“Two inoperative, another three damaged. But they’re failsoft. I think we can jump.”
“Good. Computer, jump three light-years.”
Bajan clamped down on his automatic protest. Nothing he could do about the spike of anger and exasperation in his mind though, Quinn could perceive that all right.
“Computer, jump half a light-year.”
This time the bridge lights sputtered almost to the point of extinction.
“All right,” Quinn said as the gloomy red illumination grew bold again. “I want some fucking sensor visuals on these screens now. I want to know where we are, and if anyone followed us. Dwyer, start working around those damaged systems.”
“Are we going to be okay, Quinn?” Lawrence asked. His energistic ability couldn’t hide the sweat pricking his sallow face.
“Sure. Now shut the fuck up, let me think.” He slowly unbuckled the straps holding him into his acceleration couch. Using the stikpads he shuffled on tiptoe over to Bajan’s couch. His black robe swirled like bedevilled smoke around him, the hood deepening until his face was almost completely hidden. “What,” he asked in a tight whisper, “is an ASA code?”
“I dunno, Quinn, honest,” the agitated man protested.
“I know you don’t know, dickhead. But the captain does. Find out!”
“Sure, Quinn, sure.” He closed his eyes, concentrating on the captain’s mind, inflicting as much anguish as he could dream of to wrest free the information. “It’s an Armed Ship Authorization designation,” he grunted eventually.
“Go on,” Quinn’s voice emerged from the shadows of his hood.
“Any military starship which jumps to Earth has to have one. There’s so much industry in orbit, so many settled asteroids, they’re terrified of the damage just one rogue ship could cause. So the captain of every Confederation government navy ship is given an ASA code to confirm they’re legally entitled to be armed and that they’re under official control. It acts as a fail-safe against any hijacking.”
“It certainly does,” Quinn said. “But it shouldn’t have done. Not with us. You should have known.”
Nobody else on the bridge was looking anywhere near Bajan, all of them hugely absorbed with their own tasks of stabilizing the damage. And Quinn, looming over him like some giant carrion creature.
“This Mauer is a tough mother, Quinn. He tricked me, that’s all. I’ll make him suffer for it, I swear. The Light Bringer will be proud of the way I let my serpent beast loose on him.”
“There’s no need,” Quinn said genially.
Bajan let out a faltering whimper of relief.
“I shall supervise his suffering myself.”
“But . . . how?”
In the absolute silence of the bridge, Lawrence Dillon sniggered.
“Leave us, Bajan, you little prick,” Quinn ordered. “You have failed me.”
“Leave? Leave what?”
“The body I provided for you. You don’t deserve it.”
“No!” Bajan howled.
“Go. Or I’ll shove you into zero-tau.”
With a last sob, Bajan let himself fall back into the beyond, the glories of sensation ripping out of his mind. His soul wept its torment as the crowded emptiness closed around him once again.
Gurtan Mauer coughed weakly, his body trembling. He had lurched from one nightmare to another. The Tantu ’s bridge had become an archaic crypt where technological artifacts protruded from whittled ebony, as if they were the foreign elements. A monk in midnight-black robes stood at the side of his couch, the hint of a face inside the voluminous hood indicated by the occasional carmine flicker striking alabaster skin. An inverted crucifix hung on a long silver chain around his neck; for some reason it wasn’t drifting around as it ought in free fall.
“You didn’t just defy me alone,” Quinn said. “That I could almost accept. But when you held back that fucking ASA code you defied the will of God’s Brother. Right now I should have been in the docking station, by morning I would have kissed the ground at the foot of the orbital tower. I was destined to carry the gospel of the Night to the whole motherfucking world! And you fucked with me , shithead. You!”
Mauer’s ship-suit caught light. In free fall the flame was a bright indigo fluid, slithering smoothly across his torso and along his limbs. Scraps of charred fabric peeled off, exposing the charcoaled skin below. Fans whirred loudly behind the bridge’s duct grilles as they attempted to suck the awful stench from the compartment’s air.
