Further harsh gusts of gas whistled past. Then it found what it wanted, a solid stream of liquid suffused with life-energy pouring along the core of the starscraper. It moved as close as it could, siphoning the heat out of the thick wall of matter surrounding the stream until the outside began to crack. Then it bored through with a couple of appendages, and immersed their tips in the current. Sweet, vital life-energy flowed back into the Orgathé, replenishing it after its considerable exertions. It settled down and began consuming the apparently infinite torrent, growing in a way impossible before.
Three trucks approached the ring of dilapidated hovels encircling the Djerba’s lobby. Each vehicle had two people inside, a nervous driver and an even more nervous lookout armed with a heavy calibre rifle. They began to nudge along the muddy tracks between the precarious walls, heavy wheels squelching cans and empty sachet wrappers into the ground.
Past the hovels, they pulled up short of the lobby. As with all Valisk’s internal buildings, it was an elaborate edifice, a dome shape from gradually inclined tiers of long white polyp window arches with a circular apex of amber-tinted crystal. Inside, it had the kind of furniture nests and large marble floors endemic to any human travel station. A few cracked windows along the bottom tier, and smashed furniture smeared across the floor, was the only evidence of past battles between Kiera and Rubra.
Tolton gave it all a jaundiced look. “God, I really didn’t expect to be coming back here,” he grumbled.
“You’re not alone,” Dariat told him.
Erentz climbed down out of the passenger seat, keeping her rifle trained squarely on the lobby. The visitors had been in Valisk for thirty hours now. In all that time, not one of them had emerged from a starscraper, nor made any hostile move. If it hadn’t been for the broken windows and closed emergency locks there would be no evidence of their incursion at all. After their desperate efforts to gain entry, such inactivity had everyone troubled and confused. The personality was determined to discover what nefarious activity they were cooking up in the starscrapers.
The lifts were clumped together in the centre of the lobby, a broad column of grey polyp reaching half way to the amber crystal above. Its curving wall was inset with silvery mechanical doors. One of them slid open as the group approached. Erentz put down the large case of equipment she was carrying, and inched over to the rim so she could snatch a look down. The top of the lift was out of sight, leaving a dark circular shaft with vertical rails that faded from sight after a few metres. She shone a torch into the gulf. All that did was show her more of the rails, and another set of emergency fire-control doors on the inside. If she leaned right over, she could just make out the door below.
> the personality said. >
Dariat nodded thoughtfully. >
It took twenty minutes to prepare. Three of the group started to rig up a winch they’d brought, securing it on the lobby floor with large bolts.
The rest helped Erentz into the silver-grey suit which she was going to wear for the reconnaissance. They’d chosen a thermal emission suit, capable of protecting its wearer from extreme temperatures. It had a thick layer of insulation with a molecular structure similar to the nulltherm foam used by starships. The one drawback to that particular property was that the heat generated by a living body’s organs and muscles couldn’t escape. Any wearer would cook themselves to death inside thirty minutes. So before getting into it, Erentz had to put on a tight-fitting regulator overall made from heat absorber fabric. It was capable of soaking up and storing her body’s entire output for seven hours before having to be drained.
“Are you sure this is going to work?” Tolton asked as he sealed the outer gauntlets to her sleeves. The suit’s puffy appearance was making her look like an arctic skier.
“You were down there with it before,” she answered. “It has some kind of active heat-sink ability. I’ve got to have something to shield me from that if I get too close. And I can’t risk wearing an SII suit, not in this continuum; there’s no guarantee it’ll even work below the first floor.”
“All right. If you’re happy …”
“I’m not.” She slipped the suit’s breathing mask on, fiddling with it until it was comfortable. The suit wasn’t pressurized, but the mask maintained her air supply at a constant temperature.
Tolton handed her the electron rod. Its spiked tip was capable of giving off a ten thousand volt shock. “This should stop it getting too close. Electricity seems to be our one constant these days. It can blast the possessed back into the beyond, and it certainly scared the visitor.”
