“Good point,” Samuel said. “We must find out what we
can. Time to talk to our guest.”
• • •
Only Sarha, Beaulieu, and Dahybi were on the bridge when Joshua sailed through the floor hatch. He’d told the serjeants to
take both girls to capsule C where Melvyn, Liol, and Ashly were waiting in the sick bay.
Sarha’s expression was a blend of anger and worry as he drifted past her acceleration couch. “God, Joshua!”
“I’m all right, really.” He showed her the medical nanonic which had enveloped his right hand. “All under control.”
She scowled as he moved away trailing droplets of cold water. A neat midair twist, and he was lying on his acceleration couch
with the webbing folding over him.
“The net has gone completely,” Dahybi said. “We can’t monitor the asteroid’s systems.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Joshua said. “I know exactly what’s happening in there. That’s why we’re leaving.”
“Did the girl help?” Beaulieu asked.
“Not yet. I just want to get us clear first. Dahybi, are any of the voidhawks screwing around with our nodes?”
“No, Captain, we can jump.”
“Good.” Joshua optimistically ordered the flight computer to release the cradle clamps. He was rather pleased to see them
disengage, some processors were still working back in the spaceport.
The chemical verniers fired, lifting them straight up out of the bay. Sarha winced as the drab metal wall slid past the tips
of the sensor clusters, there was only about five metres clearance. But
Lady Mac
never wavered. As soon as they emerged from the bay Joshua cut the rockets, letting the starship fly free. The sensor clusters
sank down into their jump recesses. An event horizon claimed the hull. They jumped half a light year. A second after they
emerged energy flashed through the patterning nodes again. This time the jump was three light-years.
Joshua let out a juddering sigh.
Sarha, Beaulieu, and Dahybi looked at him. He was completely motionless, staring at the ceiling.
“Why don’t you join the others in the sick bay?” Sarha said compassionately. “Your hand should be checked properly.”
“I heard them, you know.”
Sarha gave Dahybi an anxious look. The node specialist gave her a curt gesture with his hand.
“Heard who?” she asked. Her webbing peeled back, allowing her to haul herself over to Joshua. A stikpad at the side of his
couch captured her feet.
He didn’t acknowledge her presence. “The souls in the beyond. Jesus, they’re real all right, they’re there waiting. One tiny
act of weakness, that’s all it takes, and they’ve got you.”
Her fingers stroked his waterlogged hair. “They didn’t get you.”
“No. But they lie and lie about how they can help. I was angry, and stupid enough to think Horst’s damn cross would save me.”
He held up the little crucifix and snorted at it. “Jesus, he was a Muslim.”
“You’re not making a lot of sense.”
He looked up at her with bloodshot eyes. “Sorry. They can hurt you very badly, you know. He’d only just started with my hand,
that was a warm-up. I don’t know if I could have held out. I told myself I would, or at least that I wouldn’t give in. I think
the only way to do that is to die.”
“But you didn’t give in, and you’re still alive, and it’s only you inside your skull. You won, Joshua.”
“Luck, and the tank is about empty.”
“It wasn’t luck you had three serjeants with you. It was healthy paranoia and good planning. You knew the possessed are extremely
dangerous, and took it into account. And that’s what we’ll do again next time.”
He gave a nervous laugh. “If I can manage a next time. It’s quite something to look right down into the abyss and see what’s
there waiting for you, one way or the other, as possessed or possessor.”
“We were up against it at Lalonde, and we’re still flying.”
“That was different, I was ignorant then. But now I know for sure. We’re going to die, and be condemned to live in the beyond.
All of us. Every sentient entity in the universe.” His face screwed up in pain and anger. “Jesus, I can’t believe that’s all
there is: life and purgatory. After tens of thousands of years, the universe finally reveals that we have souls, and then
we have the glory snatched right back and replaced with terror. There has to be something more, there
has
to be. He wouldn’t do that to us.”
“Who?”
“God, he, she, it, whatever. This torment, it’s too… I don’t know. Personal. Why the fuck build a universe that does this
to people? If you’re that powerful, why not make death final, or make everyone immortal? Why
this?
We have to know, have to find out why it works the way it does. That way we can know what the answer to all this is. We have
to find something that’s permanent, something which will last until the end of time.”
