This Clio was a lucky woman.
> Eysk said. >
>
Mosul’s arm tightened that bit extra round her shoulder as they headed for the nearest tower. Almost proprietary, she thought.
> she asked on singular engagement, > It was a struggle to convey the emotional weight she wanted.
> He smiled as they passed under the archway at the foot of the tower.
She stared at him, dumbfounded. He had answered on the general affinity band, an extraordinary breach of protocol.
Mosul caught her expression, and sent a wordless query.
> she began. Then her thoughts flared in alarm. Oenone, she couldn’t perceive Oenone! “Mosul! It’s gone. No, wait. I can feel it, just. Mosul, something is trying to block affinity.”
“Are they?” His smile hardened into something which made her jerk away in consternation. “Don’t worry, little Syrinx. Delicate, beautiful little Syrinx, so far from home. All alone. But we treasure you for the gift you bring. We are going to welcome you into a brotherhood infinitely superior to Edenism.”
She spun round, ready to run. But there were five men standing behind her. One of them—she gasped—his head had grown until it was twice the size it should be. His features were a gross caricature, cheeks deep and lined, eyes wide and avian; his nose was huge, coming to a knife edge that hung below his black lips, both ears were pointed, rising above the top of his skull.
“What are you?” she hissed.
“Don’t mind old Kincaid,” Mosul said. “Our resident troll.”
It was getting lighter, the kind of liquid redness creeping across the island’s polyp which she associated with Duchess-night on Norfolk. Her legs began to shake. It was shameful, but she was so alone. Never before had she been denied the community of thoughts that was the wonder of Edenism. > The desperate shout crashed around the confines of her own skull. >
There was an answer. Not coherent, nothing she could perceive, decipher.
But somewhere on the other side of the blood-veiled sky the voidhawk cried in equal anguish.
“Come, Syrinx,” Mosul said. He held out his hand. “Come with us.”
It wasn’t Mosul. She knew that now.
“Never.”
“So brave,” he said pityingly. “So foolish.”
She was physically strong, her genes gave her that much. But there were seven of them. They half carried, half pushed her onwards.
The walls became strange. No longer polyp but stone. Big cubes hewn from some woodland granite quarry; and old, the age she thought she had seen on the approach flight. Water leaked from the lime-encrusted mortar, sliming the stone.
They descended a spiral stair which grew narrower until only one of them could march beside her. Syrinx’s ship-tunic sleeve was soon streaked with water and coffee-coloured fungus. She knew it wasn’t real, that it couldn’t be happening. There was no “down” in an Atlantean island. Only the sea. But her feet slipped on the worn steps, and her calves ached.
There was no red glow in the bowels of the island. Flaming torches in black iron brands lighted their way. Their acrid smoke made her eyes water.
The stairway came out onto a short corridor. A sturdy oak door was flung open, and Syrinx shoved through. Inside was a medieval torture chamber.
A wooden rack took up the centre of the room; iron chains wound round wheels at each end, manacles open and waiting. A brazier in one corner was sending out waves of heat from its radiant coals. Long slender metal instruments were plunged into it, metal sharing the furnace glow.
The torturer himself was a huge fat man in a leather jerkin. Rolls of hairy flesh spilled over his waistband. He stood beside the brazier, cursing the slender young woman who was bent over a pair of bellows.
“This is Clio,” Mosul’s stolen body said. “You did say you wanted to meet her.”
The woman turned, and laughed at Syrinx.
“What is the point?” Syrinx asked weakly. Her voice was very close to cracking.
“This is in your honour,” the torturer said. His voice was a deep bass, but soft, almost purring. “You, we shall have to be very careful with. For you come bearing a great gift. I don’t want to damage it.”
“What gift?”
“The living starship. These other mechanical devices for sailing the night gulf are difficult for us to employ. But your craft has elegance and grace. Once we have you, we have it. We can bring our crusade to new worlds with ease after that.”
>
“Oh, Syrinx.” Mosul’s handsome face wore the old sympathetic expression she remembered from such a time long ago now. “We have taken affinity from you. We have sent Oxley away. We have taken everybody from you. You are alone but for us. And believe me, we know what being alone does to an Edenist.”
“Fool,” she sneered. “That wasn’t affinity, it is love which binds us.”
“And we shall love the Oenone too,” a musical chorus spoke to her.
She refused to show any hint of surprise. “Oenone will never love you.”
“In time all things become possible,” the witching chorus sang. “For are we not come?”
“Never,” she said.
The corpulent paws of Kincaid the troll tightened around her arms.
Syrinx closed her eyes as she was forced towards the rack. This is not happening therefore I can feel no pain. This is not happening therefore I can feel no pain. Believe it!
Hands tore at the collar of her ship-tunic, ripping the fabric. Hot rancid air prickled her skin.
This is NOT happening therefore I can feel no pain. Not not not—
Ruben sat at his console station in Oenone’s bridge along with the rest of the crew. There were only two empty seats. Empty and accusing.
