“Smart. So do we have a deal?”
“Not with you. I’ll travel to New California myself and talk to Capone. That way we’ll both know how much we can trust the
other.”
• • •
Kiera hung back after Patricia left the boardroom. “This changes everything,” she said to Bonney. “Even if we don’t get enough
antimatter to knock over Srinagar, it’ll give us the deterrence to prevent another voidhawk attack.”
“It looks like it. Do you think Capone is on the level?”
“I’m not sure. He must need the hellhawks pretty badly, or he wouldn’t have offered us the antimatter. Even if he’s got a
production station, it won’t exactly be plentiful.”
“You want me to come with you?”
“No.” The tip of her tongue licked over her lips, a fast movement by a lash of forked flesh. “We’re either going to be leaving
here for Srinagar, or I’ll deal with Capone to provide us with enough bodies to fill the habitat. Either way, we won’t be
needing that shit Dariat anymore. See to it.”
“You bet.”
• • •
Can you stop the hellhawks from leaving?
Rubra asked.
No,
the Kohistan Consensus said.
Not seventy of them. They are still armed with a considerable number of conventional combat wasps.
Bugger.
If Kiera does acquire antimatter combat wasps from Capone, we don’t think we will be able to provide an adequate level of
reinforcement to Srinagar’s Strategic Defence network. The planet may fall to her.
Then call in the Confederation Navy. Srinagar’s been paying its taxes, hasn’t it?
Yes. But there is no guarantee the navy will respond. Its resources are being deployed over a wide area.
Then call Jupiter. They’re bound to have spare squadrons.
We will see what can be done.
Do that. In the meantime, there are some important decisions to be taken. By me and Dariat both. And I don’t think Bonney
Lewin is going to give us much more time.
• • •
Erick was sure that the explosion, followed by the capsule’s equally violent stabilization manoeuvre, had torn loose some
of his medical nanonic packages. He could feel peculiar lines of pressure building up under the SII suit, and convinced himself
it was fluid leakage. Blood or artificial tissue nutrient from the packages and their supplements, he wasn’t sure which. Over
half of them no longer responded to his datavises.
At least it meant they couldn’t contribute to the medical program’s dire pronouncements of his current physiological state.
His right arm wouldn’t respond to any nerve impulses at all, nor was he receiving any sensation from it. The only positive
factor was a confirmation that blood was still circulating inside the new muscles and artificial tissue.
There wasn’t much he could do to rectify the situation. The capsule’s reserve electron matrices didn’t have enough power to
activate the internal life-support system. The thin atmosphere was already ten degrees below zero, and falling rapidly. Which
meant he was unable to take the suit off and replace the nanonic packages. And just to twist the knife, an emergency survival
gear locker containing fresh medical nanonic packages had popped open in the ceiling above him.
Backup lighting had come on, casting a weak pale blue glow across the compartment. Frost was forming on most of the surfaces,
gradually obscuring the few remaining active holoscreen displays. Various pieces of refuse had been jolted loose from their
nesting places to twirl whimsically through the air, throwing avian-style shadows across the acceleration couches.
Potentially the most troubling problem was the intermittent dropouts from which the flight computer’s datavises were suffering.
Erick wasn’t entirely sure he could trust its status display. It still responded to simple commands, though.
With his personal situation stable for a moment, he instructed the capsule’s sensors to deploy. Three of the five responded,
pistonlike tubes sliding up out of the nultherm foam coating. They began to scan around.
Astrogration programs slowly correlated the surrounding starfield. If they were working correctly, then the
Tigara
had emerged approximately fifty million kilometres from the coordinate he was aiming for. Ngeuni was only an unremarkable
blue-green star to one side of the glaring A2 primary.
He wasn’t sure if they would pick up the capsule’s distress beacon. Stage one colonies did not have the most sophisticated
communications satellites. When he instructed the capsule’s phased array antenna to focus on the distant planet, it didn’t
acknowledge. He repeated the instruction, and there was still no activity.
The flight computer ran a diagnostic, which gave him a System Inviable code. Without actually going outside to examine it,
there was no way of telling what was wrong.
