The Reality Dysfunction

  “Don’t blame ’em,” Pat said.

  Kelly’s communication block reported that a signal was being beamed down from the geostationary satellites, coded for their team. It was a very powerful broadcast, completely non-directional.

  “Kelly, Reza, don’t respond to this,” Joshua said. “It looks like our communications are wide open to the invaders, which is why I’m transmitting on a wide footprint, a directional beam will pinpoint you for them. OK, situation update; we’ve got big problems up here. Several spaceplanes were taken over while they were on the ground, the invaders are now busy hijacking starships, but nobody can tell which ones. You know Ashly wasn’t sequestrated, so that means you should be able to trust me. But don’t take orders from anyone else, especially don’t broadcast your location. Problem two, a navy squadron has just arrived and shut down the strike mission. Jesus, it’s a total fucking shambles in orbit right now. Some of the hijacked ships are trying to run for a jump coordinate, I’ve got voidhawks blocking the Lady Mac’s patterning nodes, and two of my fellow combat-capable trader starships are heading up to intercept the navy squadron.

  “Your best bet is to turn round from that cloud and just keep going, out into the hinterlands somewhere. There’s no point in trying to locate the invader’s bases any more. I’ll do my best to pick you up in a day or two, if this cockup gets sorted by then. Stay alive, that’s all you have to worry about now. I’ll keep you informed when I can. Out.”

  The two hovercraft had finished erecting themselves. Sewell and Jalal were unpacking the energy matrices and superconductor fan motors ready to slot them into place.

  “Now what?” Ariadne asked. The team had all gathered around Reza.

  “Keep going,” he said.

  “But you heard what Joshua said,” Kelly exclaimed. “There’s no point. We have no orbital fire-power back-up, and no mission left. If we just manage to survive for the next few days it’s going to be a bloody miracle.”

  “You still haven’t grasped it yet, have you, Kelly?” Reza said. “This is bigger than Lalonde; this isn’t about doing a dirty job for money, not any more. These invaders are going to challenge the entire Confederation.

  They have the power. They can change people, their minds, their bodies; mould whole planets into something new, something that we have no part in. Some time soon those ships in orbit are going to have to try and attack, to put a stop to it all. It doesn’t matter whether it is Smith or the navy squadron. If the invaders aren’t stopped here, they’ll keep on coming after us. Sure we can run, but they’ll catch us, if not out in the hinterlands than back at Tranquillity, or even Earth if you want to run that far. But not me. Everyone has to make a stand eventually, and mine is right here. I’m going to find a base and let the ships know.”

  Kelly held her tongue, she could well imagine how Reza would react to her wheedling.

  “More like it!” Sal Yong proclaimed.

  “OK,” Reza said. “Finish fitting out the hovercraft, and get our gear stowed.”

  It took a surprisingly short five minutes to complete their preparations and clamber in. Fully assembled the hovercraft was a simple affair, with a big fan at the rear and two cycloidal impellers filling the skirt with air. It was steered mechanically, by vanes behind the fan.

  Kelly sat on a bench at the rear of her craft, riding with Sal Yong, Theo Connal, and Ariadne. Now the decision had been made, she was quite glad to be free of the pack and walking through the jungle.

  Reza’s lead hovercraft moved out from the bank, skimming easily over the snowlilies, and turned downstream. Fenton and Ryall sat in the prow, blunt heads thrust out into the wind as they picked up speed.

  Chapter 09

  One thing Princess Kirsten had always insisted on after ascending to the throne of the Principality of Ombey was keeping breakfast a family affair. Crises could come and go, but giving the children quality time was sacrosanct.

  Burley Palace, where she ruled from, was situated at the top of a gently sloping hill in the middle of Ombey’s capital, Atherstone. Its pre-eminent location gave the royal apartments at the rear of the sprawling stone edifice a grand view over the parks, gardens, and elegant residential buildings which made up the city’s eastern districts. Away in the distance was the haze-blurred line of deeper blue that was the ocean.