I should have gone down with her, Ruben thought. Maybe if I could have provided everything she needed from life she wouldn’t have gone running to Mosul in the first place.
> the Atlantean consensus said. >
>
>
>
>
Consensus was so large, so replete with wisdom, he found it easy to believe. An essential component of the quiddity.
> he said. >
> Oenone said. >
> the consensus said. >
The part of Ruben which had joined with the consensus was suddenly aware of Pernik igniting to solar splendour—and he was sitting strapped into a metal flea that spun and tossed erratically as it fell from the sky.
> Oenone cried. >
The voidhawk’s affinity voice was a thunderclap roar howling through the minds of its crew. Ruben thought he would surely be deafened. Serina sat with her mouth gaping wide, hands clamped over her ears, tears streaming down her face.
> > the consensus demanded.
But the voidhawk was beyond reason. It could feel its captain’s pain, her hopelessness as the white-hot metal seared into her flesh with brutal intricate skill while in her heart she thought of nothing but their love.
Lost in helpless rage its distortion effect twisted and churned like a frenzied captured beast pum
melling at its cage bars.
Gravity rammed Ruben down into his seat, then swung severely. His arms outside the webbing were sucked up towards the ceiling, their weight quadrupling. Oenone was tumbling madly, its energy patterning cells sending out vast random surges of power.
Tula was yelling at the voidhawk to stop. Loose pieces of junk were hurtling round the bridge—cups and plastic meal trays, a jacket, cutlery, several circuit wafers. Gravity was fluctuating worse than a roller-coaster ride. One moment they appeared to be hanging upside-down, the next they were at right angles, and always weighing too much. A spinning circuit wafer sliced past Edwin, nicking his cheek. Blood squirted out.
Ruben could just make out the calls of the other voidhawks in orbit above Atlantis, trying to calm their rampant cousin. They all started to alter course for a rendezvous. Together their distortion fields could probably nullify Oenone’s supercharged flailings.
Then the most violent convulsion of all kicked the crew toroid. Ruben actually heard the walls give a warning creak. One of the consoles buckled, big skinlike creases appearing in its composite sides as it concertinaed down towards the decking. Coolant fluid and sparks burst out of the cracks. He must have blacked out for a second.
Gravity was at a forty-degree angle to the horizontal when he came to, and holding steady.
> Oenone was braying.
Horrified, Ruben linked into the voidhawk’s sensor blisters. They were heading down towards Atlantis at two and a half gees. Reaction to the berserker power thundering through the energy patterning cells made the muscles in his arms and legs bunch like hot ropes.
Fast-moving specks were rising above the hazy blue-white horizon, skimming over the atomic fog of the thermosphere like flat stones flung across a placid sea. The other voidhawks: their calls redoubled in urgency. But Oenone was immune to them, to the Atlantean consensus’ imperious orders. Rushing to help its beloved.
They’re too far away, Ruben realized in dismay, they won’t reach us in time.
The consensus relaxed its contact with Oxley, allowing him complete independence to pilot the floundering flyer, letting his instinct and skill attempt to right the craft unencumbered. He shot order after order into the bitek processors, receiving a stream of systems information in return. The coherent magnetic generators were failing, databuses were glitched, the fusion generator was powering down, electron-matrix crystal power reserves were dropping. Whatever electronic warfare techniques Pernik had, they were the best he had ever encountered, and they were trying to kill him.
He concentrated on the few control channels which remained operational, reducing the spin and flattening out the dive. The faltering magnetic fields squeezed and pushed at glowing ion streams, countering the corkscrew trajectory. Black ocean and lustrous island chased each other round the sensor images at a decreasing rate.
There was no panic. He treated it as though it was just another simulation run. An exercise in logic and competence set by the CAB to try and trip him.
At the back of his mind he was aware of further pandemonium breaking out amid the consensus. A ghost image lying across the flyer’s sensor input visualization showed him Oenone plummeting towards the planet.
With only a kilometre of altitude left the flyer lost its spin. The nose was dangerously low. He poured the final power reserves into raising it, using the craft’s ellipsoid surface as a blunt wing, gaining a degree of lift in an attempt to glide-curve away from the island. Distance was his only chance of salvation now. Streaks of reflected starlight blurred on the sable water below, growing closer. There was no sign of the electronic warfare assault abating.
Pernik’s resplendent silhouette winked out. Silence detonated into the affinity consensus, absorbing the entire planet’s mental voice.
Into the emptiness came a single devastating identity trait.
> Laton said. >
The flyer’s crashed systems abruptly sprang back into zealous life. And a shock-numbed Oxley was pressed deep into his seat as it vaulted back into the sky.
Lewis Sinclair watched keenly as the torturer manipulated Syrinx’s mangled leg with a pair of ruddy glowing tongs and a mallet. She wasn’t screaming so loudly now. The fight was going out of her. But not the spirit, he suspected. She was one tough lady. He had seen the type before back in Messopia; cops mainly, the special forces mob, hard-eyed and dedicated. A pusher Lewis worked for had captured one once, and it didn’t matter what was done to the man, they couldn’t get him to tell them anything.
