"The Naked God - Faith" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hamilton Peter F.)

Chapter 04

From the safety of the little plateau, a quarter of the way up the northern endcap, Tolton trained his telescope on the lobby of the Djerba starscraper. Another swirl of darkness was pushing up through the dome of white archways. Pieces of the structure tumbled across the crumpled lawn circling the forlorn building. He kept expecting to hear the sound of breaking glass reach across the distance. The telescope provided a good, sharp image, as if he was just a few metres away. He shivered at that errant thought, still able to feel the wave of coldness that had swept through him every time the flying monster passed overhead.

“This one’s a walker.” He moved aside and let Erentz use the telescope’s eyepiece.

She studied it for a minute. “You’re right. It’s picking up speed, too.” The visitor had shoved its way through the smouldering ruins of the shanties, leaving a deep furrow in its wake. Now it was traversing the meadows beyond. The wispy pink grass stalks around it turned black, as if they’d been singed. “Moving smoothly enough; fast, too. It should reach the southern endcap in five or six hours at that rate.”

Just what we need,the personality groused. Another of the buggers leeching off us. We’ll just have to reduce nutrient fluid production to survival minimum, keep the neural strata alive. That’ll play hell with our main mitosis layer. It’ll take us years to regenerate the damage.

Eight of the dire visitors had now emerged from the Djerba, three of them taking flight. Without fail, they had headed for the southern endcap, just as the first and largest had done. Those that moved over the land had left a contrail of dead vegetation behind them. When they reached the endcap, they bored their way through the polyp and into the arteries which fed the giant organs, suckling the nutrient fluid.

“We should be able to burn them out soon,” she said. “The flame throwers and incendiary torpedoes are coming on fine. You’ll be okay.”

The look Tolton gave her made his lack of affinity irrelevant. He bent over the telescope again. The visitor was crunching its way through a small forest. Trees swayed and toppled, broken off at the base. It seemed incapable of going round anything. “That thing is goddamn strong.”

“Yeah.” Her worry was pronounced.

“How’s the signal project coming?” He asked the question several times every day, frightened he might miss out on some amazing breakthrough.

“Most of us are working on developing and producing our weapons right now.”

“You can’t give up on that. You can’t!” He said it loud for the benefit of the personality.

“Nobody’s giving up. The physics core team is still active.” She didn’t tell him it was down to five theorists who spent most of their time arguing about how to proceed.

“Okay then.”

Two more are approaching,the personality warned.

Erentz gave the street poet a swift glance. He was engrossed with the telescope again, tracking the movements of the visitors still loose on the grass plains. No need to panic the others.

Quite.

The creatures had been arriving at the rate of nearly one every half hour ever since Erentz’s disastrous foray into the Djerba. The personality was now worried about its ability to maintain the habitat’s environmental integrity. Each new arrival invariably smashed its way into a starscraper, then proceeded to hammer the tower’s internal structure. So far the emergency inter-floor pressure seals had held. But if the invasion continued at this rate a breach was inevitable.

We believe some of the incumbents are now starting to move,the personality said. It’s slow, which makes it hard to tell, but they could start to emerge into the parkland within in the next day or so.

Do you think they’re multiplying like the first one did?

Impossible to tell. Our perception routines close to them are almost completely inviolable now. We suspect a great deal of the polyp is dead. However, if one did, then it is logical to assume the others will follow that pattern.

Oh great. Oh shit. We’re going to have to tackle each one separately. I’m not even sure we can win. The numbers are starting to stack up against us.

We will have to review our tactics after the first few encounters. If the expenditure is too great then we may adopt Tolton’s wishes and deploy everyone on the signal project.

Right.she let out a beaten sigh. You know, I don’t even consider that defeatist. Anything which gets us out of this is fine by me.

A healthy attitude.

Tolton straightened up. “What next?”

“We’d better get back down to the others. The visitors aren’t immediately threatening.”

“That can change.”

“If it does, I’m sure we’ll know about it real soon.”

They walked into the small cave at the back of the plateau. It housed a tunnel which spiralled down through several chambers to the caverns at the base of the endcap. Wave escalators and stairs were arranged in parallel down each level. Most of the wave escalators had stopped, so the descent took them quite a while.

The caverns had taken on the aspect of a fort under siege. Tens of thousands of people lay ill on whatever scraps of bedding were available. There was no order to the way they were arranged. Nursing the bedridden was left entirely to those slightly less ill, and consisted mainly of taking care of their sanitary needs. Those qualified (or with basic how-to didactic memories) to operate medical packages circulated constantly, perpetually exhausted.

Erentz’s relatives had formed an inner coterie in the deepest caverns, where the light manufacturing tools and research equipment were concentrated. They’d also taken care to stockpile their own food supply, which could last them for well over a month. Here at least, a semblance of normality remained. Electrophorescent strips shone brightly in the corridors. Mechanical doors whirred open and shut. The clatter of industrial cybernetics vibrated along the polyp. Even Tolton’s processor block let out a few modest bleeps as basic functions returned to life.

Erentz let him into a chamber serving as an armoury. Her relatives had been busy since the reconnaissance in the Djerba, designing and producing a personal flame thrower. The basic principal hadn’t changed much in six hundred years: a chemical tank carried on the user’s back, with a flexible hose leading to a slim rifle-like nozzle. Modern materials and fabrication techniques allowed for a high pressure system, giving a narrow flame that could reach over twenty metres, or be switched to a wide short-range cone. Scalpel or blunderbuss, Erentz commented. There were also incendiary torpedo launchers; essentially scaled-up versions of an emergency flare.

She started into discussions with several of her relatives, mostly using affinity. Only a few exclamations were actually voiced. Tolton felt like a child left out of abstruse adult conversation. His attention wandered off. Surely the personality wouldn’t expect him to join the combatants fighting the dark creatures? He lacked the kind of driven intensity Erentz and her relatives flaunted, their birthright. He was afraid to ask in case they said yes. Worse, they could say no and kick him out of their caverns to rejoin the rest of the population.

There must be some important non-combatant post he could fill. He raised his processor block to type an unobtrusive question for the personality. The Rubra of old would sympathise with that, and the Dariat section was his friend. Then he realized Erentz and her cousins had stopped talking.

“What?” he asked nervously.

“We can sense something in the rail tube approaching one of the endcap stations,” the block said. It was essentially the same voice Rubra had used to speak with him the whole time he was in hiding; though something about it had changed. A stiffness in the inflexion? Minor yet significant.

“One of them’s coming here?”

“We don’t believe so. They rampage about without any attempt to disguise themselves. This is more like a mouse sneaking along. None of the surrounding polyp is suffering the usual heat-loss death. But our perceptive cells are unable to obtain a clear image.”

“The bastards have changed tactics,” Erentz snarled. She snatched one of the flame throwers from a rack. “They know we’re here!”

“We are uncertain on that point,” the personality said. “However, this new incursion will have to be investigated.”

Several more people ran into the armoury, and began picking up weapons. Tolton watched the abrupt whir of activity with bewildered alarm.

“Here.” Erentz thrust an incendiary torpedo launcher at him.

He grabbed it in reflex. “I don’t know how to use this.”

“Aim it and shoot. Effective range two hundred metres. Any questions?”

She didn’t sound in a forgiving mood.

“Oh crap,” he grunted. He rocked his head from side to side, attempting to force the stiffness out of his neck muscles, then joined them in the hurried exodus.

There were nine of them in the group which marched down the stairs to the endcap tube station. Eight of Rubra’s heavily armed, grim-faced descendants; and Tolton hanging as close to the back of the pack as possible while trying not to make it too obvious.

The main lighting strips were dark and cold. Emergency panels flickered with sapphire phosphorescence as if stirred into guilty life by the clumping footsteps. Not that they were of much use. Helmet projectors encased each member of the group in a sphere of bright white light. So far their power cells were unaffected.

“Any change?” Tolton whispered.

“No,” the block whispered back. “The creature is still moving along the tube tunnel.”

Rubra hadn’t damaged this particular station during the brief active phase of his conflict with the possessed. Tolton kept expecting everything to return to life in a blast of light and noise and motion. It was Marie Celeste territory. A carriage was standing abandoned at one of the twin platforms, its door open. A couple of fast food packets lay abandoned on the marble floor outside, their contents dissolved into a pellicle of grey mould.

Erentz and her cousins fanned out along the platform, and edged cautiously towards the blank circle of the tunnel mouth behind the carriage. Three of them dropped down onto the rail, and crossed swiftly to the far wall. They slunk back into various crannies, crouched down, and aimed their weapons forward.

Along with those remaining on the platform, Tolton secured himself behind one of the central pillars, and brought his launcher up. Nine helmet projectors focused their illumination on the tunnel entrance, banishing the shadows for several metres along its length.

“This isn’t exactly an ambush,” he observed. “It can see we’re here.”

“Then we find out just how determined they are to get at us,” Erentz said. “I tried the subtle approach back in the Djerba. Believe me, it’s a bunch of shit.”

Wondering just how much their definitions of subtle were at variance, Tolton tightened his grip on the launcher. Once again, he checked the safety catch.

“Getting close now,” the personality cautioned.

A speck of grey materialized at the furthest extreme of the tunnel’s shadows. It rippled as it moved steadily forwards towards the station.

“Different,” Erentz muttered. “It’s not concealing itself this time.” Then she gasped as the habitat’s sensitive cells finally managed to focus.

Tolton squinted at the slowly resolving shape, pointing his launcher to the vertical so he could strain ahead. “Holy shit,” he said quietly.

Dariat emerged from the tunnel mouth, and smiled softly at the semicircle of lethal nozzles pointing at him out of the blazing light. “Something I said?” he asked innocently.

You should have identified yourself to us,the personality said in censure.

