“Now I never said that. But worry is the Devil’s disciple, it rots the soul.”
“Well, you’d certainly be the one to know all about souls.”
Shaun chuckled softly.
Kelly glanced up at the red cloud. They had been under it for half an hour now. It was thicker than it had been yesterday,
its constituent tresses twirling sluggishly. Somehow she was aware of its weight, a heaviness necessary to blot out not just
the sight of space but the physical laws governing existence. A complex intertwining of associated emotions defeated her,
as though she was sensevising some obscure xenoc ceremony. “That cloud means a lot to you, doesn’t it?” she asked.
“Not the cloud itself, Miss Kelly, that’s nothing, but what it represents, yes. That’s like seeing your aspirations take form.
To me, to all of us damned souls, it means freedom. A precious commodity when you’ve been denied it for seven hundred years.”
Kelly switched her attention to the second hovercraft, with Horst Elwes and Russ sitting on the bench behind Ariadne, faces
ploughed up against the biting slipstream wind. Cannonades of thunder thrashed overhead, as if the cloud was the taut skin
of some gigantic drum. She saw Russ push himself closer against the priest. The simple act of trust was immensely poignant.
The privation dropped upon Shaun Wallace without the slightest warning. He experienced the dreadful exodus, the flight of
souls expelled from the universe exerting a tidal force on his own precarious possession. Their lamentations and enmity spilled
back from the beyond in that eerily pervasive chorus, and then came venomous anger of those who accompanied them on their
expulsion, those they had possessed. All of them, preying on each other, hating each other. The conflict permeated his skull,
wrenching at his thoughts. He gagged, eyes widening in shock. His face betrayed an emotion of uttermost despair, then he flung
his head back and howled.
Reza never wanted to hear a cry like it again. The outpouring of anguish compressed into that one cataclysmic bawl spoke for
an entire planet. Grief paralysed him, and loss, loss so profound he wanted the universe to end so he could be spared.
It finished as Shaun ran out of breath. Unsteadily, Reza twisted round on the front bench. Tears were streaming down the possessed
man’s cheeks. He drew breath and howled again.
Kelly’s hands were clasped against her puckered lips. “What?” she wailed. “What is it?” Her eyes shut instinctively at the
next outburst.
Reza tried to block it all out and project some comfort to Fenton and Ryall. “Pat?” he datavised. “Can Octan see anything
happening?”
“Not a thing,” the second-in-command answered from the other hovercraft. “What’s going on? Wallace frightened the shit out
of us.”
“I’ve no idea.”
Kelly shook Shaun’s arm imploringly. “What’s wrong? What is it? Speak to me!” Panic was giving her voice a shrill edge. “Shaun!”
Shaun gulped down a breath, his shoulders shivering. He lowered his head until he was staring at Reza. “You,” he hissed. “You
killed them.”
Reza looked at him through a cross-grid of yellow target graphics, his forearm gaussrifle was aimed directly at the possessed
man’s temple. “Killed who?”
“The city, the whole city. I felt them go, thousands upon thousands blown back to the beyond like so much ash. Your devil
bomb, it went off. No, it was set off. What kind of creatures are you to slaughter so indiscriminately?”
Reza felt a grin reflex coming on, which his restructured face portrayed as a moderate widening of his mouth slit. “Someone
got through, didn’t they? Someone hit back.”
Shaun’s head sagged brokenly. “One man. That’s all, one bloody man.”
“So you’re not so invincible, after all. I hope it pains you, Mr. Wallace, I hope it pains all your kind. That way you may
begin to know something of the horror we felt when we found out what you did to this planet’s children.”
The flash of guilt on the man’s face proved the barb had hit home.
“Oh, yes, Mr. Wallace, we know. Even if Kelly here is too tactful to mention it. We know the barbarism we are dealing with.”
“What bomb?” Kelly asked. “What are you two talking about?”
“Ask him,” Shaun said, and sneered at Reza. “Ask him how he was intending to help the poor people of this planet he was hired
to save.”
“Reza?”
The mercenary leader swayed as the hovercraft banked around a boulder. “Terrance Smith was concerned we might not get all
the fire support we needed from the starships. He gave each team leader a nuke.”
“Oh, Christ.” Kelly looked from one man to the other. “Do you mean you’ve got one as well?”
