He was twenty metres short of the wave elevator for platform fifty-two when the flashback from the Liberation reached him. The impact wasn’t actually too great, he’d withstood far worse at Banneth’s hands, it was the suddenness of it all which shocked him. Without warning he was yelling as streaks of pain flared out from the centre of his brain to infect his body. Edmund Rigby’s captive thoughts writhed in agony, transfixed by the blast of torment.
Quinn panicked, frightened by the unknown. Until this moment he believed he was virtually omnipotent. Now some witchery was attacking him in a method he couldn’t fathom. Souls in the beyond were screaming in terror. The ghosts around him began wailing, clasping their hands together in prayer. His control over the energistic power faltered as his thoughts dissolved into chaos.
Bud Johnson never saw where the guy came from. One second he was hurrying to the wave elevator, on his way to catch a San Antonio connection—the next, some man in a weird black robe was kneeling on all fours on the polished marble floor at his feet. That was almost impossible, everyone who grew up on Earth and lived in the arcologies had an instinctive awareness of crowds, the illogical tides and currents of bodies which flowed through them. He always knew where people were in relation to himself, alert to any possible collision. Nobody could just appear.
Bud’s momentum kept his torso going forwards, while his legs were completely blocked. He went flying, pivoting over the man’s back to crash onto the cool marble. His wrist made a nasty snapping sound, firing hot pain up his arm. And his neural nanonics did nothing. Nothing! There were no axon blocks, no medical display. Bud let out a howl of pain, blinking back tears as he looked up.
Those tears might have accounted for two or three of the curious faces peering down at him. Pale and distressed, wearing extremely odd hats. When he blinked the salty fluid clear, they’d gone. He clutched at his injured wrist. “Sheesh, dear God, that hurts.” A murmur of surprise rattled over his head, a strong contrast to the screams breaking out across the rest of the station. No one seemed particularly concerned about him.
“Hey, my neural nanonics have failed. Someone call me a medic. I think my wrist’s broken.”
The man he’d fallen over was now rising to his feet. Bud was acutely conscious of the silence that had closed around him, of people backing away. When he looked up, any thoughts of shouting curses on the clumsy oaf vanished instantly. There was a face inside the large hood, barely visible. Bud was suddenly very thankful for the robe’s shadows. The expression of fury and malice projected by the features he could see was quite bad enough. “Sorry,” he whispered.
Fingers closed around his heart. He could actually feel them, individual joints hinging inwards, fingernails digging into his atriums. The hand twisted savagely. Bud choked silently, his arms flapping wildly. He was just aware of people closing in on him again. This time, they registered concern. Too late, he tried to tell them, far too late. The aloof devil turned casually and faded from his sight. Then so did the rest of the world.
Quinn observed Bud’s soul snake away from his corpse, vanishing into the beyond, adding his screams to the beseeching myriad. There was a big commotion all around, people shoving and jostling to get a good view of whatever was going down. Only a couple of them had gasped as he returned himself to the ghost realm, fading out right in front of them. At least he’d retained enough composure not to use the white fire. Not that it mattered now. He’d been seen, and not just by people with glitched neural nanonics; the station’s security sensors would have captured the event.
Govcentral knew he was here.
Tucked down in the central hold of the landing boat, Sinon couldn’t physically see the rest of the squadron closing on the shore. Affinity made it unnecessary; all the Edenist minds on and orbiting Ombey were linked together, providing him with more information than General Hiltch had available. He was aware of his personal position, as well as that of his comrades, even the Liberation’s overall situation was available to him. The voidhawk flotilla revealed the red cloud beneath them. Huge lightning bolts were writhing across the upper surface as the SD platforms continued their electron barrage. At the centre, along the spine of hills, the glow was fading, allowing pools of darkness to ripple outward.
Along with all the other serjeants, Sinon craned forwards for a look. The barrier of red cloud had grown steadily through the night as the boats headed in for the beach. From ten kilometres offshore, it stretched right across the water, solid and resolute like the wall at the end of the world.
Small flickers of lightning arose to dance along the bottom, slashing down into the waves. Steam plumes screwed upwards from the discharges. Then the lightning streamers were coming together into massive dazzling rivers, rising up, following the steep curve of the cloud to arch inland. The red glow faded, taking less then five seconds to die completely. Its disappearance startled Sinon and the other serjeants. The victory was too sudden. This was not the epic struggle they’d been preparing for. The crawling webs of lightning more than made up for the absence; blazing bright right across the horizon.
You know, that is actually a very big cloud,sinon said. The brilliant flashes were near-continuous now, keeping the dark mass illuminated prominently.
You noticed that,choma retorted.
Yes. Which could be a problem. It was rather nicely contained while the possessed were using it as a shield. As such, we tended to disregard its physical properties; it was, after all, primarily a psychological barrier.
Psychological or not, we can’t cruise straight through with all that electrical activity.
Choma wasn’t the only one to reach that conclusion. They could already feel the boat slowing as the captain reduced power to the engines. A precaution repeated simultaneously by the entire armada.