I have been busy thinking, discovering what I am.

And that is?

I’m not quite sure yet.

Tolton whooped happily, and emerged from behind his pillar.

“Careful!” Erentz warned.

“Dariat? Hey, is that you?” Tolton hurried along the platform, grinning madly.

“It’s me.” There was only a slightly sardonic tone colouring his voice.

Tolton frowned. He’d heard his friend’s voice loud and clear, never even needing to concentrate on the lip movement. He came to a confused halt. “Dariat?”

Dariat put his hands flat on the platform edge, and heaved himself up like a swimmer emerging from a pool. It looked like a lot of effort to lift so much weight. His toga stretched tight over his shoulders. “What’s up, Tolton? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.” He chuckled as he walked forward. The frayed hem of his toga brushed against one of the fast-food packets, and sent it spinning.

Tolton stared at the rectangle of plastic as it skidded to a halt. The others were bringing their weapons to bear again.

“You’re real,” Tolton stammered. “Solid!” The obese grinning man standing in front of him was no longer translucent.

“Damn right. The Lady Chi-Ri smiled on me. A warped kind of smile, I guess, but definitely a smile.”

Tolton reached out gingerly and touched Dariat’s arm. Cold bit into his questing fingers like razor fangs. He snatched his hand back. But there had definitely been a physical surface; he’d even felt the crude weave of the toga cloth. “Shit! What happened to you, man?”

“Ah, now there’s a story.”

“I fell,” Dariat told them. “Ten bloody stories down that lift shaft, screaming all the way. Thoale alone knows why suicides are so fond of jumping off cliffs and bridges; they wouldn’t if they knew what that trip’s like. I’m not even sure I did it on purpose. The personality was bullying me to do it, but that thing was getting closer, which made me weaker. I probably lost control of my legs I was so debilitated. Whatever . . . I went over the edge and landed smack on top of the lift. I even penetrated it a few centimetres I was falling so hard. Shit, I hate that. You’ve no idea how bad solid matter feels to a ghost. Anyway, I was just forcing my legs through the lift’s roof to get out of there when the bloody bogeyman lands right bang beside me. I could even feel it coming, like a gust of liquid helium blowing down the shaft. But the thing is, it didn’t break when it hit. It splashed.”

“Splashed?” Tolton queried.

“Absolutely. It was like a goo bomb detonated on top of the lift. The whole shaft was splattered in this thick fluid. Everything got coated, including me. But the fluid reacted to me, I could feel the droplets. It was like getting caught in a spray of ice.”

“How do you mean, reacted?”

“They changed while they were going through me. Their shape and colour tried to match the section of my body they were in. I figured it’s like my thoughts have a big influence over them. I’m imagining my shape, right. So that imagination interacts with the fluid and formats it.”

“Mind over matter,” Erentz said sceptically.

“You got it. Those creatures are no different from any human ghost, except they’re made up of this fluid; a solid visualization. They’re souls, just like us.”

“So how come you became solid?” Tolton asked.

“We fought for it, me and the other entity’s soul. The impact made it lose concentration for a moment, that’s why the stuff went flying off. Both of us started scrambling round to suck up as much as we could. And I was a hell of a lot stronger that it was. I won. Must have got seventy per cent of what was there before I made a run for it. Then I hid in the bottom floors until the rest of them had gone.” He looked round the circle of faintly suspicious faces. “That’s why they’ve come here. Valisk is saturated with energy that they can use. It’s the kind of energy that makes up our souls, life-energy. The attraction is like a bee for pollen. This is what they crave; they’re sentient just like us, they’ve come from the same universe as us, but blind instinct rules them now. They’ve been here so long they’re severely diminished, not to mention totally irrational. All they know is that they have to feed on life-energy, and Valisk is the biggest single source to emerge here that they can remember.”

“That’s what they were doing to the nutrient fluid,” the personality said. “Absorbing the life-energy from it.”

“Yeah. Which is what trashes it. And once it’s gone, you’ll never be able to produce any more. This dark continuum is like a bedamned version of the beyond.”

Tolton slumped onto the bottom stair. “Just fucking great. This is worse than the beyond?”

“I’m afraid so. This must be the sixth realm, the nameless void. Entropy is the only lord here. We will all bow down before him in the end.”

“This is not a Starbridge realm,” the personality retorted sharply. “It’s an aspect of physical reality, and once we understand and tabulate its properties we will know how to open a wormhole interstice and escape. We’ve already put a stop to these creatures consuming any more of us.”

Dariat glanced suspiciously round the empty station. “How?”

“The habitat’s nutrient fluid arteries have been shut down.”

“Uh oh,” Dariat said. “Bad move.”

With their nourishment denied them, the Orgathé began to search round for further sources of raw life-energy, crying out in their own strange intangible voices. Their kith who had infested the southern endcap organs shrilled in reply. Even there, the rich fluids were drying up, but the organs themselves were suffused with a furnace glow of life-energy. Enough for thousands.

The Orgathé pummelled their way up through the starscrapers one by one, and took flight.

Dariat, Tolton, Erentz, and several others stood outside one of the endcap caverns they were using as a garage for the rentcop trucks. They shielded their eyes from the bruised tangerine nimbus of the light-tube to watch one of the dark colossi soar upwards from a collapsing lobby. With its tattered wing sails extended, it was bigger than a cargo spaceplane. A small pearl-white twister of hail and snow fell from its warty underbelly.

Erentz puffed a relieved breath out through her teeth. “At least they’re still heading for the southern endcap.”

There are over thirty of them gnawing their way through our organs now,the personality said. The damage they are inflicting is reaching dangerous levels. And there’s only a single pressure door in the Igan starscraper preventing an atmosphere breach. You will have to go on the offensive. Dariat, will the flame throwers kill them?

No. Souls cannot be killed, even here. They just fade away to wraiths, maybe shadows not even that strong.

You know what we mean, boy!

Yeah, sure. Okay, the fire will fuck with their constituent fluid. They’re taking a long time to acclimatize to the heat levels in the habitat. We’re Thoale alone knows how many thousands of degrees above the continuum’s ambient.

You mean hundreds.

I don’t think so. Anyway, they can’t take a direct blast of physical heat. Lasers and masers they can simply deflect, but flame should dissipate the fluid and leave their souls naked. It’ll turn them into another just bunch of ghosts skulking round the parkland.

Excellent.

“If they can’t die, what do they want with all that life-energy?” Erentz asked.

“It boosts them above the rest,” Dariat said. “Once they’re strong, they’ll stay free for a long time before the life-energy leaks away again.”

“Free of what?” Tolton asked uneasily. He had to stand several paces away from his friend. Not out of rudeness; Dariat was cold. Moisture condensed across his toga as it would on a beer bottle fresh from the fridge. None of the droplets stained the cloth, though, Tolton noticed. And that was only one of the oddities this reincarnation displayed. There were differences in behaviour, too, little quirks which had come to the fore. He’d watched Dariat quietly as they’d all walked up out of the tube station. There was a confidence about him that had been missing before; as if he was merely indulging his relatives rather than helping them. That deep anger had been expelled, too, replaced by sadness. Tolton wondered about that combination, sadness and confidence was a strange driving force. Probably quite volatile, too. But then given what poor old Dariat had been through in the last few weeks, that was eminently forgivable. Worthy of a verse or two, in fact. It had been a long time since Tolton had composed anything.

“We didn’t have a real long conversation on top of the lift,” Dariat said. “It was the kind of pressurized memory exchange I experienced in the beyond. The creature’s thoughts weren’t very stable.”

“You mean it knows about us?”

“I expect so. But don’t confuse knowing with being interested. Absorbing life-energy is all they exist for now.”

Erentz squinted after the receding Orgathé as it headed over the circumfluous sea. “We’d better get organized, I suppose.” She couldn’t have sounded less enthusiastic.

Dariat gave up on the dark invader, and looked around. A crowd of ghosts was hanging back from the cavern entrance, keeping among the larger boulders littering the desert. They regarded the little band of tenacious corporeal humans with grudging respect, avoiding direct eye contact like a shoplifter eluding the store detective.

“You!” Dariat barked suddenly. He started to march over the powdery sand. “Yes, you, shithead. Remember me, huh?”

Tolton and Erentz trailed after him, curious at this latest behaviour.

Dariat was closing on a ghost dressed in baggy overalls. It was the mechanic he’d encountered when he went searching for Tolton just after the habitat arrived in the dark continuum.

Recognition was mutual. The mechanic turned and ran. Ghosts parted to let him through their midst. Dariat chased after him, surprisingly fast for his bulk. As he passed through the huddle of ghosts they shivered and shuffled further away, gasping in shock at the cold he exuded.

Dariat caught hold of the mechanic’s arm, dragging him to a halt. The man screeched in pain and fear, flailing about, unable to escape Dariat’s grip. He started to grow more transparent.

“Dariat,” Tolton called. “Hey, come on, man, you’re hurting him.”

The mechanic had fallen to his knees, shaking violently as his colouring bled away. Dariat by contrast was almost glowing. He glowered down at his victim. “Remember? Remember what you did, shithead?”

Tolton drew up short, unwilling to touch his erstwhile friend. The memory of the cold he’d experienced back in the station was too strong.

“Dariat!” he shouted.

Dariat looked down at the mechanic’s withering face. Remorse opened his fingers, allowing the incorporeal arm to slip away. What would Anastasia say about such behaviour? “Sorry,” he muttered shamefully.

“What did you do to him?” Tolton demanded. The mechanic was barely visible. He’d curled up into a foetal position, half of his body sunk into the sand.

“Nothing,” Dariat blurted, ashamed of his action. The fluid which brought him solidity apparently came with an ugly price. He’d known it all along, simply refused to acknowledge it. Hatred had been an excuse, not a motivator. As with the Orgathé instinct was supplanting rationality.

