Richard Keaton smiled gladly. “That’s good. The Prince hasn’t had much to do for a long time. He’ll be happy to have a new friend. Make sure you treat him nicely, he’s a bit delicate now, poor thing.”
“I will,” Jay promised. “Are you really old, as well?”
“Older than most people you’ve ever met, but nothing like as antique as good old Trace, here.”
“Huh,” Tracy sniffed critically. “If you’re quite finished.”
Richard rolled his eyes for Jay’s benefit. “Sweet dreams, Jay. I’ll see you tomorrow, we’ve got lots to talk about.”
“Richard,” Tracy asked reluctantly. “Did Calvert do it?”
A huge smile flashed over his face. “Oh yeah. He did it. The Alchemist is neutralized. Just as well, it was a brute of a weapon.”
“Typical. If they’d just devote ten per cent of their military budget and all that ingenuity into developing their social conditions.”
“Preaching to the converted!”
“Are you talking about Joshua?” Jay asked. “What’s he done?”
“Something very good,” Richard said.
“Amazingly,” Tracy muttered dryly.
“But …”
“Tomorrow, sweetie,” Tracy said firmly. “Along with everything else. I promise. Right now, you’re going to bed. Enough delaying tactics.”
Richard waved, and walked away. Jay held Prince Dell against her tummy as Tracy’s hand pressed into her back, propelling her up the steps and into the chalet. She glanced down at the ancient bear again. His dull glass eyes stared right back at her, it was an incredibly melancholic expression.
The first hellhawk came flashing out of its wormhole terminus twelve thousand kilometres from Monterey asteroid. New California’s gravitonic detector warning satellites immediately datavised an alert to the naval tactical operations centre. The high pitched audio alarm startled Emmet Mordden, who was the duty officer in the large chamber. At the time he was sitting with his feet up on the commander’s console, reading through a four-hundred-sheet hard copy guide of a Quantumsoft accountancy program in preparation for his next upgrade to the Treasury computers. With most of the Organization fleet away at Tranquillity, and the planet reasonably stable right now, it was a quiet duty, just right to catch up on his technical work.
Emmet’s feet hit the floor as the AI responsible for threat analysis squirted a mass of symbols and vectors up on one of the huge wall-mounted holoscreens. In front of him, the equally surprised SD network operators scrambled to interpret what was happening. There weren’t many of them among the eight rows of consoles in the centre, nothing like the full complement which the Organization had needed at the height of the Edenist harassment campaign. Right now, spaceflight traffic was at a minimum, and the contingent of Valisk hellhawks on planetary defence duty had done a superb job of clearing Edenist stealth mines and spy globes from space around the planet.
“What is it?” Emmet asked automatically; by which time another three wormholes had opened. The precariously-stacked pile of hard copy avalanched off his console as he determinedly cleared his keyboard ready to respond.
The AI had acquired X-ray laser lock on for the first four targets, and was requesting fire authority. Another ten wormholes were opening. Jull von Holger, who acted as the go-between for the Valisk hellhawks and the operations centre, leapt to his feet, shouting: “Don’t shoot!” He waved his arms frantically. “They’re ours! They’re our hellhawks.”
Emmet hesitated, his fingers hovering over the keys. According to his console displays, over eighty wormholes had now opened to disgorge bitek starships. “What the fuck do they think they’re doing busting in on us like that? Why aren’t they with the fleet?” Suspicion flowered among his thoughts; and he didn’t care that von Holger could sense it. Hellhawks were dangerously powerful craft, and with the fleet away they could make real trouble. He’d never really trusted Kiera Salter.
Jull von Holger’s face went through a wild panoply of emotion-derived contortions as he conducted fast affinity conversations with the unexpected arrivals. “They’re not from the fleet. They’ve come here directly from Valisk.” He halted for a moment, shocked. “It’s gone. Valisk has gone. We lost to that little prat Dariat.”
“Holy shit,” Hudson Proctor gasped.
