The steward raised his head above the bar to see what was happening. Various inmates and staff had dived for cover behind
the furniture. The terrifying possessed woman was striding purposefully for the door, hauling a cowering Skibbow along. He
datavised a codelock order at the door, then opened an emergency channel to the net processor. It didn’t respond. His hand
curled around the nervejam stick, ready to—
“Hey you!” called the woman.
A streamer of white fire smacked straight into his forehead.
“Naughty,” she said grimly.
Gerald gibbered quietly as the steward slumped forwards, smoke rising from the shallow crater in his temple. “Oh, dear God,
what are you?”
“Don’t blow it for me now, Gerald.” She stood in front of the door. The room’s air rushed past her, ruffling her long copper
tresses. Then the air flow reversed, turning to a howling hurricane with a solid core. It smashed into the door, buckling
the reinforced composite.
She stepped through the gap, pulling Gerald after her. “Now we run,” she told him happily.
As the sanatorium was operated by the Royal Navy the guards were armed. It didn’t make any difference, they weren’t front-line
combat troops. Whenever one of them got near to Gerald and the woman she would use her white fire to devastating effect. The
asteroid’s internal security centre could trace her position purely because of the wave of destruction she generated around
herself. All electronics and power circuits were ruptured by flares of white fire, doors were simply ripped apart, environmental
ducts were battered and split, mechanoids reduced to slag. She did it automatically, a defensive manoeuvre burning clean any
conceivable threat in front of her. Crude but effective.
The asteroid went to an immediate status two defence alert. Royal Marines were rushed from their barracks to the sanatorium.
But as with all asteroid settlements, everything was packed close together, and made as compact as possible. It took the woman
and Gerald ninety seconds to get from the lounge to the sanatorium’s nearest entrance. Sensors and cameras in the public hall
caught her emerging from the splintered door. Terrified pedestrians sprinted from the vicious tendrils of white fire she unleashed;
it was almost as though she were using them as whips to drive people away from her. Then the images vanished as she hammered
at the net processors and sensors.
The Royal Marine commander coordinating the emergency at least had the presence of mind to shut down the lifts around the
hall. If she wanted out, she’d have to walk. And when she did, she’d run smack into the marines now deploying in a pincer
movement around her.
Both squads were edging cautiously down the public hall, hurrying civilians out of the way. They approached the sanatorium’s
wrecked entrance from opposite directions, chemical projectile rifles held ready, electronic warfare blocks alert for any
sign of the distortion pattern given off by a possessed. When they came into view of each other they froze, covering the length
of the hall with their rifles. No one was left between them.
The squad captain of one side shouldered his weapon. “Where the fuck did she go?”
• • •
“I knew they’d stop the lifts,” the redhead said in satisfaction. “Standard tactics for dealing with the possessed is to block
all nearby transport systems to prevent us from spreading. Bloody good job they were on the ball today.”
Gerald agreed, but didn’t say anything. He was concentrating on the rungs in front of his face, not daring to look down.
The possessed woman might have smashed open all the doors in the medical facility, but once they were out in the hall she
had stood in front of the lift doors and made a parting motion with her hands. The lift doors had obeyed, sliding open silently.
After that they had started to climb down the ladder set in the wall of the shaft. There wasn’t much light to see where he
was putting his hands and feet, just some sort of bluish radiance coming from the woman above him. Gerald didn’t want to see
how she was making it.
It was cold in the shaft, the air tasting both wet and metallic. And silent, too, the darkness above and below swallowing
all sounds. Every minute or so he could just make out another door in the shaft wall; the buzz of conversation and tiny slivers
of light oozing around the seals.
“Careful,” she said. “You’re near the bottom now. Ten more rungs.”
The light increased, and he risked a glance down. A metal grid slicked with condensation glinted dully at the foot of the
ladder. Gerald stood on it, shivering slightly and rubbing his arms. Mechanical clunks started to rumble down from above.
