Angel Stations (38 page)

When the Goblin’s protocols had first been designed, the engineers had programmed in a contingency for
emergency crash-landing
. After consultation with military psychologists and public-relations firms, this nomenclature had been changed to
controlled re-entry procedure
.

And as the Goblin fell, and as the natives of Kasper – and a lost colony of humans hidden in the high Teive Mountains – looked up and saw a second trail of smoke and fire across their sky, without their knowing it, their world was changing irrevocably, forever.

Emergency lights were beginning to flash at different points around the console. The ship was taking too much strain, she could see. She tried not to think about Vincent lying crumpled near them. He could be dead, and it seemed wrong for him to die only a few feet away, while they sat strapped into chairs and waited.

‘We just lost two propulsion jets,’ said Elias. ‘I think this is going to be rough.’

Fifteen

Sam Roy

His skin looked smoother, less blemished from wounds he had received than it had done in over a century. Ernst was paying remarkably little attention to him, and Sam could understand that. He couldn’t imagine what it must be like for almost every human alive: not knowing what would happen this day or the next, or the week after. For Sam it was all a foregone conclusion.

He waited a few moments more for Matthew to appear at the top of the path. The boy glanced behind him with a grim expression. Sam knew exactly what he was going to say – as if he had already said it.

Which, in a sense, he had.

Sam looked up, hoping to catch a glint of the shuttle in descent.
Trencher, my old friend
, he thought,
it’s been such a long time. Perhaps it would have been better if we hadn’t known, even then, and under just what circumstances
. . .

Sam was back at the bottom of the slope. If he wanted to eat or drink, he would again have to force the ball back up the path leading to where the food and water was. He had forced himself to rest, even as his belly ached and his throat cried out for moisture, for sustenance. There had been little snow in the past several days, and he could not rely on what little he could find to assuage his overpowering thirst.

What would happen, he wondered, if he merely dragged himself to the cliff’s edge, and threw himself off? Would he finally be free, with his head caved in and his brains scattered across that alien mountainside?

He would recover, unfortunately, as happened the last time he had tried that. Vaughn had punished him, of course, once he had recovered well enough to receive the punishment.

‘I hope you know what you’re doing,’ warned Sam, as Matthew got closer. ‘You’ve been down this way a lot recently. Someone might notice.’

Matthew shook his head emphatically. ‘He won’t know. The others will alert me the instant he deviates from his schedule.’

‘I’ve known your father for a long time, Matthew – since long before you came into the world. He’s capable of many things. It takes a special man to engineer’ – he raised one manacled hand and encompassed the valleys to the east with a sweep of his arm – ‘all of this. His plan.’

Matthew stared at him with an expression bordering on the contemptuous. ‘Sometimes you sound too much like you admire him for me to really be sure we can trust you.’

Sam raised his eyebrows. ‘Take a close look, kid. See the manacles? Know how long I’ve been confined here on this mountainside? Know the one thing that’s kept me sane all this time?’

Matthew scowled. ‘Yes, yes, I know. But the way you talk about him sometimes—’

‘In some ways, Matthew, your father is a great man. But history is littered to the gills with great men doing bad things. We were born into – created by – the Primalist religion whether we liked it or not. Try and imagine what it’s like, Matthew, to be told that you or one of your brothers was born specifically to lead some tiny portion of humanity to salvation. When you seem to have powers normally attributed to gods and legends. To be told that you and your brothers are the progenitors of a new age.’ Sam listened to himself, thinking,
What a bore you used to be, so given to grand speeches and cheap philosophy. You never quite got out of the habit, did you?
‘All your father has done is fulfil the expectations of those who brought him into this world. That doesn’t mean we don’t have to try our damnedest to stop him.’

‘You said something big is going to happen soon,’ said Matthew. ‘The shuttle is already on its way, everyone is in place. This is no time to be mysterious, we need to know.’