“You should know, Kelly,” Reza said. “You’re sitting on it.”
She tried to jump to her feet, only to have Shaun grab her arm and keep her sitting.
“Have you learned nothing of him yet, Miss Kelly? There’s no human part left in that mockery of a body.”
“Point to your body, Mr. Wallace, the one you were born with,” Reza said. “After that I’ll talk morality and ethics with you
all day long.”
They stared at each other.
Darkness began to fall. Kelly looked up to see the red light bleeding from the cloud, leaving behind a swollen slate-grey
mantle massing sinisterly low overhead. A blade of purple-white lightning screwed down on the savannah to the east.
“What’s happening?” Kelly shouted as thunder crashed over the hovercraft.
“You are happening, Miss Kelly. They sense you. They fear and hate you now your true nature and power has been exposed. This
is the last mercenary team left, you see. None of the others survived.”
“So what will they do?”
“Hunt you down, whatever the cost below the muzzles of your weapons.”
Two hours after Warlow had left
Lady Mac
Joshua was accessing the flight computer’s memory cores, looking for records of starships jumping from inside a Lagrange
point. He and Dahybi had gone through the small amount of available data on Murora VII, using it to refine their computations
of the Lagrange point’s size and position, locking the figures into the trajectory plot. He could pilot
Lady Mac
right into its heart—no doubt about that: now he wanted to know what would happen when the energy patterning nodes were activated.
There was a lot of theory in the physics files about how it should be possible, but no actual verified ZTT jump.
Who’s going to be stupid enough to take part in an experiment like that? he asked himself. But he was lying on his acceleration
couch, and Dahybi, Ashly, and Sarha were on the bridge with him, so he kept any qualms to himself. He was just wondering if
there would be a reference in a history file, surely the ZTT pioneers would want to know the limits of their craft, when Aethra
datavised him.
“Warlow wants to talk with you,” the habitat said.
He cancelled the link to the memory cores. “Hello, Warlow. How’s it going?”
“Superbly,” Warlow said.
“Where are you?” The cosmonik ought to be back on board in another twenty minutes if everything was running on schedule. Joshua
had helped draw up the flight vector through the ring.
“Twenty kilometres from
Gramine
.”
“What?”
“I can see it.”
“Jesus shit, Warlow. What the fuck are you playing at? The schedule doesn’t have any margin for error.”
“I know. That’s why I’m here. I’m going to make certain that
Gramine
is destroyed by the blast. I shall detonate it when the ship is in an optimum position.”
“Oh, Jesus, Warlow, get your iron arse back here now!”
“Sorry, Captain.
Maranta
will only be seven thousand three hundred kilometres away when
Gramine
is eliminated. But that will still give you an eighteen-second lead on the combat wasps. That’s easily enough time.”
“Warlow, stop this. We can wait until the end of the next sweep and position the bomb again. That’s only another five hours.
We’ll still be at Lalonde before Amarisk’s evening.”
“Joshua, you have six minutes before I detonate. Make sure everyone is strapped down, please.”
“Don’t do it. Jesus, Warlow, I’m begging you.”
“You know this has to be done properly. And I can ensure it is.”
“Not like this. Please, come back.”
“Don’t worry about me, Joshua. I’ve thought it out, I will be quite all right.”
“Warlow!” Joshua’s face was crushed into a mask of anger and desperation. He jerked round to look at Ashly. The pilot was
moving his lips silently, eyelashes sticky with tears. “Say something,” Joshua commanded. “Get him back.”
“Warlow, for Heaven’s sake come back,” Ashly datavised. “Just because you can’t navigate properly there’s no need for this.
I’ll do it next time, and do it right.”
“I would like you to do me a favour, Ashly.”
“What?”
“Next time you come out of zero-tau, in fifty years or so, I want you to come back here and visit me.”
“Visit you?”
“Yes. I am transferring my memories to Aethra. I’m going to become one of the multiplicity. I won’t die.”
“You crazy old bastard.”
“Gaura!” Joshua shouted. “Can he do that? He’s not an Edenist.”
“The datavise has already begun,” Gaura replied. “He is doing it.”
“Oh, Jesus wept.”
“Is everyone in their acceleration couches?” Warlow asked. “I’m giving you the chance you really need to escape the rings.