The possessed woman jumped nimbly past the last two rungs and gave him an enthusiastic smile. “Stand still,” she said, and
put her hands on either side of his head, spreading her fingers over his ears.
Gerald quivered at her touch. Her hands were starting to glow. This was it. The start of the pain. Soon he would hear the
demented whispers emerging from the beyond, and one of
them
would pour into his body again. All hope would die then. I might as well refuse, and let her torture kill me. Better that
than…
She took her hands away, their internal glimmer fading away. “I think that should do it. I’ve broken down the debrief nanonics.
The doctors and police would only use you to see where we were and what we were doing, then they’d send you to sleep.”
“What?” He started to probe his skull with cautious fingers. It seemed intact. “Is that all you did?”
“Yes. Not so bad was it?” She beckoned. “There’s a hatch here which leads to the maintenance tunnels. It’s only got a mechanical
lock, so we won’t trigger any processors.”
“Then what?” he asked bleakly.
“Why, we get you off Guyana and on your way to Valisk to find Marie, of course. What did you think, Gerald?” She grasped the
handle on the metre-high hatch and shoved it upwards. The hatch swung open, revealing only more darkness behind.
Gerald felt like crying. His head was all funny, hot and light, which made it very hard for him to think. “Why? Why are you
doing this? Are you just playing with me?”
“Of course I’m not playing, Gerald. I want Marie back to normal more than anything. She’s all we have left now. You know that.
You saw the homestead.”
He sank to his knees, looking up at her flat-featured face and immaculate hair, trying desperately to understand. “But why?
Who are you to want this?”
“Oh, dearest Gerald, I’m sorry. This is Pou Mok’s body. It takes up far too much concentration to maintain my own appearance,
especially with what I was doing up there.”
Gerald watched numbly as the copper hair darkened and the skin of her face began to flow into new features. No, not new. Old.
So very very old. “Loren,” he gasped.
After five centuries of astounding technological endeavour and determined economic sacrifice by the Lunar nation, the God
of War, Mars, had finally been pacified. The hostile red gleam which had so dominated Earth’s night skies for millennia was
extinguished. Now the planet had an atmosphere, complete with vast swirls of white and grey clouds; blooms of vegetation were
expanding across the deserts, patches of sepia and dark green vegetation staining the tracts of rustred soil. To an approaching
starship it seemed, at first, almost identical to any other terracompatible planet to be found within the Confederation’s
boundaries. Disparities became apparent only when the extent of the remaining deserts was revealed, accounting for three-fifths
of the surface; and there was a definite sparsity of free water. Although there were thousands of individual crater lakes,
Mars had only one major body of water, the Lowell Sea, a gently meandering ribbon which wrapped itself around the equator.
Given the scale involved it appeared as though a wide river were flowing constantly around the planet. Closer inspection showed
that circumnavigation would be impossible. The Lowell Sea had formed as water collected in the hundreds of large asteroid-impact
craters which pocked the planet’s equator in an almost straight line.
Population, too, was one of the planet’s quirks: a phenomenon which was also visible from orbit, provided you knew what to
look for. Anyone searching the nightside for the usual sprawling iridescent patches of light which marked the kind of vigorous
human cities normally present after five centuries of colonization would be disappointed; only six major urban areas had sprung
up so far. Towns and villages were also present amid the rolling steppes, but in total the number of people living on the
surface didn’t exceed three million. Phobos and Deimos were heavily industrialized, providing homes for a further half-million
workers and their families. They at least followed a standard development pattern.
Apart from stage one colony planets in their formative years, Mars had the smallest human population of any world in the Confederation.
However, that was where comparisons ended. The Martian technoeconomy was highly developed, providing its citizens with a reasonable
standard of living, though nothing like the socioeconomic index enjoyed by Edenists or the Kulu Kingdom.
One other aspect of mature Confederation societies missing from Mars was a Strategic Defence network. The two asteroid moons
were defended, of course; both of them were important SII centres with spaceports boasting a high level of starship traffic.
