The Night's Dawn Trilogy (195 page)

Joshua flicked back to the images coming in from the
Lady Mac
’s extended sensor clusters. The spaceplane was five hundred metres away, its wings already folded back. He played the starship’s
equatorial ion thrusters, and moved in, bringing the docking cradle around to engage the latches in the spaceplane’s nose
cone.

Sitting in his pilot’s seat, watching the performance through the narrow windscreen, Ashly was, as ever, amazed by Joshua’s
ability to control the huge spherical starship’s motions. The docking cradle which had telescoped out of the hangar bay swung
around gracefully until it was head-on, then slid over the squashed-bullet nose. Naturally the alignment matched first time.

Various clunking sounds were transmitted through the stress structure, and the spaceplane was slowly drawn inside the
Lady Mac’s
narrow cylindrical hangar. Ashly shuddered as another warm, sticky, smelly globe of fluid landed on his ship-suit. He didn’t
make the mistake of trying to swat it, that just broke the larger portions into smaller ones. And you could inhale those.

“Eight of you are going to have to stay inside the spaceplane cabin,” Sarha datavised as the hangar’s airlock tube mated to
the spaceplane.

“You’re kidding me,” a dismayed Ashly replied.

“Bad luck, Ashly. But we’re maxing out our life support with so many people on board. I really need the spaceplane’s carbon
dioxide filters.”

“Oh, God,” he said miserably. “Okay. But send in some handheld sanitizer units, and quickly.”

“They’re already in the airlock waiting for you.”

“Thanks.”

“Send out the smallest children first, please. I’m going to cram them into the zero-tau pods.”

“Will do.” He datavised the flight computer to open the airlock hatch, then left his seat to talk with Father Elwes about
which children should go where.

Lady Macbeth’s
two undamaged fusion drive tubes ignited as soon as the spaceplane was stowed inside the hull. She rose away from the planet
at a steady one gee, heading up towards a jump coordinate which would align her on Tranquillity’s star.

Far behind her, the middle section of the red cloud rippled and swirled in agitation. A tornado column swelled up from the
centre, extending a good twenty kilometres above the twisting currents of cumulus. It flexed blindly for several minutes,
like a beckoning—or clawing—finger. Then the
Lady Macbeth’s
sensor clusters and thermal dump panels began to retract into their jump positions below the hull. Her brilliant blue-white
fusion exhaust shrank away, and she coasted onwards and upwards for a brief minute until an event horizon claimed her.

The questing finger of cloud lost its vigour, and slowly bowed over in defeat, its glowing vapour reabsorbed into the now
quiescent centre of the shroud. The leading edges continued their advance.

•  •  •

The view from Monterey’s Hilton was as spectacular as only a three-hundred-and-fifty-million-dollar building could provide.
Al Capone loved it. The Nixon suite was on the bottom floor of the tower, giving it a standard gravity. New California glided
slowly past the curving, radiation-shielded window which made up an entire wall of the master bedroom. The planet gleamed
enticingly against the jet-black starfield. His one disappointment was that from here the stars didn’t twinkle like they used
to when he watched them at night above his summer retreat cottage at Round Lake. That aside, he felt like a king again.

The Hilton was a sixty-storey tower sticking out of the Monterey asteroid, orbiting a hundred and ten thousand kilometres
above New California. Apart from Edenist habitat starscrapers (which it was modelled on), there were few structures like it
in the Confederation. Tourists could rarely look down on terracompatible planets in such a fashion.

Which was stupid, Al thought, big business could make a packet out of hotels like the Hilton. But he couldn’t spend all day
looking at New California. He could sense his Organization’s top lieutenants waiting patiently outside the suite. They’d learned
quickly enough not to interrupt when he wanted his privacy. But they did need orders, to be kept on their toes. Al knew just
how fast things would fall apart if he didn’t ride them hard. The world might be different, but the nature of people didn’t
change.

As if on cue, Jezzibella purred, “Come back here, lover.”

Well maybe some people did, women never acted like her back in the 1920s and thirties. Then, they were either whores or wives.
But Al was beginning to suspect there weren’t many girls quite like Jezzibella in this century, either.

