The Reality Dysfunction

“The human elementals may attack you again,” Reza warned. “Before the Sleeping God arrives.”

  “We know. We pray hard.” Waboto-YAU twittered mournfully, head swinging round to gaze at the disk. “Now you have heard the fate of Coastuc-RT. Are you able to assist soldier caste in defence?”

  “No.” Reza heard Kelly’s hissed intake of breath. “Our weapons are not as powerful as those of your soldiers. We cannot assist in your defence.”

  “Then go.”

  Vast tracts of electric, electromagnetic, and magnetic energy seethed and sparked across a roughly circular section in the outermost band of Murora’s rings, eight thousand kilometres in diameter. Dust, held so long in equilibrium, exploited its liberation to squall in microburst vortices around the solid imperturbable boulders and jagged icebergs which made up the bulk of the ring, their gyrations mirroring the rowdy cloudscape a hundred and seventy thousand kilometres below. The epicentre, where the Lady Macbeth had plunged into the drive-fomented particles, was still glowing a nervous blue as brumal waves of static washed through the thinning molecular zephyr of vaporized rock and ice.

  The total energy input from the starship’s fusion drives and the multiple combat-wasp explosions was taking a long time to disperse. Their full effect would take months if not years to sink back to normality.

  Thermally and electromagnetically, the rippling circle was the equivalent of an Arctic whiteout to any probing sensors.

  It meant the Maranta and the Gramine knew little of what was going on below the surface. They kept station ten kilometres above the fuzzy boundary where boulders and ice gave way first to pebbles and then finally dust; all sensor clusters extended, focused on the disquieted strata of particles under their hulls. For the first couple of kilometres the image was sharp and reasonably clear, below that it slowly disintegrated until at seven kilometres there was nothing but a sheet of electronic slush.

  The possessed who commanded the starships now had started their search right at the heart, the exact coordinate where Lady Macbeth had entered.

  Then Maranta had manoeuvred into an orbit five kilometres lower, while the Gramine had raised its altitude by a similar amount. They slowly drifted apart, Maranta edging ahead of the phosphorescent blue splash, Gramine falling behind.

  There had been no sign of their prey. Nor any proof to confirm the Lady Macbeth had survived her impact with the rings. No wreckage had been detected. Although it was a slim chance any ever would. If she had detonated when she hit, the blowout of her drive tubes’ escaping plasma would probably have vaporized most of her. And any fragments which did survive would have been flung over a huge area. The ring was eighty kilometres thick, enough volume to lose an entire squadron in.

  They were further hindered by the way their energistically charged bodies interfered with on-board systems. Sensors already labouring at the limit of their resolution to try and unscramble the chaos suffered infuriating glitches and power surges, producing gaps in the overall coverage.

  But the crews persevered. Debris was virtually impossible to locate, but an operating starship emitted heat, and electromagnetic impulses, and a strong magnetic flux. If she was there, they would find her eventually.

  The soldier-caste vassals stayed with them until the hovercraft reached the top of the Coastuc-RT’s valley. More tumid rain-clouds were approaching fast from the east, borne by the obdurate breeze. Reza judged they should just about reach the other hovercraft by the time they arrived. Both land and sky ahead were grey. Northwards, the red cloud cast a dispiriting corona, looking for all the world as though magma was floating, light as thistledown, through the air.

  “But why?” Kelly demanded as soon as the soldiers were left behind. “You saw how well armed they were, we would have been safe there.”

  “Firstly, Coastuc-RT is too close to the Juliffe basin. As your friend Shaun Wallace said, the cloud is spreading. It would reach the valley long before Joshua gets back. Secondly, that valley is tactical suicide.

  Anyone who gets onto the high ground above the village can simply bombard it into submission, or more likely destruction. There aren’t enough soldier and hunter vassals to keep the slopes clear. Right now Coastuc-RT is wide open to anything the possessed care to throw at it. And all the Tyrathca are doing to defend themselves is building giant effigies of spacegods and having a pray-in. We don’t need that kind of shit. By ourselves we stand a much better chance; we’re mobile and well armed. So tomorrow at first light we start doing exactly what Joshua said: we run for it, through the mountains.”