“Oh, come on.” Tolton bent down and moved his hand through the whimpering ghost. The air felt slightly cooler, otherwise there was no trace that he existed. “What have you done?”

“It’s the fluid,” Dariat said. “It takes a lot to maintain myself now.”

“A lot of what?” Rhetorical question: Tolton knew without needing an answer.

“Life-energy. Just keeping going uses it up. I need to replenish. I don’t have a biology, I can’t breathe or eat a meal; I have to take it neat. And souls are a strong concentration.”

“What about him?” A tiny patina of silver frost was forming on the ground within the ghost’s vague outline. “What about this particular concentration ?”

“He’ll recover. There’s plants and stuff he can recoup the loss from. He did a lot worse to me, once.” No matter how much Dariat wanted, he couldn’t look away from the drained ghost. This is what we’re all going to end up like, he acknowledged. Pathetic emancipated remnants of what we are, clinging to our identity while the dark continuum depletes us until we’re a single silent voice weeping in the night. There’s no way out. Entropy is too strong here, drowning us away from the light.

And I was instrumental in bringing us here.

“Let’s get back inside,” Erentz said. “It’s about time we put you under the microscope, see if the physics gang can make any sense of you.”

Dariat thought about protesting. Eventually he just nodded meekly. “Sure.”

They walked back towards the cavern entrance, through the clutter of subdued ghosts. Two more Orgathé hatched from the Gonchraov starscraper lobby, tumbling up into the wan twilight sky.

There were vigilantes at Kings Cross station, hard young gang members drafted in from the low-cost residential estates scattered around the outer districts of Westminster Dome. Their uniforms went from pseudo-military to expensive business suits, denoting their differing membership. Ordinarily such a mixture was hypergolic. See/kill. And if civilians got caught in the line of fire, tough. In some cases, feuds between boroughs and individual gangs went back centuries. Today, they all wore a simple white ribbon prominently on their various lapels. It stood for Pure Soul, and united them in commitment. They were here to make sure all of London stayed pure.

Louise stepped off the vac-train carriage, yawning heavily. Gen leaned against her side, nearly sleepwalking as they moved away from the big airlock door. It was almost three in the morning, local time. She didn’t like to think how long she’d been up for now.

“What are you creeps doing getting off here?”

She hadn’t even noticed them until they stood in front of her. Two dark-skinned girls with shaved heads; the taller one had replaced her eyeballs with blank silver globes. Both of them wore identical plain black two-piece suits of some satin fabric. They didn’t have blouses; the jackets were fastened by a single button, exposing stomachs as muscular as any Norfolk field labourer. Their cleavage was the only way to tell they were female. Even then Louise wasn’t entirely sure, they might just be butched-up pectorals.

“Uh?” she managed.

“That train’s from Edmonton, babe. That’s where the possessed are. Is that why you left? Or are you here for some other reason, some kind of freako nightclub?”

Louise began to wake up fast. There were a lot of young people on the platform; some dressed in suits identical to the girls’ (the voice finally convinced her about gender), others in less formal clothes. None of them showed any inclination to embark on the newly arrived train. Several armour-suited police were clumped round the exit archway, with their shell—helmet visors raised. They were looking in her direction with some interest.

Ivanov Robson moved smoothly to stand at Louise’s side, his movement hinting at the same kind of inertia carried by an iceberg. He smiled with refined politeness. The gang girls didn’t flinch, exactly, but they were smaller now, somehow, less menacing.

“Is there a problem?” he asked quietly.

“Not for us,” the one with the silver eyes said.

“Good, then please stop hassling these young ladies.”

“Yeah? So what are you, their dad? Or maybe just their great big friend out for some fun tonight.”

“If that’s the best you can do, stop trying.”

“You didn’t answer my question, bigfoot man.”

“I’m a London resident. We all are. Not that it’s any of your concern.”

“Like fuck it isn’t, brother.”

“I’m not your brother.”

“Is your soul pure?”

“What are you all of a sudden, my confessor?”

“We’re guardians, not priests. Religion is fucked; it doesn’t know how to fight the possessed. We do.” She patted her white ribbon. “We keep the arcology pure. No shitty little demon gets in past us.”

Louise glanced across at the police. There were a couple more of them now, but they showed no sign of intervening. “I’m not possessed,” she said indignantly. “None of us are.”

“Prove it, babe.”

“How?”

The gang girls both took small sensors from their pockets.

“Show us you contain only one soul, that you’re pure.”

Ivanov turned to Louise. “Humour them,” he said in a clear voice. “I can’t be bothered to shoot them; I’d have to pay the judge far too much to bounce us out of jail before breakfast.”

“Fuck you,” the second gang girl shouted.

“Just get on with it,” Louise said wearily. She held out her left arm, the right was curled protectively round Gen. The gang girl slapped the sensor on the top of her hand.

“No static,” she barked. “This is a pure babe.” Her followup grin was weird, showing teeth that were too long to be natural.

“Check the sprog.”

“Come on, Gen,” Louise coaxed. “Hold out your hand.” A scowling Genevieve did as she was told.

“Clean,” the gang girl reported.

“Then you must be what I can smell,” Genevieve scoffed.

The gang girl drew her hand back for a slap.

“Don’t even dream it,” Ivanov purred.

Genevieve’s face slowly broke into a wide smirk. She looked straight at the girl with the silver eyes. “Are they lesbians, Louise?”

The gang girl had trouble controlling her temper. “Come with us, little girl. Find out what we do to freshmeat like you.”

“That’s enough.” Ivanov stepped forward and proffered his hand. “Genevieve, behave, or I’ll smack you.” The gang girl put her sensor to his skin, taking care to do it softly.

“I’ve met a possessed,” Genevieve said. “The nastiest one there’s ever been.”

Both gang girls gave her an uncertain look.

“If a possessed does ever comes out of a train, you know what you should do? Just run. Nothing you can do will stop them.”

“Wrong, titchy bitch.” The gang girl patted a pocket; there was something heavy bulging the fabric. “We just pump them with ten thousand volts and watch the firework display. I’ve heard it’s real pretty. Be good to me, I’ll let you watch, too.”

“Seen it already.”

“Huh!” The girl turned her silver eyes on Banneth. “You too. I want to know you’re pure.”

Banneth laughed gently. “Let’s hope your sensor can’t probe my heart.”

“What the hell are you all doing here?” Ivanov asked. “The only time I’ve seen the Blairs and the Benns in the same place before was a morgue. And I can see a couple of MoHawks over there as well.”

“Looking after our turf, brother. These possessed, they’re part of the sect. You don’t see none of those bastards down here, do you? We’re not going to let them crunch us like they done New York and Edmonton.”

“I think the police will do that, don’t you?”

“No fucking way. They’re Govcentral. And those shits let the possessed down here in the first place. This planet’s got the greatest defences in the galaxy, and the possessed just breezed through them like they weren’t even there. You want to tell me how come that happened?”

“Good point,” Banneth drawled. “I’m still waiting to hear on that one myself.”

“And why haven’t they shut down the vac-trains properly?” the girl continued. “They’re still running to Edmonton where we know the possessed are. I accessed that sensevise of the fight, it was only a couple of hours ago for Christ’s sake.”

“Criminal,” Banneth agreed. “They were probably bribed by big business.”

“You taking the piss, bitch?”

“Who, me?”

The gang girl gave her a disgusted stare, not knowing what to make of her attitude. She jerked her thumb over her shoulder. “Go on, get the fuck out of here, all of you. I hate you rich kinks.” She watched them walk through the exit archway with a vague sense of unease scratching away at her mind. There was something badly wrong about the group, the four of them were a complete mismatch. But screw that, as long as they weren’t possessed who cared what kind of orgy they were heading off to. She shivered suddenly as a cold breeze swept along the platform. It must have been caused by the carriage airlocks swinging shut.

“That was awful,” Genevieve exclaimed when they reached the big sub-level hall above the station’s platforms. “Why didn’t the police stop them doing that to people?”

“Because it’s way too much trouble at three o’clock in the morning,” Ivanov said. “Besides, I expect most of the officers down there are quite happy to let the vigilantes take the heat if a possessed did step out of a train. They act as a buffer.”

“Is Govcentral being stupid allowing the vac-trains to continue?” Louise asked.

“Not stupid, just slow. It is the universe’s largest bureaucracy, after all.” He waved a hand at the informationals flittering overhead. “See? They’ve shut a few routes down already. And public pressure will close a lot more before long. It’ll snowball once everyone’s had time to access the Edmonton fight. This time tomorrow you’ll have trouble getting a taxi to take you further than a couple of streets.”

“Do you think we’ll be able to leave London again?”

“Probably not.”

The way he said it sounded so final: a pronouncement rather than an opinion. As always, an authority in knowledge he had no business knowing.

“All right,” Louise said. “I suppose we’d better go back to the hotel, then.”

“I’ll come with you,” Ivanov said. “There might be a few more of these nutters around. It wouldn’t do for the natives to learn you’re from Norfolk right now. These are paranoid times.”

For some reason, Andy Behoo popped into Louise’s mind; his offer to sponsor her for Govcentral citizenship. “Thank you.”

“What about you?” Ivanov asked Banneth. “Do you need to share a cab?”

“No thank you. I know where I’m going.” She walked off towards the lifts around the rim of the hemispherical cavern.

“Don’t mention it,” Louise muttered grumpily at her back.

“I expect she’s grateful, really,” Ivanov said. “Probably just doesn’t know how to express it.”

“She could try harder.”

“Come along, let’s get you two home to bed. It’s been a long day.”