  Atherstone was only fifteen degrees south of the equator, putting it firmly in the tropical climate belt, but the early morning breeze coming in off the ocean kept the temperature bearable until about ten o’clock.

  So Kirsten had the servants set the table on the broad, red-tiled balcony outside her bedroom, where she could sit amid the yellow and pink flowers of the aboriginal tolla vines that choked the back of the palace, and have a leisurely hour with her husband and three natural-born children.

  Zandra, Emmeline, and Benedict were aged seven, five, and three respectively, the only naturally conceived children she and Edward had produced. Their first five offspring had been gestated in exowombs after the zygotes had been carefully geneered to the latest physiological pinnacle which the Kulu geneticists had achieved. It was the Saldana family way; incorporating the freshest advances into each new generation, or at least that part of it destined to actually hold high office. Always the elder children, following the old Earth European aristocratic tradition.

  Kirsten’s first five children would probably live for around two hundred years, whereas she herself and the natural-born three could only hope for about a hundred and eighty years. She had been sixty-six in 2608, when she was crowned in Atherstone Cathedral, two months after her brother Alastair II had assumed the throne on Kulu. As the ninth child, she had always been destined (barring an accident among her older brothers and sister) to rule Ombey, the newest principality.

  Like all her nine exowomb siblings, and the five natural-born children of her mother and father, she was tall and physically robust; geneering gave her dark red hair and an oval face with well-rounded cheeks—and of course a thin nose with a tip that curved down.

  But geneering could only provide the physical stamina necessary for the stresses resulting in a century of wielding the supreme authority vested in a reigning monarch. She had been in training for the intellectual challenge from birth; first loaded up with the theory, endless politics and economics and management didactic courses, then five years at Nova Kong University learning how to apply them. After serving a twelve-year naval commission (compulsory for all senior Saldanas) she was given divisional management positions in the Kulu Corporation, the massive kingdom-wide utilities, transport, engineering, energy, and mining conglomerate founded by Richard Saldana when he settled Kulu (and still owned solely by the king), graduating up to junior cabinet posts. It was career designed with the sole intent of giving her unrivalled experience on the nature and use of power for when she came to the throne.

  Only the siblings of the reigning monarch ruled the Kingdom’s principalities on his behalf, keeping the family in direct command. The hierarchy was long established and extraordinarily successful in binding together nine star systems which were physically spread over hundreds of light-years. The only time it had ever come near to failure was when Crown Prince Michael germinated Tranquillity; and the Saldana family would never let anything like that happen again.

  Kirsten came out onto the balcony the morning after the Ekwan’s arrival feeling distinctly edgy. Time Universe had been triumphantly broadcasting its Laton exclusive since yesterday evening. She had given the news programmes a quick scan after she woke, and the deluge hadn’t yet abated.

  Speculation over the Ekwan and Guyana’s code two alert was red hot. For the first time since her coronation she found herself considering censorship as an option for calming the mounting media hysteria.

  Certainly there would have to be some sort of official statement before the day was over.

  She pushed up the voluminous sleeves of her rising robe and looked out over the superb lawns with their mixture of terrestrial and xenoc
flower-beds, and the artificial lakes graced by black swans. The sky was a deep indigo, without any cloud. Another gorgeous, balmy day; if not in paradise, then as close as she would ever see. But the sunshine panorama left her unmoved. Laton was a name which carried too many adolescent fear-images with it. Her political instinct was telling her this wasn’t a crisis that would blow over in the night. Not this one.

  That same political instinct which had kept the Saldana family securely on their various thrones for four hundred years.

  The children’s nanny brought her excitable charges out of the nursery, and Kirsten managed to smile and kiss them all and make a fuss. Edward lifted little Benedict into his lap, while she seated Emmeline next to her own chair. Zandra sat at her place and reached eagerly for the jug of dorze juice.

  “Grace first,” Kirsten admonished.

  “Oh, Mummy!”

  “Grace.”

  Zandra sighed woundedly, clasped her hands together and moved her lips.

  “Now can I eat?”

  “Yes, but don’t bolt it.” She signalled one of the four attendant footmen to bring her own tea and toast.

