The Orgathé glided eagerly towards it. Two flames of life-energy gleamed behind the transparent sheet. One naked, the other clad in hot matter; both enraging the Orgathé’s craving. It surged forward.
“FUCK!” Tolton screamed. He dived to one side, scattering tables and chairs. Dariat jumped the other way just as the Orgathé hit the window.
Frost blossomed like a living thing, strands of long delicate crystals multiplying across the glass, then reaching out through the air. Shapes moved on the other side of the hoary fur, dark indistinct serpents, thicker than a human torso, that could be tentacles or tongues scrabbling furiously at the outer surface. The unmistakable grinding shriek of deep score lines being ripped into the material penetrated the bar, drowning out Tolton’s terrified cries.
> Dariat wailed.
>
Tolton was scuttling backwards on his hands and legs, unable to take his eyes from the window. The serpent shapes were writhing with rabid aggression as they clawed their way through. A badly stressed snap sounded above the vicious squealing; corresponding to a thin dark shadow materializing across the frosted window. Furniture was rattling, shaking its way erratically across the floor. Glasses and bottles abandoned on top of the marble bar juddered vigorously and tumbled off.
> Dariat cried. When he tried to clamber to his feet, he discovered he didn’t have the strength. Fatigue was numbing every limb.
“Kill it!” Tolton bellowed.
> the personality said, >
>
>
>
>
The personality began to re-route its patched-up power supply. Diverting current away from the axial light tube and the caverns, pumping the precarious fusion generators up to their maximum output. Electricity poured back into the Djerba starscraper’s organic conductor grid. The first-floor windows blazed with golden light; mechanical and electronic systems came alive in frantic chitters of movement and data emissions.
Milliseconds later the second floor sprang back to life. The third, fourth …
Dazzling shafts of light sliced out from the Djerba’s windows, piercing the gloom outside. They snapped downward storey by storey towards the beleaguered twenty-fourth floor. The personality gathered its major thought routines and plunged them down into the starscraper, a sensation like diving into a pitch-black well shaft. Bitek networks were swiftly resurrected around its descending mentality.
A dead zone was concentrated around Horner’s window. The external polyp was so cold the personality could no longer calibrate it. Living cells deeper in had frozen solid. The personality could feel vibrations running through the floor as the Orgathé pounded and scraped against the window.
Junctions within the organic conductor web switched polarity, high order sub-routines cancelled the safety limiters. Every erg of power from the fusion generators was channelled into Horner’s. Ceiling strips of electrophorescent cells ignited, flooding the bar with searing white light. Organic conductors behind the walls fused, burning out long lines of polyp in a cascade of amber sparks. Incandescent arcs stormed through the air as a lethal charge of electrons was fired into the external wall.
Coming on top of the heat and life-energy, the electron hammer blow was just too much. The Orgathé recoiled from the window, appendages flailing madly as the streams of alien energy churned within its body. There was a brief glimpse of sinuous chrome-black tendrils bristling with curving blades coiling back protectively around a bulbous midsection. Ragged wing petals began to flex. Then the distortion smeared it with refracted scintillations from the gleaming starscraper, and it shot away at a bruising acceleration. Within seconds it was lost inside the nebula.
Dariat took his arm away from his face. The tremendous barrage of noise and light saturating the bar had faded. A few sparks were still popping out from the deep scorch marks in the walls. The glossy electrophorescent cells had shattered and shrivelled to rain across the floor, their fragments curling up, puffing out licks of smoke.
> the personality enquired.
Dariat looked down at himself. The feeble yellow glow from Tolton’s remaining lightstick showed his spectral body unchanged. Though possibly more translucent than usual. He still felt terribly weak. >
>
> Dariat felt the personality’s major routines withdrawing from the starscraper. The lights were going off again in the upper floors, autonomic bitek functions shutting down.
He struggled to his knees, shivering intensely. When he looked round he could see ice encrusted on every surface, turning the bar into an arctic grotto. The electrical discharge had melted very little of it. That was probably what had saved them; it was several centimetres thick over the window. And the fracture pattern in the glass underneath was unnervingly pronounced.
Tolton was spasming on the floor, spittle flecking his lips. His hair was rimed with frost. Each shallow panted breath was revealed in a cloud of white vapour.
“Shit.” Dariat staggered over to him. Just in time he remembered not to try and touch the tormented body. >
>
> He knelt down next to Tolton, and leaned right over, staring into delirious eyes. “Hey.” Limpid fingers clicked right in front of Tolton’s nose. “Hey. Tolton. Can you hear me? Try and steady your breathing. Take a deep breath. Come on! You’ve got to calm your body down. Breathe.”
Tolton’s teeth chittered. He gurgled, cheeks bulging.
“That’s it. Come on. Breathe. Deep. Suck that air down. Please.”
The street poet’s lips compressed slightly, making a whistling sound.
“Good. Good. And again. Come on.”
