The Night's Dawn Trilogy (134 page)

“Depends what you’ve done wrong.”

“Nothing! Ask Nanny, I’ve been good. All day.”

“She pinched Rosy Oldamere’s swimming towel yesterday,” Zandra said. Emmeline burst into giggles. “You said you wouldn’t tell.”

“It was so funny. Miss Eastree had to lend Rosy hers, she was shivering all over.”

“Her skin was turning blue,” Emmeline said proudly.

“Who’s Laton?” Zandra asked.

“A bad man,” Edward said.

“Is he on Ombey?”

“No,” Kirsten said. “Now eat your rice chips.”

Her neural nanonics gave a silent chime, which warned her from the start it was going to be bad news; her equerry would never
allow a datavised message through unless it was serious, not at breakfast. She accessed the Defence and Security Council datapackage.

“Trouble,” she said resentfully.

Edward glanced over as she rose.

“I’ll help get them ready for day club,” he said.

“Thanks.” He was a good man.

She walked through the private apartments and emerged into the wide marbled corridor which led to the cabinet offices, drawing
startled looks and hurried bows from staff who were in early. She was still dressed in her turquoise and grey rising robe.

The official reception room was a decagonal chamber with a vaulting roof that dripped chandeliers. A horizontal sheet of sunlight
was pouring in through a ring of azure windows halfway up the walls. Pillars were inlaid with gold and platinum under a lofriction
gloss which kept the metal permanently agleam. Holoprints of impossibly violent stellar events alternated with oil paintings
around the walls. There were no modern dreamphase or mood-effusion works; the Saldanas always favoured antiquity for the intimation
of timeless dignity it gave.

Three people were waiting for her in the middle of the black tushkwood tile floor. Sylvester Geray was at their head; her
equerry, a thirty-six-year-old captain wearing his Royal Kulu Navy dress uniform. Hopelessly formal, she always thought, but
he hadn’t put a foot wrong since he took up the post three months after her coronation.

The other two, both wearing civilian suits, were a less welcome sight. Roche Skark, the director of the ESA office on Ombey,
smiled politely at his princess and inclined his head. Despite geneering, he was a rotund man, in his eighties, and twenty
centimetres shorter than Kirsten. He had held his post for thirteen years, dealing with threats and perceived threats throughout
the sector with pragmatism and a judicious application of abstruse pressure on the people who counted. Foreign governments
might grumble endlessly about the ESA and its influence and meddling in local internal politics, but there was never any solid
proof of involvement. Roche Skark didn’t make the kind of elementary mistakes which could lead to the diplomatic embarrassment
of his sovereign.

Jannike Dermot, on the other hand, was quite the opposite of the demure ESA director. The fifty-year-old woman wore a flamboyant
yellow and purple cord stripe suit of some expensive silk-analogue fabric, with her blonde hair arranged in a thick, sweep-back
style. It was the kind of consummate power dressing favoured by corporate executives, and she looked the part. However, her
business was strictly the grubbier side of the human condition: she was the chief of the Internal Security Agency on Ombey,
responsible for the discreet maintenance of civil order throughout the principality. Unlike its more covertly active sister
agency, the ISA was mostly concerned with vetting politicians and mounting observations on subversives or anyone else foolish
enough to question the Saldana family’s right to rule. Ninety-five per cent of its work was performed by monitor programs;
fieldwork by operatives was kept to a minimum. Also within its province was the removal of citizens deemed to be enemies of
the state; which—contrary to popular myth—was actually a reasonably benign affair. Only people who advocated and practised
violence were physically eliminated, most were simply and quietly deported to a Confederation penal planet from which there
was never any return.

Quite where the boundaries of the respective agencies’ operational fields were drawn tended to become a little blurred at
times, especially in the asteroid settlements or the activities of foreign embassy personnel. Kirsten, who chaired Ombey’s
Defence and Security Council, often found herself arbitrating such disputes between the two. It always privately amused her
that despite the nature of their work the agencies were both basically unrepentant empirebuilding bureaucracies.

“Sorry to disturb you, ma’am,” Sylvester Geray said. “The matter was deemed urgent.”