  Edward was feeding Benedict slim slices of bread along with his boiled egg. “Is the news still all Laton?” he asked over Emmeline’s head.

  “Yes,” Kirsten said.

  He pulled a sympathetic face, and dangled another bread soldier in front of a cheerful Benedict.

  They had been married forty years. A good marriage by any reasonable standards, let alone an institution as odd as a royal marriage. Edward was old money, titled as well, and an ex-navy officer who had served with some distinction. He was also geneered, which was a big plus; the court liked matches with the same range of life expectancy—it made things tidy.

  They hadn’t quite been pushed into it by the family, but the pressure had been there for someone like him. All the senior Saldanas displayed for public consumption the Christian monogamy ideal. Divorce was, of course, out of the question. Alastair was head of Kulu’s Church, Defender of the Faith throughout the Kingdom. Royalty didn’t break the commandments, not publicly.

  However, she and Edward enjoyed a relationship of mutual respect, and trust, and even considerable fondness. Maybe love had been there too at the start of it, forty years ago. But what they had now was enough to carry them through the next century together without bitterness and regret. Which was an achievement in itself. When she thought of her brother Claude’s marriage ...

  “Mummy’s thinking again,” Emmeline announced loudly.

  Kirsten grinned. “Thinking what to do with you.”

  “What?” Emmeline squealed.

  “Depends what you’ve done wrong.”

  “Nothing! Ask Nanny, I’ve been good. All day.”

  “She pinched Rosy Oldamere’s swimming towel yesterday,” Zandra said.

  Emmeline burst into giggles. “You said you wouldn’t tell.”

  “It was so funny. Miss Eastree had to lend Rosy hers, she was shivering all over.”

  “Her skin was turning blue,” Emmeline said proudly.

  “Who’s Laton?” Zandra asked.

  “A bad man,” Edward said.

  “Is he on Ombey?”

  “No,” Kirsten said. “Now eat your rice chips.”

  Her neural nanonics gave a silent chime, which warned her from the start it was going to be bad news; her equerry would never allow a datavised message through unless it was serious, not at breakfast. She accessed the Defence and Security Council datapackage.

  “Trouble,” she said resentfully.

  Edward glanced over as she rose.

  “I’ll help get them ready for day club,” he said.

  “Thanks.” He was a good man.

  She walked through the private apartments and emerged into the wide marbled corridor which led to the cabinet offices, drawing startled looks and hurried bows from staff who were in early. She was still dressed in her turquoise and grey rising robe.

  The official reception room was a decagonal chamber with a vaulting roof that dripped chandeliers. A horizontal sheet of sunlight was pouring in through a ring of azure windows halfway up the walls. Pillars were inlaid with gold and platinum under a lofriction gloss which kept the metal permanently agleam. Holoprints of impossibly violent stellar events alternated with oil paintings around the walls. There were no modern dreamphase or mood-effusion works; the Saldanas always favoured antiquity for the intimation of timeless dignity it gave.

  Three people were waiting for her in the middle of the black tushkwood tile floor. Sylvester Geray was at their head; her equerry, a thirty-six-year-old captain wearing his Royal Kulu Navy dress uniform.

  Hopelessly formal, she always thought, but he hadn’t put a foot wrong since he took up the post three months after her coronation.

  The other two, both wearing civilian suits, were a less welcome sight.

  Roche Skark, the director of the ESA office on Ombey, smiled politely at his princess and inclined his head. Despite geneering, he was a rotund man, in his eighties, and twenty centimetres shorter than Kirsten. He had held his post for thirteen years, dealing with threats and perceived threats throughout the sector with pragmatism and a judicious application of abstruse pressure on the people who counted. Foreign governments might grumble endlessly about the ESA and its influence and meddling in local internal politics, but there was never any solid proof of involvement.

  Roche Skark didn’t make the kind of elementary mistakes which could lead to the diplomatic embarrassment of his sovereign.