Quinn watched the lift doors close on Banneth. He didn’t bother to rush after her. Finding her again would be relatively simple. Bait was never hidden. Oh, it wouldn’t be obvious. He would need time, and resources, and have to make an effort. But her location would be filtered through the arcology’s downtowners, the sect covens and gangs would be informed. That was why he’d been lured here, after all. London was the largest, most elaborate trap ever assembled for one man. In a strange way, he felt rather flattered. That the supercops were prepared to sacrifice the whole arcology just to nail him was a mark of extreme respect. They feared God’s Brother exactly as He should be feared.

He trailed after Louise as she walked over to the lifts with her brat sister and the huge private eye. She was very drowsy, which relaxed her face. It left her delicate features unguarded and natural; a state which served only to amplify her beauty. He wanted to put out a hand and stroke her exquisite cheeks, to see her smile gently at his touch. Welcome him.

She frowned, and rubbed her arms. “It’s cold down here.” The moment broke.

Quinn rode up to the surface with the trio, then left them as they went off to the taxi garage. He took a subwalk under the busy road and hurried along one of the main streets radiating out from the station. There would only be a limited amount of time until the supercops closed down the vac-trains.

The second alley leading off from the main street contained what he wanted. The Black Bull, a small, cheap pub, filled with hard-drinking men. He moved among them, unseen as his expanded senses examined their clothing and skulls. None of them were fitted with neural nanonics, but several were carrying processor blocks.

He followed one into the toilets, where the only electrical circuit was for the light panel.

Jack McGovern was peeing blissfully into the cracked urinal when an icy hand clamped round the back of his neck and slammed his face into the wall. His nose broke from the impact, sending a torrent of blood to splash into the porcelain.

“You will take your processor block from your coat pocket,” a voice said. “Use your activation code, and make a call for me. Do it now, or die, dickhead.”

Rat-arsed he might have been, but overdosing on self-preservation allowed Jack’s mind to focus with remarkable clarity on his options. “Okay,” he mumbled, a lip movement which sent more blood dribbling down the wall. He fumbled for his processor block. There was an emergency police-hail program which was activated by feeding in the wrong code.

The terrible pressure on his neck eased off, allowing him to turn. When he saw who his assailant was, the thought of deviously calling for help withered faster than hell’s solitary snowflake.

Quinn returned to Kings Cross, sharing a lift down to the underground chamber with a cluster of vigilantes. He wandered through the vaulting hall, ambling round the closed kiosks and steering clear of industrious cleaning mechanoids. The lifts kept on disgorging gang members, who immediately took the wave escalators down to the platforms. He kept watching the informationals, paying particular attention to the arrivals screens. In the two hours which followed, five vac-trains arrived from Edmonton. All departures slowed down to zero.

The Frankfurt train pulled in at five minutes past five. Quinn went and stood at the top of its platform’s wave escalator. They were the last to come up, Courtney and Billy-Joe gently guiding the drugged woman between them. The two acolytes had smartened up, looking closer to a pair of grungy university students than downtown barbarians now. Their snatch victim—a middle-aged woman wearing a crumpled dress with an unbuttoned cardigan—had the vacant eyes typical of a triathozine dose; her body fully functional, brain in an advanced hypnoreception state. There and them, if she’d been told to jump off the top of an arcology dome, she’d do it.

They moved at a brisk pace across the floor and hopped into a lift. Quinn wanted to materialize, just so he could cheer at the top of his voice. The tide was turning now. God’s Brother had given His chosen messiah another sign that he remained on the path.

At five-thirty, the sixth train from Edmonton arrived. A notice slithered over the holograms announcing that the routes to North America had now been shut by order of Govcentral. Five minutes later, all departures were cancelled. Vac-trains already en route to the arcology were being diverted to Birmingham and Glasgow. London was now physically isolated from the rest of the planet.

It was just a little scary how his prediction had come so true. But then he was bound to be right, with God’s Brother gifting him understanding.

People were coming up from the platforms: the last straggle of passengers, the vigilante gangs (already eyeing each other now the reason for their truce was over), the police duty teams, station crews. Informationals floating overhead vanished like pricked bubbles. Display boards blanked out. The twenty-four hour stalls closed up, their staff gossiping hotly together at they rode the lifts up to the surface. The wave escalators halted. All the solaris lights overhead dimmed down, sinking the cavern into a gloomy dusk. Even the conditioning fans slowed, their whine dropping several octaves.

It was the paranoiac moment every solipsist fears. The world was a stage constructed around him, and this chunk of it was shutting down as it was no longer part of the act. For a second, Quinn worried that if he went to the dome wall and looked out there would be nothing there to see.

“Not yet,” he said. “Soon though.”

He took a last look round, then went over to one of the emergency fire stairs and started the long trek to the surface and the rendezvous point.

Louise was surprised at how much she associated the hotel room with home. But it was reassuring to be back after the ordeal of Edmonton. Partly it was because she now considered her obligation over: she’d done what she promised dear Fletcher and warned Banneth. A small blow struck against that monster Dexter (even though he’d never know). The fact that the Ritz was so comfortable helped a lot, too.

After Ivanov Robson dropped them off, both girls slept well into the morning. When they finally went downstairs for breakfast, reception informed Louise there was a small package for her. It was a single dark-red rose in a white box, with a silver bow tied round. The card that came with it was signed from Andy Behoo.

“Let me see,” Gen said, bouncing on her bed in excitement.

Louise smelt the rose, which to be honest was rather a weak scent. “No,” she said, and held the card aloft. “It’s private. You can put this in water, though.”

Gen regarded the rose suspiciously, sniffing it cautiously. “Okay. But at least tell me what he says.”

“Just: thank you for last night. That’s all.” She didn’t mention the second half of the message, where he said how lovely she was, and how he’d do anything to see her again. The card was put into her new snakeskin bag, and the little pocket codelocked against small prying fingers.

Gen took one of the vases from the ancient oak dresser, and went off to the bathroom for some water. Louise datavised her net connection server and inquired if there were any messages for her. The six-hourly ritual. Pointless, as the server would automatically deliver any communiqué as soon as it received one.

There were no messages. Specifically, no messages from Tranquillity. Louise flopped back on the bed, staring at the ceiling as she tried to puzzle it out. She knew she’d got the message protocol right; that was part of the NAS2600 communication program. Something had to be wrong at the other end. But when she put the news hound into primary mode, there was no report of anything untoward happening to Tranquillity. Perhaps Joshua simply wasn’t there, and her messages were piling up in his net server memory.

She thought about it for a while, then composed a brief message to Ione Saldana herself. Joshua said he knew her, they’d grown up together. If anybody knew where he was, she would.

After that, she launched a quick directory search and datavised detective Brent Roi.

“Kavanagh?” he replied. “God, you mean you bought yourself a set of neural nanonics?”

“Yes, you didn’t say I couldn’t.”

“No, but I thought your planet didn’t allow you that kind of technology.”

“I’m not on Norfolk now.”

“Yeah, right. So what the hell do you want?” he asked.

“I’d like to go to Tranquillity, please. I don’t know who I have to get permission from.”

“From me, I’m your case officer. And you can’t.”

“Why not? I thought you wanted us to leave Earth. If we got to Tranquillity, you wouldn’t have to worry about us any more.”

“Frankly, I don’t worry about you now, Miss Kavanagh. You seem to be behaving yourself—at least, you haven’t tripped any of our monitor programs.”

Louise wondered if he knew about the bugs Andy had removed at Jude’s Eworld. She wasn’t going to volunteer the information. “So why can’t I go?”

“I gather you haven’t got the hang of your news hound program yet.”

“I have.”

“Really. Then you ought know that as of oh-five-seventeen hours GMT, the global vac-train network was shut down by an emergency Presidential executive decree. Every arcology is on its own. The President’s office says they want to prevent the possessed in Paris and Edmonton from sneaking into more arcologies. Myself, I think it’s a load of crap, but the President is scared of public opinion more than he is of the possessed. So like I told you before, you’re on Earth for the duration.”

“Already?” she whispered aloud. So much for Govcentral moving slowly. But Robson had been right again. “There must be a way out of London to the tower,” she datavised.

“Only the vac-trains.”

“But how long will this go on for?”

“Ask the President. He forgot to tell me.”

“I see. Well, thank you.”

“Don’t mention it. You want some advice? You have finite funds, right? You might consider shunting along to a different hotel. And if this goes on for much longer, which I suspect it will, you’ll need a job.”

“A job?”

“Yeah, that’s one of those nasty little things ordinary people do, and in return they get given money by their employer.”

“There’s no need to be rude.”

“Eat it. When you apply to the local Burrow Burger as a waitress, or whatever, they’ll want your citizenship number. Refer them to me, I’ll grant you temporary immigrant status.”

“Thank you.” That much sarcasm couldn’t be carried along a datavise, but he’d know.

“Hey, if you don’t fancy that, at least you’ve got an alternative. A girl like you won’t have any trouble finding a man to look after her.”

“Detective Roi, can I ask what happened to Fletcher?”

“No, you can’t.” The link ended.

Louise looked out of the window across Green Park. Dark clouds swirled over the dome, hiding the sun. She wondered who’d sent them.

It was a forty-storey octagonal tower in the Dalston district, one of eight similar structures that made up the Parsonage Heights development. They were supposed to raise the general tone of the neighbourhood, encumbered as it was by low-cost housing, bargain centre market halls, and a benefits-reliant population. The towers were supposed to rest on a huge underground warren of factory and light manufacturing units. Above that buzzing industrial core, the first seven floors would be given over to retail outlets, followed by five floors of leisure industry premises, three more floors of professional and commercial offices, and the remaining floors taken up by residential apartments. The whole entity would be an economic heart transplant for Dalston, creating opportunity and invigorating the maze of shabby ancient streets outside with rivers of commerce and new money.

