The Night's Dawn Trilogy (10 page)

There was something drifting in amongst the particles, a long feather-shape. He shifted the suit sensors’ focus, glad of the
diversion. It was a complete bough from a tree, about five metres away on his left. The forked branches were the palest grey,
tapering down to small twigs laden with long triangular leaves; the end which had broken away from the trunk was barbed with
narrow blades of wood.

Joshua datavised an order into the manoeuvring pack, and curved round to catch the bough. When he reached it he closed his
gauntleted hand around the middle. It was like trying to grasp a sculpture of sun-baked sand. The wood crumbled below his
fingers, dissociating into minute flakes. Tremors ran along the branches, shaking the origami leaves as if they were in a
breeze. He caught himself listening for the dry rustle, then he was suddenly in the heart of an expanding cloud of ash. He
watched it for a long regretful moment before unclipping the slim sampler box from his belt in a reflex action, and swatting
a few of the flakes.

The gas jets fired, agitating the cloud, and he emerged into a clearer section of space. The shell section was twenty metres
away. For a disconcerting moment it looked like solid ground, and he was falling towards it. He shut down the collar sensor
input for half a second, redefining his visual orientation in his mind. When the image came back, the shell section was a
vertical cliff face, and he was flying towards it horizontally. Much better.

The soil was in shadow, although no part of the shell section was truly black, there was too much scattered light from Mirchusko
for that. He could clearly see the foundations now, walls of black glass, snapped off a metre above the frozen quagmire of
lustreless soil. The largest room had some kind of mosaic flooring, and a quarter of the small tiles were still in place.
He halted seven metres from the darkened shell surface, and slid sideways. When he switched on the armour suit’s lights, white
spot beams picked out an elaborate pattern of green, scarlet, and mauve tiles. From where he was it looked almost like a giant
eight-taloned claw. Rivulets of water had solidified over it. They sparkled in the twin beams.

Joshua assigned the image a file code, storing it in an empty neural nanonic memory cell. The mosaic would bring in about
thirty thousand fuseodollars, he guessed, if he could chip the hundreds of tiles out without breaking them. Unlikely. And
the water, or whatever, would have to be scraped or evaporated away first. Risky. Even if he did work out a suitable method,
it would probably take at least a week. That couldn’t have been the siren call he’d heard with his mind.

The gas jets burped again.

He began to build up a picture of the edifice as he glided over the stumpy walls: it was definitely a public building of some
description. The room with the tile floor was probably a reception hall; there were five equally spaced gaps in one wall which
suggested entrance doors. Corridors led off from the other three walls, each with ten small rooms on either side. There was
a T-junction at the end of each of them, more corridors, more side rooms. Offices? There was no way of telling, nothing had
been left when the building took flight, whirling off into space. But if it were a human building, he would call them offices.

Like most scavengers, Joshua thought he knew the Laymil well enough to build up a working image. In his mind they weren’t
so much different from humans. Weird shape, trisymmetric: three arms, three legs, three stumpy serpentlike sensor heads, standing
slightly shorter than a man. Strange biochemistry: there were three sexes, one female egg-carrier, two male sperm-carriers.
But essentially human in basic motivation; they ate and shitted, and had kids, and built machines, and put together a technological
civilization, probably even cursed their boss and went for a drink after work. All perfectly normal until that one day when
they encountered something they couldn’t handle. Something which either had the power to destroy them in a couple of hours,
or make them destroy themselves.

Joshua shivered inside the perfectly regulated environment of the SII suit. Too much time in the Ruin Ring could do that,
set a man to brooding. So call the cramped square rooms offices, and think what happens in human offices. Over-paid intransigent
bureaucrats endlessly shuffling data.

Central data-storage system!

Joshua halted his aimless meander around the serrated foundations and flew in close to the nearest office. Low, craggy black
walls marked out a square five metres to a side. He got to within two metres of the floor and stopped, hanging parallel to
it. Gas from the manoeuvring jets coaxed little twisters of dust from the network of fine fissures lacing the rumpled polyp
surface.

