Fallen Dragon

  The Skins were still out of sight. Nobody else was outside the maintenance hangar. Josep jogged quickly to the door he'd used on his approach to the spaceplane and slipped through.

  There was an office fifteen meters away from the door, shut for the night. He reached it in five seconds, bundled the corpse inside, then checked to see if anyone had noticed. Neither the maintenance crews nor Skins had reacted, and no alarms were screaming into the datapool.

  They even had a contingency for an incident like this. Priority had to be given to getting the body out of the spaceport for disposal. No suspicion must be attached to the area.

  Josep called up a menu for cargo robots currently in the maintenance hangar.

  Camera feeds outside continued to show Dudley Tivon walking across the parking apron. He opened a door into the neighboring hangar and disappeared inside.

  * * *

  "After eight years of flight, Mozark had traveled halfway around the Ring Empire, stopping at over a hundred star systems to explore and learn what he could in the hope of inspiration. He could no longer see his own kingdom; that little cluster of stars was lost from sight behind the massive blaze of gold, scarlet and dawn-purple light that was the core. Few of his kind had ever ventured into this part of the Ring Empire, yet he felt comfortable amid the races and cultures inhabiting this section of the galaxy.

  "Mozark might not have seen any of these species before, but everywhere he traveled he was able to communicate with his new hosts and eventually able to learn their separate philosophies and interests and goals and dreams. In many ways this heartened him, that he had so many ideas at his disposal, all of which he was eventually able to understand. Some he regarded as magnificent, and he looked forward to introducing them to the kingdom when he returned home. Some were simply so alien that they could never be adopted or used by his own kind, although they remained interesting on a purely intellectual level. While some were too hideous or frightening even to speak of."

  Edmund immediately stuck his hand up, as Denise knew he would.

  "Yes, Edmund?" she asked.

  "Please, miss, what were they?"

  "The hideous and frightening ideas?"

  "Yes!"

  "I don't know, Edmund. Why do you want to know?"

  "Coz he's horrible!" Melanie shouted. The other children laughed, giggling and pointing at the beleaguered boy. Edmund stuck his tongue out at Melanie.

  "Enough," Denise told them, waiting until they'd quietened down again. "Today's story is all about the time when Mozark meets the Outbounds. Now this wasn't a single race: like the Last Church, the Outbounds attracted a great many people to their cause. In many ways they were the opposite of the Last Church. The Outbounds were building starships. Not just the ordinary ones that the Ring Empire used for trade and travel and exploration. These were intergalactic starships." She gave the children a knowing look as they ooohed with wonder. "The greatest machines the technology of the Ring Empire could devise. They were the largest, fastest, most powerful and sophisticated ships that this galaxy has ever known. The effort to build them was immense; the Outbounds had taken over an entire solar system to serve as a construction center. Only a star with all of its circling planets could provide them with the resources necessary. Mozark spent a month there, flying his own small ship around all the facilities, playing tourist amid these tremendous cathedrals of engineering. The Outbounds proudly told him of the ocean-sized converter disks that they'd dropped into the star, where they'd sunk down to the inner layers to settle amid the most intense fusion process to be found within the interior. That was the only place to generate sufficient energy to power the tens of thousands of industrial bases operating through the system. Behemoths in their own right, these bases were partially mobile, allowing them to swallow medium-sized asteroids in their entirety. The rocks were digested and separated into their constituent minerals, which were then fed into refinery towers. Biomechanical freighters that only operated in-system would collect the finished products and ferry them to manufacturing facilities where they would be fabricated into components for the starships.

  "The shipyards they were built in were the size of a small moon. Each individual intergalactic ship was miles long, with silver-and-blue hypermorphic hulls that would gather up every speck of starlight falling on their spinshifted molecules and radiate it away again in a uniform coronal shimmer. When they were parked in orbit, they were smooth and egg-shaped. Then, when their engines came alive, flinging them into the nullvoid at hundreds of times the speed of light, they would instantly convert themselves into sleek rapiers sprouting long, aggressive forward-swept tail fins. It was as though the nullvoid where they now traveled possessed an atmosphere of elementary photons through which only their metasonic profile would fly.

