“Hard to think of any other reason, especially given the timing. The only real puzzle about this is, if it exists, why hasn’t
it been used already?”
“The sanctions. No… ” He started to concentrate on the problem. “There was only ever one navy squadron on blockade duties.
A sneak raid would have a good chance of getting through. That’s if one ship was all it took to fire it at the planet.”
“Yes. The more we know about Dr Mzu, the less we understand the whole Alchemist situation. But I really don’t think her ultimate
goal can be in any doubt.”
“Right. So she’s probably gone to collect it, and use it. The
Udat
has a fair payload capacity; and Meyer’s seen combat duty in his time, he can take a bit of heat.” Except… Joshua knew Meyer,
a wily old sod, for sure, but there was one hell of a difference between the occasional mercenary contract, and annihilating
an entire planet of unsuspecting innocents. Meyer wouldn’t do that, no matter how much money was offered. Offhand, Joshua
couldn’t think of many (or even any) independent trader captains who would. That kind of atrocity was purely the province
of governments and lunatic fanatics.
“The use of it is what concerns me the most,” Ione said. “Once it’s been activated, governments will finally be able to see
what it can actually do. From that, they’ll deduce the principles. It’ll be mass-produced, Joshua. We have to try and stop
that. The Confederation has enough problems with antimatter, and now possession. We cannot allow another terror factor to
be introduced.”
“We? Oh, Jesus.” He let his head flop back onto the cushions—if only there was a stone wall to thump his temple against instead.
“Let me guess. You want me to chase after her. Right? Go up against every intelligence agency in the Confederation, not to
mention the navy. Find her, tap her on the shoulder, and say nicely: All is forgiven, and the Lord of Ruin would really like
you to come home, oh, and by the way, whatever your thirty-year plan—your
obsession
—was to screw up Omuta we’d like you to forget it as well. Jesus fucking Christ, Ione!”
She gave him an unflustered sideways glance. “Do you want to live in a universe where a super-doomsday weapon is available
to every nutcase with a grudge?”
“Try not to weight your questions so much, you might drown.”
“The only chance we have, Joshua, is to bring her back here. That or kill her. Now who are you going to trust to do that?
More to the point, who can
I
trust? There’s nobody, Joshua. Except you.”
“Walk into Harkey’s Bar any night of the week, there’s a hundred veterans of covert operations who’ll take your money and
do exactly what you ask without a single question.”
“No, it has to be you. One, because I trust you, and I mean really
trust
you. Especially after what you did back at Lalonde. Two, you’ve got what it takes to do the job, the ship and the contacts
in the industry necessary to trace her. Three, you’ve got the motivation.”
“Oh, yeah? You haven’t said how much you’ll pay me yet.”
“As much as you want, I am the national treasurer after all. That is, until young Marcus takes over from me. Did you want
to bequeath our son this problem, Joshua?”
“Shit, Ione, that’s really—”
“Below the belt even for me? Sorry, Joshua, but it isn’t. We all have responsibilities. You’ve managed to duck out of yours
for quite a while now. All I’m doing is reminding you of that.”
“Oh, great, now this is all my problem.”
“No one else in the galaxy can make it your problem, Joshua, only you. Like I said, all I’m doing is making the data available
to you.”
“Nice cop-out. It’s me that’s going to be in at the shit end, not you.” When Joshua looked over at her he expected to see
her usual defiant expression, the one she used when she was powering up to out-stubborn him. Instead all he saw was worry
and a tinge of sorrow. On a face that beautiful it was heartbreaking. “Look, anyway, there’s a Confederation-wide quarantine
in effect, I can’t take
Lady Mac
off in pursuit even if I wanted to.”
“It only applies to civil starflight.
Lady Macbeth
would be re-registered as an official Tranquillity government starship.”
“Shit.” He smiled up at the ceiling, a very dry reflex. “Ah well, worth a try.”
“You’ll do it?”
“I’ll ask questions in the appropriate places, that’s all, Ione. I’m not into heroics.”
“You don’t need to be, I can help.”
“Sure.”
