“An outside force?” Grant Kavanagh could hardly believe what he was hearing.
“It may be. I have asked the Chancellor’s office in Norwich to request the Confederation Navy squadron extends its duty tour.
Fortunately the personnel are all still here having their shore leave. The squadron commander is recalling them back up to
orbit now.”
“What good is that?”
“The navy starships can make damn sure nothing else is delivered to the insurrectionists from outsystem. And as a last resort
they can provide our ground forces with strike power.”
Grant sat perfectly still. Ground forces. Strike power. It was unreal. Through the windows he could see Cricklade’s peaceful
wolds, rich and verdant. And here he was calmly talking about virtual civil war. “But God’s teeth, man, this is a city we’re
talking about. You can’t use starship weapons against Boston. There are a hundred and twenty thousand people living there.”
“I know,” Trevor Clarke said mordantly. “One of the militia’s major assignments will be to help evacuate the civilians. You
will be minimizing casualties, Grant.”
“Have you told the Chancellor what you’re planning? Because if you haven’t, I damn well will.”
There was a silence which lasted for several seconds. “Grant,” Trevor Clarke said gently, “it was the Chancellor’s office
that recommended this action to me. It must be done while the insurrectionists are concentrated in one place, before they
have a chance to spread their damnable revolution. So many people are joining them. I… I never thought there was so much dissatisfaction
on the planet. It has to be stopped, and stopped in a way that forbids repetition.”
“Oh, my God,” Grant Kavanagh said brokenly. “All right, Trevor, I understand. I’ll call in the militia captains this afternoon.
The regiment will be ready for you by tomorrow.”
“Good man, Grant. I knew I could rely on you. There will be a train to collect you from Colsterworth Station. We’ll billet
you in an industrial warehouse outside town. And don’t worry, man, the starships are only a last resort. I expect we’ll only
need one small demonstration and they’ll cave in.”
“Yes. I’m sure you’re right.” Grant returned the pearlhandled phone to its cradle, a morbid premonition telling him it could
never be that simple.
The train had six passenger carriages, room enough for all of the Stoke county militia’s seven hundred men. It took them twenty-five
minutes to embark. The station was a scene of pure chaos; half of the town’s streets were clogged with carts, carriages, buses,
and farm-ranger vehicles. Families took a long time saying goodbye. Men were shifty and irritable in their grey uniforms.
Complaints about ill-fitting boots rippled up and down the platform.
Louise and Marjorie were pressed against the wall of the station with a pile of kitbags on one side, and olive-green metal
ammunition boxes on the other. Some of the boxes had date stamps over ten years old. Three hard-faced men were guarding the
ammunition, stumpy black guns cradled in their arms. Louise was beginning to regret coming, Genevieve hadn’t been allowed.
Mr Butterworth, in his sergeant-major’s uniform, marched up and down the platform, ordering people about. The train was gradually
filled; work teams began to load the kitbags and ammunition into the first carriage’s mail compartment.
William Elphinstone came down the platform, looking very smart in his lieutenant’s uniform. He stopped in front of them. “Mrs
Kavanagh,” he said crisply. “Louise. It looks like we’re off in five minutes.”
“Well, you mind you take great care, William,” Marjorie said. “Thank you. I will.”
Louise let her gaze wander away with deliberate slowness. William looked slightly put out, but decided this wasn’t the time
to make an issue of it. He nodded to Marjorie and marched off.
She turned to her daughter. “Louise, that was extremely rude.”
“Yes, Mother,” Louise said unrepentantly. How typical of William to volunteer even though it wasn’t his militia, she thought.
He only did it to be covered in glory, so he would seem even more acceptable to Daddy. And he would never be in the front
line sharing the risk with the poor common troops, not him. Joshua would.
Marjorie gave her daughter a close look at the unexpected tone, seeing the sulky stubborn expression on her usually placid
face. So Louise doesn’t like William Elphinstone. Can’t say I blame her. But to be so public was totally out of character.
Louise’s decorum was always meticulously formal and correct, gratingly so. Suddenly, despite all the worry of Boston, she
felt delighted. Her daughter wasn’t the meekminded little mouse any more. She wanted to cheer out loud. And I wonder what
started this episode of independent thinking, though I’ve a pretty shrewd idea. Joshua Calvert, if you laid one finger on
her…
Grant Kavanagh strode vigorously along the side of the train, making sure his troops were settled and everything was in place.