  Violent rain made a mockery of the hovercraft’s blazing monochrome headlight beams, chopping them off after five or six metres. It obscured the moons, the red cloud, it damn near hid the drooping, defeated grass below the gunwale. The pilots navigated by guidance blocks alone. It took them forty minutes to retrace their route back to the first tower house above the river.

  Sewell plugged a half-metre fission blade into his left elbow socket and confronted the blocked-up doorway. Water steamed and crackled as the blade came on. He placed the tip delicately against the wind-fretted cement, and pushed. The blade sank in, sending out a thick runnel of ginger sand which the rain smeared into the reeds at his feet. Relieved at how easy it was to cut, he started to slice down.

  Kelly was fourth in. She stood in musty darkness shaking her arms and easing her cagoule hood back. “God, there’s as much water inside this cagoule as out. I’ve never known rain like this.”

  “ ‘Tis a bleak night, this one,” Shaun Wallace said behind her.

  Reza stepped through the oval Sewell had cut, carrying two bulky equipment packs, TIP carbines slung over his shoulder. “Pat, Sal, check this place out.” Fenton and Ryall hurried in after their master, and immediately shook their coats, sending out a fountain of droplets.

  “Great,” Kelly muttered. The blocks clipped to her broad belt were slippery with water. She wiped them ineffectually on her T-shirt. “Can I come with you, please?”

  “Sure,” Pat said.

  She turned the seal catch on her bag, and searched round until she found a light stick. Shadows fled away. Collins disapproved of infrared visuals unless absolutely unavoidable.

  They were in a hall that ran the diameter of the tower. Archways led off into various rooms. A ramp at the far wall started to spiral upwards.

  Tyrathca didn’t, or couldn’t, use stairs, according to her didactic memory.

  Pat and Sal Yong started down the hall, Kelly followed. She realized Shaun Wallace was a pace behind. He was back in his LDC jump suit.

  Completely dry, she noticed enviously. Her armour-suit trousers squelched as she walked.

  “You don’t mind if I tag along, do you, Miss Kelly? I’ve never seen one of these places before.”

  “No.”

  “That Mr. Malin there, he’s a right one for doing things by the book. This place has been sealed up for years. What does he expect us to find?”

  “We won’t know till we look, will we?” she said coyly.

  “Why, Miss Kelly, I do believe you’re running me a ragged circle.”

  The house was intriguing: strange furniture, and startlingly human utensils. But there was little technology, the builders had obviously been given instructions on how to utilize wood. They were excellent carpenters.

  Rain drummed on the walls, adding to the sense of isolation and displacement as they mounted the ramp. Vassal castes had their own rooms; Kelly wasn’t sure if they could be called stables. Some rooms, for the soldiers, she guessed, had furniture. There was only a thin layer of dust. It was as though the tower had been set aside rather than abandoned. Given her current circumstances, it wasn’t the most reassuring of thoughts. The neural nanonics drank it all in.

  They found the first bodies on the second floor. Three housekeeper castes (the same size as a farmer), five hunters, and four soldiers. Desiccation had turned them into creased leather mummies. She wanted to touch one, but was afraid it would crumble to dust.

>   “They’re just sitting there, look,” Shaun Wallace said in a tamed voice.

  “There’s no food anywhere near them. They must have been waiting to die.”

  “Without the breeders, they are nothing,” Pat said.

  “Even so, ’tis a terrible thing. Like those old Pharaohs who had all their servants in their tombs with them.”

  “Were there any Tyrathcan souls in the beyond?” Kelly asked.

  Shaun Wallace paused at the bottom of the ramp to the third floor, his brow crinkling. “Now there’s a thing. I don’t think there were. Or at least, I never came across one.”

  “Different afterworld, perhaps,” Kelly said.

  “If they have one. They seem heathen creatures to me. Perhaps the Good Lord didn’t see fit to give them souls.”

  “But they have a god. Their own god.”

  “Do they now?”

  “Well, they’re hardly likely to have Jesus or Allah, are they? Not human messiahs.”

  “Ah, you’re a smart one, Miss Kelly. I take my hat off to you. I’d never have thought of that in a million years.”

  “It’s a question of environment and upbringing. I’m used to thinking in these terms. I’d be lost in your century.”

  “Oh, I can’t see that. Not at all.”

  There were more vassal-caste bodies on the third floor. The two breeders were together on the fourth.