“I can,” she insisted, piqued. “For a start, I can issue you with some decent combat wasps.”
“Great, no heroics please, but take a thousand megatonnes’ worth of nukes with you just in case.”
“Joshua… I don’t want you to be vulnerable, that’s all. There will be a lot of people looking for Mzu, and none of them are
the type to ask questions first.”
“Wonderful.”
“I can send some serjeants with you as well. They’ll be useful as bodyguards when you’re docked.”
He tried to think up an argument against that, but couldn’t. “Fine. Unsubtle, but fine.”
Ione grinned. She knew that tone.
“Everyone will just think they’re cosmoniks,” she said.
“Okay, that just leaves us with one minor concern.”
“Which is?”
“Where the hell do I start looking? I mean, Jesus; Mzu’s smart, she’s not going to fly straight to the Garissa system to pick
up the Alchemist. She could be
anywhere
, Ione; there are over eight hundred and sixty inhabited star systems out there.”
“She went to the Narok system, I think. That’s where the
Udat
’
s
wormhole was aligned, anyway. It makes sense, Narok is Kenyan-ethnic; she may be contacting sympathisers.”
“How the hell do you know that? I thought only blackhawks and voidhawks could sense each other’s wormholes.”
“Our SD satellites have some pretty good sensors.”
She was lying; he knew it right away. What was worse than the lie, he thought, was the reason behind it. Because he couldn’t
think of one, certainly not one that had to be kept from him, the only person she trusted to send on this job. She must be
protecting something, a something more important than the Alchemist. Jesus. “You were right, you know that? The night we met
at Dominique’s party, you said something to me. And you were right.”
“What was it?”
“I can’t say no to you.”
• • •
Joshua left an hour later to supervise the
Lady Mac’s
refit, and round up his crew. It meant he missed Kelly’s report, which put him in a very small minority. Kate Elvin’s earlier
optimism had been well founded; the other news companies didn’t even try to compete. Ninety per cent of Tranquillity’s population
accessed the sensevises Kelly had recorded on Lalonde. The impact was as devastating as predicted—though not at once. The
editing was too good for that, binding segments together in a fast-paced assault on the sensorium. Only afterwards, when they
could duck the all-out assault on their immediate attention, did the implications of possession begin to sink in.
The effect acted like a mild depressant program or a communal virus. Yes, there truly was life after corporeal death. But
it seemed to be perpetual misery. Nor was there any sighting of God, any God, even the Creator’s numerous prophets went curiously
unseen; no pearly gates, no brimstone lakes, no judgement, no Jahannam, no salvation. There was apparently no reward for having
lived a virtuous life. The best anybody now had to hope for after death was to come back and possess the living.
Having to come to terms with the concept of a universe besieged by lost souls was a wounding process. People reacted in different
ways. Getting smashed, or stoned, or stimmed out was popular. Some found religion in a big way. Some became fervently agnostic.
Some turned to their shrinks for reassurance. Some (the richer and smarter) quietly focused their attention (and funding)
to zero-tau mausoleums.
One thing the psychiatrists did notice, this was a depression which drove nobody to suicide. The other constants were the
slow decline in efficiency at work, increased lethargy, a rise in use of tranquilizer and stimulant programs. Pop psychology
commentators took to calling it the rise of the why-bother psychosis.
The rest of the Confederation was swift to follow, and almost identical in its response no matter what ethnic culture base
was exposed to the news. No ideology or religion offered much in the way of resistance. Only Edenism proved resilient, though
even that culture was far from immune.
Antonio Whitelocke chartered twenty-five blackhawks and Adamist independent trader starships to distribute Kelly’s fleks to
Collins offices across the Confederation. Saturation took three weeks, longer than optimum, but the quarantine alert made
national navies highly nervous. Some of the more authoritarian governments, fearful of the effect Kelly’s recording would
have on public confidence, tried to ban Collins from releasing it; an action which simply pushed the fleks underground whilst
simultaneously boosting their credibility. It was an unfortunate outcome, because in many cases it clashed and interacted
with two other information ripples expanding across the Confederation. Firstly there was the rapidly spreading bad news about
Al Capone’s takeover of New California, and secondly the more clandestine distribution of Kiera Salter’s seductive recording.
