Bringer of Light (38 page)

As he followed the new instructions from his suit-com his thoughts returned to his final conversation with Vy. He’d still been digesting the revelation about males being able to download into beacons, and he’d asked, ‘So if you do manage to imprint on the beacon, then you’ll be linked back to Khesh – to the City – all the time, even if the beacon’s at Serenein, right? That means you’ve got some sort of opening into shiftspace active, permanently like.’ Jarek had described beacons as doors left ajar, to allow ships from the realspace universe to escape from shiftspace; he hadn’t thought much about it at the time, but if beacons contained downloaded male consciousnesses— He looked down at Vy. ‘Won’t that fuck you up? It certainly don’t do transit-kernels much good. I’d’ve thought being inside tech that’s always open to shiftspace would leave you well screwed!’

Vy had smiled. ‘Not
me
.’ There was something knowing, something nasty, about that smile. ‘The imprinted male in a beacon isn’t the one holding open the door to the void. The males thought it was fitting when they came up with the idea – nicely symmetrical. They were completing the pattern,
and
paying them back.’

He giggled, and Taro’d had to resist the urge to shake him. Instead he’d said, ‘Fuck’s sake, Vy, tell me what you’re on about!’

‘Don’t you see? It’s the females – for millennia they’d stayed sane in shiftspace by travelling in unity, using us to blaze the trail. We came up with a way to turn the tables on the bitches – and into the bargain we gave humans a way of steering shiftships for themselves, without females.’

Taro felt sick. ‘I really hope you ain’t saying what I think you’re saying.’

‘Depends what you think I’m saying,’ Vy countered, mimicking Taro’s accent, ‘don’t it?’

‘Shiftships have a male at their heart, so beacons—’

‘—have an insane female mind bound into them, yep. It’s ironic, really.’

‘
Oh shitting fuck!
’

‘Language, Taro. Back when everything was kicking off, the males caught themselves the mother of motherships. They killed some of the crew, and put the rest on ice. Later, they used those females to build the beacons.’

So when Zhian had told Taro Nual had been put in stasis and stashed next to the beacon manufactory, he hadn’t been surprised, though he didn’t think it meant anything to Zhian. All that mattered to her was doing what her patron wanted, and luckily for him, that happened to be for Taro to get his lover out. But it made horrible sense: the males of Aleph had used up one of their captured females to make the new beacon. Some of them were bound to be furious at the waste; this way they got a replacement.

Now his suit was directing him back up to the surface of the Egg; progress through the ducts was too slow, and he needed to be in the right place at the right time. When he reached the exit airlock, he was relieved to find it was on a sensor; you only needed to ask the hab-mind for permission to enter, not to leave.

He’d turned off his suit-light but it turned out he wouldn’t have needed it; he emerged into bright sunlight, reflecting off the pale surfaces all around. His visor instantly dimmed the blinding glare. He had five and a half minutes to reach his target. He knew roughly where to head even without the suit-com’s help: towards the fat disc of the
Heart of Glass,
hovering just above the surface of the hab. Looked like Zhian’s shuttle had come and gone safely; so as far as the males knew, Taro was now back on board Jarek’s ship.

Zhian had assured him that the software package he’d just delivered would run interference on the local sensors and surface weaponry, but the tight timescale meant the patron who’d come up with the hack had had to concentrate on the main mission, so the countermeasures might take a while to cut in, and when they did, they might not be entirely reliable. Best walk, not fly, for now.

Fortunately there were access paths between the clumps of tech, wide enough for a human. Bizarrely, a lot of the clumps looked very similar, each some variation on box, dish and aerial . . . of course, this was the hab’s
coms equipment.
Why’d they need so much, though? As he edged round a massive dish Taro answered his own question: because each sept would have their own, transmitting their own code to whichever part of Aleph that sept was based in . . . this huge fucker would be broadcasting to out-system, he’d bet.