Kiera stuck her head round the bathroom door as the beautician tried to wrap her sopping wet hair in a huge fluffy purple towel. The Quayle suite in the Monterey Hilton was a temple to opulence and personal luxury. As Rubra had denied everyone access to the Valisk starscrapers, along with their apartment bathrooms, Kiera had simply groomed herself with energistic power alone. She had forgotten what it was to sprawl in a Jacuzzi with a selector that could blend in any of a dozen exotic salts.
And as for having her hair styled properly rather than forcing it into shape …
“What?” she snapped in annoyance; though the beacon-bright dismay in her associate’s mind tempered any real fury at being interrupted.
“The hellhawks are here,” he said. “All of them. They’ve come from Valisk. It’s …” He flinched in trepidation. Delivering bad news to Kiera was always a desperately negative career move. Just because she had the kind of teenage-sweetheart looks which could (and had) suckered in non-possessed kids from right across the Confederation didn’t mean her behaviour matched. Quite the opposite—she took a perverse enjoyment from that, too. “Bonney chased after Dariat, apparently. There was a big fight in one of the starscrapers. Plenty of our people got flung back into the beyond. Then she forced him to ally with Rubra, or something.”
“What happened?”
“They, er—Valisk’s gone. The two of them took the habitat out of the universe.”
Kiera stared at him, little wisps of steam starting to lick out of her hair. She’d always bitterly regretted that Marie Skibbow didn’t have some kind of affinity faculty; its absence had always put her at a slight disadvantage in Valisk. But she’d coped, the entire worldlet and its formidable starships had belonged to her. She’d been a power to contend with. Even Capone had sought out her help. Now—
Kiera gave the non-possessed beautician girl a blank-eyed glance. “Get lost.”
“Ma’am.” The girl curtseyed, and almost sprinted for the suite’s double doors on the other side of the lounge.
Kiera allowed herself a muted scream of fury when the doors closed. “That fucking Dariat! I knew it! I fucking knew he was a disaster waiting to happen.”
“We’re still in charge of the hellhawks,” Hudson Proctor said. “That gives us a big chunk of Capone’s action; and the Organization is in charge of a couple of star systems, with more on the way. It’s not such a loss. If we’d been inside the habitat it would be one hell of a lot worse.”
“If I’d been inside, it would never have happened,” she snapped back. Her hair was abruptly dry, and her robe blurred, running like hot wax until it became a sharp mauve business suit. “Control,” she murmured almost to herself. “That’s the key here.”
Hudson Proctor could sense her focusing on him, both her eyes and her mind.
“Are you with me?” she asked. “Or are you going to ask good old Al if you can sign on as one of his lieutenants?”
“Why would I do that?”
“Because if I can’t keep control of the hellhawks, I’m nothing to the Organization.” She smiled thinly. “You and I would have to start right back at the beginning again. With the hellhawks obeying us, we’ll still be players.”
He glanced out of the big window, searching space for a sight of the bitek starships. “We’ve got no hold on them any more,” he said dejectedly. “Without the affinity-capable bodies stored in Valisk, there’s no way they’ll do as they’re ordered. And there aren’t any more of Rubra’s family left for us to replace them with. We’ve lost.”
Kiera shook her head impatiently. Considering she’d coopted the ex-general to her council for his ability to think tactically, he was doing a remarkably poor
job of it. But then, maybe a politician’s instinct was naturally quicker at finding an opponent’s weakness.
“There’s one thing left which they can’t do for themselves.”
“And that is?”
“Eat. The only sources of their nutrient fluid which they’ll be able to use are on Organization-held asteroids. Without food, even bitek organisms will wither and die. And we know our energistic power can’t magic up genuine food.”
“Then Capone will control them.”
“No.” Kiera could sense his anxiety at the prospect of losing his status, and knew she could rely on him. She closed her eyes, focusing on assignments for the small number of her people she’d brought with her to Monterey. “Which is the most reliable hellhawk we’ve got on planetary defence?”
“Reliable?”
“Loyal, idiot. To me.”
“That’ll probably be Etchells in the Stryla. He’s a regular little Nazi, always complaining hellhawks never see enough battle action. Doesn’t get on too well with the others, either.”
