No! You’d love that, wouldn’t you? Getting into my mind again. Poking around to see what makes me pulse.
Rubra—
You shits don’t ever give up, don’t ever stop.
Given the circumstances, do you not think it would be sensible to put old antagonisms behind us?
I’ll deal with it. By myself. They can only fuck with my peripheral routines. They can’t touch
me
.
As far as you know.
I know! Believe me, I know. I’m me; same as I ever was.
Rubra, this is only the beginning. They will try to infiltrate your higher-order thought routines.
They won’t succeed, not now I know what to watch for.
Very well. But we must recommend to the Srinagar system assembly that starships are prohibited from docking with you. We cannot
risk the prospect of any contamination spreading.
Suits me fine.
Will you at least cooperate with us on that?
Yes, yes. But only until I’ve tracked down the three
Yaku
crew and exterminated them.
Please be careful, Rubra. Laton’s proteanic virus is extremely dangerous.
So that’s what you think I’ve got, why my routines are failing. Bastards!
It took several minutes for his anger to sink back into more rational, passive thought currents. By the time he was thinking
logically again, Valisk’s SD sensor network alerted him to five voidhawks emerging from their wormhole termini to take up
station half a million kilometres away. Spies! They didn’t trust him.
He had to find the three people from the
Yaku
, and those members of his family whose monitor routines had been tampered with. While the rest of the Srinagar system went
to an agitated stage one military alert status, he tried again and again to scan his own interior for the renegades. Standard
visual pattern recognition routines were useless. He upgraded and changed the perception interpretation routines several times.
To no avail. He tried loading similar search orders into the servitors, hoping that they might succeed where the sensitive
cells woven into every polyp surface had failed. He swept through entire starscrapers with his principal consciousness, certain
that they still hadn’t managed to infiltrate and corrupt his identity core. He found nothing.
After ten hours, the watching voidhawks were joined by three Srinagar navy frigates.
Inside the habitat, Time Universe played Graeme Nicholson’s recording continuously, agitating the population badly. Opinions
were divided. Some said Laton and Rubra were obviously colleagues, comrades in antagonism. Laton wouldn’t hurt Valisk. Others
pointed out that the two had never met, and had chosen very different paths through life.
There was unease, but no actual problems. Not for the first few hours. Then some idiot from the spaceport’s civil traffic
control centre leaked the news (actually he was paid two hundred thousand fuseodollars by Collins for the data) that the
Yaku
had docked at Valisk. Twenty starships immediately filed for departure flights, which Rubra refused.
Unease began to slip into resentment, anger, and alarm. Given the nature of the residents, they had no trouble asserting their
feelings in a manner which the rentcops employed by Magellanic Itg had a hard time damping down. Riots broke out in several
starscrapers. Localized ‘councils’ were formed, demanding the right to petition Rubra—who simply ignored them (after memorizing
the ringleaders). More thoughtful and prudent members of the population started to hike out into the remoter sections of parkland,
taking camping gear with them.
Such strife was almost designed to make Rubra’s frantic search for the three
Yaku
crew members difficult verging on impossible.
Thirty-eight hours after Graeme Nicholson’s flek arrived in the Srinagar system, a voidhawk came from Avon, exposing the true
nature of the threat the Confederation was facing. Such was the priority, it even beat the First Admiral’s earlier communiquÉ
warning of a possible energy virus.
In its wake all incoming starships were isolated and told to prepare for boarding and inspection by fully armed military teams.
Civil starflight effectively shut down overnight. Proclamations were issued, requiring all newly arrived travellers to report
to the police. Failure to comply was roughly equivalent to thumbprinting your own death warrant. Navy reserves were called
in. Industrial astroengineering stations began producing combat wasps at full capacity.
In one respect, news of the possessed assisted Rubra. It seemed to shock Valisk’s population out of their confrontational
attitude. Rubra judged it an appropriate time to appeal to them for help. Every communications net processor, holoscreen,
and AV pillar in the habitat relayed the same image of him: a man in his prime, handsome and capable, speaking calmly and
authoritatively. Given that he’d had nothing to do with the general population for a century, it was an event unusual enough
to draw everyone’s attention.