But the planet was left open; there was nothing of any value on its surface to threaten or hold hostage or steal. The trillions
of fuseodollars poured into the terraforming project were dispersed evenly throughout the new biosphere. Oxygen and geneered
plants were not the kinds of targets favoured by pirates. Mars was the most expensive single project ever undertaken by the
human race, yet its intrinsic value was effectively zero. Its real value was as the focus of aspirations for a whole nation
of exiles, to whom it had become the modern promised land.
None of this was readily apparent to Louise, Genevieve, and Fletcher as they observed the planet growing in the lounge’s holoscreen.
The difference from Norfolk was apparent (Genevieve said Mars looked worn-out rather than brand-new) but none of them knew
how to interpret what they were seeing in geotechnical terms. All they cared about was the lack of glowing red cloud.
“Can you tell if there are any possessed down there?” Louise asked.
“Alas no, Lady Louise. The planet lies far outside my second sight. All I can feel is the shape of this doughty ship. We could
be alone in the universe for all the perception I have.”
“Don’t say that,” Genevieve said. “We’ve come here to get away from horrible things.”
“And away from them we certainly are, little one.”
Genevieve spared a moment from watching the holoscreen to grin at him. The voyage had calmed her considerably. With very little
to do for any of the passengers during the flight, the novelty of bouncing around in free fall had soon worn off, and she
had swiftly learned how to access the flight computer. Furay had brought some old voice-interactive tutorial programs on-line
for her, and she had been engrossed ever since with AV recordings of children’s stories, educational files, and games. Genevieve
adored the games, spending hours in her cabin, surrounded by a holographic haze, fighting off fantasy creatures, or exploring
mythological landscapes, even piloting ships to the galactic core.
Louise and Fletcher had used the same programs to devour history encyclopedia files, reviewing the major events which had
shaped human history since the mid 1800s. Thanks to Norfolk’s restrictive information policies, most of it was as new to her
as it was to him. The more she reviewed, the more ignorant she felt. Several times she had been obliged to ask Furay if a
particular incident was genuinely true; the information in the
Far Realm’s
memory was so different from that which she’d been taught. Invariably, the answer was yes; though he always tempered it by
saying that no one viewed anything in the same context. “Interpretation through the filters of ideology has always been one
of our race’s curses.”
Even that cushion didn’t make her any happier. The teachers at school hadn’t exactly been lying to her, censorship was hardly
practical given the number of starship crews who visited at midsummer; but they’d certainly sheltered her from an awful lot
of unsavoury truths.
Louise ordered the flight computer to show a display of their approach vector. The holoscreen image shifted, showing them
the view from the forward sensor clusters overlaid with orange and green graphics. Phobos was falling towards the horizon,
a darkened star embedded at the heart of a large scintillating wreath of industrial stations. They watched it expand as the
Far Realm
matched orbits at a tenth of a gee. Inhabited for over five centuries, it had a weighty history. No other settled asteroid/moon
of such a size orbited so close to an inhabited planet. But its proximity made it ideal to provide raw material for the early
stages of the terraforming project. Since those days it had reverted primarily to being an SII manufacturing centre and fleet
port. The spin imparted to provide gravity within its two biosphere caverns had flung off the last of the surface dust centuries
ago. Naked grey-brown rock was all that faced the stars now; large areas had a marbled finish where mining teams had removed
protrusions to enhance the symmetry, and both ends had been sheared flat. With its cylindrical shape and vast encrustations
of machinery capping each end its genealogy appeared to be midway between ordinary asteroid settlements and an Edenist habitat.
Captain Layia slotted the starship into the spaceport approach vector which traffic control assigned her, then spent a further
twenty minutes datavising the SII fleet operations office, explaining why their scheduled return flight from Norfolk had been
delayed.
“You didn’t mention our passengers then?” Tilia said when the exchange was over.
“Life is complicated enough right now,” Layia retorted. “Explaining to the operations office why they’re on board, and the
financial circumstances, isn’t going to make a good entry on anyone’s record. Agreed?”