  “Do they have love, these beasties?” Shaun Wallace asked, looking down at them. “They look like they do, to me. Dying together is romantic, I think. Like Romeo and Juliet.”

  Kelly ran her tongue round her cheeks. “You didn’t strike me as the Shakespeare type.”

  “Now don’t you go writing me off so quickly, you with your classy education. I’m a man of hidden depths, I am, Miss Kelly.”

  “Did you ever meet anyone famous in the beyond?” Pat asked.

  “Meeting!” He wrung his hands together with fulsome drama. “You’re talking about the beyond as if it’s some kind of social gathering. Lords and ladies spending the evening together over fine wine and a game of bridge. It’s not like that, Mr. Halahan, not at all.”

  “But did you?” the mercenary scout persisted. “You were there for centuries. There must have been someone important.”

  “Ah now, there was that, as I recall. A gentleman by the name of Custer.”

  Pat’s neural nanonics ran a fast check. “An American army general? He lost a fight with the Sioux Indians in the nineteenth century.”

  “Aye, that’s the one. Don’t be telling me you’ve heard of him in this day and age?”

  “He’s in our history courses. How did he feel about it? Losing like that?”

  Shaun Wallace’s expression cooled. “He didn’t feel anything about it, Mr. Halahan. He was like all of us, crying without tears to shed. You’re equating death with sanity, Mr. Halahan. Which is a stupid thing to do, if you don’t mind me saying. You’ve heard of Hitler now? Surely, if you’ve heard of poor damned George Armstrong Custer?”

  “We remember Hitler. Though he was after your time, I think.”

  “Indeed he was. But do you think he changed after he died, Mr. Halahan? Do you think he lost his conviction, or his righteousness? Do you think death causes you to look back on life and makes you realize what an ass you’ve been? Oh no, not that, Mr. Halahan. You’re too busy screaming, you’re too busy cursing, you’re too busy coveting your neighbour’s memory for the bitter dregs of taste and colour it gives you. Death does not bestow wisdom, Mr. Halahan. It does not make you humble before the Lord. More’s the pity.”

  “Hitler,” Kelly said, entranced. “Stalin, Genghis Khan, Jack the Ripper, Helmen Nyke. The butchers and the warlords. Are they all there? Waiting in the beyond?”

  Shaun Wallace gazed up at the domed ceiling partially lost amid a tapestry of shadows thrown by sparse alien architecture; for a moment his features portraying every year of his true age. “Aye, they’re all there, Miss Kelly, every one of the monsters the good earth ever spawned. All of them aching to come back, waiting for their moment to be granted. Us possessed, we might be wanting to hide from the open sky, and death; but it’s not paradise we’re going to be making down here on this planet. It couldn’t be, there’ll be humans in it, you see.”

  It wasn’t true daybreak, not yet. The sun was still half an hour from bringing any hint of grizzled light to the eastern horizon. But the rain-clouds had blown over, and night had sapped the wind’s brawn. The northern sky glowed with a grievous fervour, blemishing the savannah grass a murky crimson.

  Octan watched the dark speck moving along the side of the river, heading upstream towards the Tyrathcan tower house. Heavy moist air stroked the eagle’s feathers as he dipped a wing, curving down in a giddy voluted dive. Pat Halahan gazed out at the lonely nocturnal wanderer through his affinity bonded friend’s narrow peerless eyes.

  Kelly came awake at the touch of a hand on her shoulder, and the sound of feet rapping on the hard dry floor of the second storey, where the team had rested up for the night. Neural nanonics accelerated her fatigue-soaked brain into full alertness.

  The last of the combat-boosted mercenaries were disappearing down the ramp.

  “Someone coming,” Shaun Wallace said.

  “Your people?”

  “No. I’d know if it was. Not that Mr. Malin asked, mind you.” He sounded cheerful.

  “Good heavens, anyone would think he doesn’t trust you.” She shoved back the foil envelope she’d been sleeping in. Shaun Wallace offered his hand to help her to her feet. They made their way down the ramp to the ground-floor hall.

  The seven mercenaries were clustered round the hole in the door, red light shining dully off their artificial skin. Fenton and Ryall were on their feet, growling softly as they were caught in the backwash of agitation coming from their master’s mind.