• • •
The
Mindor
hit eight gees as soon as it cleared the wormhole terminus. Various masses immediately impinged on Rocio Condra’s perception.
The core of the Trojan point was twenty million kilometres in diameter, and cluttered with hundreds of medium-sized asteroids,
tens of thousands of boulders, dust shoals, and swirls of ice pebbles, all of them gently resonating to the pull of distant
gravity fields.
Mindor
opened its wings wide, and began beating them in vast sweeps.
Rocio Condra had chosen an avian form as the hellhawk’s image. The three stumpy rear fins had broadened out, becoming thinner
to angle back. Its nose had lengthened, creases and folds multiplying across the polyp, deepening, accentuating the creature’s
streamlining. Meandering green and purple patterns had vanished, washed away beneath a bloom of midnight-black. The texture
was crinkly, delineating tight-packed leather feathers. He had become a steed worthy of a dark angel.
Loose streamers of inter-planetary dust were churned into erratic storms as he powered forwards in hungry surges. Radar and
laser sensors began to pulse against his hull. It had taken Rocio Condra a long time experimenting with the energistic power
pumping through his neural cells to maintain a viable operational level within the hellhawk’s electronic systems, although
efficiency was still well down on design specs. So long as he remained calm, and focused the power sparingly and precisely,
the processors remained on-line. It helped that the majority of them were bitek, and military grade at that. Even so, combat
wasps had to be launched with backup solid rockets, but once they were clear they swiftly recovered; leaving only a small
window of vulnerability. Thankfully, his mass perception, a secondary effect of the distortion field, was unaffected. Providing
he wasn’t outnumbered by hostile voidhawks, he could give a good account of himself.
The beams of electromagnetic radiation directed at him were coming from a point ten thousand kilometres ahead: Koblat asteroid,
a new and wholly unimportant provincial settlement in a Trojan cluster which after a hundred and fifteen years of development
and investment had yet to prove its economic worth. There were thousands just like it scattered across the Confederation.
Koblat didn’t even rate a navy ship from the Toowoomba star system’s defence alliance. Its funding company certainly didn’t
provide it with SD platforms. The sole concession which the asteroid’s governing council had made to “the emergency” was to
upgrade their civil spaceflight sensors, and equip two inter-planetary cargo ships with a dozen combat wasps apiece, grudgingly
donated by Toowoomba. It was, like every response to the affairs of the outside universe, a rather pathetic token.
And now a token which had just been exposed for what it was. The hellhawk’s emergence, location, velocity, flight vector,
and refusal to identify itself could only mean one thing: It was hostile. Both of the armed inter-planetary craft were dispatched
on an interception vector, lumbering outwards at one and a half gees, hopelessly outclassed even before their fusion drives
ignited.
Koblat beamed a desperate request for help to Pinjarra, the cluster’s capital four million kilometres away, where three armed
starships were stationed. The asteroid’s inadequate internal emergency procedures were activated, sealing and isolating independent
sections. Its terrified citizens rushed to designated secure chambers deep in the interior and waited for the attack to begin,
dreading the follow on, the infiltration by possessed.
It never happened. All the incoming hellhawk did was open a standard channel and datavise a sensorium recording into the asteroid’s
net. Then it vanished, expanding a wormhole interstice and diving inside. Only a couple of optical sensors caught a glimpse
of it, producing a smudgy image which nobody believed in.
When Jed Hinton finally got back from his designated safe shelter chamber, he almost wished the alert had kept going a few
more hours. It was change, something new, different. A rare event in all of Jed’s seventeen years of life.
When he returned to the family apartment, four rooms chewed out of the rock at level three (a two-thirds gravity field), his
mum and Digger were shouting about something or other. The rows had grown almost continual since the warning from the Confederation
Assembly had reached Koblat. Work shifts were being reduced as the company hedged its bets, waiting to see what would happen
after the crisis was over. Shorter shifts meant Digger spending a lot more time at home, or up at the Blue Fountain bar on
level five when he could afford it.