  Jannike Dermot, on the other hand, was quite the opposite of the demure ESA director. The fifty-year-old woman wore a flamboyant yellow and purple cord stripe suit of some expensive silk-analogue fabric, with her blonde hair arranged in a thick, sweep-back style. It was the kind of consummate power dressing favoured by corporate executives, and she looked the part. However, her business was strictly the grubbier side of the human condition: she was the chief of the Internal Security Agency on Ombey, responsible for the discreet maintenance of civil order throughout the principality. Unlike its more covertly active sister agency, the ISA was mostly concerned with vetting politicians and mounting observations on subversives or anyone else foolish enough to question the Saldana family’s right to rule. Ninety-five per cent of its work was performed by monitor programs; fieldwork by operatives was kept to a minimum. Also within its province was the removal of citizens deemed to be enemies of the state; which—contrary to popular myth—was actually a reasonably benign affair. Only people who advocated and practised violence were physically eliminated, most were simply and quietly deported to a Confederation penal planet from which there was never any return.

  Quite where the boundaries of the respective agencies’ operational fields were drawn tended to become a little blurred at times, especially in the asteroid settlements or the activities of foreign embassy personnel.

  Kirsten, who chaired Ombey’s Defence and Security Council, often found herself arbitrating such disputes between the two. It always privately amused her that despite the nature of their work the agencies were both basically unrepentant empire-building bureaucracies.

  “Sorry to disturb you, ma’am,” Sylvester Geray said. “The matter was deemed urgent.”

  “Naturally,” Kirsten said. She datavised a code at one set of high double doors, and gestured for them to follow. “Let’s get on with it.”

  The doors opened into her private office. It was a tastefully furnished room in white and powder blue, though lacking in the ostentation of the formal State Office next door where she received diplomats and politicians. French windows looked out into a tiny walled garden where fountains played in a couple of small ornamental ponds. Glass-fronted cabinets and bookshelves stood around the walls, heavy with exquisite gifts from visitors and institutions who enjoyed her patronage. A malachite bust of Alastair II sat on a pedestal in an alcove behind her desk (Allie looking over her shoulder, as always). A classic Saldana face, broadly handso
me, with a gravity the sculptor had captured perfectly. She remembered her brother practising that sombre poise in the mirror when he was a teenager.

  The doors swung shut and Kirsten datavised a codelock at them. The processor in her desk confirmed the study was now physically and electronically secure.

  “The datapackage said there has been a new development in the Ekwan case,” she said as she sat in her high-backed chair behind the desk.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Jannike Dermot said. “Unfortunately there has.”

  Kirsten waved a hand for them to sit. “I didn’t think it would be good news.”

  “I’d like to bring in Admiral Farquar,” Sylvester Geray said.

  “Of course.” Kirsten datavised the processor for a security level one sensenviron conference and closed her eyes.

  The illusion was of a curving featureless white chamber with a central oval table; Kirsten sat at the head, with Roche Skark and Pascoe Farquar on one side, and Jannike Dermot and Sylvester Geray on the other.

  Interesting that the computer should be programmed to seat the two agency directors opposite each other, she thought.

  “I would like to formally request a system-wide code two defence alert,” the Admiral said as his opening gambit.

  Kirsten hadn’t been expecting that. “You believe Laton will attack us?” she asked mildly. Only she could issue a code two alert, which allowed the military to supersede all civil administration, and requisition whatever personnel and materials it required. Basically it was a declaration of martial law. (A code one alert was a full declaration of war, which only Alastair could proclaim.)

  “It’s a little more complicated than that, ma’am,” the Admiral said. “My staff have been reviewing the whole Lalonde-Laton situation. Now this reporter Graeme Nicholson has confirmed Laton was present on the planet, we have to begin to consider other factors, specifically this energy virus which the Edenists reported.”

  “I find it quite significant they wanted their findings to be known,” Roche Skark said. “In fact they actually requested that we should be told. Which is an unusual step given the Kingdom’s standard relationship with Edenism. They obviously considered the threat dangerous enough to exceed any political differences. And considering what happened to our G66 troops in Lalonde’s jungle I believe they were totally justified.”