Alone.
Cut off.
Fifty million kilometres from possible rescue.
Light-years from where he desperately needed to be.
All that was left for him now was to wait. He began switching off every piece of equipment apart from the attitude rockets,
the guidance system which drove them, and the computer itself. Judging by the frequency of the thruster firings, the capsule
was venting something. The last diagnostic sweep before he shut down the internal sensors couldn’t pinpoint what it was.
After he’d reduced the power drain to a minimum, he pressed the deactivation switch for his restraint webbing. Even that seemed
reluctant to work, taking a long time to fold back below the side of the cushioning. At this movement, levering himself up
from the couch, fluid stirred across his abdomen. He found that by moving very slowly, the effect (and perhaps the harm) was
moderated.
Training took over, and he began to index the emergency gear which had deployed from the ceiling. That was when the emotional
shock hammered him. He suddenly found himself shaking badly as he clung to a four person programmable silicon dinghy.
Indexing his position! Like a good little first-year cadet.
A broken laugh bubbled around the SII suit’s respirator tube. The glossy black silicon covering his eyes turned permeable
to vent the salty fluid burning his squeezed up eyelids.
Never in his life had he felt so utterly helpless. Even when the possessed were boarding the
Villeneuve’s Revenge
he’d been able to do something. Fight back, hit them. Orbiting above New California with the Organization poised to obliterate
them at the first false move, he’d been able to store most of the sensor images. There had always been something, some way
of being positive.
Now he was humiliatingly aware of his mind crumbling away in mimicry of his tattered old body. Fear had risen to consume him,
flowing swiftly out of the dark corners of the bridge. It produced a pain in his head far worse than any physical injury ever
could.
Those muscles which still functioned disobeyed any lingering wishes he might have, leaving him ignominiously barnacled to
the dinghy. Every last reserve of determination and resolve had been exhausted. Not even the ubiquitous programs could shore
up his mentality anymore.
Too weak to continue living, too frightened to die: Erick Thakrar had come to the end of the line.
• • •
Eight kilometres west of Stonygate, Cochrane tooted the horn on the Karmic Crusader bus and turned off the road. The other
three vehicles in the convoy jounced over the grass verge and came to a halt behind it.
“Yo, dudettes,” Cochrane yelled back to the juvenile rioters clambering over the seats. “Time out for like the big darkness.”
He pressed the red button on the dash, and the doors hissed open. Kids poured out like a dam burst.
Cochrane put his purple glasses back on and climbed down out of the cab. Stephanie and Moyo walked over to him, arm in arm.
“Good place,” she said. The convoy had halted at the head of a gentle valley which was completely roofed over by the rumbling
blanket of crimson cloud, rendering the mountain peaks invisible.
“This whole righteous road trip is one major groove.”
“Right.”
He materialized a fat reefer. “Hit?”
“No thanks. I’d better see about cooking them some supper.”
“That’s cool. I can’t psyche out any hostile vibes in this locale. I’ll like keep watch, make sure the nazgul aren’t circling
overhead.”
“You do that.” Stephanie smiled fondly at him and went to the back of the bus, where the big luggage hold was. Moyo started
pulling out the cooking gear.
“We should manage to reach Chainbridge by tomorrow evening,” he said.
“Yes. This isn’t quite what I expected when we started out, you know.”
“Predictability is boring.” He put a big electric camping grille on the ground, adjusting the aluminum legs to make it level.
“Besides, I think it’s worked out for the best.”
Stephanie glanced around the improvised campsite, nodding approval; nearly sixty children were scampering around the parked
vehicles. What had started off as a private mission to help a handful of lost children had rapidly snowballed.
Four times during the first day they had been stopped by residents who had told them where non-possessed children were lurking.
On the second day there were over twenty children packed on board; that was when Tina Sudol had volunteered to come with them.
Rana and McPhee joined up on the third day, adding another bus.