Lewis didn’t think the possessed were going to gain control of the voidhawk through Syrinx. But he didn’t say anything, let them sweat it.
It wasn’t so much his problem, possessing the island gave him a measure of security a mere human body could never offer. The range of physical sensations and experiences available to him was truly astonishing.
The sensitive cells woven through the polyp were fantastically receptive; people with their mundane eyes and ears and nose were almost insensate by comparison. His consciousness roved at random through the huge structure, tasting and sampling. He was getting the hang of splitting himself into multiples, supervising a dozen actions at once.
Syrinx groaned again as the souls from beyond sang into her mind with their strange icy promises. And Lewis saw a girl standing at the back of the dungeon. The quake her presence sent through his psyche perceptibly rocked the entire island, as though it had ridden over a tidal wave. It was her! The girl from Messopia, Thérèse, the one he’d fought and died over.
Thérèse was tall for thirteen, skinny, with breasts that had been pushed into maturity by a course of tailored growth hormones. Long raven hair, brown eyes, and a pretty, juvenile face with just the right amount of cuteness; everybody’s girl next door. She was wearing black leather shorts to show off her tight little arse, and her breasts were almost falling out of a scarlet halter top. Her pose was indolent, chewing at her gum, one hand on her hip.
> Lewis asked.
> the possessed Eysk asked.
>
Eysk turned round, then frowned angrily at the ceiling. >
>
Thérèse gave a bored sigh and sauntered out of the dungeon.
>
None of them answered him. He knew she was real, he could hear her clicking walk, feel the weight of her black stilettos on his polyp, olfactory cells picked up the sugary whiff of gum on her exhaled breath.
She walked away from the dungeon, down a long corridor. For some reason it was difficult to keep his perception focused on her. She was only walking, but she seemed to be moving so fast. He barely noticed as the polyp of the corridor gave way to concrete. The light became a harsh electric yellow coming from bulbs on the ceiling, each one cupped by a protective wire cage. She hurried on ahead of him, feet sending out that regular click click click as her stilettos rapped the ground. His filthy jeans restricted his movements, clinging to his legs as he trailed after her. The air was cooler here, he could see his breath emerging as white streamers.
Thérèse slipped through a big set of grey-painted metal doors ahead.
Lewis followed her into the empty subterranean warehouse in Messopia five hundred and fifty years ago. He gagged. It was a square chamber, sixty metres to a side, twenty metres high, rough poured concrete ribbed with steel beams coated in red-oxide paint. Striplights cast a feeble moon-white glow from on high. As before, leaking sewage pipes dripped rank liquids onto the floor.
She stood in the middle of the floor, looking at him expectantly.
He glanced down, seeing his body for the first time. “Oh no,” he said in a desperate voice. “This isn’t happening.”
Loud, positive footsteps sounded from the far end of the warehouse. Lewis didn’t wait to see who was
emerging from the gloom, he spun round. There was no door any more, just a concrete wall. “Jesus Almighty. Fuck!”
“Hello, Lewis.”
His body was compelled to turn, leg muscles working like dead meat fired by a cattle prod. He bit hard on his trembling lip.
Thérèse had gone. The person walking towards him was the body he had possessed on Lalonde.
“You’re dead,” Lewis whispered through a fear-knotted throat.
Laton merely smiled his superior smile. “Of all the people resident in this universe today, Lewis, you should know there is no such thing as death.”
“I’m in charge here,” Lewis yelled. “I am Pernik.” He tried to fling the white fire, to conjure up energistic devastation, to flay the zombie to its stinking corrupt bones and beyond.
Laton halted five metres away. “You were Pernik. I told you once that we would meet again as equals. I lied. You cannot even begin to conceive the processes involved in your manifestation within this universe. You are a Neanderthal out of time, Lewis. You believed brute force was the key to conquest. Yet you failed to even think about the source of your energistic power. I know, I’ve been analysing your tiresomely sluggish thoughts ever since you possessed my body.”
“What have you done to me?”
“Done? Why, Lewis, I have made you a part of me. Possession of the possessor. It is possible given the right circumstances. In this case I simply corrupted Pernik’s neural stratum with my biological weapon. The neuron cells and nerve paths only conduct my thought impulses now. You can kill the cells, but you can’t subvert them. It’s a question of coding, you see. I know the codes, you don’t. And please don’t ask me for them, Lewis, it’s nothing as simple as a number. You now operate only as a subsidiary part of me, you only think because I allow you to. That is how I summoned you here.”
“I think because I am! I have been me for centuries, you bastard.”
“And were you to go back there to the beyond, you would be you again. Free and independent. Do you want to go, Lewis? That is your escape from my bondage. In this universe you require a physical, living biological matrix in which to function. You may depart now if you wish.”