  "Mozark, of course, was enthused by the whole project. The Outbounds were the Ring Empire's final and greatest pioneers. The intergalactic ships were taking colonists to other galaxies. New empires would be born out there on the other side of the deep night. That would be a wondrous future flowering out there amid the unknown, replete with challenges and struggle. Life would not be smooth and complacent as it was amid the Ring Empire.

  "He watched the ordinary passenger starships dock, bringing the tens of thousands of colonists who were searching for a new life for themselves and their descendants. They had come from kingdoms right across the neighboring section of the Ring Empire, hundreds of different species united by wanderlust. The first time he saw an intergalactic ship launch itself into nullvoid he felt nothing but envy. They were his soulmates, and he was being left behind. But such was his duty; he had to return home to his own kingdom. There and then, with his own ship still floundering for stability in the energy backwash of the intergalactic ship's drive, he wanted to bring word of this enormous venture back to his people. He envisaged the kingdom's resources being turned over to a similar project, carrying them all on a magnificent voyage to the future. It was only after the massive ship had vanished from his sensors that doubts and disillusionment began to creep into his thoughts. He had undertaken this quest voyage to find something that would benefit and inspire all of his people. Yet how many of them, he wondered, would really want to discard everything they had and gamble on a wild trip into uncharted reaches of the universe? Many would: millions, perhaps hundreds of millions. But his kingdom was home to billions of people, all of them leading a relatively happy existence. Why should he make them abandon that? What right could he possibly have to tear them away from the worlds and society they had built, and which served them so well?

  "That was when he finally began to understand himself and his own dissatisfaction. Looking out of his own ship at its proud, giant cousins orbiting a nameless barren Out-bounds planet he now saw only a difference in scale. Both he and the colonists were prepared to fly away into the unknown in order to find what they hoped would be a worthwhile life. They were probably braver than he, taking a bigger chance with what they would find and where they would end up. But for them it would be the flight itself that was the accomplishment. When they reached that far shore, they would have every ability and material advantage at their disposal that they had in the Ring Empire itself. There were no new ideas waiting for them out there, only space that was—one hoped—a little less crowded. They were taking the primary Ring Empire culture with them in the form of the technology and data that were their heritage. Just as the similarity that pervaded the Ring Empire was due to its monoknowledge base, so these fledgling seeds would sprout identical shoots. If anything, he decided, the colonists weren't as brave as he was: they were just running away. At least he was trying to help his people back in the kingdom."

  Denise stopped, conscious of the way the children were regarding her with faintly troubled expressions. One or two of them were even resentful and impatient, picking at the blades of grass and throwing the occasional wistful glance out at the white town beyond the wall. This was no longer the story they thought it was going to be, a qu
est with terrible hardships to overcome and monsters to battle. All they were hearing was how Mozark kept turning his nose up at wonders and sights beyond anything they would ever know. A fine hero he made.

  She rebuked herself for losing sight of whom she was telling this to and gathered up her memories of the story. There was much that she could discard: shorn of its abstracts and philosophizing, it could still be made to work for them.

  "So when he was standing there in his starship, thinking all these thoughts about the Outbounds and the Last Church, and The City, and even the Mordiff, Mozark suddenly knew what he had to do."

  "What?" one of the girls asked avidly.

  "He had to go home," Denise said. "Because he knew then what he was going to say to Endoliyn, the thing he was going to devote the rest of his life to."

  "What!" the chorus was yelled at her.

  "It's a beautiful day," Denise said with a mischievous laugh. "You should be out there playing and enjoying it I'll tell you what happened when Mozark returned to his kingdom soon."

  "Now!"

  "No. I said soon."

  "Tomorrow, then."

