“I could never bring myself to do it. Never!”
He gave an ironic laugh. “No, I suppose not. After so many years of inhibition, my cancelling of the engram might be ineffective.”
“Your … what?”
“My poor little one! Do you think I don’t know how you toyed with the notion of doing away with me when you were young? You and the other Hydra-units—indulging in tantrums against a repressive parent, wishing me dead as you reveled in fantasies of independence.”
“We were silly adolescents,” she whispered, opening her mind wide to show her sincerity and remorse, “slow to mature. It was only your insistence upon bringing other minds into the alliance that drove us into a jealous rage. We didn’t understand …”
“Never mind, lubymetsa. I forgive you.” A tinge of frost hardened his smile. “But I will tell you now that your childish scheme never could have succeeded. As you were born to my service, I implanted a mental safeguard deep in your unconscious. You need me, just as I need you.”
“I know,” she said. “I know.”
On the starship, confronted with hard evidence of her master’s mortality, Hydra had finally realized with frightening clarity that if Fury became impotent or died, she was finished. She had been a deluded fool to think that she could control a paramount mind like Marc’s and simultaneously plot the strategy of the upcoming Rebellion all by herself. The other Hydra-units who might have assisted her were dead. Alone, she would never be able to command the direction of an interstellar war, insuring the victory of the Second Milieu. Not even Mental Man would tip the scales in her favor, for the swift-ripening conflict might not wait upon His coming.
No … she needed Fury, who was superior to her in every meta-function and infinitely wiser in evil. He had offered her second place, and she was willing to accept it.
If it was not already too late.
When the Mental Man project was conceived by Fury and first described to the Hydra-unit named Madeleine Remillard, she thought that it might provide the perfect way of slipping the bond of dependency. Why shouldn’t she be Mental Man’s master, with uncounted numbers of paramount minions? All it needed was for the newborn minds to bond to her, rather than to Marc or Fury! And they would have—after Marc himself was enslaved, according to the long-standing plan.
And Fury was dead.
In the days when the other three Hydra-units were still alive, she had dared to hope that Fury could somehow be eliminated from the picture, leaving her in control. So long as Fury remained a subordinate persona residing in Denis Remillard’s body, the monster was dependent upon Hydra’s interface to the physical world. Killing Denis would not be easy, but she had worked out several practical plans of action over the years, thinking that the opportunity might come.
Even after the deaths of Quentin, Celine, and Parnell, after she had begun the new work on Astrakhan, she had clung to her dream of becoming the master.
But then a shattering event had occurred. Without warning, Fury’s newly integrated mind in its creatively transformed body had suddenly appeared to her on the Russian world—the dual personae merged at last and the Fury component finally in control of a physical body and no longer dependent upon Hydra.
Even more amazing, Fury had undoubtedly generated an upsilon-field mentally and teleported 2910 lightyears through hyperspace! Reborn, he was stronger than Marc Remillard, stronger than Jack the Bodiless or Diamond Mask—and certainly invulnerable to any threat she might pose to his safety.
At first she had been reduced to dismayed stupefaction, only grateful that the monster had refrained from searching the deep recesses of her mind where treachery lurked. Later, when resignation and acceptance replaced her initial terror, she had been eager to do whatever this renascent Fury commanded, without question.
The new strategy was already worked out.
Hydra was already in place, her identity as Chief of Staff to the Astrakhanian Intendant General established. Her politically corrupt predecessor had perished in a fiery groundcar smash and his replacement was a great surprise to the local bureaucracy: a charming, extremely attractive young woman of high metacoercive quotient named Lyudmila Pavlovna Arsanova, a recent immigrant from Rostov-na-Donu on the Old World. This amazing female swept through the crony-ridden office of Intendant General Ruslan Terekev like a whirlwind, striking fear into the hearts of those staffers who survived the purge and gratifying Dirigent Xenia Kudryasheva and the Astrakhanian Intendant Assembly—who had been about to impeach IG Terekev for gross incompetence.