His wife and daughter were waiting dutifully at the end of the platform. Both of them quite divine, Marjorie especially.
Why do I bother with those little Romany tarts?
Louise’s face was all melancholic. Frightened, but trying not to show it. Trying to be brave like a good Kavanagh. What a
wonderful daughter. Growing up a treat. Even though she had been a bit moody these last few days. Probably missing Joshua,
he thought jovially. But that was just another reminder that he really would have to start thinking seriously about a decent
bloodmatch for her. Not yet though, not this year. Cricklade Manor would still echo with her laughter over Christmas, warming
his heart.
He hugged her, and her arms wrapped round his waist. “Don’t go, Daddy,” she whispered.
“I have to. It won’t be for long.”
She sniffed hard, and nodded. “I understand.”
He kissed Marjorie, ignoring the whistles and cheers which rang out from the carriages at the rear of the train.
“Now don’t you try and prove anything,” she said in that weary half-censorious way which meant she was scared to the core.
So he said, “Of course I won’t, I’ll just sit in the command tent and let the youngsters get on with it.”
Marjorie put her arm around Louise as they waved the train out of the station. The platform was a solid mass of women with
handkerchiefs flapping from frantic wrists. She wanted to laugh at how silly they must all look to the men on the train. But
she didn’t because she was a Kavanagh, and must set an example. Besides, she might have started crying at the futility and
stupidity of it all.
In the clear sky above, silver lights flashed and twisted as the navy squadron changed formation and orbital inclination so
that Boston was always in range to one of their number.
Dariat was nerving himself up to commit suicide. It wasn’t easy. Suicide was the culmination of failure, of despair. Since
the return of the dead from the realm of emptiness, his life had become inspiring.
He watched the couple make their cautious way down the starscraper’s fetid stairwell. Kiera Salter had done well seducing
the boy, but then what fifteen-year-old male could possibly resist Marie Skibbow’s body? Kiera didn’t even have to enhance
the physique she had possessed. She just put on a mauve tank top and a short sky-blue skirt and let nature wreak havoc on
the boy’s hormone balance—as she had done with Anders Bospoort.
The monitoring sub-routine assigned to observe Horgan flowed through the neural cells behind the stairwell’s polyp walls,
spreading out through the surrounding sectors to interface with the starscraper’s existing routines. An invisible, all-encompassing
guardian angel. It was checking for threats, the possibility of danger. Horgan was another of Rubra’s myriad descendants.
Cosseted, privileged, and cherished; his mind silently, stealthily guided into the correct academic spheres of interest, and
bequeathed a breathtaking arrogance for one so young. He had all the hallmarks of conceit endemic to Rubra’s tragic protÉgÉs.
Horgan was proud and lonely and foul tempered. A lanky youth with dark Asian skin, and giveaway indigo eyes, if his chromosomes
had granted him the muscle weight to back up his narcissistic personality he would have been involved in as many fights as
the young Dariat.
Naturally he admitted no surprise when Kiera/Marie confided her attraction to him. A girl like that was his due.
Kiera and Horgan stepped out of the stairwell onto the eighty-fifth-floor vestibule.
Dariat felt the monitoring routine flood into the apartment’s stratum of neural cells and interrogate the autonomic routines
within, reviewing local memories. This was the crux. It had taken him two days to modify the apartment’s routines. None of
his usual evasions had ever had to withstand examination by such a large personality sub-routine before, it was virtually
sentient in its own right.
There was no alarm, no bugle for help to Rubra’s principal consciousness. The monitor routine saw only an empty apartment
waiting for Horgan.
“They are coming,” Dariat told the others in Anders Bospoort’s bedroom. All three possessed were with him. Ross Nash who rode
in Bospoort’s own body, a Canadian from the early twentieth century. Enid Ponter, from the Australian-ethnic planet Geraldton,
dead for two centuries, who occupied Alicia Cochrane’s mortal form. And Klaus Schiller, possessing Manza Balyuzi’s body, a
German who muttered incessantly about his Führer, and seemingly angered at having to take on an Asian appearance. The body
was now markedly different to the image contained in his passport flek the day he disembarked from the
Yaku
. His skin was blanching; jet-black hair streaked with expanding tufts of fine blond strands; the gentle facial features shifting
to rugged bluntness, eyes azure blue. He had even grown a couple of centimetres taller.