“Perfect. Call him back to Monterey’s docking ledges and go on board. I want you to visit every Organization asteroid in this system with a nutrient fluid production system. And blow it to shit.”
Hudson gave her an astounded look, trepidation replacing the earlier anxiety. “The asteroids?”
“No, shithead! Just the production systems. You don’t even have to dock, just use an X-ray laser. That’ll leave Monterey as their only supply point.” She smiled happily. “The Organization has enough to do right now without the burden of maintaining all that complicated machinery. I think I’ll go down there right now with our experts, and relieve them.”
It wasn’t dawn which arose over the wolds, in as much as there was no sun to slide above the horizon any more, but none the less the darkened sky grew radiant in homage to Norfolk’s lost diurnal rhythm. Luca Comar felt it developing because he was a part of making it happen. By coming to this place he had freed himself from the clamour of the souls lost within the beyond, their tormented screams and angry pleas. In exchange he had gained an awareness of community.
Born at the tail end of the Twenty-first Century he’d grown up in the Amsterdam arcology. It was a time when people still clung to the hope that the planet could be healed, their superb technology employed to turn the clock back to the nevertime of halcyon pastoral days. In his youth, Luca dreamed of the land returned to immense parkland vistas with proud white and gold cities straddling the horizon. A child brought up by some of the last hippies on Earth, his formative years were spent loving the knowledge that togetherness was all. Then he turned eighteen, and for the first time in his existence reality had bitten, and bitten hard; he had to get a job, and an apartment, and pay taxes. Not nice. He resented it until the day his body died.
So now he had stolen a new body, and with the strange powers that theft had bestowed, he’d joined with the others of this planet to create their own Gaia. Unity of life was a pervasive, shroud-like presence wrapping itself around the planet, replacing the regimented order of the universe as their provider. Because the new inhabitants of Norfolk wished there to be a dawn, there was one. And as they equally desired night, so the light was banished. He contributed a little of himself to this Gaia, some of his wishes, some of his strength, a constant avowal of thanks to this new phase of his existence.
Luca sat on the edge of the huge bed in the master bedroom to watch the light strengthen outside Cricklade; a silver warmth shining down from the sky, its uniformity leaving few shadows. With it came the sense of anticipation, a new day to be treasured because of the opportunity it might bring.
A dull dawn, bland and boring, just as the days have become. We used to have two suns, and revelled in the contrast of colours they brought, the battle of shadows. They had energy and majesty, they inspired. But this, this …
The woman on the bed beside Luca stretched and rolled over, resting her chin in her hand and smiling up at him. “Morning,” she purred.
He grinned back. Lucy was good company, sharing a lot of his enthusiasms, as well as a wicked sense of humour. A tall woman, great figure, thick chestnut hair worn long, barely into her mid-twenties. He never asked how much of her appearance was hers, and how much belonged to her host. The age of your host had swiftly become taboo. He liked to think himself modern enough so that bedding a ninety-year-old wouldn’t bother him, age and looks being different concepts here. He still didn’t ask, though. The solid image was good enough.
An image so close to Marjorie it verges on the idolatrous. Did this Lucy see that in my heart?
Luca yawned widely. “I’d better get going. We have to inspect the mill this morning, and I need to know how much seed corn we’ve actually got left in the silos over in the estate’s western farms. I don’t believe what the residents are telling me. It doesn’t correspond with what Grant knows.”
Lucy pulled a dour face. “One week in heaven, and the four horsemen are already giving us the eye.”
“Alas, this is not heaven, I’m afraid.”
“And don’t I know it. Fancy having to work for a living when you’re dead. God, the indignity.”
“The wages of sin, lady. We did have one hell of a party to start with, after all.”
She flopped back down on the bed, tongue poised tautly on her upper lip.
“Sure did. You know I was quite repressed back when I was alive first time around. Sexually, that is.”
“Hallelujah, it’s a miracle cure.”
