“Put them in zero-tau,” Dr Gilmore said. “We know that method has enjoyed a hundred per cent success rate. They employed it on Ombey.”
“Yes,” the First Admiral acknowledged, recalling the file he’d accessed, the battle to capture the possessed inside the big department store. “And at what cost? I don’t intend to be cavilling about your endeavours, Doctor, but you really need to bring some experienced combat personnel into your consultation process. Even conceding your stun gun could work, it would take two or three marines to subdue a possessed and place them in zero-tau. During which time those possessed remaining at liberty would have converted another five people. With that ratio we could never win. We must have a single weapon, a one-shot device which can rid a body of the possessing soul without harming it. Will electricity do that? Can you increase the voltage until the incursive soul is forced out?”
“No, Admiral,” Euru said. “We have already tried with Couteur. The voltages necessary will kill the body. In fact we had to abandon the procedure for several hours to allow her to heal herself.”
“What about other methods?”
“There will be some we can try, Admiral,” Dr Gilmore insisted. “But we’ll need to research her further. We have so little data at the moment. The ultimate solution will of course be to seal the junction between this universe and the beyond continuum. Unfortunately we still cannot locate the interface point. Those scanners we are operating in there are some of the most sensitive gravitonic distortion detectors ever built, yet there is no sign of any space-time density fluctuation in or around her. Which means the souls are not returning through a wormhole.”
“Not wormholes as we understand them, anyway,” Euru finished. “But then, given Couteur’s existence, our whole conception of quantum cosmology is obviously seriously incomplete. Having the ability to travel faster than light isn’t nearly as smart as we once thought it was.”
It had taken Quinn some time to modify the Tantu ’s bridge. It wasn’t the look of the compartment which bothered him so much; the frigate was configured for high gee acceleration, its fittings and structure were correspondingly functional. He liked that inherent strength, and emphasised it by sculpting the surfaces with an angular matte-black bas-relief of the kind he imagined would adorn the walls of the Light Brother’s supreme temple. Lighting panels were dimmed to a carmine spark, flickering behind rusty iron grilles.
It was the information he was presented with, or rather the lack of it, which displeased him, and consequently required the longest time to rectify. He had no neural nanonics, not that they would have worked even if he did have a set. Which meant he didn’t know what was happening outside the ship. For all of Tantu ’s fabulous high-resolution sensor array, he was blind, unable to react, to make decisions. To have the external universe visible was his first priority.
Possessing the frigate’s nineteen-strong crew had taken barely twenty minutes after he and Lawrence had docked. Initiating the returned souls into the sect, having them accept his leadership, had required another hour. Three times he had to discipline the faithless. He regretted the waste.
Those remaining had worked hard to build the displays he wanted; fitting holoscreens to the consoles, adapting the flight computer programs to portray the external environment in the simplest possible terms. Only then, with his confidence restored, had he ordered their departure from Norfolk orbit.
Quinn settled back in his regal, velvet-padded acceleration couch and gave the order to jump away. Twenty seconds after they completed the operation, the holoscreens showed him the little purple pyramid which represented the squadron’s lone pursuit ship lit up at the centre of the empty cube. According to the scale, it was three thousand kilometres away.
“How do we elude them?” he asked Bajan.
Bajan was possessing the body of the Tantu ’s erstwhile captain, the third soul to do so since the hijacking began. Quinn had been dissatisfied with the first two; they had both lived in pre-industrial times. He needed someone with a technological background, someone who could interpret the wealth of data in the captain’s captive mind. A civil fusion engineer, Bajan had died only two centuries ago; starflight was a concept he understood. He also had a sleazy, furtive mind which promised instant obedience to both Quinn and the sect’s doctrines. But Quinn didn’t mind that, such weaknesses simply made him easier to control.
Bajan’s fists squeezed, mimicking the pressure he was placing on the mind held within. “Sequential jumps. The ship can do it. That can throw off any pursuer.”
“Do it,” Quinn ordered simply.
Three jumps later, spanning seven light-years, they were alone in interstellar space. Four days after that, they jumped into a designated emergence zone two hundred thousand kilometres above Earth.
“Home,” Quinn said, and smiled. The frigate’s visible-spectrum sensors showed him the planet’s nightside, a leaden blue-grey crescent which was widening slowly as the Tantu ’s orbit inched them towards the edge of the penumbra. First magnitude stars blazed on the continents: the arcologies, silently boasting their vast energy consumption as the light from the streets, skyscrapers, stadiums, vehicles, parks, plazas, and industrial precincts merged into a monochrome blast of photons. Far above the equator, a sparkling haze band looped around the entire world, casting the gentlest reflection off the black-glitter oceans below.