  "Possibly. If you're good."

  They promised her they were and would always be.

  She let them scatter and fling themselves about on the school's small, protected lawn. There was no need for her to check her big old watch; she knew what the time was. The goodwill soccer game was about to start.

  Clusters of d-written neural cells connected Denise with Memu Bay's datapool. Several reporters were covering the game—not that there was much interest. Public access figures for the game were minimal. They were already lining their cameras up on the pitch, bringing the two teams into focus as they went through their prematch kickabout routines.

  Lawrence stopped the ball firmly and tapped it with the inside of his right foot. It bobbled along the ground, rolling to a halt a couple of meters away from Hal, who gave him a disgusted look. The maneuver was supposed to be a deft pass, landing just so for Hal to kick into the defenders' goal area.

  Instead, as Hal made a frantic dash for the ball, two of the lads they were playing against tackled him. For a moment Lawrence thought they were playing rugby by mistake. Hal hadn't quite reached the ball, and they were high, legs lashing out.

  Hal yelped as he fell, his shoulder taking the full impact. "Fuck me," he grunted under his breath.

  The ref blew his whistle.

  Hal looked up at him expectantly.

  "Free kick," the ref grunted reluctantly.

  "What card are you showing them?" Hal asked indignantly. The ref walked away.

  Lawrence and Wagner got their hands under the kid's shoulders and lifted him up. "He's got to be kidding," Hal cried. "That was a yellow card at least."

  "Slightly different rules here," Lawrence said, hoping it would calm the kid down. Hal looked as if he was about to start a fight.

  The two lads who'd tackled him were grinning happily. One of them showed a finger. "KillBoy says spin on it."

  Hal lurched forward, snarling. Lawrence and Wagner just managed to hold on to him. There were a few desultory cheers from the touchline where the locals were gathered.

  It wasn't different rules here at all. For the tenth time since the goodwill game started, Lawrence's Loafers versus the Avenging Angels, Lawrence wondered if this had been such a good idea after all. The locals saw this purely as a way to legitimately hack Z-B squaddies to pieces with the strangely long studs on their boots and tackles that would make a kung-fu master wince.

  Just before kickoff, Ebrey Zhang had come over for a quiet pep talk with the team. After he'd finished spouting on about opportunities and enhanced community relations, he'd said to Lawrence: "We don't want to cause any sort of commotion here, Sergeant. Let's just take it easy out there, shall we?"

  "Are you ordering us to lose, sir?" Lawrence had asked. He supposed in a way it was flattering, their commander assuming they would automatically win. But he'd seen some of the youths they were up against. Big and fit-looking. It should be quite a tight game.

  "No, no," Ebrey said softly. "But we wouldn't want a walkover, would we? Bad feeling and all that."

  "Got you, sir."

  "Good man." Ebrey slapped him heartily on the shoulder and joined the rest of the Z-B supporters.

  Goodwill had run out in the first five minutes. Not that the Avenging Angels had ever brought any to the pitch in the first place.

  Hal took the free kick, sending the ball in a long arc over to Amersy. The corporal began his run down the wing. Lawrence ran level with him on the other side, two Avenging Angels marking him close all the way. Close enough to mistakenly knock into him when the ref happened to be looking the other way.

  Lawrence skidded along the mud, almost losing his balance. Amersy had raced on ahead now, leaving Lawrence hopelessly misplaced to receive a pass. "Damn it," he growled. His markers were surprised when he elbowed them aside. Fortunately the ref was still watching Amersy as the corporal was tackled.

  "Support!" Lawrence screamed at his team. "Support him, for fuck's sake, you pitiful assholes."

  "Now, Sergeant," Captain Bryant's voice carried in faintly from the touchline. "No need for that sort of language."

  Lawrence glared, managing to force out a few words under his breath.

  Amersy was trying to lift himself off the ground as the victorious Avenging Angels made off with the ball. The hulking hooligans actually had good ball control, Lawrence admitted grudgingly. They nudged it between them, easily beating their way around the one midfielder who tried to intercept them.