He started at a corner, switching the sensors to cover an area of half a square metre, then fired the jets to carry him sideways.
His neural nanonics monitored the inertial guidance module in a peripheral mode, allowing him to give his full attention to
the ancient polyp as the search navigation program carried him backwards and forwards across the floor, each sweep overlapping
the last by five centimetres.

He had to keep reminding himself of scale, otherwise he might have been flying an atmosphere craft over a desert of leaden
sand. Deep dry valleys were actually impact scratches, sludgy oases marked where mud particles had hit, kinetic energy melting
them, only to re-freeze immediately.

A circular hole one centimetre in diameter. Expanded to fill half his vision. Metal glinted within, a spiral ramp leading
down. Bolt hole. He found another one; this time the bolt was still inside, sheared off. Two more, both with snapped bolts.
Then he found it. A hole four centimetres across. Frayed cable ends inside waved at him like seaweed fronds. The optical fibres
were unmistakable, different tolerances to the Kulu Corporation standard he was used to but apart from that they could have
been human made. A buried communication net, which must logically be linked with the central data-storage system. But where?

Joshua smiled around the respirator tube. The entrance hall gave access to every other part of the building, why not the maintenance
ducts? It fell into place without even having to think. So obvious. Destiny, or something close. Laughter and excitement were
vibrating his nerves. This was it, the Big Strike. His ticket out into the real universe. Back in Tranquillity, in the clubs
and scavenger pubs, they would talk in envious respectful tones about Joshua and his strike for decades. He’d made it!

The datavised order he shot into the manoeuvring pack sent him backing away from the office’s floor. His suit sensors clicked
down the magnification scale, jumping his vision field back to normal in a lurching sequence of snapshots. The pack rotated
him ninety degrees, pointing him at the mosaic, and he raced towards it, pale white ribbons of gas gushing from the jet nozzles.

That was when he saw it. An infrared blob swelling out of the Ruin Ring. Impossible, but there it was. Another scavenger.
And there was no way it could be a coincidence.

His initial surprise was replaced by a burst of dangerous anger. They must have tracked him here. It wouldn’t have been particularly
difficult, now he thought about it. All you needed was an orbit twenty kilometres above the Ring plane, where you could watch
for the infrared signature of reaction drives as scavenger craft matched orbits with their chosen shell sections. You would
need military-grade sensors, though, to see through all the gunk in the Ring. Which implied some pretty cold-blooded planning
on someone’s part. Someone determined in a way Joshua had never been. Someone who wouldn’t shrink from eliminating the scavenger
whose craft they intercepted.

The anger was beginning to give way to something colder.

Just how many scavengers had failed to return in the last few years?

He focused the collar sensors on the still-growing craft, and upped the magnification. Pink smear enveloped by brighter pink
mist of the reaction-drive exhaust. But there was a rough outline. The standard twenty-metre-long hexagonal grid of an inter-orbit
cargo tug, with a spherical life-support module on one end, tanks and power cells filling the rear cargo cradles, nesting
round the reaction drive.

No two scavenger craft were the same. They were put together from whatever was available at the time, whatever components
were cheapest. It helped with identification. Everyone knew their friends’ ships, and Joshua recognized this one. The
Madeeir
, owned by Sam Neeves and Octal Sipika. Both of them were a lot older than him; they’d been scavengers for decades, one of
the few two-man teams working the Ruin Ring.

Sam Neeves: a ruddy-faced jovial man, sixty-five years old now, with fluid retention adding considerable bulk to his torso
due to the time he spent in free fall. His body wasn’t geneered for long-term zero-gee exposure like Joshua’s, he had to go
in for a lot of internal nanonic supplements to compensate for the creeping atrophy. Joshua could remember pleasant evenings
spent with Sam, back around the time he started out scavenging, eagerly listening to the older man’s tips and tall stories.
And more recently the admiration, being treated almost like a protÉgÉ made good. The not quite polite questions of how come
he came up trumps so often. So many finds in such a short time. Exactly how much were they worth? If anyone else had tried
prying like that he would have told them to piss off. But not Sam. You couldn’t treat good old Sam like that.