But Dalston’s underlying clay had a water-table problem which would have tripled the cost of the underground factory warren in order to prevent it from flooding, so it was downgraded to a couple of levels of storage warehousing. The local market halls cut their rock bottom prices still further, leaving half of the retail units unrented; franchise chains took over a meagre eight per cent of the designated leisure floorspace. In order to recoup their investment, Voynow Finance hurriedly converted the thirty upper floors into comfortable apartments with a reasonable view across the Westminster Dome, which market research indicated they could sell to junior and middle management executive types.

The rushed compromise worked, after a fashion. Certainly, sixty years after its construction, Parsonage Heights was home to a slightly more affluent class than Dalston’s average. There were even some reasonable shops and cafés established on the lower floors—though what activities went on in the dilapidated, damp, and crumbling warehouses hidden beneath was something the top-floor residents declined to investigate.

The local police station knew there was a Light Bringer coven down there; but for whatever reason, the chief constable had never instituted a raid. So when Banneth’s tube train pulled in at Dalston Kingsland station, the magus and a fifteen-strong bodyguard was waiting with impunity on the platform to greet her. She took one look at the blank-faced young toughs carrying their pathetic assortment of inferior weapons, and had trouble preventing a laugh.

Did you arrange this?she asked western europe.

I simply told the magus how important you are to God’s Brother. He reacted appropriately, don’t you think?

Too appropriately. This is becoming a farce.

The Dalston coven magus stepped forwards, and bowed slightly. “High Magus, it’s an honour to have you here. We have your safe house ready.”

“It better be a good one, or I’ll have you strapped down on your own altar and demonstrate how we deal with people who fail God’s Brother in Edmonton.”

The magus’s vaguely hopeful air wafted away, leaving behind a belligerent expression. “You won’t be able to fault us. Our position hasn’t been compromised.”

She ignored the crude reference. “Lead on.”

The bodyguard clumped their way noisily up the carbon-concrete stairs and out onto Kingston High Street. The first four out of the station’s automatic door levelled their TIP carbines along the road, which startled the few late-night pedestrians heading home from the district’s grotty clubs. They swept their muzzles round in what they thought was a professional scanning manoeuvre.

“Clear!” the leader barked.

Banneth rolled her eyes as the rest of the bodyguard hurried out around her. Cars had been halted in the street to let them cross. They hurried into the ground floor mall of the Parsonage Heights tower opposite the station. Three more sect members were waiting inside, standing guard beside an open lift. The magus and eight bodyguards crowded in around Banneth. They rode it to the top floor, where it opened out directly into the penthouse vestibule. More sect members were inside, toting their weapons and finishing off the new security sensor array.

“No fucker’s going to sneak up on you while you’re here,” the magus said confidently. “We’ve got every approach covered. There’ll be guards outside, and in all the stairwells. Nobody gets in or out without a secure access code, which you have command authority over.”

Banneth walked into the penthouse, which occupied the whole fortieth floor. The absent owner had chosen its decor straight out of a thirty-year-old catalogue file specialising in unashamed chintz: green leather furniture, Turkish rugs over polished marble tiles, glowing primary-colour sketches hanging on the walls, and a red marble fireplace complete with holographic flames. A glass wall had swing-up slab doors which led out to a roof garden with a swimming pool and hot tub; the sun loungers were sculpted blue plastic frogs.

“The fridge is full,” the magus said. “If you take a fancy to anything, just let us know and we’ll have it sent up. I can get anything you need. My grip on this town is total.”

“I’m sure,” Banneth said. “You, you, and you,” her finger singled out two attractive girls and a teenage boy. “Stay. The rest of you, fuck off. Now.”

The magus blushed heavily. Treating him like a piece of street shit in front of his acolytes would be a serious blow to his authority. She stared right at him, a silent direct challenge.

He snapped his fingers, gesturing everyone out, then stomped through the big blackwood doors without looking back.

“Dump the guns,” Banneth told the three remaining acolytes. “You won’t be needing them in here.”

After a moment’s hesitation they left them beside the kitchen bar. Banneth walked out into the small paved garden. Night fuchsias spilled their sweetness into the air. It had a balcony of high, one-way glass, allowing her to look over the glimmering crater of lights which defined the city. Nobody could see in. A reasonable protection against snipers, she acknowledged.

Did I cause a big enough splash?she asked western europe.

Oh yes. The dear magus is currently screaming at London’s High Magus about how big a shit you are. All the covens will be talking about your arrival by this evening.

Evening.she shook her head irritably. I hate train lag.

Not relevant. I’ll have the little traffic-stopping scene downstairs logged on the police intelligence bulletin as well. The patrol constables will ask their informants for further information about the coven’s new activities. We’ll have the whole arcology covered. Dexter will find you.

“Shit,” Banneth mumbled. She beckoned the nervous acolytes out onto the roof garden. “One, find me a decent glass of Crown whisky; then take your clothes off. I want to watch you swimming.”

“Um, High Magus,” one of the girls said anxiously. “I can’t swim.”

“Then you’d better learn fast. Hadn’t you?”

Banneth ignored their whispering behind her, and looked upwards. Long strips of faintly luminescent cloud curved round the dome, breaking into agitated foam as they hit the surface flow boundary. Patches of night sky were visible through the choppy fringes. Stars and spacecraft shone bright against the blackness. There was the hint of a hazy ark above the northern horizon.

This penthouse is difficult to reach from the ground, but wide open to the sky,she observed. That means an SD strike.

Correct. I have no intention of using a nuke inside the dome. But an X-ray laser can penetrate the crystal with minimal damage. If he can survive that, then frankly there is no hope for us.

There certainly isn’t for me.

You created him.

B7 created me.

We permitted you, there’s a difference. You were convenient for us. Under our patronage you fulfilled most of your ambitions. Without us, you would now either be dead or an Ivet.

If I can take him out . . .

No. I don’t want you fighting back. He must not be made to turn invisible again. I only have one chance at this. It’s quite poetic really: the whole world’s future depending on an individual.

Poetic. Fuck, what the hell are you people?

I believe our original agreement was that B7’s patronage would be provided on a no-questions-asked basis. Despite your predicament, you still don’t qualify to ask that question, and I have no intention of indulging you. When you are dead, then you can observe me from the beyond.

Some people make it past the beyond. That’s what the Edenists claim.

Then I wish you bon voyage.

Banneth glanced out over the preserved city again. The first pale grey photons of dawn were slipping up from the eastern horizon to lap against the bottom of the giant crystal dome. She wondered how many more dawns she was going to see.

Truthful estimate, knowing the way she’d put Dexter together, no more than a week.

The acolytes were splashing about in the pool now, including the non-swimming girl clinging resolutely to the shallow end. Banneth didn’t care, the whole point was just to see their great young bodies glistening wet. Indulging herself with them was definitely one-up on the customary last meal. However, there were files stored in her neural nanonics which had to be edited and prepared. Her lifetime’s work. She could hardly allow it to go to waste, though finding an institution that would accept it might prove difficult. It wasn’t just that she wanted it preserved, she wanted it studied, utilized. An important body of knowledge: human behaviour under the kind of extreme conditions that would forever remain closed to academic medical circles. It was unique, which made it all the more valuable. Perhaps some day it might become a classic reference for psychology students.

She went back into the lounge and settled into one of the dreadful green leather couches, ready to start indexing the files. It would be amusing to see how long the acolytes stayed in the water.

The Lancini had been built at the start of the Twenty-first Century, a huge department store intended to rival London’s best: set on Millbank overlooking the Thames, it had a très chic view which along with its retro-thirties decor was calculated to bring in the affluent and curious alike. As with all outsize endeavours, its decline was never going to be swift. It had limped along for decades with falling customer numbers and negative profits. The image it attempted to foster right from the start was dignity without snobbishness. According to the market survey programs worshiped by its executives, such a policy would attract older shoppers, with their correspondingly larger credit funds. Floor managers, left with no margin for innovation, kept ordering established, unhip, brands to serve their loyal, ageing shoppers. Every year, fewer of them returned.

The execs really should have known that; if they’d just cross-linked their market surveys with the store’s own funeral service department, they would have seen just how far their customer loyalty extended. Unfortunately, it didn’t quite extend to after-burial purchasing. So 2589 saw the very last traditional January sale ending with an undignified auction to dispose of the store’s fittings. Now only the shell of the building remained.

Nothing changed, because nothing was allowed to change. The London historical buildings continuity council made quite sure of that in its rigorous defence of heritage. Anyone was free to purchase the Lancini and start a commercial business up in it, providing it was refurbished to match the original interior plans, and that business was retail shopping. Another setback to refurbishment was the price the receivers were demanding to satisfy the store’s creditors.

Then news of possession and the beyond reached Earth. And, quite paradoxically, age suddenly became a highly motivating factor in change. It was old people who sat on the historical buildings continuity council. London’s most venerated (and richest) banks and financial institutions were mostly governed by centenarians. These were the people who were going to be the first generation of humans who would enter the horror of the beyond knowing it was waiting for them. Unless, of course, a method of salvation was found. So far the Church (any/every denomination), Govcentral’s science councils, and the Confederation Navy had been unable to provide that salvation.

That just left one possible refuge: zero-tau.

Several companies were quickly formed to supply demand. Obviously, long-term facilities would ultimately be needed to carry these customers of oblivion through the millennia; mausolea more enduring than the pyramids. But they’d take time to design and build; meanwhile the hospital chaplains remained in business. Temporary storage facilities were urgently required.

By a near unanimous vote, the historical buildings continuity council quickly approved a change of use of premises certificate for the Lancini. Zero-tau pods were shipped in from the Halo and taken in via delivery gates more used to household furnishings and haute couture. The ancient cage lifts had the load capacity to take them up to every floor. Oak floorboards, seasoned by five centuries of dehumidified conditioning, were strong enough to hold the new weight distribution pattern. Heavy-duty cabling laid in for the floor displays carried sufficient electricity to feed the pods’ power-hungry systems. In fact, if it hadn’t been for the building’s projected three hundred year lifespan, the Lancini would have made a good eternity crypt.

