“I can send some serjeants with you as well. They’ll be useful as bodyguards when you’re docked.”
He tried to think up an argument against that, but couldn’t. “Fine. Unsubtle, but fine.”
Ione grinned. She knew that tone.
“Everyone will just think they’re cosmoniks,” she said.
“Okay, that just leaves us with one minor concern.”
“Which is?”
“Where the hell do I start looking? I mean, Jesus; Mzu’s smart, she’s not going to fly straight to the Garissa system to pick up the Alchemist. She could be anywhere , Ione; there are over eight hundred and sixty inhabited star systems out there.”
“She went to the Narok system, I think. That’s where the Udat ’s wormhole was aligned, anyway. It makes sense, Narok is Kenyan-ethnic; she may be contacting sympathisers.”
“How the hell do you know that? I thought only blackhawks and voidhawks could sense each other’s wormholes.”
“Our SD satellites have some pretty good sensors.”
She was lying; he knew it right away. What was worse than the lie, he thought, was the reason behind it. Because he couldn’t think of one, certainly not one that had to be kept from him, the only person she trusted to send on this job. She must be protecting something, a something more important than the Alchemist. Jesus. “You were right, you know that? The night we met at Dominique’s party, you said something to me. And you were right.”
“What was it?”
“I can’t say no to you.”
Joshua left an hour later to supervise the Lady Mac ’s refit, and round up his crew. It meant he missed Kelly’s report, which put him in a very small minority. Kate Elvin’s earlier optimism had been well founded; the other news companies didn’t even try to compete. Ninety per cent of Tranquillity’s population accessed the sensevises Kelly had recorded on Lalonde. The impact was as devastating as predicted—though not at once. The editing was too good for that, binding segments together in a fast-paced assault on the sensorium. Only afterwards, when they could duck the all-out assault on their immediate attention, did the implications of possession begin to sink in.
The effect acted like a mild depressant program or a communal virus. Yes, there truly was life after corporeal death. But it seemed to be perpetual misery. Nor was there any sighting of God, any God, even the Creator’s numerous prophets went curiously unseen; no pearly gates, no brimstone lakes, no judgement, no Jahannam, no salvation. There was apparently no reward for having lived a virtuous life. The best anybody now had to hope for after death was to come back and possess the living.
Having to come to terms with the concept of a universe besieged by lost souls was a wounding process. People reacted in different ways. Getting smashed, or stoned, or stimmed out was popular. Some found religion in a big way. Some became fervently agnostic. Some turned to their shrinks for reassurance. Some (the richer and smarter) quietly focused their attention (and funding) to zero-tau mausoleums.
One thing the psychiatrists did notice, this was a depression which drove nobody to suicide. The other constants were the slow decline in efficiency at work, increased lethargy, a rise in use of tranquilizer and stimulant programs. Pop psychology commentators took to calling it the rise of the why-bother psychosis.
The rest of the Confederation was swift to follow, and almost identical in its response no matter what ethnic culture base was exposed to the news. No ideology or religion offered much in the way of resistance. Only Edenism proved resilient, though even that culture was far from immune.
Antonio Whitelocke chartered twenty-five blackhawks and Adamist independent trader starships to distribute Kelly’s fleks to Collins offices across the Confederation. Saturation took three weeks, longer than optimum, but the quarantine alert made national navies highly nervous. Some of the more authoritarian governments, fearful of the effect Kelly’s recording would have on public confidence, tried to ban Collins from releasing it; an action which simply pushed the fleks underground whilst simultaneously boosting their credibility. It was an unfortunate outcome, because in many cases it clashed and interacted with two other information ripples expanding across the Confederation. Firstly there was the rapidly spreading bad news about Al Capone’s takeover of New California, and secondly the more clandestine distribution of Kiera Salter’s seductive recording.
The Mindor hit eight gees as soon as it cleared the wormhole terminus. Various masses immediately impinged on Rocio Condra’s perception. The core of the Trojan point was twenty million kilometres in diameter, and cluttered with hundreds of medium-sized asteroids, tens of thousands of boulders, dust shoals, and swirls of ice pebbles, all of them gently resonating to the pull of distant gravity fields. Mindor opened its wings wide, and began beating them in vast sweeps.
Rocio Condra had chosen an avian form as the hellhawk’s image. The three stumpy rear fins had broadened out, becoming thinner to angle back. Its nose had lengthened, creases and folds multiplying across the polyp, deepening, accentuating the creature’s streamlining. Meandering green and purple patterns had vanished, washed away beneath a bloom of midnight-black. The texture was crinkly, delineating tight-packed leather feathers. He had become a steed worthy of a dark angel.
Loose streamers of inter-planetary dust were churned into erratic storms as he powered forwards in hungry surges. Radar and laser sensors began to pulse against his hull. It had taken Rocio Condra a long time experimenting with the energistic power pumping through his neural cells to maintain a viable operational level within the hellhawk’s electronic systems, although efficiency was still well down on design specs. So long as he remained calm, and focused the power sparingly and precisely, the processors remained on-line. It helped that the majority of them were bitek, and military grade at that. Even so, combat wasps had to be launched with backup solid rockets, but once they were clear they swiftly recovered; leaving only a small window of vulnerability. Thankfully, his mass perception, a secondary effect of the distortion field, was unaffected. Providing he wasn’t outnumbered by hostile voidhawks, he could give a good account of himself.
The beams of electromagnetic radiation directed at him were coming from a point ten thousand kilometres ahead: Koblat asteroid, a new and wholly unimportant provincial settlement in a Trojan cluster which after a hundred and fifteen years of development and investment had yet to prove its economic worth. There were thousands just like it scattered across the Confederation.