“Naturally,” Kirsten said. She datavised a code at one set of high double doors, and gestured for them to follow. “Let’s get
on with it.”

The doors opened into her private office. It was a tastefully furnished room in white and powder blue, though lacking in the
ostentation of the formal State Office next door where she received diplomats and politicians. French windows looked out into
a tiny walled garden where fountains played in a couple of small ornamental ponds. Glass-fronted cabinets and bookshelves
stood around the walls, heavy with exquisite gifts from visitors and institutions who enjoyed her patronage. A malachite bust
of Alastair II sat on a pedestal in an alcove behind her desk (Allie looking over her shoulder, as always). A classic Saldana
face, broadly handsome, with a gravity the sculptor had captured perfectly. She remembered her brother practising that sombre
poise in the mirror when he was a teenager.

The doors swung shut and Kirsten datavised a codelock at them. The processor in her desk confirmed the study was now physically
and electronically secure.

“The datapackage said there has been a new development in the
Ekwan
case,” she said as she sat in her highbacked chair behind the desk.

“Yes, ma’am,” Jannike Dermot said. “Unfortunately there has.” Kirsten waved a hand for them to sit. “I didn’t think it would
be good news.”

“I’d like to bring in Admiral Farquar,” Sylvester Geray said.

“Of course.” Kirsten datavised the processor for a security level one sensenviron conference and closed her eyes.

The illusion was of a curving featureless white chamber with a central oval table; Kirsten sat at the head, with Roche Skark
and Pascoe Farquar on one side, and Jannike Dermot and Sylvester Geray on the other. Interesting that the computer should
be programmed to seat the two agency directors opposite each other, she thought.

“I would like to formally request a system-wide code two defence alert,” the Admiral said as his opening gambit.

Kirsten hadn’t been expecting that. “You believe Laton will attack us?” she asked mildly. Only she could issue a code two
alert, which allowed the military to supersede all civil administration, and requisition whatever personnel and materials
it required. Basically it was a declaration of martial law. (A code one alert was a full declaration of war, which only Alastair
could proclaim.)

“It’s a little more complicated than that, ma’am,” the Admiral said. “My staff have been reviewing the whole Lalonde-Laton
situation. Now this reporter Graeme Nicholson has confirmed Laton was present on the planet, we have to begin to consider
other factors, specifically this energy virus which the Edenists reported.”

“I find it quite significant they wanted their findings to be known,” Roche Skark said. “In fact they actually requested that
we should be told. Which is an unusual step given the Kingdom’s standard relationship with Edenism. They obviously considered
the threat dangerous enough to exceed any political differences. And considering what happened to our G66 troops in Lalonde’s
jungle I believe they were totally justified.”

“Our analysis of both Jenny Harris’s jungle mission and subsequent events on Lalonde suggests that the energy virus and this
prevalent sequestration are the same thing,” said the Admiral. “What we are dealing with is an invisible force that can take
over human thought processes and bestow an extremely advanced energy manipulation ability. Sophisticated enough to act as
an electronic warfare field, and construct those white fireballs out of what appears to be thin air.”

“I reviewed parts of the jungle mission,” Kirsten said. “The physical strength those people had was phenomenal. Are you suggesting
anyone who is infected will acquire similar capabilities?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“How is the energy virus transmitted?”

“We don’t know,” the Admiral admitted. “Though we do consider the fact that Laton called it a virus to be significant. The
very nature of the term virus, whether employed in the biological or software sense, implies a pattern that can reproduce
itself within its host, usually at an exponential rate. But again, I’m not sure. We really are working in the dark on this
one, putting together appraisals from observed data. There has to be a priority to discover its exact nature.”

“We can find out relatively easily,” Jannike Dermot said. “The answer is in Gerald Skibbow’s memory—how he was infected and
sequestrated, how the energy virus behaves, what its limits are. I consider him to be the key to alleviating our lack of knowledge.”

“Has he recovered yet?” Kirsten asked.

“No. The doctors say he is suffering from a case of profound trauma; it’s touch and go if he ever will recover his full intellectual
faculties. I want him to undergo a personality debrief.”

“Is that wise, in his state?”