Certainly Paul Jerrold thought it appropriate enough when he was shown to his pod. It was on the fourth floor, one of a long row in the old Horticultural section, lined up opposite the windows. Over half of the big sarcophagi were active, their black surfaces absorbing the dust-choked sunbeams as if they were spatial chasms. The two nurses helped him in over the rim, then fussed round, smoothing down his loose fitting track-suit. He kept quiet through the nannying; at a hundred and twelve he was becoming used to the attitude of medical staff. Always exaggerating the attention they gave their patients, as if the care would go unnoticed if they didn’t.

“Are you ready?” one asked.

Paul smiled. “Oh yes.” The last couple of weeks had been busy ones, itself a blessing at his age. First the devastating news of possession. Then the slow response, the determination by himself and the others at his elite West End club that they should not become victims of the beyond. The web of discreet contacts put out, offering an alternative for those who could pay for it. His solicitors and accountants had been tasked with shifting his substantial holdings into a long-term trust that would pay for maintaining his stasis. It didn’t cost much: maintenance, rent, and power. Even if the trust was badly bungled, he had enough money in the bank to keep himself secure for ten thousand years. Then once it had been arranged, there had been the arguments with his children and their swarm of offspring, all of whom had adopted a quiet waiting policy to obtain his wealth. A brief legal battle (he could afford much better lawyers than they), and that was it, and here he was: a new breed of chrononaut.

His habitual dread of the future had faded, replaced by a keen interest in what awaited. When the zero-tau field switched off, there would be a full solution to the beyond, society would have evolved radically to take knowledge of the afterlife into account. There might even be a decent rejuvenation treatment available. Possibly, humans would have finally achieved physical immortality. He would become as a god.

A flicker of greyness, shorter than an eyeblink . . .

The pod cover lifted, and Paul Jerrold was slightly surprised to see he was still in the Lancini. He’d expected to be in some huge technological vault, or perhaps a tasteful recovery room. Not right back where his voyage through eternity had started. Unless these new, magnificently advanced humans had re-created the Lancini to provide their ancestors with the psychological comfort of familiar territory, a considerate way to ease their introduction to this fabulous new civilization built in his absence.

He glanced eagerly through the big, dirty window opposite. Dusk had fallen across the Westminster Dome. The thriving lights of the south bank glimmered brightly in front of the steel grey clouds smothering the vast arc of the dome. A projection of some kind?

The pair of medical staff attending him were somewhat unconventional. A girl leaned over the pod, very young, with amazingly large breasts squeezed up by a tight leather waistcoat. The adolescent boy standing beside her wore an expensive pure-wool sweater that was somehow wrong on him; his face was stubbly, with animal-mad eyes. He held a loop of power cable in one hand, plug dangling loosely.

Paul took one look at the plug, and datavised an emergency code. He couldn’t get a response from any net processor; then his neural nanonics crashed. A third figure clad in a jet-black robe slipped out of the gloom to stand at the foot of the pod.

“Who are you?” Paul croaked in fright. He levered himself up into a sitting position, skinny hands with their bulging veins gripping the edge of the pod.

“You know exactly who we are,” Quinn said.

“Have you won? Did you defeat us?”

“We’re going to, yes.”

“Oww shit, Quinn,” Billy-Joe protested. “Look at these old farts, they ain’t good for nothing. No soul’s gonna make them last, not even with your kind of black magic.”

“They’ll last long enough. That’s all that matters.”

“I told you, you want decent possessed you gotta go to the sects for bodies. Fuck, they worship you. All you’ve gotta do it tell them to bend over, they ain’t gonna put up no fight.”

“God’s Brother,” Quinn growled. “Don’t you ever think, shithead? The sects are a lie. I’ve told you, they’re controlled by the supercops. I can’t go to them for anything, we’d just give ourselves away. This place is fucking perfect. Nobody’s going to notice people going missing from here, as far as this world’s concerned they stopped existing as soon as they walked through the door.” His face jutted out of the hood to grin down at Paul. “Right?”

“I have money.” It was Paul’s last gambit, the one thing everyone desired.

“That’s good,” Quinn said. “You’re almost one of us already. You don’t have far to go.” He pointed a finger, and Paul’s world howled into pain.

Western Europe had hooked eight AIs in to London’s communication net, which gave him enough processing capacity to review each chunk of electronic circuitry in the arcology on a ten second cycle, providing it had a net connection. All processor blocks, no matter what their function, were datavised on a fifteen-second rota and examined for suspect glitches.

He wasn’t the only worried citizen. Several commercial software houses had gripped the marketing opportunity and offered possession monitoring packages. It consisted of a neural nanonics program which sent a continual capacity diagnostic and location datavise to the company security centre, who would alert the police if the user suffered an unexplained glitch or drop out. Bracelets were also spilling into the shops which did the same thing for kids too young for neural nanonics.

Communication bandwidth was becoming a serious problem. Western Europe had used GSDI authority to prioritize the AI scanning programs, leaving them unimpeded while civil data traffic suffered unheard of capacity reductions and switching delays.

The visualization of the arcology’s electronic structure was a theatrical gesture, impressing no one. It stood on the table of the sensenviron secure conference chamber like an elaborate glass model of the ten domes. Fans of coloured light rotated through the miniature translucent structures with strobe-like repetition.

South Pacific studied their movement as the other B7 supervisor representations came on line around the oval table. When all sixteen were there, she asked: “So where is he, then?”

“Not in Edmonton,” North America said. “We kicked their asses out of the universe. The whole goddamn nest of them. There’s none of the bastards left.”

“Really?” Asian Pacific said. “So you’ve accounted for the friend of Carter McBride as well, have you?”

“He’s not a threat to the arcology, he only wants Dexter.”

“Crap. You can’t find him, and he’s just an ordinary possessed.” Asian Pacific waved an arm at the simulacrum of London. “All they have to do is steer clear of electronics, and they’re safe.”

“Got to eat sometime,” Southern Africa said. “It’s not like they’ve got friends to take care of them.”

“The Light Bringer sect loves them,” East Asia grumbled.

“The sects are ours,” Western Europe said. “We have no worries in that direction.”

“Okay,” South Pacific said. “So tell us how you’re doing in New York? We all thought the police had got them that time as well.”

“Ah yes,” Military Intelligence said. “What’s the phrase the news anchors keep using? Hydra Syndrome. Shove one possessed into zero-tau, and while you’re doing that five more come forth. Emotive figures, but true.”

“New York got out of hand,” North America said. “I wasn’t prepared for that.”

“Obviously. How many domes have been taken over now?”

“Figures of that magnitude are unnecessarily emotive,” Western Europe said. “Once the possessed base population climbs above two thousand, there’s nothing anyone can do. The exponential curve takes over and the arcology is lost. New York is going to be this planet’s Mortonridge. It’s not our concern.”

“Not our concern!” North Pacific said. “This is bullshit. Of course it’s our concern. If they spread through the arcologies this whole planet will be lost.”

“Large numbers are not our concern. The military will have to deal with New York later.”

“If it’s still here, and if they don’t turn cannibal. The food vats won’t work around possessed, you know, and the weather shields won’t hold, either.”

“They’re reinforcing the domes they’ve captured with their energistic power,” North America said. “The arcology caught the tail end of an armada storm last night. The domes all held.”

“Only until they complete their takeover,” South Pacific said. “The remaining domes can’t barricade themselves in forever.”

“New York’s inevitable fall is regrettable, I’m sure,” Western Europe said. “But not relevant. We have to accept it as a defeat and move forward. B7 is about prevention, not cure. And in order to prevent Earth itself from falling, we have to eliminate Quinn Dexter.”

“So like I asked, where is he?”

“Undetermined at this moment.”

“You lost him, didn’t you? You blew it. He was a sitting duck in Edmonton, but you thought you were smarter. You thought your dandy little psychology game would triumph. Your arrogance could have enslaved us all.”

“Interesting tense, there,” Western Europe snapped. “Could have. You mean, until you saved the day by closing down the vac-trains, after we agreed not to screw each other over.”

“The President had a very strong public mandate for closing them down. After Edmonton’s High Noon firefight, the whole world was clamouring for a shutdown.”

“Led by your news companies,” Southern Africa said.

Western Europe leaned over the table towards a smiling South Pacific, his head centimetres short of the simulacrum. “I got them back, you moronic bitch. Banneth and Louise Kavanagh returned to London safely. Dexter will do everything in his power to follow them there. But he can’t bloody well do that if he’s trapped in Edmonton. Six trains, that’s all that got out before your stupid shut down order. Six! It’s not enough to be certain.”

“If he’s as good as you seem to think, he would have got on one of them.”

“You’d better hope he has, because if he was left behind you can kiss goodbye to Edmonton. We have nothing in place there which could confirm his existence.”

“So we lose two arcologies. The rest are now guaranteed safe.”

“I lose two arcologies,” North America said. “Thanks to you. Do you realize how much territory that is for me?”

“Paris,” South Pacific said. “Bombay, Johannesburg. Everyone’s taking losses today.”

“You’re not. And the possessed are on the run in those arcologies. We have them locked down, thanks to the sects. None of those will escalate into a repetition of New York.”

“We hope,” said India. “I’m managing parity at the moment, that’s all. But panic is going to be a factor in the very near future. And that works to their advantage.”

“You’re quibbling over details,” South Pacific said. “The point is, there are methods of solving this problem other than obsessing over Dexter. My policy is the correct one. Confine them while we engineer a permanent solution. If that had been adopted at the start, we would have lost the Brazilian tower ground station at most.”