Koblat didn’t even rate a navy ship from the Toowoomba star system’s defence alliance. Its funding company certainly didn’t provide it with SD platforms. The sole concession which the asteroid’s governing council had made to “the emergency” was to upgrade their civil spaceflight sensors, and equip two inter-planetary cargo ships with a dozen combat wasps apiece, grudgingly donated by Toowoomba. It was, like every response to the affairs of the outside universe, a rather pathetic token.
And now a token which had just been exposed for what it was. The hellhawk’s emergence, location, velocity, flight vector, and refusal to identify itself could only mean one thing: It was hostile. Both of the armed inter-planetary craft were dispatched on an interception vector, lumbering outwards at one and a half gees, hopelessly outclassed even before their fusion drives ignited.
Koblat beamed a desperate request for help to Pinjarra, the cluster’s capital four million kilometres away, where three armed starships were stationed. The asteroid’s inadequate internal emergency procedures were activated, sealing and isolating independent sections. Its terrified citizens rushed to designated secure chambers deep in the interior and waited for the attack to begin, dreading the follow on, the infiltration by possessed.
It never happened. All the incoming hellhawk did was open a standard channel and datavise a sensorium recording into the asteroid’s net. Then it vanished, expanding a wormhole interstice and diving inside. Only a couple of optical sensors caught a glimpse of it, producing a smudgy image which nobody believed in.
When Jed Hinton finally got back from his designated safe shelter chamber, he almost wished the alert had kept going a few more hours. It was change, something new, different. A rare event in all of Jed’s seventeen years of life.
When he returned to the family apartment, four rooms chewed out of the rock at level three (a two-thirds gravity field), his mum and Digger were shouting about something or other. The rows had grown almost continual since the warning from the Confederation Assembly had reached Koblat. Work shifts were being reduced as the company hedged its bets, waiting to see what would happen after the crisis was over. Shorter shifts meant Digger spending a lot more time at home, or up at the Blue Fountain bar on level five when he could afford it.
“I wish they’d stop,” Gari said as more shouting sounded through the bedroom door. “I can’t think right with so much noise.” She was sitting at a table in the living room, trying to concentrate on a processor block. Its screen was full of text with several flashing diagrams, part of a software architecture course. The level was one his didactic imprints had covered five years ago; Gari was only three years younger, she should have assimilated it long ago. But then his sister had something in her genes which made it difficult for laser imprinters to work on her brain. She had to work hard at revising everything to make it stick.
“Girl’s just plain arse backwards,” Digger shouted some nights when he stumbled home drunk.
Jed hated Digger, hated the way he shouted at Mum, and hated the way he picked on Gari. Gari tried hard to keep up with her year, she needed encouraging. Not that there was anything to achieve in Koblat, he thought miserably.
Miri and Navar came in, and promptly loaded a games flek into the AV block. The living room immediately filled up with an iridescent laserlight sparkle. A flock of spherical, coloured-chrome chessboards swooped around Jed’s head every time his eyes strayed towards the tall AV pillar. Both girls started yelling instructions at the block, and small figures jumped between the various spheres in strategic migrations, accompanied by a thumping music track. The projector was too damn large for a room this size.
“Come on, guys,” Gari wailed. “I’ve got to get this stuff locked down ready for my assessment.”
“So do it,” Navar grunted back.
“Cow!”
“Dumb bitch!”
“Stop it! You played this all yesterday.”
“And we haven’t finished yet. If you weren’t so thick you’d know that.”
Gari appealed to Jed, chubby face quivering on the threshold of tears.
Miri and Navar were Digger’s daughters (by different mothers), so if Jed lifted a finger to them Digger would hit him. He’d found that out months ago. They knew it too, and used the knowledge with tactical skill.
“Come on,” he told Gari, “we’ll go down to the day club.”
Miri and Navar laughed jeeringly as Gari shut down her processor block and glared at them. Jed shoved the door open and faced his tiny worldlet.
“It’s not any quieter at the club,” Gari said as the door shut behind them.
Jed nodded dispiritedly. “I know. But you can ask Mrs Yandell if you can use her office. She’ll understand.”
“Suppose,” Gari acknowledged brokenly. Not long ago her brother had been capable of putting the whole universe to rights. A time before Digger.
Jed set off down the tunnel. Only the floor had been covered in composite tiling, the walls and ceiling were naked rock lined with power cables, data ducts, and fat environmental tubes. He took the left turning at the first junction, not even thinking. His life consisted of walking the hexagonal weave of tunnels which circled the asteroid’s interior; that entire topographic web existed only to connect two places: the apartment and the day club. There was nowhere else.
Tunnels with gloomy lighting, hidden machines that made every wall in Koblat thrum quietly; that was his environment now, a worldlet without a single horizon. Never fresh air and open spaces and plants, never room , not for his body or his mind. The first biosphere cavern was still being bored out (that was where Digger worked), but it was years behind schedule and ruinously over budget. At one time Jed had lived with the faith that it would provide him an outlet for all his crushed-up feelings of confinement and anger, allowing him to run wild over fresh-planted grass meadows. Not now. His mum and Digger along with all the rest of the adults were too stupid to appreciate what possession really meant. But he knew. Nothing mattered now, nothing you did, nothing you said, nothing you thought, nothing you wished for. Die now or die in a hundred years time, you still spent eternity with a sprained mind which was unable to extinguish itself. The final, absolute horror.