“Recommendations?” Ralph asked.
“Shut down the SD assault,” Acacia said. “The landing boats are already slowing. They can’t penetrate that kind of lightning storm.”
“Diana?”
“I think so. If the red light is an indication of the possessed’s control, then we’ve already routed them.”
“That’s a very big if,” Admiral Farquar protested.
“We don’t have a lot of choice,” the elderly technology advisor said. “The landing boats clearly can’t get through, nor can the ground vehicles, for that matter. We have to let the energy discharge itself naturally. If the red light returns when they’re inside, we can resume the electron beam attack until the cloud itself starts to break up.”
“Do it,” Ralph ordered. “Acacia, get the serjeants as close as they can to the cloud, then as soon as the lightning’s finished, I want them through.”
“Yes, General.”
“Diana, how long is it going to take to dissipate that electricity?”
“A good question. We’re not sure how deep or dense that cloud is.”
“Answer me.”
“I’m afraid I can’t. There are too many variables.”
“Oh great. Acacia, is the lightning going to affect the harpoons?”
“No. The cloud’s too low for that, and they’re going too fast. Even if one took a direct hit from a lightning bolt, the trajectory won’t be altered by more than a couple of metres at best.”
The voidhawk flotilla was only one and a half thousand kilometres from the surface of Ombey. Mortonridge filled their sensor blister coverage, changing from a red smear to a seething mass of blue-white streamers, more alive than ever before. There was just time for one last query.
We’re still go,acacia assured them.
All three hundred voidhawks reached the apex of their trajectory. Their bone-crushing eight-gee acceleration ended briefly. Each one flung a swarm of five thousand kinetic harpoons from its weapons cradles. Then power surged through their patterning cells again, reversing the previous direction of the distortion field. The punishing intensity was unchanged, still eight gees, pushing them desperately away from the planet with its dangerous gravity field.
Far below, the delicate filigree of shimmering lightning vanished beneath an incandescent corona as the upper atmosphere ignited. The plasma wake left by one and a half million kinetic harpoons had merged together into a single photonic shockwave. It hit the top of the cloud, puncturing the churning grey vapour with such speed there was little reaction. At first. Acacia was quite right, the cloud for all its bulk and animosity could not deflect the harpoons from their programmed targets.
No human could draw up that list, it was the AI in Pasto that ultimately designated their impact points. They descended in clumps of three, giving a ninety-seven per cent probability of a successful hit. Mortonridge’s communication net was the main target.
Urban legend dictated that modern communication nets were annihilation proof. With hundreds of thousands of independent switching nodes spread over an entire planet, and millions of cables linking them, backed up by satellite relays, their anarchistic-homogeneous nature made them immune to any kind of cataclysm. No matter how many nodes were taken out, there was always an alternative route for the data. You’d have to physically wipe out a planet before its data exchange was stalled.
But Mortonridge was finite, its net isolated from the redundancy offered by the rest of the planet. The location of every node was known to within half a metre. Unfortunately, ninety per cent of them were proscribed, because they were inside a built up urban area. If kinetic harpoons started dropping amid the buildings, resulting casualties would be horrendous. That left the cables out in the open countryside. A lot of them followed roads, nestled in utility conduits along the side of the carbon concrete, but many more took off across the land, laid by mechanoids tunnelling through forests and under rivers, with nothing on the surface to indicate their existence.
Long-inactive files of their routes had been accessed and analysed by the AI. Strike coordinates were designated, with the proscription that there should be no habitable structure within three quarters of a kilometre. Given the possessed’s considerable ability to defend themselves on a physical level, it was considered a reasonable safe distance.
Stephanie Ash lay quivering on the floor even after her mind had recoiled from the communion with other souls. The loss hurt her more than any pain from the electron beam attack against the cloud. That simple act of union had given her hope. As long as people went on supporting each other, she knew, despite everything else, they remained human to some small degree. Now even that fragile aspiration had been wrenched from them.
“Stephanie?” Moyo called. His hand was shaking her shoulder gently. “Stephanie, are you all right?”
The fear and concern in his voice triggered her own guilt. “God, no.” She opened her eyes. The bedroom was lit solely by a small bluish flame coming from his thumb. Outside the window, blackness swarmed the whole world. “What did they do?” She could no longer sense the psychic weight pressing against her from the other side of the firebreak. Only the valley was apparent.
“I don’t know. But it’s not good.” He helped her to her feet.
“Are the others all right?” She could sense their minds, spread out through the farmhouse, embers of worry and pain.
“Same as us, I guess.” A bright flash from outside silenced him. They both went to the window and peered out. Huge shafts of lightning skidded along the underbelly of the cloud.
Stephanie shivered uncomfortably. What had successfully shielded them from the open sky was now an intimidatingly large mass far too close overhead.
“We’re not in charge of it anymore,” Moyo said. “We let go.”
“What’s going to happen to it?”