred per cent right, and they now see the human race as a dangerous plague to be wiped out. It would be decades before they can even contemplate such an action. Take the worst case, and assume they’ve already travelled from Hesperi-LN to the other colonies Tanjuntic-RI founded. They still won’t be able to build ZTT starships for years to come, not in any quantity. Frankly, I have my doubts they would ever manage it. Retro-engineering our systems would be extremely difficult for them, given their lack of intuition. Even if they did crack it, they’d have to build production stations. So even if this flight takes us a couple of years, we’ll still be back well in time to warn the First Admiral.”

Monica consulted Samuel. “I think that’s reasonable,” he said.

“All right,” she said reluctantly. “I admit I’m curious about this Sleeping God.”

“Good,” Joshua said. “Next question, where the hell is it? You left the star system location blank.”

“It’s a ten digit coordinate,” Kempster said. “I can give you a direct translation if you really want. Unfortunately, it’s total nonsense, because we don’t have the Tyrathca almanac from which it was taken.”

“Oh bollocks!” Liol slumped back into the couch, slapping the cushion fabric in frustration. “You mean we’ve got to go back into Tanjuntic-RI?”

“Unwise,” Samuel said. “I believe the hornets’ nest analogy applies. We really did stir them up.”

“Can’t the Oenone work it out?” Liol asked. “I thought voidhawks have a real good spatial awareness.”

“They do,” Syrinx said. “If we had a Tyrathca almanac, we could take you straight to the star with the Sleeping God. But first we need that almanac, and there’s only one place to get it from. We have to go back.”

“Not so,” Kempster said cheerily. “There is a second star system where we know it exists: Mastrit-PJ itself. Even better, they received Swantic-LI’s messages direct; there may be others which were never relayed to Tanjuntic-RI. All we have to do is fly around the Orion nebula, any red giant star will shine at us like a damn great beacon. As soon as the sensors see it, we can work out a valid approach vector.”

“More promising, from our point of view, Mastrit-PJ is now uninhabited,” Parker said. “This time we’ll be able to undertake a more leisurely, and thorough, retrieval of the files we want from the ruins.”

“We don’t know how long this redoubt civilization has been dead for,” Oski said, a note of worry in her voice. “The condition of the Laymil relics are bad enough, and they’re only two and a half thousand years old. I can’t promise I can recover anything from electronics that have been exposed to space for twice that long.”

“If necessary, we can just scout round the stars closest to Mastrit-PJ for other Tyrathca colonies. There must be a lot of them in that area. They won’t have been warned about us devious humans yet. The point is, we can find copies of that almanac on the other side of the nebula.”

“I wasn’t disputing that,” Oski said. “I’m just saying, for the record, there may be problems.”

“You’re all overlooking one thing,” Joshua said. He almost smiled when he received their indignant looks. “Is there even going to be a Sleeping God waiting for us if the Kiint get there first? And what the hell do they want with it anyway?”

“We can’t not continue because of the Kiint,” Syrinx said. “In any case, we don’t have real proof that . . .” she trailed off under Joshua’s mocking gaze. “All right, they were at Tanjuntic-RI. But we knew they were interested before we set out. It’s because of them we’re here now. To my mind, this just proves the Sleeping God is a big deal.”

“All right,” Joshua said. “The other side of the nebula, it is.”