Popular opinion held that it was the force of Arsanova’s personality that subsequently induced Ruslan to clean up his executive act. Within a scant five months after her appointment the Intendant General was transformed from a silly blowhard and rumored recipient of Chechen mafia favors into a fair simulacrum of a galactic statesman. Ruslan Terekev declared war on organized crime and broke the mafia’s power. His eye was now firmly fixed upon the commercial main chance. He was still an avowed Rebel, but a respectable one.
Fresh investment capital then began to pour into faltering Astrakhan—presumably as a result of the new climate of law and order, loosened government regulations, and hastily negotiated tax breaks. Immigration (from the Old World, and from Volhynia, Yakutia, and Polovtsia as well) skyrocketed when new colonists were offered rent-free housing for three orbits. The crowning achievement of Ruslan Redux came when the moribund Astrakhanian starship yards at Novonikolayevsk unexpectedly won the bid for fifty new Bering-class colonization transports destined for the Fourteenth Sector Base on Assawompsett. Terekev achieved the coup almost single-handedly, with discreet help from his brilliant Chief of Staff.
It was this latter triumph—along with some adroit under-the-table maneuvers by Hibernian Dirigent Rory Muldowney—that had made possible the upcoming meeting of Rebel leaders on the Irish planet. It seemed probable that Fury’s grand scheme for the establishment of a Second Milieu was about to receive a significant leg up, along with Hydra’s personal hopes and aspirations.
Provided that Fury remained in firm control of his faculties.
As the car rounded a massive promontory, Ruslan Terekev stared blindly out to sea, exerting his farsight in the increasingly poor visibility. “I can see the island about twenty-five kloms offshore. It’s as I remember it: the airspace barricaded with rho-field dampers, the house itself protected by ordinary electronic alarms and low-powered thoughtscreens. Nothing even an adept-class operant mind couldn’t farsense through with ease.”
Arsanova scowled. “How reckless of the Irish Dirigent, if his secret cache is a significant one.”
“Not at all. A powerful aboveground security system guarding a mere country retreat would of itself be suspicious. Muldowney relies instead upon both primitive and sophisticated methods to protect his treasure. The cache of weaponry is buried over fourteen hundred meters down in the bedrock beneath the island. It is also creatively disguised so that only the most meticulous deepsight scrutiny by a paramount mind would ever penetrate it—and then only after knowing it was there.”
“And you knew.”
Ruslan Terekev laughed.
“It’s still hard to believe that this man can have assembled any sort of significant arsenal,” she said. “Hibernia is not especially wealthy, even if it is a bastion of anti-Milieu sentiment.”
“Muldowney has had twenty years to gather his collection of arms,” Terekev noted, “together with an interesting personal incentive for doing so. He has cultivated friends in both high and low places who have assisted his schemes. A Planetary Dirigent whose people love and trust him is in a unique position to defy Milieu strictures. He controls both the import-export apparatus of his world and its local Magistratum, and has a much better chance of getting away with a colossal fiddle than a mere Intendant General does. I envy him! We are in a much more precarious position on Astrakhan.”
“If this meeting is a success,” Lyudmila said, “our vexing Dirigent Xenia Kudryasheva wil
l have to be dealt with. ODA has too many Milieu loyalists in its ranks for comfort. We cannot safely implement the starship modification plan if we must keep watching over our shoulders for Xenia Ivanovna and her inquisitive band of merry men.”
As the road continued to curve, taking them onto a long peninsula, the jagged silhouette of Rory Muldowney’s sizable private island became visible on the horizon, black against the sullen sky and heaving gray sea. A strobe beacon flashed from a distinctive triple peak at its eastern end. The place was named Inisfáil, which they understood meant “isle of destiny.”
“It’s going to rain again soon,” Lyudmila remarked. “Look at that squall line coming toward us—”
“Mila!” He tensed. His hands, pressed against the console, were white-knuckled. “I think there are people somewhere close by! Slow down. Call up a terrain scan! How far are we from Dumha Sí?”
“Chuy yego znayet,” she hissed, hitting the decelerator. “How should I know?” Her own heart was thudding and her hastily deployed seekersense detected nothing. The navigation display showed that a cove with steep walls lay some eight kilometers ahead, around the other side of the rugged peninsula.