  Where the fuck was the rest of the team?

  "Defense," Lawrence shouted desperately. His arms semaphored wildly.

  At least his backs had some understanding of tactics. Two were coming forward to take on the Avenging Angels with the ball. Three were guarding the goal area. A midfield duo were heading to the other wing, marking the Avenging Angels striker who was dodging forward into position. Lawrence saw one of their midfielders heading for an open space in the center circle and ran to cut him off.

  Not such a bad game after all, and his men could play tough too.

  The land mine went off under the Lawrence's Loafer defender on the right of the goal area. It blew him three meters straight up into the air, taking off his legs and shredding his lower torso. Lawrence dived to the ground at the dull thudding boom of the explosion. An eerie moment of silence followed. Then the defender's upper torso thumped down, lifeless arms flopping about grotesquely from the jarring impact. His head twisted around to stare blankly at the goalmouth. Lawrence recognized Graham Chapell, a squaddie from Ciaran's platoon. Blood and gore splattered across half of the pitch. There was still no sound; everyone was too shocked even to scream.

  Lawrence looked around wildly, seeing the steaming crater that had ripped out of the ground, understanding immediately what had happened. Everybody else had flung themselves down. He watched in horror as the ball rolled on, bouncing and juddering across the rucked grass field.

  Stop, he implored it silently. Oh fuck, stop. Stop!

  The damn thing was easily big enough to trigger another mine if it passed over one. It was rolling toward Dennis Eason, who was watching it coming, his face drawn into a rictus of terror and fatalistic expectation.

  The ball stopped half a meter from him. He let out a sob of relief as his head dropped back to the mud.

  People were yelling and screaming now, spectators as well as players; they were all flat on the ground. Z-B personnel were all shouting at everyone not to move, to stay exactly as they were. Help was on its way.

  Lawrence clenched his fists, pushing them into the mud, furious at how helpless he was. Waiting with every muscle locked tight in fright and suspense. Supremely vulnerable without his Skin. Open for death from any passing student revolutionary with a whim to be a hero that day. He hated KillBoy right then. Hated this whole fucking world. That had never happened before. Not ever. The best he'd ever come up
with before today was animosity and contempt.

  All they were doing here was playing soccer, for God's sake. Soccer. Their own people as well, few of whom were out of their teens. He could hear the young Avenging Angels around him, whimpering in terror, several of them crying.

  What the hell was wrong with these people? He wanted to shout it out at them. They'd hear. They'd be here watching, relishing the distress and dread they'd created. Gloating as the knife was twisted.

  But all he could do was grit his teeth and lie still, the muddy water seeping into his shirt and shorts. Waiting for the glorious sound of the helicopters.

  Seven platoons were rushed to the park where the soccer game was being played. Their helicopters landed on the roads around the outside. The Skins advanced cautiously, sensors probing the ground as they came.

  They reached Ebrey Zhang first, leading the commander away down a safe path marked out by beacon tubes that flashed a bright amber. His helicopter thundered away overhead as the remaining Skins spread out over the park, sensors playing back and forth. People were slowly led away one at a time, shaking with relief as they leaned on the squaddies. They reached Lawrence forty minutes after the helicopters arrived. He stood unsteadily, staring around. A confusing grid of amber lights were flashing all across the pitch. Three red lights gleamed bright among them. One was four meters away from where Lawrence had lain.

  A medic squad was picking up pieces of Graham Chapell from cleared sections of the pitch, putting him in thick black polyethylene bags.

  "Bastards," Lawrence hissed as the Skin eased him toward the waiting jeeps. "You utter bastards."

  Dean Blanche was ushered into the mayor's study by one of Ebrey Zhang's aides. The commander only needed one look at the carefully blank expression on the internal security captain's face to know it was going to be bad news.

  "So?" he asked when the doors were closed.