“God’s Brother, but it’s magnificent,” Quinn said. They hadn’t shown him this view when he’d been brought up the Brazilian orbital tower on his way to exile. There were no ports in his deck of the lift capsule, nor on the sections of the mammoth docking station through which the Ivets had passed. He’d lived on Earth all his life, and never seen it, not as it should be seen. Exquisite, and tragically fragile.
In his mind he could see the dazzling lights slowly, torturously, snuffed out as thick oily shadows slid across the land, a tide which brought with it despair and fear. Then reaching out into space, crushing the O’Neill Halo, its vitality and power. No light would be left, no hope. Only the screams, and the Night. And Him.
Tears of joy formed fat distorting lenses across Quinn’s eyeballs. The image, the conviction, was so strong. Total blackness, with Earth at its centre; raped, dead, frozen, entombed. “Is this my task, Lord? Is it?” The thought of such a privilege humbled him.
The flight computer let out an alarmed whistle.
Furious that his dreams should be interrupted, Quinn demanded: “What is it?” He had to squint and blink to clear his vision. The holoscreens were filling with tumbling red spiderwebs, graphic symbols flashed for attention. Five orange vector lines were oozing inwards from the edge of the display to intersect at the Tantu ’s location. “What is happening?”
“It’s some kind of interception manoeuvre,” Bajan shouted. “Those are navy ships. And the Halo’s SD platforms are locking on.”
“I thought we were in a legitimate emergence zone.”
“We are.”
“Then what—”
“Priority signal for the Tantu ’s captain from Govcentral Strategic Defence Command,” the flight computer announced.
Quinn glowered at the AV projection pillar which had relayed the message. He snapped his fingers at Bajan.
“This is Captain Mauer, commander of the CN ship Tantu ,” Bajan said. “Can somebody tell me what the problem is?”
“This is SD Command, Captain. Datavise your ship’s ASA code, please.”
“What code?” Bajan mouthed, completely flummoxed.
“Does anybody know what it is?” Quinn growled. Tantu had already datavised its identification code as soon as the jump was completed, as per standard procedure.
“The code, Captain,” SD Command asked again.
Quinn watched the fluorescent orange vectors of another two ships slide into the holoscreen display. Their weapons sensors focused on the Tantu ’s hull.
“Computer, jump one light-year. Now,” he ordered.
“No, the sensors . . .” Bajan exclaimed frantically.
His objection didn’t matter. The flight computer was programmed to respond to Quinn’s voice commands alone.
The Tantu jumped, its event horizon slicing clean through the carbon-composite stalks which elevated the various sensor clusters out of their recesses. Ten of them had deployed as soon as the starship emerged above Earth: star trackers, midrange optical sensors, radar, communications antennae.
All seven warships racing towards the Tantu saw it disappear behind ten dazzling white plasma spumes as its event horizon crushed the carbon molecules of the stalks to fusion density and beyond. Ruined sensor clusters spun out of the radioactive mist.
The SD Command centre duty officer ordered two of the destroyers to follow the Tantu , cursing his luck that the interception squadron hadn’t been assigned any voidhawks. It took the two starships eleven minutes to match trajectories with the Tantu ’s jump coordinate. Everybody knew that was too long.
Soprano alarms shrilled at painful volume, drowning out all other sounds on the Tantu ’s bridge. The holoscreens which had been carrying the sensor images turned black as soon as the patterning nodes discharged, then flicked to ship schematic diagrams. Disturbing quantities of red symbols flashed for attention.
“Kill that noise,” Quinn bellowed.
Bajan hurried to obey, typing rapidly on the keyboard rigged up next to his acceleration couch.
“We took four hull breaches,” Dwyer reported as soon as the alarm cut off. He was the most ardent of Quinn’s new apostles, a former black stimulant program pusher who was murdered at the age of twenty-three by a faster, more ambitious rival. His anger and callousness made him ideal for the cause. He’d even heard of the sects, dealing with them on occasion. “Six more areas have been weakened.”
“What the fuck was that? Did they shoot at us?” Quinn asked.
“No,” Bajan said. “You can’t jump with sensors extended, the distortion effect collapses any mass caught in the field. Fortunately it’s only a very narrow shell which covers the hull, just a few micrometers thick. But the atoms inside it get converted directly into energy. Most of it shoots outwards, but there’s also some which is deflected right back against the hull. That’s what hit us.”
“How much damage did we pick up?”
“Secondary systems only,” Dwyer said. “And we’re venting something, too; nitrogen I think.”