Terekev studied the monitor. For an instant his brown eyes, dull as pebbles, showed a flash of the old electric sapphire. “That’s where they are, in that cove! Three of them, and all weakly operant! They’re on the beach, doing something that I can’t make out. We couldn’t have asked for a better situation. Drive on! Drive on!”
She pushed the Mercedes up to 150 kph in manual mode, overriding the UNSAFE CONDITIONS alert. The sky had darkened abruptly with the approach of the squall from the northwest and the car’s headlamps switched to high beam. The narrowing peninsula became a jagged blade of rock with the twisting road carved from a precipitous slope. Surf crashed on the rocks below, throwing white water 30 meters into the air. The island had disappeared behind an onrushing curtain of rain.
They rounded the tip of the peninsula. She said, “Almost there—ah, yibitskaya sila! Now what?”
The console navigation unit bleeped, drowning out her exclamation of astonishment, and uttered a loud warning: “Cruifall alert! Cruifall alert! Executing mandatory autodeceleration sequence.”
In seconds, the view through the car’s windscreen was obscured by a reddish, gelatinous substance that defied the efforts of the rainionizer. Lyudmila Arsanova was effectively blinded. Before she could use her farsight the car braked automatically and came to a stop on the narrow shoulder of the road. Through the side windows they could see that the tumultuous downpour had turned sticky crimson, coating the pavement and portions of the landscape with gory slime.
“Is it my imagination,” she said, “or is that stuff moving?” She mouthed another Russian obscenity and hit the computer INQUIRY pad. “Define cruifall!”
The artificial voice said: “Cruifall is a meteorological phenomenon peculiar to Loch Mór in the Connemara Intendancy of the planet Hibernia. During periods of high winds and quasi-waterspout activity, the wormlike planktonic marine organism Xenohydrobdella praecipitans, in Irish called cruimh fearthain, one to two centimeters in length and colored blood-red or brown, is sucked into the air from the surface of the sea and subsequently falls again with the rain. Cruifall is generally harmless to the environment, although it may occasion temporary inconvenience to mariners or shore dwellers because of the slipperiness of the gelatinous organisms or their obstruction of visibility. When dry, the cruimh crumbles away to a fine dust. For detailed information on the life cycle of the cruimh, please say MORE.”
Lyudmila Arsanova maintained a frustrated silence. Ruslan Terekev, staring into space with an expression of breathless anticipation, softly said, “The people are down below us, Mila. Right here. There’s a track leading to the cove’s beach not ten meters ahead.”
The computer announced: “This vehicle is equipped with windscreen wipers and waterspray equipment designed to alleviate cruifall. For activation, please say GO.”
“Idi k yebanoiy matyeri!” Lyudmila cried. “Stupid computer—now you tell us! Go.”
The mechanical wipers popped out of their slots and turned on, producing two cleared semicircles on the glass. Nudging the Mercedes to go ahead dead slow, Lyudmila steered onto a treacherous stony ramp with a grade of nearly 35 percent. Bumping and skidding, the big car crawled down to the storm-tossed shore.
There, splayed helplessly on the pocked strata above the surf line, lay a stranded sea-monster with an arched carapace at least 20 meters long and dozens of fringed tentacles like hairy fire hoses. Several of the tentacles were still moving. Two men and a woman dressed in yellow slicksuits, ignoring the cruifall, were using Matsushita laser cutters to zap the huge creature into pieces of convenient size. An open-bed crawler emblazoned AN LEACHT ORGANIC FERTILIZERS LTD stood ready to be loaded.
“Get the AV recorder,” Lyudmila said quietly. “Open your window.”
Ruslan retrieved the instrument from the back seat with his PK. As they came to a halt a dozen meters away from the scavengers, he rolled down the window and began to pan the scene, oblivious of the slimy downpour. One of the Hibernians waved. After a few minutes he ambled over while his mates continued to shovel chunks of flesh into an antigrav tote.
“Céad míle fáilte! Tourists, are ye, then?” Ruslan and Lyudmila nodded at the man and smiled. The scavenger gave an amiable operant salute with a bloody glove. He was considerably older than the other two workers. “ ’Tis a sorry thing to have to welcome ye to our darlin’ planet in a worm-storm, but I think the cruifall may be nearly over.”