“We didn’t know what we were dealing with when Dexter arrived,” South America said. “We were always going to lose one arcology to him.”

“Dear me, I had no idea this was a policy forum,” Western Europe said. “I thought we were conducting a progress review.”

“Well, as you’ve made no progress . . .” South Pacific said sweetly.

“If he’s in London, he won’t be found by conventional means. I thought we’d established that. And for your information, total inactivity isn’t a policy, it’s just the wishful thinking of small minds.”

“I’ve stopped the spread of possession. Remind us what you’ve achieved?”

“You’re fiddling while Rome burns. The cause of the fire is our paramount concern.”

“Eliminating Dexter will not remove the possessed in New York or anywhere else. I vote we devote a higher percentage of our scientific resources to finding a permanent solution.”

“I find it hard to credit that even you are playing politics with this. Percentages aren’t going to make the slightest difference to the beyond at this stage. Anyone who can provide a relevant input to the problem had been doing just that since the very beginning. We don’t need to call in the auditors to verify our compassion credentials, they’re hardly quantifiable in any case.”

“If you don’t want to be a part of the project, fine. Be sure you don’t endanger us any further by your irresponsibility.”

Western Europe cancelled his representation, withdrawing from the conference. The simulacrum of London vanished with him.

The cave was at the lowest level of the endcap caverns, protected on all sides by hundreds of metres of solid polyp. Tolton felt quite secure inside it; first time in a long time.

Originally a servitor veterinary centre, it had been pressed into use as a physics lab. Dr Patan headed up the team which the Valisk personality had charged with making sense of the dark continuum. He’d greeted Dariat’s arrival with the joy of a long-lost son. There had been dozens of experiments, starting with simple measurements: temperature (Dariat’s ersatz body was eight degrees warmer than liquid nitrogen, and almost perfectly heat resistant) electrical resistivity (abandoned quickly when Dariat protested at the pain). Then came energy spectrum and quantum signature analysis. The most interesting part for a layman observer like Tolton was when Dariat gave a sample of himself. Patan’s team quickly decided an in-depth study was impossible when the fluid was being animated by Dariat’s thoughts. Attempts to stick a needle into him and draw some away proved impossible, the tip wouldn’t penetrate his skin. In the end it was down to Dariat himself, holding his hand over a glass dish and pricking himself with a pin which he’d conjured into existence by imagination. Red blood dripped out, changing as it fell away from him. Slightly sticky grey-white fluid splattered into the bowl. It was carried away triumphantly by the physicists. Dariat and Tolton exchanged a bemused look, and went to sit at the back of the lab.

“Wouldn’t it have been easier to tear off a bit of cloth from your toga?” Tolton asked. “I mean, it’s all the same stuff, right?”

Dariat gave him a flabbergasted look. “Bugger. I never thought of that.”

They spent the next couple of hours talking quietly, with Dariat filling in the details of his ordeal. The conversation stopped a couple of hours later when he fell silent, and gave the physicists a cheerless glance. They’d been quiet for several minutes, five of them and Erentz studying the results of a gamma spike microscope. Their expressions were even more worried than Dariat’s.

“What have you found?” Tolton asked.

“Dariat might be right,” Erentz said. “Entropy here in the dark continuum appears to be stronger than in our universe.”

“For once I wish I hadn’t said I told you so,” Dariat said.

“How do you know?” Tolton asked.

“We have contended this state for some time,” Dr Patan said. “This substance seems to confirm that. Although I can’t give you an absolute yet.”

“What the hell is it, then?”

“Best description?” Dr Patan smiled thinly. “It’s nothing.”

“Nothing? But he’s solid.”

“Yes. The fluid is a perfect neutral substance, the end product of total decay. That’s the best definition I can give you based on our results. A gamma spike microscope allows us to probe sub-atomic particles. A most useful device for us physicists. Unfortunately, this fluid has no sub-atomic particles. There are no atoms as such; it appears to be made up from a single particle, one with a neutral charge.”

Tolton summoned up his first grade physics didactic memories. “You mean neutrons?”

“No. This particle’s rest mass is much lower than that. It has a small attractive force, which gives it its fluidic structure. But that’s its only quantifiable property. I doubt it would ever form a solid, not even if you were to assemble a supergiant star mass of the stuff. In our own universe, that much cold matter will collapse under its own gravity to form neutronium. Here, we believe there’s another stage of decay before that happens. Energy is constantly evaporating out of electrons and protons, breaking down their elementary particle cohesion. In the dark continuum dissipation rather than contraction would appear to be the norm.”

“Is evaporating? You mean we’re leaking energy out of our atoms right now?”

“Yes. It would certainly explain why our electronic systems are suffering so much degradation.”

“How long till we dissolve into that stuff?” Tolton yelped.

“We haven’t determined that yet. Now we know what we’re looking for, we will begin calibrating the loss rate.”

“Oh shit.” He whirled round to face Dariat. “The lobster pot, that’s what you called this place. We’re not going to get out, are we.”

“With a little help from the Confederation, we can still make it back, atoms intact.”

Tolton’s mind was racing ahead with the concept now. “If I just fall apart into that fluid, my soul will be able to pull it back together. I’ll be like you.”

“If your soul contains enough life-energy, yes.”

“But that fades away as well. . . . Yours does, you had to steal more from that ghost. And those entities outside, they’re all battling for life-energy. That’s all they do. Ever.”

Dariat smiled with sad sympathy. “That’s the way it goes here.” He broke off and stared at a high corner of the cave. The physicists did the same, their expressions all showing concern.

“Now what?” Tolton demanded. He couldn’t see anything up there.

“Looks like our visitors have got tired with the southern endcap,” Dariat told him. “They’re coming here.”

The first of three Confederation Navy Marine flyers soared across Regina just as twilight fell. Sitting in the mid-fuselage passenger lounge, Samual Aleksandrovich accessed the craft’s sensor suite to see the city below. Street lighting, adverts, and skyscrapers were responding to the vanishing sun by throwing their own iridescent corona across the urban landscape. He’d seen the sight many times before, but tonight the traffic along the freeways was thinner than usual.

It corresponded to the mood reported by the few news shows he’d grazed over the last couple of days. The Organization’s attack had left the population badly shaken. Of all the Confederation worlds, they had supposed Avon to be second only to Earth in terms of safety. But now Earth’s arcologies had been infested, and Trafalgar was so badly damaged it was being evacuated. There wasn’t a countryside hotel room to be had anywhere on the planet as people claimed their outstanding vacation days or called in sick.

The flyer shot over the lake bordering the eastern side of the city and swiftly curved back, losing height as it approached the Navy barracks in the shadow of the Assembly Building. It touched down on a circular metal pad, which immediately sank down into the underground hangar. Blastproof doors rumbled shut above it.

Jeeta Anwar was waiting to greet the First Admiral as he emerged from the flyer. He exchanged a couple of perfunctory words with her, then beckoned the captain of the Marine guard detail.

“Aren’t you supposed to check new arrivals, Captain?” he asked.

The captain’s face remained blank, though he was strangely incapable of focusing on the First Admiral. “Yes, sir.”

“Then kindly do so. There are to be no exceptions. Understand?” A sensor was applied to the First Admiral’s bare hand; he was also asked to datavise his physiological file into a block.

“Clear, sir,” the captain reported, and snapped a salute.

“Good. Admirals Kolhammer and Lalwani will be arriving shortly. Pass the word.”

The Marine guard squad emerging from the flyer, and the two staff officers, Amr al-Sahhaf and Keaton, were also quickly vetted for signs of possession. Once they were cleared, they fell in around the First Admiral.

The incident put Samual Aleksandrovich in a bad frame of mind. On the one hand the captain’s behaviour was excusable; that the First Admiral would be a possessed infiltrator was inconceivable. Yet possession was still spreading precisely because no one believed their friend/spouse/child could have been taken over. That was why the Navy was leading by example, the three most senior admirals all taking different flyers to the same destination in case one of them was targeted by a rogue weapon. Enforced routine procedures might just succeed where personal familiarity invited disaster.

He met President Haaker in the barracks commander’s conference room. This was one discussion both of them had agreed shouldn’t be taken to the Polity Council just yet.

The President had Mae Ortlieb with him, which gave them two aides each. All very balanced and neutral, Samual thought as he shook hands with the President. Judging by Haaker’s unconstrained welcome, he must have thought the same.

“So the anti-memory does actually work,” Haaker said as they sat round the table.

“Yes and no, sir,” Captain Keaton said. “It eradicated Jacqueline Couteur and her host along with Dr Gilmore. However, it didn’t propagate through the beyond. The souls are still there.”

“Can it be made to work?”

“The principal is sound. How long it will take, I don’t know. Estimates from the development team range from a couple of days to years.”

“You are still giving it priority, aren’t you?” Jeeta Anwar asked.

“Work will be resumed as soon as our research team is established in its back-up facility,” Captain Amr al-Sahhaf said. “We’re hoping that will be inside a week.”

Mae turned to the President. “One team,” she said pointedly.

“That doesn’t seem to be much of a priority,” the President said. “And Dr Gilmore is dead. I understand he was providing a lot of input.”

“He was,” the First Admiral said. “But he’s hardly irreplaceable. The basic concept of anti-memory has been established; developing it furthers a multidisciplinary operation.”

“Exactly,” Mae said. “Once a concept has been proved, the quickest way to develop it is give the results to several teams; the more people, the more fresh ideas focused on this, the faster we will have a useable weapon.”

“You’d have to assemble the teams, then bring them up to date on our results,” Captain Keaton said. “By the time you’ve done that, we will have moved on.”

“You hope,” she retorted.

“Do you have some reason to think the Navy researchers are incompetent?”