She gave a husky chuckle, then sobered. “I’m supposed to be helping out in the kitchen today. Cooking the workers lunch, then taking it out to the fields for them. Bugger, it’s like some kind of Amish festival. And how come we’re reverting to gender stereotypes?”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s us girls that are doing all the cooking.”
“Not all of you.”
“The majority. You should work out a better rota for us.”
“Why me?”
“You seem to be taking charge around here. Quite the little baron.”
“Okay, I designate you to draw up a proper equitable rota.” He stuck his tongue out at her. “You should be good at secretarial work.”
The pillow hit him on the side of his head, nearly knocking him off the bed. He caught the next one, and put it out of her reach. “I didn’t do it deliberately,” he said seriously. “People tell me what they can do, and I shove them at the first matching job. We need to get a list of occupations and skills sorted out.”
She moaned. “Bureaucracy in heaven, that’s worse than sexism.”
“Just think yourself lucky we haven’t got round to introducing taxes yet.” He started searching round for his trousers. Luckily, the Manor had entire wardrobes of Grant Kavanagh’s high-quality clothes. They weren’t quite Luca’s style, but at least they fitted perfectly. And the outdoor gear was hard-wearing, too. It saved him from having to dream up new stuff. That was harder here, in this realm. Imagined items took a long time to form, but when they did, they had more substance, and persevered longer. Concentrate hard enough and long enough on changing something, and the change would become permanent, requiring no more attention.
But that was inert objects: clothes, stone, wood, even chunks of machinery (not electronics), they could all be fashioned by the mind.
Which was fortunate; Norfolk’s low-technology infrastructure could be repaired with relative ease. Physical appearance, too, could be governed by a wish, flesh gradually morphing into a new form—inevitably firmer and younger. The majority of possessed were intent on reverting to their original features. As seen through a rose-tinted mirror, Luca suspected.
Having quite so many beautiful people emerge in one place together was statistically implausible.
Not that vanity was their real problem. The one intractable difficulty of this new life was food. Energistic power simply could not conjure any into existence; no matter how creative or insistent you were.
Oh, you could cover a plate with a mountain of caviar; but cancel the illusion and the glistening black mass would relapse into a pile of leaves, or whatever raw material you were trying to bend to your will.
Irony or mockery, Luca couldn’t quite decide what their deliverance had led them to. But whichever it was, eternity tilling the fields was better than eternity in the beyond. He finished dressing, and gave Lucy an expectant, slightly chiding look.
“All right,” she grumbled. “I’m getting up. I’ll pull my communal weight.”
He kissed her. “Catch you later.”
Lucy waited until the door shut behind him, then pulled the sheets back over her head.
Most of the manor’s residents were already awake and bustling about. Luca said a dozen good-mornings as he made his way downstairs. As he walked along the grand corridors, the state of the building gradually registered. Windows left ajar, allowing the nightly sprinkling of rain to stain the carpets and furniture; open doors showed him glimpses of rooms with clothes strewn everywhere, remnants of meals on plates, grey mould growing out of mugs, sheets unwashed since the start of Norfolk’s possession. It wasn’t apathy, exactly, more like teenage carelessness—the belief that mum will always be around to clean up after you.
Bloody squalor junkies. Wouldn’t have happened in my day, by damn.
There were over thirty people having their breakfast in Cricklade’s dining hall, which now served as the community’s canteen. The big chamber was three stories high, with a wooden ceiling supported by skillfully carved rafters. Cascade chandeliers hung on strong chains; their light globes were inoperative, but they bounced plenty of the sky’s ambient light around the hall, illuminating the elaborate Earth-woodland frescos painted between every window. A thick blue and cream coloured Chinese carpet silenced Luca’s boots as he walked over to the counter and helped himself to scrambled egg from an iron baking dish.
The plate he used was chipped, the silver cutlery was tarnished, and the polish on the huge central table was scuffed and scratched. He nodded to his companions as he sat, holding back any criticism. Focus on priorities, he told himself. Things were up and running at a basic level, that’s what counts. The food was plain but adequate; not rationed exactly, but carefully controlled. They were all reverting to a more civilized state of behaviour.