“And Rubra?” Enid Ponter asked. “Does he know?”
“My disruption routines have worked. The monitor can’t see us.”
Ross Nash looked slowly round the bedroom, almost as though he was sniffing a trace of some exotic scent in the air. “I sense
it. Behind the walls, there is a coldness of heart.”
“Anstid,” Dariat said. “That’s what you sense. Rubra is just an aspect of him, a servant.”
Ross Nash made no attempt to hide his disgust.
None of them really trusted him, Dariat knew. They were strong enemies who had agreed a precarious truce because of the damage
they could each inflict on the other. Such a stand-off could never last long. Human doubts and insecurities gnawed at such
restraints, chafing at reasonableness. And the stakes on both sides were high, accelerating the devout need to see treachery
in every hesitant breath and wary footstep.
But he would prove his worthiness as few had done before. Entrusting them with not merely his life, but his death as well.
It was all so absurdly logical.
He needed their awesome powers of manifestation, and at the same time retain his affinity. Their power came from death, therefore
he must die and possess a body with the affinity gene. So simple when you say it quick. And completely mad. But then what
he had seen these last few days defied sanity.
Horgan and Kiera entered the apartment. They were kissing even as the door closed.
Dariat concentrated hard, his affinity strumming the new neural routines alive with a delicate harmony of deceit. The image
of the twined figures was incorporated into one of them. An illusive fallacy; generated by a misappropriated section of the
habitat’s neural cells massing ten times that of the human brain. Small in relation to the total mass of the neural strata,
but enough to make the illusion perfect, giving the phantom Horgan and Kiera weight and texture and colour and smell. Even
body heat. The sensitive cells registered that as they started to tug each other’s clothes off with the typical impatience
of teenagers in lust.
Most difficult of all for Dariat to mimic was the constant flow of emotion and feeling Horgan emitted unconsciously into the
affinity band. But he managed it, by dint of careful memory and composition. The monitor routine looked on with tranquil disinterest.
There was a split in Dariat’s mind, like alternative quantum-cosmology histories, two realities diverging. In one, Horgan
and Kiera raced for the bedroom, laughing, clothes flying. In the other…
Horgan’s eyes blinked open in surprise. The kiss had delivered every promise her body made. He was primed for the greatest
erotic encounter of his life. But now she was sneering contemptuously. And four other people were coming into the lounge from
one of the bedrooms. Two of the men were huge, in opposite directions.
Horgan barely paid them any attention. He had heard of deals like this, whispered terrors amongst the kids in the day clubs.
Snuffsense. The bitch had set him up as the meat they would rape to death. He turned, his leg muscles already taut.
Something—strange, like a hard ball of liquid—hit him on the back of the head. He was falling, and in the distance a choir
of infernal angels was singing.
Dariat stood aside as Ross Nash hauled the semiconscious Horgan into the bedroom. He tried not to stare at the boy’s feet,
they were floating ten centimetres in the air.
“Are you ready?” Kiera asked, her tone dripping with disdain.
He walked past her into the bedroom. “Do we get to screw afterwards?” Dariat had favoured an old-fashioned capsule you swallowed
rather than a transfusion pad or medical package. It was black—naturally—two centimetres long. He had acquired it from his
regular narkhal supplier. A neurotoxin, guaranteed painless, she promised. As if he could complain if it wasn’t.
He grinned at that. And swallowed, almost while his conscious mind was diverted. If it did hurt she was due for some very
pointed lessons on consumer rights from an unexpected direction.
“Get on with it,” he told the figures grouped round the bed. Tall and reedy, they were now, mud-brown effigies a sculptor
had captured through a blurred lens. They bent over the spread-eagled boy and sent cold fire writhing up and down his spine.
The poison was fast acting. Guaranteed. Dariat was losing all feeling in his limbs. Sight greyed out. His hearing faded, which
was a relief. It meant he didn’t have to listen to all that screaming. “Anastasia,” he muttered. How easy it would be to join
her now. She only had a thirty-year head start, and what was that compared to infinity? He could find her.