  Reza and Sewell slipped through the hole as Kelly reached them.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “Horse coming,” Pat told her. “Two riders.”

  Kelly peered round him just as Reza and Sewell activated their chameleon circuits and flicked into the landscape. For a few seconds she tracked them thanks to the circular medical nanonic package on the big combat-adept’s leg, but even that was soon lost amongst the unsavoury coloured grass.

  It was one of the plough horses favoured by the colonists. A young one, but clearly on its last legs; the neck was drooping as it plodded gamely along, mouth flecked with foam. Reza worked his way unobtrusively down the slope from the tower house towards the animal, leaving Sewell to cover him. His optical sensors showed him the two people on its back; both wore stained poncho capes cut from a canvas tarpaulin. The man was showing the first signs of age, stubble shading heavy jowls, temples touched with grey; and he’d recently lost a lot of weight by the look of him. But he had a vigour animating his frame which was visible even from Reza’s position across the swaying grass. The young boy behind him had been crying at some time, he had also been soaked during the ride, and now he was shivering, clinging to the man in a wearied daze.

  They didn’t pose any threat, Reza decided. He waited until the horse was twenty metres away, then switched off his chameleon circuit. The horse took a few more paces before the man noticed him with a start. He reined in the lethargic animal and leaned over its neck to peer at Reza in bewilderment.

  “What manner of ... You’re not a possessed, you don’t have their emptiness.” His fingers clicked. “Of course! Combat boosted, that’s what you are. You came down from the starships yesterday.” He smiled and whooped, then swung a leg over the horse and slithered to the ground.

  “Come on, Russ, down you come, boy. They’re here, the navy marines are here. I said they’d come, didn’t I? I told you, never give up faith.” The boy virtually fell off the horse into his arms.

  Reza went over to help. The man was none too steady on his feet, either, and one of his hands was heavily bandaged.

  “Bless you, my son.”
Horst Elwes embraced the surprised mercenary with tears of gratitude and supreme relief shining in his eyes. “God bless you. These weeks have been the sorest trial my Lord has ever devised for this weak mortal servant. But now you are here after all this time spent alone in the Devil’s own wilderness. Now we are saved.”

  Chapter 11

  Boston had fallen to the possessed, not that the rapidly disintegrating convocation of Norfolk’s martial authorities would admit it.

  Edmund Rigby looked out of the hotel window, across the provincial city’s steep slate rooftops. Fires were still burning in the outlying districts where the militia troops had tried to force their way in. The Devonshire market square had been struck by a navy starship’s maser last Duchess-night. Its granite cobbles had transmuted to a glowing lava pool in less than a second. Even now, with its surface congealing and dimming, the heat was enough to barbecue food. Nobody had been in the square at the time; it was intended as a demonstration only. A show of naval might: you there, ant folk crawling on the filthy ground far below, we angels above have the very power of life and death over all of you. As one, the possessed had laughed at the circling starships, rendered impotent by their lack of targets. Yes, they had the physical power to destroy, but the fingers on the trigger were snared in the perpetual dilemma of the great and the good. Hostages had always struck a paralysing blow into the heart of governments. The starships wanted to pour sterilizing fire down from the sky, the officers yearning to burn the loathsome low-life crop of anarchists and revolutionaries from the pastoral idyll planet, but the city hadn’t been cleaned of decent people, the women and children and frail, kindly grandparents. As far as the planetary authorities and navy officers knew this was just an uprising, a political revolt, they believed the meek were still mingled with the wolves. The lofty orbiting angels had been castrated.

  Even if they suspected, believed the rumours of atrocities and massacres flittering from mouth to mouth through the nearby countryside, they could do nothing. Boston was no longer alone in its dissent, it was simply the first. Edmund Rigby had planted the germs of insurgency in every city across the planet’s islands, cabals of possessed who were already annexing the populace. A captain in the Australian Marines, he had died from a landmine explosion in Vietnam in 1971; but he had studied military tactics, had even been sent to the Royal Naval College in Dartmouth for officer training. And this vast space empire of Confederated planets, for all its awesome technology, was no different to the Earth upon which he had once walked. Vietcong insurgency tactics from the past were just as applicable now, and he knew them by heart. Securing the entire planet had been his principal objective since the vast merchant fleet had left Norfolk after midsummer.