There was a patch of open space beyond the dish and as he looked up, Taro saw movement on the far side of the
Heart of Glass
: a large orange cube, rising slowly from the surface of the hab towards the ship. The beacon.

Taro suppressed a shudder, then crossed the open area and headed into a gully. The top of the force-cage containing the beacon was drawing level with the bottom of Jarek’s ship. He had to hurry. Movement caught his eye: a small gawky-looking bot was working at the base of one of the aerial arrays, its manipulator arms deep inside an open access panel. It blocked his current path, and he didn’t have time for a diversion. Taro followed his instincts and kicked off, ready to leap over the bot.

His Angel implants included the ability to compensate for variable gravity. Taro hadn’t realised that his suit, even without the lifter-harness active, was keeping him stuck to the hab’s surface. The Angel mods didn’t allow for that. He tore free, but his flight was erratic, and too low, and his trailing foot clipped the top of the bot.

As he landed, the bot’s arms whipped back out of the access panel and it took off diagonally, heading straight for him.

Shit and blood, this little fucker could fly!

He turned, feeling time slow as his mods assessed the situation and worked out his best course of action. A single thrusting cut across the sensor apparatus would blind it, then a follow up to sever— No, if he used his blades he’d breach his v-suit. Even with the emergency forceshield, it was too risky.

His hesitation gave the bot time to close and Taro had to duck and roll as it sailed over his head. Something silver shot past his face, so close that if there’d been any atmosphere he’d have felt the near miss. He suspected Consensus maintenance bots weren’t always this unfriendly; presumably they were on alert, thanks to the package he’d just delivered.

He came up into a crouch, and touched a couple of buttons on the back of his gauntlet. If his harness wanted him stuck here, who was he to argue with the tech?

The bot had turned and was coming back in for another pass.

Taro forced himself to ignore the subliminal instructions his Angel mods were giving him and straightened. The bot was coming straight for him. He overrode the urge to weave and slash, stood his ground, drew back both arms and bunched his fists. When the bot arrived, he jerked his head back to avoid its attack, at the same time punching out with all his – and the lifter-harness’ – might.

The contact jarred his entire upper body, but the harness, holding fast to the deck below, soaked up the force of a blow that would otherwise have knocked him flying, not to mention probably breaking his arms.

The bot sailed back, moving absurdly fast in the airless, lo-grav environment. It hit the base of an aerial tower along the gully. The aerial wobbled for a moment, then settled at a slight angle. A broken manipulator arm floated slowly off into space.

Taro waited, in case the bot was still active, but all was still. His suit chose that moment to helpfully inform him that he was now running twenty-nine seconds behind schedule.

Fuck it. Well, they
definitely
knew he was here now. He disengaged the harness and kicked off again, more carefully this time. He began to fly low and fast, weaving between obstacles, scanning for bots heading his way or weapons drawing a bead on him. His suit squawked, trying to keep him on course now he was no longer at ground level. Ahead he could see Jarek’s ship beginning to move off slowly; he hoped it was moving slowly enough.

The airlock opened while he was still a dozen metres away. All pretence at stealth gone, he arrowed in, reaching the ’lock just as the comabox began to float sedately out. He wrapped his arms around it, wondering for a moment if he should be able to sense Nual inside – but no, she’d still be unconscious.

The suit increased his strength and let him offset the comabox’s momentum, but it didn’t extend his reach. Not even his long arms would fit around the box and he swiftly realised he needed to push it, not grasp. As he slid down to the end, he said, ‘Suit, can you give me directions to the ship I’m looking at right now, and can you keep doing it even when I can’t see it?’

‘Conditional affirmative: using inertial guidance I can direct you to a rendezvous; however due to the difficulty of precise vector matching and occlusion of the target by your burden there will be a significant margin of error, even assuming the ship does not significantly change its course or speed.’

‘How significant a margin of error’re we talking about?’

‘Five to ten per cent.’