One minute all cute and kittenish, the next an animal as strong and demanding as himself. Al had his energistic strength now,
which meant he could do some pretty incredible things with his wang. Things which even Jezzibella hadn’t known about. Performances
which made him proud, for a while anyway, because they were the only times he could make her beg him for more, to keep going,
tell him how stupendous he was. Most of the time it was the other way around. Shit, she even kissed like a boy. Trouble was,
after he’d done all those fantastic things to her hot-rod body, she wanted them done again, and again, and again…

“Please, baby. I really liked the Egyptian position. Only you are big enough to make that work.”

With a halfhearted sigh Al left the window and walked back to the sunken bed she was lying on. The oomph girl had no shame,
she was absolutely naked.

He grinned and let the front of his white robe fall open. Jezzibella hooted and applauded as his erection rose. Then she flopped
back, character shifting in an instant. Al looked down on a scared-for-her-cherry schoolgirl.

His entry was fierce, without any attempt at finesse. It made her cry out in disbelief, pleading for him to stop, to be kind.
But she couldn’t resist, no girl could, not a lover like him. In minutes his vigorous pumping had turned her cries to rolling
moans of delight, her snarl to a smile. Her body was responding, the two of them moving in a slick acrobatic rhythm. He made
no attempt to control himself, to wait for her, he climaxed when
he
was ready, oblivious to anything else. When his drowsy eyes opened, he saw her staring drunk-enly up at the ceiling, the
tip of her tongue licking her lips. “That was a good fantasy fuck,” she drawled. “We’ll have to do that one again.”

Al gave up. “I gotta get going. I gotta sort the boys out, you know how it is.”

“Sure, baby. What are you going to get them to do?”

“Christ, you dumb broad. I’m running the whole fucking planet now. You think that just falls into place? I gotta million problems
need looking at. Soldiers, they need orders or they go sour.”

Jezzibella pouted, then rolled over to grab the processor block which lay on the side of the bed. She typed on it, and frowned.
“Al, honey, you must pull in that field of yours.”

“Sorry,” he muttered, and made an effort to calm his thoughts. It was the best way to make the electric gadgets work.

Jezzibella whistled in appreciation as she read the data running down the block’s screen (she’d long since given up trying
to datavise when she was in Al’s presence). According to the information assembled by Harwood’s office, there were nearly
forty million possessed on New California now. Hooking up with Al, that wild impulse back at the San Angeles spaceport, looked
like being the smartest move she’d ever made.
This
was the anarchy ride she’d been hunting for most of her life. The buzz of power she got from being with Al—very literally
one of life and death—stimmed her higher than any adulation the fans gave during a concert.

How could anyone know that a gangster from the past would have such a genius for assembling a power structure which could
hold an entire planet in bondage? But that was what he’d done. “You just gotta know what strings to jerk,” he’d told her on
the flight up to the orbiting asteroids.

Of course all forty million possessed weren’t perfectly loyal to him, they weren’t even recruited into the Organization. But
then neither had the vast majority of Chicago’s citizens sworn fealty to him. Nonetheless, willing or not, they had been his
vassals. “All we gotta do is have an Organization in place and ready when the possessed start to emerge,” he explained. “Back
in Chicago, they called me a mobster because there was another administration trying to run things parallel to mine: the government.
I lost out because the fuckers were bigger and stronger. This time, I ain’t making that mistake. This time there’s only gonna
be me from the word go.”

And he’d been true to his word. She’d watched him at work that first day, just after they’d captured the orbiting asteroids
and the SD network, sitting quietly in the background of the Monterey naval tactical operations room which the Organization
soldiers had taken over as their headquarters. Watching and learning just what she’d gone and gotten herself involved in.
And what she saw was the building of a pyramid, one constructed entirely from people. Without once losing his temper, Al issued
orders to his lieutenants, who issued them to their seconds, and so on down the line. A pyramid which was constantly growing,
absorbing new recruits at the bottom, adding to the height, to the power of the pinnacle. A pyramid whose hierarchy was established
and maintained with the coldly ruthless application of force.