Sam chuckled. He almost felt free, as if these chains were now made of paper and he could shrug them off easily. It was strange to think it was almost over. This mountainside was all he had known for a multitude of lifetimes. He couldn’t imagine what it might be like not to live in searing pain, every second of every day, not to suffer unquenchable hunger without the blissful release of death.

‘I couldn’t be absolutely sure Elias was going to make it here along with the others,’ said Sam. ‘That’s what I was waiting for. The probability he’d survive this far was extremely high, and the fact of my observing his arrival in the future will have tipped the balance. But I’ve been surprised before. Remember, Matthew, some of the things your father and I foresee are still only probabilities, not inevitabilities. It’s up to us to work together to choose the outcome we want.’

‘What do we do with Trencher?’

Sam sighed. ‘You do what you’re supposed to do. Just get him out of there, and away from Ernst.’

Matthew stared at him, his face full of uncertainty and anger.

Matthew was becoming like his father. ‘Maybe we should just leave you here on the mountainside when this is all over,’ said Matthew. ‘We need certainties, not maybes. We need to know this is going to work.’

Sam squatted in the freezing dirt, flexing his knees. What Matthew had said was exactly the kind of thing Ernst might have said. ‘Trencher, your father and me – remember what I said about us. We can tap into something which the Angel DNA put inside us before we were born.’ Matthew’s irritated glance indicated that he knew all this. But it was important, now more so than ever before, to repeat it. Again, and again if necessary. Sam continued: ‘There are things that are going to concern us greatly when all this is over. The Angels were ready to bring dangerous predestination into the universe, but did you ever wonder why?’

Matthew cocked his head. ‘And you think
you
know the reason?’

‘I don’t
think
I know,’ Sam said softly. ‘I
do
know.’

Matthew gazed at him in consternation, as he couldn’t possibly understand. The powers that derived from the gene alterations didn’t seem to pass themselves on through subsequent generations. Sam and Trencher and Vaughn had each had their embryonic DNA altered in a lab, before being reimplanted into the wombs of three loyal Primalist women whom each had learned to call mother. He wondered if the Angels had deliberately wanted to prevent these abilities passing on from generation to generation. Perhaps he could understand why.

‘The wavefront of the explosion will reach this system within a few hours,’ said Sam. ‘That’s all that matters right now. And when your father opens the door of that shuttle, he’s going to get the biggest surprise of his life.’

Kim

Kim watched as their fuel reserves plummeted ever closer to zero. They were flying blind as re-entry had stripped the Goblin of most of its exterior sensors and data feeds. Elias had explained to her the Goblin was flying according to an internalized map of the terrain they were traversing, pieced together before and during their descent.

Her hands itched to guide her own ship, but she had no experience of flying in atmosphere.

As they waited for the end, Kim watched their fuel reserves sink further, so close to zero that she wondered how they were still airborne.

‘We’re just about down,’ said Elias, his voice strained. ‘We’re only a couple of hundred metres up.’

‘Any idea where we’re landing?’

‘No.’ Elias cursed. ‘All I know is, there isn’t enough fuel to make it as far as the shuttle.’

You don’t say
, Kim thought to herself.
And there was me just worrying about getting out of this alive
.

The Goblin dropped lower, lower. It shuddered, dropped again.

‘Fuel’s all gone,’ observed Elias.

Now the Goblin dropped like a stone. Kim screamed, feeling herself become suddenly weightless again.

It seemed to Kim that a world fell on her, and consciousness fled, leaving only blackness.

Roke

‘Master Roke, Master Roke.’

It was so bitterly cold here. Roke turned, glanced out through the flap of the tent. He could see the Teive Mountains rising far to the north. A young guardsman entered the tent, and Roke set down his writing implement.

‘Master Roke. You should come outside. There are flames up in the sky.’

Roke frowned. Then, as he heard a low hubbub of commotion, a sudden stab of fear ran through him. Perhaps local rebels were intending to attack them? He looked quickly around, feeling reassured when his eye fell upon the case in which his armour was stored.

