One thing he couldn’t ignore, the vac-trains were running again. Though that might be the trap, the reason for this charade.
To snare him on the ocean bed halfway between continents; even he couldn’t get out of that. But how would they know if he
was on board a specific train?
He followed the group out of the office and down the stairs, not really paying much attention. His mind was savaging the possibilities.
If they could detect me when I’m in this realm, they would have done everything they could to destroy me. That means they
can’t. So this must be a ploy to lure me out. The supercops know I want Banneth, so they’re using her as bait. The vac-train
isn’t the trap; wherever she goes in London is their kill arena. And that’s where they’ll be: this planet’s strongest, most
subtle line of defence against His Night.
Quinn smiled lustily and increased the speed of his gliding walk through the ghost realm, determined not to let Louise and
her party out of his sight. After so many false starts, the true Armageddon was beginning.
It was a foul job, but better than scouting round the starscrapers. Tolton and Dariat were driving a truck slowly over Valisk’s
grass plains in search of servitor bodies. Food was becoming a critical commodity within the enfeebled habitat. During Kiera’s
reign the possessed had simply helped themselves to existing supplies with little thought devoted to replenishing them. Then
after plunging into the dark continuum, the survivors had turned to butchering the wild terrestrial animals that had fallen
into unconsciousness. Large cooking pits had been dug outside the northern endcap caverns, where the Starbridge tribes took
charge of trussing the beasts on long poles to be roasted over the flames as if for a medieval banquet. It was a predictably
monotonous diet of goat, sheep, and rabbits; but nourishing enough. None of the other lethargic survivors complained.
Now that operation was being accelerated. The animals were gradually slipping from their strange comas into death. Their carcasses
had to be recovered and cooked before they started to decay. If it was hung in the coolest caverns, properly cured meat could
be stored for several weeks and still remain edible. Building up a stockpile of food was also a logical precaution to be undertaken
in times of war. Rubra’s regiment of descendants all knew about the visitor, and had been surreptitiously supplementing their
armaments ever since. The remaining survivors hadn’t been told.
Tolton wondered if that was why he and Dariat had been given this particular task, so he wouldn’t have much contact with the
refugees occupying the caverns.
“Why should the personality distrust you?” Dariat asked as the street poet drove them along the side of a stream in one of
the shallow valleys meandering through the southern grasslands. “You’re one of the real survivors of the possessed occupation.
You’ve proved yourself as an asset as far as it’s concerned.”
“Because of what I am; you know I’m on the side of the underclass, that’s my nature. I might warn them.”
“Do you think warning them is helping them? They’re in no fit state to put up any resistance if that thing comes back. You
know damn well my illustrious relatives are the only ones who stand a chance of stopping it. Go ahead and tell the sick there’s
some kind of homicidal ice dragon stalking us, see how much you improve their morale. I don’t want to preach homilies, but
class distinction has been suspended for the duration. We’re divided into effectives and dependants, now. That’s all.”
“All right, damn it. But you can’t keep them in ignorance forever.”
“They won’t be. If that thing ever gets inside, everyone’s going to know about it.”
Tolton gripped the top of the steering wheel with both hands, and slowed so he could watch Dariat’s answer. “You think it
will come back?”
“The opinion is a resounding yes. It wanted something the first time, and all we did was make it mad at us. Even assuming
it has the wackiest psychology possible, it’ll come back. The only questions are: when? And: will it be alone?”
“Bloody hell.” Tolton twisted the throttle again, and sent the truck splashing through a shallow section of the stream. “What
about the signalling project? Can we call the Confederation yet?”
“No. There’s still a team working on it, but most of my relatives are doing what they can to beef up the habitat defences.”
“We still have some?”
“Not many,” Dariat admitted.
Tolton saw a suspicious avocado-green lump amid the wispy tips of pink xenoc grass, and slowed the truck to a halt. The body
of a large servitor lizard was lying curled up on the ground. A tegu, geneered for agronomy maintenance, it measured one and
a half metres from nose to tail, with long rakelike fingers on its hands. There were hundreds of them in Valisk, patrolling
the streams where they were employed to clear jams of dead grass and twigs that built up along rocky snags.