The first targets to be blasted into lava by the SD platforms had been government centres, everything from the Senate palace
and the military bases right down to county police stations. (Al really hated the police. “Those cocksuckers murdered my brother,”
he’d growl darkly when she questioned him on it.) Even little town halls in country smallvilles were reduced to cinders after
they opened for business in the morning. For eight hours, the platforms had fired energy pulses down on the hapless, helpless
planet they had been constructed to defend. Any group who could organize resistance was systematically wiped out. After that,
the possessed were free to sweep across the land.

But Al’s Organization people were among them, directing the onwards march, finding out exactly who had returned from the beyond,
when they came from, what they did in their first life. Their details would be sent up to the office which Avram Harwood had
set up in Monterey, where they would be studied to gauge their potential usefulness. A select few would then be made an offer
which—“They just can’t refuse,” Al chortled jubilantly.

They were a tiny minority, but that was all it ever took to govern. No rival could ever develop. Al had seen to that; he had
the firepower to support his Organization if anyone stepped out of line. And when he captured the SD network, he acquired
the ultra-hardened military communications net which went with it, the only one which had a chance of remaining functional
in the territories of the possessed. So even if there were objectors among the newly emerged possessed (and there certainly
were), they couldn’t get in contact with others who thought along the same lines to create any decent kind of opposition.

In the end Jezzibella had felt privileged. It was a pivotal moment of history, like watching Eisenhower dispatching his D-day
forces, or being with Richard Saldana as he organized the exodus from the New Kong asteroid to Kulu. Privileged and ecstatic.

More statistics ran down the processor block’s screen. There were over sixteen million non-possessed left in the areas where
the Organization ruled supreme. Harwood’s office had declared they should be left alone to keep the utilities and services
going, and by and large the Organization ensured they were left alone—for now. How long that would last, though, Jezzibella
had her doubts.

Transport was also being orchestrated to invade the cities and counties which remained uncontaminated. According to the tactical
estimates there would be a hundred million possessed living on New California by this time tomorrow. The Organization would
achieve absolute control of the entire planet within a further three days.

And yesterday all she’d had to entertain her were a couple of fresh, gawky kids and the tiresome antics of the entourage.

“It’s looking pretty fucking fantastic, Al,” she said. “Guess you’ve got what it takes.”

He slapped her buns playfully. “I always have. Things here ain’t so different from Chicago. It’s just a question of size;
this is one fuck of a lot bigger, but I got savvy Avvy’s boys to help sort out that side of things, keeping track and all.
Avvy didn’t get to be mayor of San Angeles the way Big Jim Thompson made it into city hall back in Chicago. No, sir, he’s
got a flair for paperwork.”

“And Leroy Octavius, too.” “Yep. I see why you wanted to keep him now. I could do with a load more like him.”

“To do what?”

“To keep going, of course. At least for a few days more.” He slumped his shoulders and rubbed his face in his hands. “Then
it’s really gonna hit the fan. Most of the dumb asses down there want to do this magic disappearing act. Je-zus, Jez, I ain’t
so sure I can stop them.” Eight times in the last day he’d ordered Emmet Mordden to use the SD platforms to sharpshoot buildings
and city blocks over which the wisps of red cloud were forming. Each time the culprits had taken the hint, and the luminous
swirl had vanished.

For the moment he was on top of things. But what was gonna happen after he’d won the planet was giving his brain a real hard
time. It was going to be difficult stopping the possessed from vanishing inside the red cloud, because he was the only one
among them who didn’t want that to happen. Once he’d delivered the whole planet to them, they’d start looking around at what
was stopping them from achieving their true goal. And some wiseass with an eye on the main chance would make his bid. Wouldn’t
be the first time.

“So give them something more to do,” Jezzibella said.

“Sure, right, doll. Like after the entire fucking world, what else am I gonna give them, for Christ’s sake?”

“Listen, you keep telling me this whole setup is going to end once the possessed pull New California out of the universe,
right? Everyone’s going to be equal and immortal.”