Roke stepped outside into dim twilight and glanced up towards the band of stars that had recently been renamed Xan’s Crown. A line of smoke cut across it. Roke dropped his gaze and looked around him. There were three hundred warriors in this expedition, plus half that number more of attendant smithies and random camp-followers.

The trail of smoke was very far up indeed but, despite his age, the old Master’s eyesight was still clear and sharp. He had never seen anything like this, nor ever heard of it.

His eyes followed the direction of the smoke trail. It faded out at great distance over the sea, as if a burning arrow had flown across the horizon in the far west, beyond the point where the Great Northern Sea became uncharted ocean.

At the opposite end, it pointed to the midst of the distant Teive Mountains.
On our way
, thought Roke, looking around at the members of his expedition, gathered in loose knots around camp fires burning in the wide spaces between tents.

Then a second miracle happened. Something new passed overhead; roaring like a west Tisane volcano containing a bellyful of angry gods. Trailing flames and smoke, it passed only a thousand or so imperial measures above their heads, heading for the forests that coated the shores of the Northern lands.

We are being attacked by demons
, thought Roke. The fiery object passed far into the distance, dropping into the distant forest which was perhaps no more than a half a day’s march away.

As Roke waited for something else to happen, he noticed the camp had fallen silent. Even the exuberant wildlife of this northern wilderness had fallen quiet, as if the world and its gods had paused mid-breath.

Luke

‘Storm coming in.’

Luke glanced up and saw white cotton-wool clouds tumbling down a distant peak. He reached up and adjusted the hood of his thermal suit. They all wore white, thus fading into the gleaming, snowy landscape. He scanned the sky nervously, looking for shuttles, any sign that Vaughn was yet on to them, had anticipated what they were going to do.

It had taken time for Luke to accept Matthew’s heresies, but he was smart enough to know the seeds of rebellion had been planted when he had been blackmailed into concealing Matthew’s meetings with Sam Roy. It had been so hard, at first; Matthew had discovered Luke’s affair with Elizabeth, a girl intended for another under Vaughn’s complex breeding programme. Now Luke was a willing co-conspirator, but in the past several days he had woken many times during the night to find his teeth chattering loudly, his fading nightmares full of the fear of discovery. ‘What have we got, ten, fifteen minutes before the bad weather reaches us?’

‘Something like that,’ said Michelle. He glanced over and saw the troubled expression on her face. Luke had some idea of what she was going through. Her parents were deeply loyal to Vaughn and, although she disagreed with them to the point of betrayal, he knew she loved them dearly. But here she was, and they were – what had Matthew said? – doing the right thing.

The three of them had travelled overnight, coming on foot into the foothills lying far below the plateau where they had spent almost their entire lives. They were all familiar with this territory through regular hiking trips, as they worked at maintaining and checking the shield generators dotted across the surrounding peaks. The regular patrols also helped ensure that none of the native Kaspians had wandered too close. It gave them a legitimate reason for being where they were, if questioned.

Luke scanned the skies above their heads. Nothing. What if something had gone wrong? Either way, their past lives were finished, over. They’d never be able to return home. He forced himself to think about other things, to remember how things were supposed to go.

The flight path for the
Jager
shuttle had been put together by a few Primalists outside of Kasper, who still believed in Vaughn’s incipient godhood. Apparently they were willing to believe this after Vaughn had manifested himself to them a few times. And, thanks to his relatively privileged position within Vaughn’s home, Matthew had found a way to remotely insert a command routine into the shuttle’s flight path that would cause the shuttle to land here first before continuing on to its rendezvous with Vaughn. The deception would be worth, at the most, a few minutes, and Jason had helped carry out the tricky and complex programming that was necessary. They’d run a considerable risk of discovery, timing being very much of the essence.

Vaughn might not trust his son any more, but Luke and Matthew and Jason were the ones who understood best how the computer systems operated.

The
Jager
shuttle would drop onto the floor of the valley where they waited, touching down for barely 120 seconds. That was risky, very risky. But just long enough to enter the craft, open the deepsleep coffin, and drag Trencher’s comatose form free before the shuttle lifted off and resumed its course.