“None at all. I’m simply pointing out a method which insures our chances of success are significantly multiplied. A standard approach to Ramp;D, in fact.”

“Who would you suggest assists us? I doubt astroengineering company weapons divisions have the necessary specialists.”

“The larger industrialized star systems would be able to assemble the requisite professionals. Kulu, New Washington, Oshanko, Nanjing, Petersburg, for starters, and I’m sure the Edenists would be able to provide considerable assistance; they know more about thought routines than any Adamist culture. Earth’s GISD has already offered to help.”

“I’ll bet they have,” Samual Aleksandrovich grunted. By virtue of his position he had an idea of just how widespread Earth’s security agency was across the Confederation stars. They had at least three times the assets of the ESA, though even Lalwani was uncertain just how far their networks actually reached. One of the reasons it was so difficult to discover their size was the network’s essentially passive nature. In the last ten years there had only been three active operations that CNIS had discovered, and all of those were mounted against black syndicates. Quite what they did with all the information their operatives gathered was a mystery, which made him cautious about trusting them. But they always cooperated with Lalwani’s official requests for information.

“It’s a reasonable suggestion,” the President said.

“It would also remove exclusivity from the Polity Council,” the First Admiral said. “If sovereign states acquire a viable anti-memory weapon they could well use it without consultation, especially if one of them was facing an incursion. After all, that kind of supra-racial genocide would not leave any bodies as evidence. Anti-memory is a doomsday weapon, our primary negotiating tactic. As I have always maintained, it is not a solution to this problem. We must face this collectively.”

The President gave a reluctant sigh. “Very well, Samual. Keep it confined to the Navy for now. But I shall review the situation in a fortnight. If your team isn’t making the kind of progress we need, I’ll act on Mae’s suggestion and bring in outside help.”

“Of course, Mr President.”

“That’s good then. Let’s go face the Polity Council and hear the real bad news, shall we.” Olton Haaker rose with a pleasant smile in place, content another problem had been smoothly dealt with in the traditional consensus compromise. Mae Ortlieb appeared equally sanguine. Her professional expression didn’t fool Samual Aleksandrovich for a second.

For its private sessions the Confederation’s Polity Council eschewed secure sensenvirons, and met in person in a discrete annex of the Assembly building. Given that this was where the most crucial decisions affecting the human race would be taken, the designers had seen fit to spend a great deal of taxpayer’s money on the interior. It was the amalgam of all government Cabinet rooms, infected with a quiet classicism. Twelve native granite pillars supported a domed roof painted in Renaissance style, with a gold and platinum chandelier hanging from the centre, while swan-white frescos of woodland mythology roamed across powder blue walls. The central round table was a single slice of ancient sequoia wood, taken from the last of the giant trees to fall before the Armada Storms. Its fifteen chairs were made from oak and leather to a Nineteenth-Century Plymouth design, and new (each delegate was allowed to take theirs home with them after their term was over). Glass-fronted marbled alcoves displayed exactly 862 sculptures and statuettes; one donated by each planet in the Confederation. The Tyrathca had contributed a crude hexagonal slab of slate with faint green scratches on the surface, a plaque of some kind from Tanjuntic-RI (worthless to them, but they knew how much humans valued antiquity). The Kiint had presented an enigmatic kinetic sculpture of silvery foil, composed of twenty-five concentric circular strips that rotated around each other without any bearings between them, each strip was suspended in air and apparently powered by perpetual motion (it was suspected they were pieces of metallic hydrogen).

Lalwani and Kolhammer joined the First Admiral outside the council chamber, and the three of them followed the President in. Twelve chairs were already filled by the ambassadors currently appointed to the Polity Council. Haaker and Samual took their places, leaving the fifteenth empty. Although Ambassador Roulor was entitled to take the seat vacated by Rittagu-FUH, the Assembly had delayed formally voting to confirm his appointment. The Kiint hadn’t complained.

Samual sat down with minimum fuss, acknowledging the other ambassadors. He didn’t enjoy the irony of being called here in the same way he’d called them to request the starflight quarantine. It indicated events were now controlling him.

The President called the meeting to order. “Admiral, if you could brief us on the Trafalgar situation, please.”

“The evacuation will be complete in another three days,” Samual told them. “Active Navy personnel were given priority and are being flown to their secondary locations. We should be back up to full operational capability in another two days. The civilian workers are being ferried down to Avon. All decisions about refurbishing the asteroid will be postponed until the crisis is over. We’ll have to wait until it’s physically cooled down anyway.”

“What about the ships?” the President enquired. “How many were damaged?”

“One hundred and seventy three Adamist ships were destroyed, a further eighty-six are damaged beyond repair. Fifty-two voidhawks were killed. Human deaths so far stand at nine thousand two hundred and thirty-two. Seven hundred and eighty-seven people have been hospitalised, most of them with radiation burns. We haven’t released those figures to the media yet. They just know it’s bad.”

The ambassadors were silent for a long moment.

“How many starships belonged to the First Fleet?” Earth’s ambassador asked.

“Ninety-seven front-line warships were lost.”

“Dear God.” Samual didn’t see who muttered that.

“Capone cannot be allowed to get away with an atrocity of this magnitude,” the President said. “He simply cannot.”

“It was an unusual set of circumstances,” Samual said. “Our new security procedures should prevent it happening again.” Even as he spoke the words, he knew how pathetic it sounded.

“Those circumstances, possibly,” Abeche’s ambassador said bitterly. “What if he dreams up some new course of action? We’ll be left with another bloody great disaster on our hands.”

“We’ll stop him.”

“You should have expected this, made some provision. We know Capone had antimatter, and he has nothing to lose. That combination was bound to result in a reckless strike of some kind. Jesus Christ, don’t your strategy planners consider these scenarios?”

“We’re aware of them, Mr Ambassador. And we do take them seriously.”

“Mortonridge hasn’t delivered anything like the victory we were expecting,” Miyag’s ambassador said. “Capone’s infiltration flights have got everybody petrified. Now this.”

“We have eliminated Capone’s source of antimatter,” the First Admiral said levelly. “The infiltration flights have stopped because of that. He does not have the resources to conquer another planet. Capone is a public relations problem, not the true threat.”

“Don’t tell me we should just ignore him,” Earth’s ambassador said. “There’s a difference between confining your enemy and not doing anything in the hope he’ll go away, and the Navy has done precious little to convince me it’s got Capone under control.”

The President held a hand up to prevent the First Admiral from replying. “What we’re saying, Samual, is that we have decided to change our current policy. We can no longer afford the holding tactics of the starflight quarantine.”

Samual looked around the hard, determined faces. It was almost a vote of no confidence in his leadership. Not quite, though. It would take another setback before that happened. “What do you propose to replace it with?”

“An active policy,” Abeche’s ambassador said hotly. “Something that will show people we’re using our military resources to protect them. Something positive.”

“Trafalgar should not be used as a casus belli ,” the First Admiral insisted.

“It won’t be,” the President said. “I want the Navy to eliminate Capone’s fleet. A tactical mission, not a war. Wipe him out, Samual. Eliminate the antimatter threat completely. As long as he still has some, he can send one Pryor after another sneaking through our defences.”

“Capone’s fleet is all that keeps him in charge of the Organization. If you take that away, we’ll loose Arnstat and New California. The possessed will take them out of the universe.”

“We know. That’s the decision. We have to get rid of the possessed before we can start to deal with them properly.”

“An attack on the scale necessary to destroy his fleet, and New California’s SD network will also kill thousands of people. And I’d remind you that the majority of crews in the Organization ships are non-possessed.”

“Traitors, you mean,” Mendina’s ambassador said.

“No,” the First Admiral said steadily. “They are blackmail victims, working under the threat of torture to themselves and their families. Capone is quite ruthless in his application of terror.”

“This is exactly the problem we must address head on,” the President said. “We are in a war situation. We must retaliate, and swiftly or we will lose what little initiative we have. Capone must be shown we are not paralysed by this diabolical hostage scenario. We can still implement our decisions with force and resolution when required.”

“Killing people will not help us.”

“On the contrary, First Admiral,” Miyag’s ambassador said. “Although we must deeply regret the sacrifice, eradicating the Organization will give us a much needed breathing space. No other group of possessed has managed to command ships with the same proficiency as Capone. We will have returned to the small risk of the possessed spreading through quarantine-busting flights, which the Navy should be able to contain as you originally envisaged. Eventually, the possessed will simply remove themselves from this universe entirely. That is when we can begin our true fight back. And do so under a great deal less stress than our current conditions.”

“Is that the decision of this Council?” Samual asked formally.

“It is,” the President said. “With one abstention.” He glanced at Cayeaux. The Edenist ambassador returned the look unflinchingly. Edenism and Earth held the two other permanent seats on the Polity Council, awarded because of their population size and formed a powerful voting bloc; they were rarely in disagreement over general policy. Ethics, of course, nearly always set the Edenists apart.

“They’re inflicting too much damage on us,” Earth’s ambassador said, adopting a measured tone. “Physically and economically. Not to mention the disintegration of morale propagated by events like Trafalgar, and unfortunately our arcologies. It has to be stopped. We cannot show any weakness in dealing with this.”

“I understand,” the First Admiral said. “We still have the bulk of Admiral Kolhammer’s task force available in the Avon system. Motela, how long would it take to deploy them?”

“We can rendezvous the Adamist warships above Kotcho in eight hours,” Kolhammer replied. “It will take a little longer for affiliated voidhawk squadrons to gather. Most could join us en route.”

“That will mean we can hit Capone in three days’ time,” Samual said. “I would like some extra time to augment those forces. The tactical simulations we’ve run indicate we need at least a thousand warships to challenge Capone successfully in a direct confrontation. We’ll need to call in reserve squadrons from national navies.”

“You have one week,” the President said.