“We don’t mind. We find it very interesting!” Lyudmila gushed. “What kind of creature is that you’re working on, Citizen?”
“An ollphéistmhara, one of the local marine beasts. Ye might think of it as a kind of cross between a turtle and a squid. Nasty great bastards if you meet ’em in a small boat. They’re a protected species in their sanctuary further along the coast, but fair game hereabouts when the waves wash ’em ashore. Where are ye from?”
“The Russian world of Astrakhan,” Ruslan said. “Would you mind if we came out of the car and got a closer look at the animal?”
The scavenger shrugged. “Ye’ll likely mess up your fine clothes, but come ahead. When the wormies dry, ye can brush ’em off easily enough.” He turned away. “I must be getting back to me work. Stay clear of the tentacles. The brute is still alive.”
They climbed out and cautiously negotiated the slippery rock slabs. The rain with its crimson cargo was indeed letting up, but the wind blew stronger than ever, driving salt spray from the breakers at them horizontally and soaking their clothing in seconds. Neither of them paid any attention to the discomfort.
Lyudmila spoke on the intimate mode: First we must subdue them with a coercive metaconcert and compel them to move back into the shelter of those rocks where they are out of sight of the road. Then we can begin to feed. Are you sure you’re all right?
Ruslan’s eyes had brightened and he moved without hesitation. He said: All right—? I’m exhilarated Mila! Look at them all three strong and operant. Zayadis’! What unbelievable luck!
He held up the camcorder and called out to the scavengers with declamatory telepathy: Please! One pose of all three in front of the creature without your tools.
With good-natured grins, the men and woman downed their cutters and linked arms.
Fury and Hydra moved closer, minds conjoined.
YOU ARE OURS.
The three Hibernians staggered, as though a blast of wind had caught them off-balance. Then they stood paralyzed, staring incredulously at the outland tourists.
YOU WILL FOLLOW US.
In single file, the trio marched after their captors into a narrow, sheltered corridor of broken limestone overgrown with vinelike succulents. The force of the gale was cut off, although it still roared overhead. The rain and the cruifall had stopped.
YOU … AND YOU. SIT THERE.
The men sank down onto the
messy shingle among the shells and flotsam. Their faces were slack but their eyes were alive with anger. The woman stood swaying, helpless, her glance darting from one predator to another in bewilderment. The Hydra tore off the woman’s sou’wester hat, releasing a cascade of chestnut hair. She was no more than twenty years old, with rosy cheeks and full lips. Strong hands ripped open the fasteners of the red-smeared yellow slicksuit and the young woman stepped dazedly out of it, clad in clean white polypro underwear. Her figure was richly curved, the nipples of her full breasts straining against the taut fabric. When the Hydra gripped the victim’s shoulders her mouth opened in a voiceless scream that rang in the minds of the others. The two men moaned but did not move.
Hydra said: This one is ready for your/your feeding [image].
Fury had removed his overcoat and fur hat. His eyes were transmuted to luminous blue as he studied the petrified Hibernian woman. Finally, he reached out and touched the top of her head with a single finger. There was a blinding flash. An odor of burning hair filled the air and the prey went limp in Hydra’s supporting arms. The head fell forward and on the crown was a peculiar design like a many-petaled flower, scorched into the skin of the scalp.
Take her Fury come and take her!
He came up behind the body, enfolding it in his arms and crushing it against his aroused flesh. His aura sprang forth, dazzling emerald shot through with azure, engulfing the two of them. Instinctively, he pressed his lips to the font of life at the victim’s crown, stopping her heart for the first time.
You/you already know. But see [image] the seven chakra points along the head and spine? Drink from them as you/you take her.
Hydra’s own feeding aura kindled, ravenous gold edged with carmine. She plucked the older man from the ground as though he were a doll, stripped him naked, and expertly broke his neck. When his head sagged forward she embraced him, burying her face in the grizzled curls of his pate and setting him afire. Her hands, gripping his haunches, ground his pelvis against her own, forcing him into her.