“How do you propose to do that?” she asked quietly.
“I don’t know,” he snapped, then just as suddenly he was thoughtful again. “Maybe the Kiint. They say they’ve solved all this.
They won’t tell us outright, but they might at least point me in the right direction.”
Sarha looked down at his intense expression in astonishment. Joshua taking life so seriously was strange, Joshua mounting
a crusade was frankly astonishing. For one second she thought that he had been possessed after all. “You?” she blurted.
All the suffering and angst vanished from his angular face. The old Joshua swept back. He started chuckling. “Yeah, me. I
might be catching religion a little late in life, but the born-again are always the most insufferable and devout.”
“It’s more than your hand which needs checking out in the sick bay.”
“Thank you, my loyal crew.” His restraint webbing parted, allowing him up. “But we’re still going to ask the Kiint.” He ordered
the flight computer to run a full star track search and correlate their exact position. Then he ran an almanac search for
Jobis’s file.
“Right now?” Dahybi asked tartly. “You’re going to throw away all you achieved on Ayacucho just like that?”
“Of course not,” Joshua said smoothly.
“Good. Because if we don’t find Mzu and the Alchemist before the possessed do, there probably won’t be any Confederation left
for you to save.”
• • •
Adok Dala returned to consciousness with a loud cry. He looked around fearfully at the
Hoya
’s sick bay. Not reassured by his surroundings. Not at all.
Samuel removed the medical nanonic package from the base of his neck. “Easy there. You’re quite safe, Adok. Nobody is going
to hurt you here. And I must apologize for the way we treated you in the club, but you are rather important to us.”
“You’re not the possessed?”
“No. We’re Edenists. Well, apart from Monica, here; she’s from the Kulu Kingdom.”
Monica did her best to smile at the nervous boy.
“You’re foreign agents, then?”
“Yes.”
“I won’t tell you anything. I’m not helping you catch Mzu.”
“That’s very patriotic. But we’re not interested in Mzu. Frankly, we hope she got away clean. You see, the possessed are in
charge of Ayacucho now.”
Adok moaned in distress, clamping his hand over his mouth.
“What we’d like to know about is Voi,” Samuel said.
“Voi?”
“Yes. Do you know where she is?”
“I haven’t seen her for days. She put us all on standby. It was silly, we had to organize the kids in the day clubs to kill
spiders. She said Lodi figured out you were using them to spy on us.”
“Clever man, Lodi. Do you know where he is?”
“No. Not for a couple of days.”
“Interesting. How many are there in this group of yours?”
“About twenty, twenty-five. There’s no real list. We’re just friends.”
“Who started it?”
“Voi. She’d changed when she came out of detox. The genocide became a real cause for her. We just got sucked along by her.
Everybody does when Voi gets serious about an issue.”
Monica datavised a request to her processor block, retrieving a memory image from the file she’d recorded at the Terminal
Terminus. It had bothered her since the snatch. The last glimpse she had of Joshua Calvert showed him tugging a girl along.
She showed the enhanced image to Adok. “Do you know her?”
He blinked blearily at the little screen. Whatever drugs Samuel had administered to loosen his tongue were making him drowsy.
“That’s Shea. I like her, but. . .”
“Is she one of your group?”
“Not really, but she’s Prince Lambert’s girlfriend. He’s sort of a member; and she’s done a few things for us occasionally.”
Monica looked at Samuel. “What have we got on this Prince Lambert character?”
“A moment.” He consulted his bitek processor block. “He’s registered as a pilot for the
Tekas
, an executive yacht owned by his family corporation. Monica, it was one of the starships which left Ayacucho this afternoon.”
“Damn it!” She slammed her fist down on one of the cabinets beside Adok Dala’s couch. “Does Voi know Prince Lambert?”
Adok smiled blithely. “Yes. They used to be lovers. He was the reason she wound up in detox.”
Do you have a jump coordinate for the
Tekas
? Samuel asked Niveu.
No. It flew outside our mass perception range. None of the voidhawks registered its jump. But we do have the flight vector.
It was an odd course, the ship was heading back down to the disk when it passed beyond us. If it didn’t perform any drastic
realignment manoeuvres there are three possible stars it could have flown to: Shikoku, Nyvan, and Torrox.