That didn’t sound like too much. ‘Fine. Do it.’ He got himself under the comabox and began to push it up and away into space, towards the
Heart of Glass.
He used everything his mods and the suit could give him to go as fast as he could. It was time to find out if the virus he’d just planted really had taken out the hab’s guns.

‘What precisely were you
expecting
me to do about it?’ asked Urien. ‘Invite him to take tea with me and share his concerns?’

They were alone; Damaru had gone out after suffering Kerin to paint his forehead with the mark of a skyfool in order that he could walk unmolested wherever he wished. Kerin was glad he was not here to witness this argument. ‘Of course not!’ she said, ‘but I thought you would just have him watched, and perhaps get one of your people to try and draw him out later.’

‘And that is
precisely
what I did: when you told me about Captain Siarl this morning, I had someone observe his movements for the rest of the day. As soon as he got off duty he went to an unoccupied house in the lower city. He obviously expected someone to be there, for he knocked and then waited for some time. My informant tells me he called out to someone within at one point, but my man was not close enough to hear what he said. No one answered, and eventually Captain Siarl left. Such activity is suspicious in itself, but it also transpires that he comes from the same town as the girl who unexpectedly turned up for judgment earlier this week.’

‘Do you think she could be at that house?’

‘It is entirely possible, and when I have a moment, I will send someone to find out. I decided that the combination of my investigations into Captain Siarl, and your own report of his actions in the market-place and of his attitude last night – not to mention the fact that we have now aroused his suspicions – meant we had no choice but to detain him. Had we left him at liberty, he would have warned his associates.’

‘If he has any! And even if you are right, and we need to stop Captain Siarl spreading dissent and alerting any allies he
might
have, would it not be sufficient merely to put him in prison?’

‘There is no other way, Kerin. Truly, I wish there were. I did try questioning him when I initially had him arrested, but he professes to know nothing. I know he lied when he told me that, but being able to sense a lie is not the same as being able to sniff out the full truth, and we need to know the truth, for if there is organised opposition, we
must
counteract it before the situation gets out of hand. If we do not nip dissent in the bud now, then I fear that the day when we will not need such measures may never come. So, if you will excuse me—’

‘You are going there now? To the dungeons?’

‘That is so. I cannot trust anyone else to hear Siarl’s confession—’

‘
Confession!
’

‘It is a term used with some irony, but it is nonetheless accurate.’

Kerin suddenly realised that true evil was not something huge and imposing, something that could be fought like a mythical beast; it was small and insidious, and it came in many guises. She wondered how many people who had been accused of doing evil would ever have chosen that label for themselves. Perhaps even the Sidhe believed they did right.

‘Wait,’ she said, suddenly resolved, ‘I will come with you. I wish to witness this man’s torture.’

‘Kerin, truly, I do not think that would be a good idea.’

‘I put us on this path. I must know what it truly means to commit to it.’ She barked a short, bitter laugh. ‘Besides, as you so like to remind me, fear is a vital tool in controlling people; if this hapless monitor is confronted with someone he believes to be his goddess, might he not confess more freely, and quickly?’

‘Perhaps,’ Urien conceded. ‘If I did not know better I would say you also wished to save this man, who may be a traitor, from undue pain.’ Amazement warred with dark amusement in his voice.

‘Perhaps I do. I met him, Urien; my words condemned him, and I must face up to the price we are paying to bring our people into the light. If I cannot accept the consequences of our – of
my
– actions, or worse, if I pretend there are no consequences, then I have no right to impose my wishes on people. Besides, I know you think me soft. This will harden me. Urien, you cannot dissuade me.’

The Escori of Frythil led the way through rarely used corridors that wound ever downwards. Those few people they met, priests and servants alike, reacted with the usual awe. As they passed near the acolytes’ hall, the distant singing of young voices, sweet and pure, brought unasked-for tears to Kerin’s eyes; she blinked them back.