“There are only three possessed at large in the habitat at this moment,” he told his audience. “While they are certainly a
cause for concern, they do not as yet present a threat to us. I have issued the police with the kind of heavy-calibre weapons
necessary to surmount their energistic ability. And if circumstances warrant, several citizens have the kind of experience
which might prove useful in a confrontation.” An ironic, knowing curl of his lip brought an appreciative smile from many watchers.
“However, their ability to alter their appearance means they are proving hard for me to track down. I’m therefore asking all
of you to look out for them and inform me immediately. Don’t trust people just because they look the same as they’ve always
been; these bastards are probably masquerading as friends of yours. Another effect to watch for is the way they interfere
with electronic equipment; if any of your processors start glitching, inform me immediately. There’s a half-million-fuseodollar
reward for the information which results in their elimination. Good hunting.”
• • •
“Thank you, Big Brother.” Ross Nash tipped his beer glass at the holoscreen over the Tacoul Tavern’s bar. He looked away from
the drastically wobbly picture of Rubra, and grinned at Kiera. She was sitting in one of the wall booths, talking in low intense
tones with the small cadre she’d been building up; her staff officers, people joked. Ross was mildly bugged that she hadn’t
been including him in the consultation process recently. Okay, so he didn’t have much in the way of technical knowledge, and
this habitat was a far gone trip into future-world for a guy who was born in 1940 (and died in ’89—bowel cancer); he kept
expecting Yul Brynner to turn up in his black gunslinger outfit. But damn it, his opinion counted for something. She hadn’t
screwed with him for days either.
He glanced around the black and silver tavern, resisting the impulse to laugh. It was busier than it had been for years. Unfortunately
for the owner, nobody was paying for their drinks and meals anymore. Not this particular clientele. Tatars and cyberpunks
mixed happily with Roman legionaries and heavy-leather bikers, along with several rejects from the good Dr Frankenstein’s
assembly lab. Music was blasting out of a magnificent 1950s Wurlitzer, allowing a flock of seraphim to strut their stuff across
the neon underlit floor. It was pure sensory overload after the deprivation of the beyond, nourishment for the mind. Ross
grinned engagingly at his new buddies propping up the bar. There was poor old Dariat, also cut out of Kiera’s elite command
group and really pissed by that. Abraham Canaan, too, in full preacher’s ensemble, scowling at the debauchery being practised
all around. One thing about the possessed, Ross thought cheerfully, they knew how to party. And they could do it in perfect
safety in the Tacoul Tavern; those who were affinity-capable had turned the joint into a safe enclave, completely reformatting
the subroutines which operated in the neural strata behind the walls.
He gulped down the rest of his glass, then held it up in front of his nose and wished it full once again. The liquid which
appeared in it really did look like gnat’s piss. He frowned at it; a complicated process, coordinating that many facial muscles.
For the last five hours he’d been delighted that possessing a body didn’t prevent you from getting utterly smashed, now it
seemed there were disadvantages. He chucked the glass over his shoulder. He was sure he’d seen shops out in the vestibule,
some of them would stock a bottle or two of decent booze.
• • •
Rubra knew his thought processing efficiency was lower than optimum. The malaise was his own fault. He should be reviewing
the search, reformatting sub-routines yet again. Now more than ever the effort should be made, now the true nature of his
predicament was known. And it was a predicament. The possessed had conquered Pernik. Bitek was not invincible. He ought to
divert every mental resource towards breaking the problem; after all, the possessed were physically present, there had to
be some way of detecting them. Instead he brooded—something an Edenist habitat personality couldn’t, or wouldn’t, do.
Dariat. Rubra simply couldn’t forget the insignificant little shit. Dariat was dead. But now death wasn’t the end. And he
died happy. That passive half smile seemed to flitter through the cells of the neural strata like a menacing ghost. Not such
a stretched metaphor, now.