It took several minutes for Tolton’s bucking to subside. His erratic breathing reduced to sharp gasps. “Cold,” he grunted.
Dariat smiled down at him. “Ho boy. You had me worried there. We really don’t need any more ghosts floating around in here right now.”
“Heart. My heart. God! I thought …”
“It’s okay. It’s over.”
Tolton nodded roughly, and tried to lever himself up.
“Stop! You just lie there for another minute longer. There’s no paramedic service any more, remember? First thing we need is some proper food for you. I think there’s a restaurant on this floor.”
“No way. As soon as I can get up, we’re leaving. No more starscrapers.” Tolton coughed, and started to glance round. “Jesus.” He scowled. “Are we safe?”
“Sure. For now, anyway.”
“Did we kill it?”
Dariat grimaced. “Not exactly, no. But we gave it a hell of a fright.”
“That lightning bolt didn’t kill it?”
“No. It flew off, though.”
“Shit. I nearly died.”
“Yeah. But you didn’t. Concentrate on that.”
Tolton slowly eased himself into a sitting position, wincing at each tiny movement. Once he was propped up against a table leg, he reached out and caressed the ice which was engulfing a chair, fingers stroking curiously.
He gave Dariat a grim look with badly bloodshot eyes. “This isn’t going to have a happy ending, is it?”
The seven hellhawks glided in towards Monterey, acknowledging the query from the SD network defence as the sensors locked on.
> they told Jull von Holger, when he asked how the mission had gone. >
>
ndred got through.>>
>
Neither side said anything more. Jull von Holger could sense the quiet rage of the surviving hellhawks. He chose not to mention the fact to Emmet Mordden; the hellhawks were all Kiera’s problem.
> Hudson Proctor told the hellhawks. > He focused on Kiera’s face. She smiled her brightest ingénue smile, pouring as much gratitude into her thoughts as possible for her deputy to relay. “Well done. I know it’s not easy, but believe me there won’t be many more of these ridiculous seeding missions.” She arched an eyebrow in query to Hudson. “Was there a reply?”
He coloured slightly at the emotional backlash to her little speech that flooded the affinity band. “No. They’re pretty tired.”
“I understand.” Her sweet expression hardened. “End your contact.”
Hudson Proctor nodded curtly, signalling it had been done.
“You hope there ain’t going to be many more seeding flights, you mean,” Luigi said indolently.
The three of them were sitting in one of the smaller, more private lounges above the asteroid’s docking ledges, waiting for the last member of their group to arrive. Kiera’s small revolution had picked up a respectable degree of momentum over the last ten days. The success of the seeding flights had bolstered Al’s popularity and authority considerably.
But that triumph came with a high price in terms of starships, and quite a few people were starting to acknowledge that the infiltration campaign was short-termism. Slowly, quietly, Kiera had exploited that. Being able to see the dissatisfaction and worry in people’s minds gave her a handy advantage when it came to spotting potential recruits.
Silvano Richmann came in and took his seat around the coffee table. There was a cluster of bottles in the centre, he poured himself a shot of whisky.
“The Sevilla flotilla is back,” Kiera told him. “Seven frigates and five hellhawks got zapped.”
“Fuck.” Silvano shook his head in dismay. “Al’s putting together another fifteen of these missions. He just doesn’t see it.”
“He sees it the way he wants to see it,” Kiera said. “They’re successful in that they’re landing infiltrators each time. The Confederation is going apeshit. We’re knocking off five of their planets a day. It buys him complete respect and loyalty with the Organization down on the planet.”
“While my fleet gets chopped to shit,” Luigi snapped. “That goddamn whore Jezzibella. She’s got him by the balls.”
“Not just your fleet,” Kiera said. “I’m losing hellhawks fast. Much more of this, and they’ll leave.”
“Where to?” Silvano asked. “They’ve got to stick with you. That was a neat sting you pulled on them with the food.”
“The Edenists keep making offers to try and lure them away,” Hudson said.
“Etchells keeps us informed. The latest offer is that they’ll actually accept the blackhawk host personality into their habitat neural strata, leaving our guys as the only soul in there. In exchange they get all the food they want, providing they just cooperate with the Edenists, help them find out about our powers.”
“Shit,” Silvano muttered. “We gotta stop this. I’d be mighty tempted by any offer that got rid of this body’s host soul.”
“Wouldn’t we all,” Kiera said. She sat back and sipped at her wine.
“Okay, the question is, how far are you prepared to go?”
“Pretty goddamn obvious for me,” Luigi said. “I’ll waste that shit Capone myself. Busting me down to a fucking errand boy. Nobody could have handled Tranquillity any different.”
“Silvano?”
“He’s got to go. But there’s one condition for me signing up with you. And it ain’t negotiable.”
“What’s that?” Kiera asked, though she was fairly sure she knew. Silvano was feared as Al’s chief enforcer, but he did have one major difference with his boss.