The ISA director showed no emotion. “Medically, no, not making him relive the events. But a debrief will provide us with the
information we require.”

It was a responsibility Kirsten could have done without; Skibbow was somebody’s child, probably had children of his own. For
a moment she thought of Benedict sitting in Edward’s lap. “Proceed,” she said, trying to match the ISA director’s impersonality.

“Thank you, ma’am.”

“The report from Lalonde said it was Laton himself who warned the Edenists of this energy virus? He claimed he was being attacked
by it.”

“That’s right, ma’am,” Admiral Farquar said. “Which is what makes our current problem even more acute.”

“You think he was telling the truth, that it is a xenoc incursion?”

“Under the circumstances, I have to give it strong consideration. Which is why I want a code two alert. It will give me the
resources to defend the Ombey system should they back up the virus with a physical invasion.”

Kirsten felt her palms tingle, that earlier unsettling notion that this wasn’t just an ordinary crisis was abruptly resumed.
“What do you mean: back up the virus?”

The Admiral flicked a glance at Roche Skark. “It is a possibility that the
Ekwan
brought it to Ombey,” he said.

“Oh, dear God. Do you have any proof?”

“We are ninety per cent convinced Gerald Skibbow has been purged, although none of the science team can offer an explanation
as to how that happened. However, in their haste to get him here, the Lalonde Embassy’s Intelligence team may have overlooked
the fact that some of their own people were carrying it. After all, Graeme Nicholson’s report confirms that Laton—presumably
a sequestrated Laton—was in Durringham the day they left. We have to assume the virus was also present in the city’s population
at that time.”

“When the Admiral’s staff informed me of this probability, my Guyana operatives immediately tried to round up the
Ekwan
’s crew and all the embassy staff,” the ISA director said. “Three embassy people were unaccounted for: Angeline Gallagher,
Jacob Tremarco, and Savion Kerwin. We subsequently found that all three took a spaceplane down to Ombey as soon as the code
three restrictions were lifted. We know they landed at Pasto Spaceport seven hours ago. The spaceplane which brought them
down suffered from several systems failures and processor glitches during the flight.”

“
Ekwan
’s flight from Lalonde was one long list of malfunctions. But since it docked at Guyana its systems have functioned smoothly,”
the Admiral said.

“And the spaceplane?” Kirsten asked, guessing.

“When my people arrived at the spaceport it was in the line company’s engineering hangar,” Jannike Dermot said. “The maintenance
crews couldn’t find a thing wrong with it.”

“And there was some difficulty with the zero-tau pod when Gerald Skibbow was put in it,” Roche Skark added. “The implication
is that this energy virus isn’t quite under control, it interferes with nearby electronic equipment on a permanent basis.”

“So what you’re telling me is that they’re down here,” Kirsten said.

“Yes, ma’am,” the ISA director acknowledged. “I’m afraid we have to assume they are. We’re hunting them, of course. I’ve already
alerted the police.”

“What about the others who were on board the
Ekwan
?”

“As far as we can tell, they have not been infected.”

“Exactly how do you tell?”

“Those that have neural nanonics can use them. We thought that if the energy virus does have an unrestrained capacity to interfere
with circuitry then implants would be the first to suffer a loss of efficiency.”

“Good idea,” she said.

“The rest of
Ekwan
’s complement of colonists are being brought into close proximity with delicate electronics. So far none of the processor
arrays have been affected, but we’re repeating the procedure every few hours just to be sure.”

“What about people the three from the embassy came into contact with while they were in Guyana?”

“We have reviewed the spaceport crews,” the Admiral said. “And we’re drawing up a schedule now to run the entire asteroid
population through these assessments. Including myself, no exceptions.”

“I see.”

“Will you declare a code two alert, ma’am?”

“I would point out that a code two alert will allow me to quarantine the Xingun continent,” Jannike Dermot said. “It is unlikely
that Gallagher, Tremarco and Kerwin have left yet. I can shut down all air transport to and from the rest of Ombey. I can
also order all road traffic to be suspended, though it may prove difficult to enforce in practice. We might get lucky and
trap them in Pasto City itself.”