Now there were four vehicles, and eight possessed adults. They were no longer making a straight dash for the border at the
top of Mortonridge. It was more of a zigzag route, visiting as many towns as they could to pick up children. Ekelund’s people,
who had evolved into the closest thing to a government on Mortonridge, maintained the communications net between the larger
towns, albeit with a considerably reduced bit capacity than previously. News of Stephanie’s progress had spread widely. Children
were already waiting for the buses when they reached some towns; on a couple of occasions dressed smartly and given packed
lunches by the possessed who had taken care of them. They had borne witness to some very tearful partings.
After the children had eaten and washed and been settled in their tents, Cochrane and Franklin Quigley sliced branches off
a tree and piled them up to form a proper camp-fire. The adults came to sit around it, enjoying the yellow light flaring out
to repel the clouds’ incessant claret illumination.
“I think we should forget going back to a town when we’re done with the kids,” McPhee said. “All of us get along okay, we
should try a farm. The towns are starting to run out of food, now. We could grow some and sell it to them. That would give
us something to do.”
“He’s been back a whole week, and he’s already bored,” Franklin Quigley grunted.
“Bore-/«
g
,” Cochrane said. He blew twin streams of smoke out of his nostrils. They spiralled through the air to jab at McPhee’s nose
like a cobra.
The giant Scot made a pass of his hand, and the smoke wilted, turning to tar and splattering on the ground. “I’m not bored,
but we have to do something. It makes sense to think ahead.”
“You might be right,” Stephanie said. “I don’t think I’d like to live in any of the towns we’ve passed through so far.”
“The way I see it,” said Moyo, “is that the possessed are developing into two groups.”
“Please
don’t use that word,” Rana said. Sitting cross-legged next to the flamboyantly feminine Tina Sudol, Rana appeared fastidiously
androgynous with her short hair and baggy blue sweater.
“What word?” Moyo asked.
“Possession. I find it offensive and prejudicial.”
“That’s right, babe,” Cochrane chortled. “We’re not possessors, we’re just like dimensionally disadvantaged.”
“Call our cross-continuum placement situation whatever you wish,” she snapped back. “You cannot alter the fact that the term
is wholly derogatory. The Confederation’s military-industrial complex is using it to demonize us so they can justify increased
spending on their armaments programs.”
Stephanie pressed her face into Moyo’s arm to smother her giggles.
“Come on, we’re not exactly on the side of the saints,” Franklin observed.
“The perception of common morality is enforced entirely by the circumstances of male-dominated society. Our new and unique
circumstances require us to re-evaluate that original morality. As there are clearly not enough living bodies to go around
the human race, sensory ownership should be distributed on an equitable basis. It’s no good the living protesting about us.
We have as much right to sensory input as they do.”
Cochrane took the reefer from his mouth and gave it a sad stare. “Man, I wish I could manifest your trips.”
“You ignore him, darling,” Tina Sudol said to Rana. “He’s a perfect example of male brutality.”
“I suppose a fuck is out of the question tonight, then?”
Tina sucked in her cheeks theatrically as she glowered at the unrepentant hippie. “I’m only interested in men.”
“And always have been,” McPhee said, in an unsubtle whisper.
Tina flounced her glossy, highlighted hair back with a manicured hand. “You men are animals, all of you, simply
rancid
with hormones. No wonder I wanted to escape that
prison
of flesh I was in.”
“
The two groups”
Moyo said, “seem to be divided into those that stay put, like the cafÉ proprietors, and the restless ones—like us I suppose,
though we’re an exception. They complement each other perfectly. The wanderers go around playing tourist, drinking down the
sights and experiences. And wherever they go, they meet the stayers and tell them about their journeys. That way both types
get what they want. Both of us exist to relish experience; some like to go out and find it, others like it brought to them.”
“You think that’s what it’s going to be like from now on?” McPhee asked.
“Yes. That’s what we’ll settle down into.”
“But for how long? Wanting to see and feel is just a reaction from the beyond. Once we’ve had our fill, human nature will
come back. People want to settle down, have a family. Procreation is our biological imperative. And that’s one thing we never
can do. We will always be frustrated.”