She held up the rod, then slipped it into her belt next to a laser pistol and a fission blade. “I feel like I’m off to poke the tiger,” she mumbled round the mask.
> said the personality. >
> She pulled the helmet visor down, a transparent material thick enough to give the world a gentle turquoise shade. > she asked Dariat.
> His affinity voice might have said it, but his mind didn’t.
The winch cable had been looped round a pulley at the top of the lift shaft. It ended in a couple of simple straps which Erentz clipped onto a harness around her torso. Above the straps, there was a simple control box on a flexible stalk, with four buttons to govern the winch. She tugged at the thin cable, testing its strength.
> explained one of the engineers who’d rigged it up. > He indicated a small toggle-like handle nesting in the junction between the two straps. >
> Erentz touched the little toggle reverently, the way she’d seen Christians stroking a crucifix. She walked over to the rim of the lift shaft, switching on her helmet and wrist lights. >
Dariat nodded and came over to stand behind her. He put his arms round her chest. His legs he bent so they were wrapped round hers, his feet hooking together between her ankles. It felt like a solid hold. >
Erentz stepped off into space, and swung out into the shaft. She dangled over black emptiness, rotating very slowly. Dariat weighed nothing at all. The only way she knew he was still there was the faintest glow coming from his arms as they clung to her. > She pressed the descent button, and the cable started to play out, lowering her. The last she saw of the lobby was three people crowded shoulder to shoulder in the bright doorway, craning down to watch her. Twenty-two floors is a long way to go when you’re hanging on the end of an invisible cable in absolute darkness.
> the personality said. >
> she shot back waspishly.
Dariat didn’t say anything. He was too busy fighting the fatigue trembles in his legs. The awkward position he was in made his muscles prone to cramps. Stupid for a ghost, he told himself repeatedly.
The lift doors kept sliding by, buff silver panels affixed to the polyp by a web of support rails and actuator cabinets. Dariat kept trying to use the sensitive cells on each floor
to survey the vestibule as they dropped past, but the neural strata was badly affected by the dark continuum’s enervation. The thought routines inside were confused and slow, providing meagre pictures of the darkened corridors. Even those had vanished by the twenty-first storey. Real worry began to seep into Dariat’s thoughts. It was the visitor who was causing this part of the affliction. Almost an anti-presence, soaking up life and heat like some hazy event horizon. This was alien at its extreme.
> Erentz said. She slowed their descent until they were level with the doors to the twenty-second floor vestibule.
> Dariat said. >
Erentz’s mind was moderately incredulous, but she spared him a direct comment. She started to sway, building up pendulum momentum, carrying them closer to the shaft wall each time. Catching hold of the struts and conduits beside the door was easy, and she steadied them against the polyp, feet resting on a latch motor casing. There was an emergency release handle on the top rail, which she turned through ninety degrees.
The door slid open with a quiet hiss of compressed air.
With one hand poised ready on the retrieval toggle, she shuffled along the lower rail and swung round the edge of the door. > she told the personality and all her relatives who were monitoring her progress. The vestibule was as dark as the lift shaft. Even the emergency lights had failed. Frost glinted everywhere her lights touched. The suit’s environment sensor reported the air was fifty degrees below freezing. So far here electronic systems were functioning close to their operational parameters.
Erentz slowly unclipped the winch cable, and secured it on a strut just inside the rim of the door; easily available in a hurry. She and Dariat shared an affinity layout of the floor, with the visitor’s approximate position indicated by a black blob. It wasn’t very precise, and they both knew that since the floor’s bitek and electronics had failed, it could have moved without the personality knowing.
That was one of the reasons the personality had wanted Dariat along on the reconnaissance. They knew he was affected by the visitor, implying he might just be able to sense it while Erentz in her insulated suit would remain unaware. As theories went, it wasn’t the most inspiring. In the end, Dariat only agreed to accompany Erentz because he knew more than most just how grim their position was. The personality held nothing from him, treating him almost as an adjunct of itself, like an exceptionally mobile observation sub-routine (or favourite pet, he thought on occasion). They desperately needed quantifiable data on the dark continuum if they were going to get a message out to the Confederation.