Dariat stood and watched as his friend bent over and gingerly touched the creature’s flanks.
“I can’t make out if it’s alive or not,” Tolton complained.
“It’s dead,” Dariat told him. “There is no life energy left in the body.”
“You can tell that?”
“Yeah. It’s like a little internal glow; all living things have it.”
“Hell. You can see that?”
“It’s similar to seeing, yes. I guess my brain just interprets it as light.”
“You haven’t got a brain. You’re just a ghost. A whole bunch of thoughts strung together.”
“There’s more to me than that, if you don’t mind. I’m a naked soul.”
“Okay. There’s no need to get touchy about it.” Tolton grinned. “Touchy. Get it? A ghost, touchy.”
“I hope your poetry is better than your humour. After all, you’re the one that’s got to pick it up.” His translucent foot
nudged the dead lizard.
Tolton’s grin crumpled. “Bugger.” He went round to the back of the truck, and lowered the tailgate. There were already three
dead servitor chimps lying on the metal floor. “I didn’t mind the goats so much, but this is like cannibalism,” he grumbled.
“Monkeys were a delicacy in several pre-industrial societies back on Earth.”
“No wonder they all died out, then; their kids ran off to the city and lived happily ever after on Chinese takeaway.” He put
his hands under the lizard’s body, disgruntled by the dry-slippery feel of the scales and the way they shifted so easily over
protuberant bones. Muttering about the truck’s lack of a winch, he started to drag the body over to the tailgate. The lizard
was quite a weight, needing several stages to haul it up the steep ramp. Tolton was flushed by the time he finally skewed
it over the chimps. He jumped down and shoved the tailgate back up, shoving the latches home.
“Good job,” Dariat said.
“Just as long as I don’t have to butcher them, I don’t care.”
“We should get back. That’s a big load already.”
Tolton grunted in agreement. The trucks had been stripped down to the minimum number of systems; there were no governing processors,
no power steering, no collision alert radar, nor impact-triggered seat webs. A power cell was wired directly to the wheel
hub motors, with the throttle as the only control. Such an arrangement gave the vehicles a modicum of reliability, though
even that was far from a hundred per cent. Switching them on was always a lottery. And if they had too much weight in the
back they wouldn’t work at all.
Dariat,
the personality called.
The visitor is back, and it’s not alone.
Oh Thoale. How many?
A couple of dozen, I think. Maybe more.
Once again, Dariat knew how much mental effort it took for the personality to focus on the approaching specks. Even then,
he wasn’t sure it was observing all of them. As before, pale streaks of turquoise and burgundy were fluxing within the strands
of the dusky nebula outside. A scattering of wan grey dots swished between the ragged strands, curving sharply at each turn,
but always coming closer. Their movements were confusing, but even so the personality should have been able to track them.
Dariat looked through the truck’s grimed windscreen. The Northern endcap was thirty kilometres away, suddenly a huge distance
across the rolling grasslands and scrub desert. It would take them at least forty minutes to get there, assuming the cloying
blades of pink grass didn’t get any thicker before they reached one of the rough tracks. And that was a long time to be alone
in this continuum. Not that the caverns would offer much sanctuary.
It was ironic, Dariat thought: he who had managed to isolate himself for thirty years, now wanted to surround himself with
people. He could never forget that debilitating cold the visitor had inflicted on him last time. His soul was unprotected
in this realm. If he was going to truly die, he preferred to do it in the company of his own kind. He turned to Tolton, making
sure his lips were exaggerating his words. “Does this thing go any faster?”
The street poet gave him a panicked glance. “Why?”
“Because now would be a good time to find out.”
“The bastard’s come back?”
“More than one.”
Tolton twisted the throttle urgently, nudging the speed up to over forty kilometres an hour. The wheel hub motors started
making erratic buzzing sounds—normally they were completely silent. Dariat used affinity to watch the visitors’ approach.
The personality had activated the seven lasers and two masers emplaced around the rim of the counter-rotating spaceport. As
before, there was no radar return from any of the visitors.