Good old fucking Sam.

The
Madeeir
had matched velocities with the shell section. Its main reaction drive shut down, shimmering vapour veil dissipating. The
image began to clarify, details filling in. There were small bursts of topaz flame from its thruster clusters, edging it in
closer. It was already three hundred metres behind the spaceplane.

Joshua’s manoeuvring pack fired, halting him above the mosaic, still in the shell’s umbra.

His neural nanonics reported a localized communication-frequency carrier wave switching on, and he just managed to datavise
a response prohibition order into his suit transponder beacon as the interrogation code was transmitted. They obviously couldn’t
see him just yet, but it wouldn’t take long for their sensors to pinpoint his suit’s infrared signature, not now they had
shut down their reaction drive. He rotated so that his manoeuvring pack’s thermo-dump fins were pointing at the shell, away
from the
Madeeir
, then considered his options. A dash for the spaceplane? That would be heading towards them, making it even easier for their
sensors. Hide round the back of the shell section? It would be putting off the inevitable, the suit’s regenerator gills could
scrub carbon dioxide from his breath for another ten days before its power cells needed recharging, but Sam and Octal would
hunt him down eventually, they knew he couldn’t afford to stray far from the spaceplane. Thank Christ the airlock was shut
and codelocked; it would take time for them to break in however powerful their cutting equipment was.

“Joshua, old son, is that you?” Sam’s datavise was muzzy with interference, ghostly whines and crackling caused by the static
which crawled through the particles. “Your transponder doesn’t respond. Are you in trouble? Joshua? It’s Sam. Are you OK?”

They wanted a location fix, they still hadn’t seen him. But it wouldn’t be long. He had to hide, get out of their sensor range,
then he could decide what to do. He switched the suit sensors back to the mosaic floor behind him. The dendrite tendrils of
ice cast occasional pinpoint sparkles as they reflected the
Madeeir
’s reaction-control-thruster flames. A coherent-microwave emission washed over him; radar wasn’t much use in the Ruin Ring,
the particles acted like old-fashioned chaff. To use a scanner which only had the remotest chance of spotting him showed just
how serious they were. And for the first time in his life he felt real fear. It concentrated the mind to a fantastic degree.

“Joshua? Come on, Joshua, this is Sam. Where are you?”

The ribbons of frozen water spread across the tiles resembled a river tributary network. Joshua hurriedly accessed the visual
file of his approach from his neural nanonics, studying the exact pattern. The grubby ice was thickest in one of the corners,
a zone of peaks and clefts interspaced by valleys of impenetrable shadow. He cautiously ordered the manoeuvring pack to push
him towards that corner, using the smallest gas release possible, always keeping the thermo-dump fins away from the
Madeeir
.

“Joshua, you’re worrying us. Are you OK? Can we assist?”

The
Madeeir
was only a hundred metres away from the spaceplane now. Flames speared out from its thruster clusters, stabilizing its position.
Joshua reached the rugged crystalline stalagmites rearing up a couple of metres from the floor. He was convinced he was right;
the water had surged up here, escaping its pipes or tubing or whatever had carried it through subterranean depths. He grabbed
one of the stalagmites, the armour’s gauntlet slipping round alarmingly on the iron-hard ice until he killed his momentum.

Crawling around the tapering cones hunting for some kind of break in the shell was hard work, and slow. He had to brace himself
firmly each time he moved a hand or leg. Even with the sensors’ photonic reception increased to full sensitivity the floor
obstinately refused to resolve. He was having to feel his way round, metre by metre, using the inertial guidance display to
navigate to the centre, logically where the break should be. If there was one. If it led somewhere. If, if, if…

It took three agonizing minutes, expecting Sam’s exuberant mocking laughter and the unbearable searing heat of a laser to
lash out at any second, before he found a crevice deeper than his arm could reach. He explored the rim with his hands, letting
his neural nanonics assemble a comprehensible picture from the tactile impressions. The visualization that materialized in
his mind showed him a gash which was barely three metres long, forty centimetres wide, but definitely extending below the
floor level. A way in, but too small for him to use.