So far the probes and quantum analysis sensors had returned next to zero information. The visitor was the only source of new facts they’d encountered. Its apparent ability to manipulate energy states could prove valuable.
“Earth’s recipe for omelettes,” Dariat murmured silently. “First steal some eggs.”
> Erentz said.
Try as he might, Dariat couldn’t find true fear in her mind. Apprehension aplenty, but she genuinely believed they would be successful.
They set off along the gently curving vestibule, heading for the visitor.
Fifteen metres from the lift, a massive hole had been punched through the floor. It was as if a bomb had detonated, smashing the neat layers of polyp into a jumble of large slabs and pulverised gravel. Nutrient fluid, water, and sludge had leaked out from various severed tubules, oozing down the piles of detritus before turning to rucked tongues of dull grey ice. They stood at the broken rim, and looked down.
> Dariat said. >
> the personality replied. >
>
> Erentz said. >
> Dariat retorted scathingly.
>
> Dariat said. >
> Erentz said simply. >
Dariat cursed as she started to pick her way over the loose debris bordering the hole. He knew now why the personality had picked her. She had more gung-ho optimism than a whole squadron of test-pilots.
Reluctantly, he started to follow.
There were deep gouge marks in the floor that had torn the scarlet and lemon carpet into crumpled waves. The naked polyp underneath was pocked with small craters in a triangular pattern every couple of metres. Dariat had no trouble picturing them as talon marks. The visitor had bulldozed its way along the vestibule, cracking the walls and shredding the furniture and fittings. Then it had veered off deeper into the interior of the starscraper. According to the personality, it was resting right against the core. The door to a large apartment suite was missing, along with a considerable chunk of the surrounding wall. Erentz halted several of metres short, and ran her suit’s wrist beams around the big aperture.
> she said. >
>
>
>
>
>
She knelt down and began unhooking sensors from her belt, screwing them onto a telescopic pole. >
> the personality suggested.
> Erentz added one last sensor to the small clump, then looked round at Dariat. >
He nodded. She extended the pole cautiously. Dariat used affinity to receive the results directly from the bitek processor governing the sensors, seeing a pale image of the frosted wall sliding past. It was superimposed with translucent sheets of colour that shimmered with defraction patterns, the results of the analysis programs, which Dariat fully failed to understand. He shifted the focus, cancelling everything but the raw visual and infrared image.
He watched the edge of the smashed wall go past. Then there was nothing.
> he asked.
>
> Dariat said. >
> the personality said.
>
>
>
>
Erentz had already pulled the telescopic pole back. She wasn’t going to give him any support at all.
> The whole notion was even worse than when he’d taken that suicide pill back in Bospoort’s apartment. At
least then he’d had a pretty good idea what he was letting himself in for. > he told Erentz.
She put the last sensor back on her belt, then pulled out the laser pistol and a small tubular flare launcher. >
They both moved over to the other side of the vestibule, giving Dariat a better angle. Erentz focused her helmet beams on the gap as he crept towards it. There was nothing to see. The beams could have been trying to illuminate a cold neutron star for all the effect they had.
Dariat was standing opposite the gap now. > It was as if the universe ended inside the apartment. An uncomfortable analogy, given their circumstances.
> Erentz said. She brought her flare launcher up, aiming it at the gap. >
> Dariat said quickly.
> the personality interjected. >
> Dariat said.
>
>
>
> Right out on the very edge of visibility, there was a perturbation in the curtain of darkness. Faint shadow-shapes moved sinuously, the surface distortion of something stirring deep inside. The blackness started to recede from him with the leisurely speed of an outgoing tide, uncovering the edges of the apartment.
His mind was aware of Erentz’s finger tightening on the launcher’s release trigger. Determination in her mind not to come back without some useful information on the visitor.
>
The flare streaked across the vestibule, a searing-white magnesium blaze that punctured the pseudoveil across the gap. Dariat looked directly into the shattered apartment.