Quinn ignored the agonized wailing muted by the captain’s clamped mouth. He let his mind lovingly undress Lawrence.
The slight lad drifted idly in the centre of the bridge, smiling dreamily down at his naked body. He allowed Quinn to shape him, the young stable boy’s skinny figure developing thick sinuous muscles, the width of his shoulders increasing. Clad only in a barbarian warrior garb of shiny leather strips, he began to resemble a dwarf addicted to bodybuilding.
The blue flame cloaking Mauer dribbled away as the last of the ship-suit was consumed. With a simple wave of his hand, Quinn healed the captain’s burns, restoring skin, nails, hair to their former state. Mauer became a picture of vitality.
“Your turn,” Quinn told Lawrence with a deviant laugh.
The pain-shocked, imprisoned captain could only stare upwards in terror as the freakishly hulking boy grinned broadly and glided in towards him.
Alkad Mzu accessed the Samaku ’s sensor suite via the flight computer, allowing the picture to share her mind with a sense of benevolent dismay. This is what we fought over? This was what a planet died for? This? Dear Mary!
Like all starships jumping insystem, the Samaku had emerged a safe half-million kilometres above the plane of the eliptic. The star known as Tunja was an M4-type, a red dwarf. Bright enough from the starship’s forty million kilometres distance, but hardly dazzling like a G-type, the primary of most terracompatible planets. From Alkad’s excellent vantage point it hung at the centre of a vast disk of grizzled particles, extending over two hundred million kilometres in diameter.
The inner (annulet), surrounding Tunja out to about three million kilometres, was a sparsely populated region where the constant gale of solar wind had stripped away the smaller particles, leaving only tide-locked boulders and asteroid fragments. With their surfaces smoothed to a crystalline gloss by the incessant red heat, they twinkled scarlet and crimson as if they were a swarm of embers flung off by the dwarf’s arching typhonic prominences. Further out, the disk’s opacity began to build, graduating into a sheet of what looked like dense grainy fog; bright carmine at the inner fringe, shading away to a deep cardinal-red ninety million kilometres later. A trillion spiky shadows speckled the uniformity, cast by the larger chunks of rock and metal bobbing among the dust and slushy gravel.
No terracompatible planet was conceivable in such an environment. The star was barren except for a single gas giant, Duida, orbiting a hundred and twenty-eight million kilometres out. A couple of young Edenist habitats circled above it, but the main focus of human life was scattered across the disk.
A disk of such density was usually the companion of a newborn star, but Tunja was estimated to be over three billion years old. Confederation planetologists suspected the red dwarf’s disk had its genesis in a spectacularly violent collision between a planet and a very large interstellar meteor. It was a theory which could certainly explain the existence of the Dorados themselves: three hundred and eighty-seven large asteroids with a near-pure metal content. Two-thirds of them were roughly spherical, permitting the strong conclusion that they were molten core magma material when the hypothetical collision took place. Whatever their origin, such abundant ore was an immensely valuable economic resource for the controlling government. Valuable enough to go to war over.
“Ayacucho’s civil traffic control is refusing us docking permission,” Captain Randol said. “They say all the Dorados are closed to civil starflight and we have to return to our port of origin.”
Alkad exited the sensor visualization and stared across the Samaku ’s bridge. Randol was wearing a diplomatically apologetic expression.
“Has this ever happened before?” she asked.
“No. Not that we’ve been to the Dorados before, but I’ve never heard of anything like it.”
I have not waited this long, nor come so far, to be turned away by some bloody bureaucrat, Alkad thought. “Let me talk to them,” she said.
Randol waved a hand, signalling permission. The Samaku ’s flight computer opened a channel to Ayacucho asteroid’s traffic control office.
“This is Immigration Service Officer Mabaki, how can I help you?”
“My name is Daphine Kigano,” Alkad datavised back—she ignored the speculative gaze from Randol at the name on one of her passports. “I’m a Dorado resident, and I wish to dock. I don’t see why that should be a problem.”