But to kill yourself just to return… No. He wouldn’t.
But someone had taught the possessed how to glitch his thought routines. Someone very competent indeed.
That smile, though. Suppose, just suppose, he was
so
desperate for vengeance…
Rubra became aware of a disturbance in the Diocca starscraper, the seventeenth floor, a delicatessen. Some kind of attempted
holdup. A sub-routine was attempting to call for the rentcops, but it kept misdirecting the information. The new safeguard
protocols he’d installed were trying to compensate, and failing. They fell back on their third-level instructions, and alerted
the principal personality pattern. And barely succeeded in that. Dozens of extremely potent subversive orders were operating
within the Diocca starscraper’s neural strata, virtually isolating it from Rubra’s consciousness.
Elated and perturbed, he focused his full attention on it…
Ross Nash was leaning on the delicatessen’s counter, pressing a very large pump-action shotgun into the face of the petrified
manager. He clicked the fingers of his free hand, and a thousand-dollar bill flipped out of his cuff, just like the way he’d
seen a magician do it in Vegas one time. The crisp note floated down to join the small pile on the counter. “We got enough
here yet, buddy?” Ross asked.
“Sure,” the manager whispered. “That’s fine.”
“Goddamn bet your ass it is. Yankee dollar, best goddamn currency in the whole fucking world. Everybody knows that.” He snatched
up a bottle of Norfolk Tears from beside the bills.
Rubra focused on the shotgun, not entirely sure the seventeenth floor’s perception interpretation routine was fully functional
after all. The weapon seemed to be made of wood.
Ross grinned at the trembling manager. “I’ll be back,” he said, in a very heavy accent. He did an about-face and started to
march away. The shotgun flickered erratically, competing with a broken chair leg to occupy the same space.
The manager snatched his shockrod from its clips under the counter and took a wild swing. It connected with the back of Ross’s
head.
Along with the manager, Rubra was amazed at the result of the simple blow.
As soon as the shockrod sparked across Ross’s skin, his possessed body ignited with the pristine glory of a small solar flare.
All colours in the shop vanished beneath the incandescent blaze, leaving only white and silver to designate rough shapes.
Nearby processors and sensors came back on-line. Thermal alerts flashed into Valisk’s net, along with a security call. Ceiling-mounted
fire suppression nozzles swivelled around, and squirted retardant foam at the blaze.
The thick streams made little difference. Ross’s stolen body was dimming now, sinking to its charred knees, flakes of carbonated
flesh crumbling away.
Rubra activated the audio circuit on in the shop’s net processor. “Out!” he commanded.
The manager cringed at the shout.
“Move,” Rubra said. “It’s the possessed. Get out.” He instructed all the net processors on the seventeenth floor to repeat
the order. Analysis routines began correlating all the information from the starscraper’s sensitive cells. Even with his principal
personality pattern directing the procedure, he couldn’t see what was happening inside the Tacoul Tavern. Then bizarre figures
started to emerge from the tavern’s doorway into the vestibule. He’d found them, the whole damnable nest.
White fireballs shot through the air, pursuing the terrorized delicatessen manager as he ran for the lifts. One of them caught
him, clinging to his shoulder. He screamed as black, rancid smoke churned out of the wound.
Rubra immediately cancelled the floor’s autonomic routines and shunted himself into the operating hierarchy. The vestibule’s
electrophorescent cells went dead, dropping the whole area into darkness, except for the confusing strobe of white fire. A
muscle membrane door leading onto the stairwell snapped open, sending out a single fan of light. The manager altered course,
put his head down, and charged straight at it.
Chips of polyp rained down on the vestibule floor. All across the ceiling the atmosphere duct tubules were splitting open
as Rubra contracted and flexed the flow regulator muscles in directions they were never designed for. Thick white vapour poured
out of the jagged holes. Warm, dank, and oily, it was the concentrated water vapour breathed out of a thousand lungs, which
the tubules were supposed to extract from the air and pump into specialist refining organs.