Thank you. We’ll check them. Of course. I’ll inform Duida’s defence command. We’ll leave immediately.
• • •
Shea had changed into a grey ship-suit when Joshua floated into the sickbay. She was talking quietly to Liol, but broke off
to give him a shy grin. Ashly and Melvyn were busy packing equipment away. One of the serjeants held on to a grab hoop just
inside the hatch.
“How are you feeling?” Joshua asked her.
“Fine. Ashly gave me a tranquillizer. I think it helps.”
“I wish he’d give me one.”
Her grin brightened. “Is your hand very bad?”
He held it up. “Most of the bone is intact, but I’m going to need some clone vat tissue to build the fingers up. The package
can’t regenerate quite that much.”
“Oh. I’m sorry.”
“Tranquillity will pay for it,” he said, straight-faced. “Where’s Kole?”
“Zero-tau,” Melvyn said.
“Good idea.”
“Do you want me to go in as well?” Shea asked.
“Up to you. But I need some help before you decide.”
“From me?”
“Yes. Let me explain. Contrary to everything the news studios were saying, I’m not a foreign agent.”
“I know that, you’re Lagrange Calvert.”
Joshua smiled. “I knew it would come in useful one day. The thing is, we are looking for Alkad Mzu, but not because of any
Omutan propaganda.”
“Why then?”
He took her hand in his, squeezing emphatically. “There is a reason, Shea, it’s a good reason, but not a very nice one. I’ll
tell you if you really want to know; because if you’re anything like the person I think you are, you’d help us find her if
you knew what’s actually going on. But if you’ll trust me on this, you don’t want to know. It’s up to you.”
“Are you going to kill her?” she asked sheepishly.
“No.”
“Promise?”
“I promise. We just want to take her back to Tranquillity where she’s been living since the genocide. As prisons go, it isn’t
bad. And if we can get to her in time, it’ll save an awful lot of people. Maybe an entire planet.”
“She’s going to drop a planet-buster on Omuta, isn’t she?”
“Something like that.”
“I thought so,” she said in a tiny voice. “But I don’t know where she is.”
“I think you do. You see, we believe she’s with Voi.”
“Oh,
her.”
Shea’s face darkened.
“Yes, her. I’m sorry, this sounds painful for you. I didn’t realize.”
“She and Prince Lambert had a thing. He still. . . well, he’d go back to her if she’d have him.”
“This Prince Lambert is your boyfriend, the starship captain?”
“Yes.”
“Which ship?”
“The
Tekas.”
“And it left Ayacucho today?”
“Yes. Do you really think Alkad Mzu was on board?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“Is he going to be in trouble with the authorities?”
“I couldn’t care less about him. I just want to locate Mzu. Once I’ve done that, once she knows I’m on her tail and watching
every move, the threat will be neutered. She’ll have to come back with me then. Now, are you going to tell me where the
Tekas
went?”
“I’m sorry, I wish I could help, but he wouldn’t tell me where they were going.”
“Shit!”
“PL. is flying the
Tekas
to Nyvan,” Liol said. He looked around inquiringly at the startled faces. “Did I say something wrong?”
“How the bloody hell do you know where he was going?” Joshua demanded.
“P.L.’s a good friend of mine; we grew up together. Quantum Serendipity has the contract to service the
Tekas
. He’s not the most experienced pilot, and Voi had given him a very odd manoeuvre to fly. So I helped him program the flight
vector.”
AndrÉ Duchamp had half expected to be shot at by the Ethenthia asteroid’s SD platforms when the
Villeneuve’s Revenge
jumped into its dedicated emergence zone three thousand kilometres away. He certainly had a lot of explaining to do to the
local defence command, followed up by testimony from the rover reporters. When he did finally receive docking permission he
assumed the famed Duchamp forceful-ness and integrity had won through again.
What actually happened was that while he was busy claiming to be a defector from the Capone Organization, Erick opened a channel
to the local Confederation Navy Bureau and asked them to press the local authority for clearance. Even so, the authorities
were extremely cautious. Three SD platforms were locked on to the
Villeneuve’s Revenge
as it approached the spaceport.