You’re not going to waste that, are you, Joshua?”
“Shit.” A hot steel band was constricting Joshua’s chest, far worse than any gee force. “They’re getting onto the couches,
Warlow.” He datavised the flight computer for an image from the cabin cameras, watching Edenists tighten the webbing around
themselves. Melvyn was swimming about, checking they had done it properly.
“And what about the thermo-dump panels, have you retracted them? There’s only five minutes left.”
Joshua datavised the flight computer to retract the thermo-dump panels. Systems schematics appeared as he prepped the generators
and drive tubes; mostly green, some amber. The old girl was in good shape. Sarha started to help him with the checklist.
“Please, Warlow?”
“Fly the bastards into the ground, Joshua. You can do it.”
“Jesus, I don’t know what to say.”
“Promise me something.”
“Yes.”
“Gotcha. You should have asked me what it was first.”
Joshua coughed. Laughed painfully. It made his vision all blurred for some unfathomable reason. “What is it?”
“Hard luck, you committed. I want you to be more considerate to your girls. You never see the effect you have on them. Some
of them get hurt, Joshua.”
“Jesus, cosmonik and social worker.”
“Promise?”
“I promise.”
“You were a good captain, Joshua.
Lady Macbeth
was a great way to finish. I wouldn’t have had it any other way.”
Sarha was sobbing on her acceleration couch. Ashly was clenching and unclenching his fists.
“I would,” Joshua said silently.
Aethra showed them
Gramine
. The starship was traversing the ring surface with the suavity of a maglev train, straight and sure. Three thermo-dump panels
were extended to the full, shining a dull vermilion. A long, narrow flame of blue ions flickered for an instant.
“Who’d have thought it,” Warlow datavised. “Me, an Edenist.”
Joshua had never felt so pathetically worthless as he did then. He’s
my
crewman.
The bomb exploded. It sent a flat circle of sheer white light flaring out across the ring surface.
Gramine
was a tiny dark speck above its centre.
Joshua fired the restraint bolts. Taut silicon-fibre cables tethering the
Lady Macbeth
to its rock shield recoiled from the hull, writhing in serpentine coils. Lights inside the four life-support capsules dimmed
and sputtered as the one active auxiliary generator powered up the four remaining primary generators. Ion thrusters fired,
hosing the dark rock with unaccustomed turquoise luminosity.
A sphere of plasma inflated at the centre of the white shroud thrown across the ring, fast at first, then slowing when it
was five kilometres across, diminishing slightly. Black phantoms migrated across its surface.
Gramine
’s lower hull shone brighter than a sun as it reflected the diabolical corona seething four kilometres below.
Thousands of fragmented rock splinters flew out of the heart of the fusion blast, overtaking the disbanding plasma wave. They
had the same riotous glow of doomed meteorites caught by an atmosphere. Unlike the plasma they left behind, their velocity
didn’t fall off with distance.
“Generators on-line,” Sarha called out. “Power output stabilizing.”
Joshua closed his eyes. Datavised displays filled his head with technicolour dragonfly wings.
Lady Mac
cleared the rock. Her radar started to fire hard microwave pulses at the loose shoal of ring particles, evaporating snowflakes
and inflaming carbonaceous motes. Beams of blue-white radiance shone out of the secondary reaction-drive nozzles, rigid as
lasers.
They started to rise up through the ring. Dust currents splashed over the monobonded-silicon hull, producing short-lived surf-bloom
patterns. Pebbles and larger stones hit and bounced. Ice splattered and stuck, then slipped downwards to fall away in the
turbulent glare of the drive exhaust.
A rock chunk crashed into the
Gramine
, shattering its hull open and decimating the internal systems. Cryogenic tanks ruptured, white gases scintillating from the
dying fusion bomb’s energy barrage. Four life-support capsules raced out of the destruction, charred nultherm foam flaking
away, emergency beacons blaring.
Lady Mac
cleared the ring surface. Fifty kilometres above her a wave of scarlet meteors streaked across the starfield.
“Stand by for high gees,” Joshua said. The fusion drives came on, tormenting the abused ring still further.
Lady Mac
tilted round, and started chasing down the inside of the tapering orange vector tube in Joshua’s mind. He monitored the displays
to ensure their course was aligned correctly as the gee forces built, then datavised an extra order into the flight computer.