“After we do this, there are no more non-possessed in the Organization. We take them all out. Understood?”
“Suits me,” Kiera said.
“No way!” Luigi shouted. “I can’t run my fucking fleet with just possessed crews. You know that. You’re shitting on me here, man.”
“Yeah? Who says there’s going to be a fucking fleet after this. Right, Kiera? We’re doing this for our own safety. We’re going to take New California out of here; out of this universe. Just like all the other possessed have done. And for that, we can’t afford no non-possessed to be around. Come on, Luigi, you know that. As long as there’s one of them left, they’re going to be plotting and scheming how to get rid of us. For Christ’s sake. We steal their bodies from them. If you was alive right now, you wouldn’t give jack shit about anything else other than getting them back from us.” He slammed his tumbler back down on the table. “We eliminate all the non-possessed, or there’s no deal.”
“Then there’s no fucking deal,” Luigi stormed.
Kiera held up her hands. “Boys, boys, this is how Al wins. You ever heard of divide and rule? All of us have different interests, and the only way we can hang on to them is if we’re part of the Organization. Only the Organization needs a fleet, and hellhawks, and lieutenants that have to be kept in line.” She shot Silvano a significant look. “He’s made it complicated so that we have to support him to keep our own places. What we’ve got to do is dismantle the Organization, but rig whatever’s next so that we three come out on top.”
“Like what?” Luigi asked suspiciously.
“Okay, you want the fleet back, right? Tell me why?”
“Because it’s fucking mine, you dumb broad. I built that fleet up from nothing. I was here right from the start, the day Al walked into San Angeles City Hall.”
“Fair enough. But all the fleet did was make you a player. Do you really want to risk flying to Confederation planets and going up against their SD networks? They’re getting wise to us now. These seeding flights are pissing them off bad. They’re killing us out there, Luigi.”
“So? Like I should care. I’m the admiral. I don’t have to go with them every time.”
“The whole fleet doesn’t have to go anywhere, Luigi; that’s the point. What you need is to exchange the fleet for something else that will keep you in the game, right?”
Luigi eyed her cautiously. “Maybe.”
“That’s what we’ve got to work out between the three of us. Right now, we can carry the Organization if we eliminate Capone. But the Organization’s a dead end. Dishing out tokens instead of money, for Christ’s sake. If we take it over, we’ve got to use it to establish a new type of government. One that has us at the top.”
“Like what?” Silvano asked. “The second New California leaves this universe then nobody needs any kind of government.”
“Says who?” Kiera sneered. “You’ve seen the cities down there. Unless the Organization keeps putting the squeeze on the farmers to supply food, they’d collapse overnight. If New California escapes this universe, everyone on it is going to have to turn into some kind of medieval peasant just to stay alive. And that’s such bullshit. Five per cent of the population working in the fields can sustain the rest of us. Now I don’t know what kind of society we can build on the other side, but I’m damned if I’m going to live in a mud hut and spend my days walking behind a horse’s arse to plough a field. Especially when someone else can be made to do it for me.”
“So what are you saying here?” Silvano asked. “That we keep the farmers working while the rest of us live it up?”
“Basically, yeah. It’s just like what I’ve done with the hellhawks, but on a much bigger scale. We have to keep the farmers farming, and we have to be in charge of distributing the food to the urban areas. Convert the Organization into a giant supplier; and the only people who get supplied, are the ones who we say.”
“You’d need a fucking army for that!” Luigi exclaimed.
Kiera ge
stured magnanimously. “There you are then. That’s what you turn the fleet into. Find a portable weapon that’s effective against the possessed: something like those bastard serjeants use on Mortonridge, manufacture it up here, and equip our supporters with it. Use the same chain of command network that’s already in place, but with a land army to back it up instead of the SD platforms.”
“That might work,” Silvano said. “So if Luigi’s got himself an army, what do I get?”
“Communications are vital, otherwise this whole thing will just collapse. And we’d need to be more subtle with the farmers than forcing them at gunpoint. That’s an enforcer’s job.”
He poured himself another whisky. “Okay. Let’s talk about it.”
Western Europe always took his dogs for a walk himself. Dog ownership was a healthy reminder of responsibility; you either do it properly or not at all. There weren’t many crises which could make him skip a day. Though he suspected one of his staff was going to have to start substituting fairly soon.
The formal lawns extended for over three hundred metres from the back of the house (they were yards back in the days when he bought the estate, but even he had fallen to using that appalling modern French metric system now). A hedge of ancient yews marked the end, ten metres high, laden with their squishy dull-red berries. He pushed through the gap marked by crumbling stone pillars that used to be gateposts, making a mental note to get a gardening construct to prune the twigs. The carpet of dry needles compressed beneath his brogues as the Labradors scampered round him. It was meadowland beyond, the shaggy grass thick with daisies and buttercups. A gentle slope led down to a long still lake eight hundred metres away. He whistled softly, and threw his stick.