The first ones began their final dash from the shifting fringe of the nebula through the clear space to the habitat’s shell.
They were condensing the darkness around themselves now, twirling sharp horns of light in kaleidoscopic arcs. Optical sensors
locked on, aligning the energy weapons on one of the giveaway distortion swirls. Nine intense energy beams pinioned the visitor.
Its sole response was to spin faster, wriggling wildly along its trajectory as it plummeted in towards the shell. The radial
spires of distorted luminescence flared brighter and higher. Then it was falling behind the tips of the starscrapers, beyond
the weapons’ elevation. They slid back to find another target. It, too, was unaffected by the energy strike.
The personality stopped firing. Anxiety spread like a mental virus among Rubra’s descendants as they waited to see what the
visitors would do next. The personal weapons they’d prepared were distributed and primed. Not that anyone held out much hope.
If the spaceport lasers couldn’t harm them, then rifles (however large the calibre) were going to be completely useless. Not
that anybody refused them. Having a hefty chunk of destructive hardware you could grip in your hands was always a nice psychological
boost.
______
The Orgathé led a swarm of its eager kith towards the giant living object, soaking up the blaze of heat which it threw away
so casually. They had come to pre-empt the absorption that was the fate of all beings in the dark continuum, gorging on as
much of its life-energy as they could before it reached the mÉlange. Once that happened, so many of the entities entombed
within would be empowered to resurrection and individuality that the whole mÉlange would be loosened, possibly even breaking
apart for a short while. But there would never be enough energy to return them all to the place from which they’d fallen.
That privilege could only be granted to those who empowered themselves before the dispersal.
That was why it had called upon the others, the strongest of their kind, able to fly far and long from the mÉlange. Together
they might successfully storm the object where one had failed. To be rewarded with enough energy to elevate themselves out
of the dark continuum was worth any risk.
The Orgathé swooped closer. Huge waves of thought rippled through the layer of life energy below the object’s surface, focusing
on it. Pillars of energy lashed out from the dead section at the far end; a kind unusable by the Orgathé. It closed its boundary
against the flow, letting the power splash apart harmlessly. The pillars of energy vanished when it dove down close to the
surface. Its kith were following it down, hungered by the abundant energy, crying victoriously among themselves.
Ahead now were the hollow spindles protruding from the object’s midsection. The Orgathé increased its speed, hardening itself
with a reckless expenditure of energy. It remembered the sheet of transparent matter it had landed on before. Easy to identify
amid the thousands of other identical sheets inlaid along the length of the spindle, a dead section, drained of life-energy
and heat. This time, the Orgathé didn’t slow down.
The window of Horner’s bar detonated inwards with a terrifyingly violent explosion. Craggy shards of crystal blasted into
the bar, scything through the furniture. Frozen, ice-cloaked tables and chairs disintegrated into billowing clouds of glossy
silvery fragments. Then the entire maelstrom reversed its flow, and howled out through the shattered window. The badly shredded
main door into the vestibule buckled and collapsed, allowing the air to rush through.
Emergency pressure locks all across the twenty-fifth storey started to slide shut. They were mechanical systems, self-powered,
activated by simple failsafe pressure sensors. The majority of them were unaffected by the malaise inflicted by the dark continuum.
Only a minority of the starscraper’s muscle membranes reacted to the potentially lethal development.
The personality concentrated hard, ensuring that the muscle membranes around the Djerba’s lobby were shut, then tried to reach
the floors immediately below that. Its thought routines encountered a tide of exhaustion that grew worse the further it inserted
itself into the starscraper. Only the vaguest images from the twenty-fifth floor were available.
The Orgathé gripped the rim of the bar’s window with several appendages, waiting until the gale subsided. Bottles detonated
in mid flight as they were swept across the room, their exotic liquor solidifying in weird bulbous shapes the instant they
broke free of the glass. Anything which struck the Orgathé simply bounced off, gyrating away into the void outside. As soon
as the roar of air began to ebb, it moved into the starscraper. The wall around the empty door simply burst apart as it went
through.