The Night's Dawn Trilogy (282 page)

What do I do?
she asked her crew.

Their minds merged, awash with compassion and distress. The answer, she felt, was inevitable.

Syrinx walked over and took Erick’s cold, damp hand in hers. “All right, Erick,” she said softly. Wishing once more for a
single second of genuine communication. “We’ll put you in zero-tau. But I want you to promise me something in return.”

Erick’s eyes had closed. His breathing was very shallow now as he datavised several files into the toroid’s net. Caucus was
exuding concern at the read-out from the diagnostic scanner.
Hurry
, he urged.

“What?” Erick asked.

“I want your permission to take you out of zero-tau if we find a proper solution to all this.”

“You won’t.”

“But if we do!”

“This is stupid.”

“No it isn’t. Edenism was founded on hope, hope for the future, the belief that life can get better. If you have faith in
our culture to preserve you for eternity, you must believe in that. Jesus, Erick, you have to believe in something.”

“You are a very strange Edenist.”

“I am a very typical Edenist. The rest just don’t know it yet.”

“Very well, deal.”

“I’ll talk to you soon, Erick. I’ll be the one who wakes you up and tells you.”

“At the end of the universe, perhaps. Until then…”

Alkad Mzu hadn’t seen snow since she left Garissa. Back in those days she’d never bothered indexing a memory of winter in
her neural nanonics. Why waste capacity? The season came every year, much to Peter’s delight and her grudging acceptance.

The oldest human story of all: I never knew what I had until I lost it.

Now, from her penthouse in the Mercedes Hotel, she watched it falling over Harrisburg, a silent cascade as inexorable as it
was gentle. The sight made her want to go outside and join the children she could see capering about in the park opposite.

The snow had begun during the night, just after they landed at the spaceport, and hadn’t let up in the seven hours since.
Down on the streets tempers were getting shorter as the traffic slowed and the pavements turned slippery with the slush. Ancient
municipal mechanoids, backed up by teams of men with shovels, struggled to clear the deep drifts which blockaded the main
avenues.

The sight didn’t exactly bode well. If the Tonala nation’s economy was so desperate that they used human labour to clean the
streets of their capital. . .

So far Alkad had managed to keep her objective in focus. She was proud of that; after every obstacle thrown in her way she
had proved herself resourceful enough to keep the hope alive. Even back on the
Tekas
she’d thought she would soon be retrieving the Alchemist.

Nyvan had done much to wreck her mood and her confidence. There were starships docked at the orbiting asteroids, and the local
astroengineering companies could probably provide her with the equipment she wanted; yet the decay and suspicion native to
this world made her doubt. The task was slipping from her grasp once more. Difficulties were piling up against her, and now
she had no more fallback positions. They were on their own now: she, Voi, Lodi, and Eriba, with money as their only resource.
True to his word, Prince Lambert had taken the
Tekas
out of orbit as soon as they’d disembarked. He said he was flying to Mondul, it had a strong navy, and he knew people there.

Alkad resisted accessing her time function. Prince Lambert must have made his third ZTT jump by now, and another potential
security hazard was no more.

“That’s a new one,” Eriba announced. He was stretched out along the settee, bare feet dangling over the armrest. It meant
he could just see the holoscreen on the far wall. A local news show was playing.

“What is?” Alkad asked him. He had been consuming news ever since they arrived, switching between the holoscreen and the communications
net’s information cores.

“Tonala has just ordered every border to be closed and sealed. The cabinet claims that New Georgia’s actions are overtly hostile,
and other nations can’t be trusted. Apparently, the SD networks are still blasting each other with electronic warfare pulses.”

Alkad grimaced. That clash had been going on when the
Tekas
arrived. “I wonder how that affects us? Are those the land borders, or are they going to prohibit spaceflight as well?”

“They haven’t said.”

The door chimed as it admitted Voi. She strode into the big living room shrugging out of her thick navy-blue coat and shaking
grubby droplets of melted snow on the white carpet. “We’ve got an appointment for two o’clock this afternoon. I told the Industry
Ministry we were here to buy defence equipment for the Dorados, and they recommended the Opia company. Lodi ran a check through
the local data cores, and they own two asteroid industrial stations along with a starship service subsidiary.”

“That sounds promising,” Alkad said guardedly. She had left all the organization to Voi. The agencies would be looking for
her; zipping around town would be asking for trouble. As it was, using the Daphine Kigano passport when they arrived was a
risk, but she didn’t have any others prepared.

“Promising? Mary, it’s spot on. What do you want, the Kulu Corporation?”

“I wasn’t criticising.”

“Well it sounded like it.”

Voi had slowly reverted to her original temper during the voyage. Alkad wasn’t sure if the waspy girl was recovering from
her father’s death or reacting to it.

“Has Lodi found out if there are any suitable starships for hire?”

“He’s still checking,” Voi said. “So far he’s located over fifty commercial vehicles stranded insystem due to the quarantine.
Most of them are docked in low orbit stations and the asteroid ports. He’s running performance comparisons against the requirements
you gave us. I just hope he can find us one at a Tonala facility. Did you hear about the border restrictions? They’re even
closing down net interface points with the other nations.”

“That’s a minor problem compared to the one we’ll have crewing the ship.”

“What do you mean?”

“Our flight is not the kind of job you normally give mercenaries. I’m not sure money will guarantee loyalty for this mission.”

“Why didn’t you say so, then? Mary, Alkad, how can I help if you keep complaining after the fact? Be more cooperative.”

“I’ll bear it in mind,” Alkad said mildly.

“Is there anything else we should know?”

“I can’t think of anything, but you’ll be the first to be told if I do.”

“All right. Now, I’ve arranged for a car to take us to Opia’s offices. The security company which supplied it is also providing
bodyguards. They will be here in an hour.”

“Good thinking,” Eriba said.

“Elementary thinking,” Voi shot back. “We’re foreigners who have arrived in the middle of an Assembly-imposed quarantine.
That’s hardly an optimum low-visibility scenario. I want to downgrade our risk to a minimum.”

“Bodyguards ought to help, then,” Alkad said prosaically. “You should go and take a rest before we visit Opia. You haven’t
slept since we landed. I’ll need you to be fresh for the negotiations.”

Voi gave a distrustful nod, and went into her bedroom.

Alkad and Eriba exchanged a glance and smiled simultaneously.

“Did she really say
low-visibility scenario?”
he asked.

“Sounded like it to me.”

“Mary, that detox therapy was a bad idea.”

“What was she like before?”

“About the same,” he admitted.

Alkad turned back to the window and the snow softening the city skyline.

The door chimed again.

“Did you order something from room service?” she asked Eriba.

“No.” He gave the door a worried look. “Do you think it’s the bodyguards Voi hired?”

“They’re very early, then; and if they’re professional they would datavise us first.” She picked up her shoulder bag and selected
one of the devices inside. When she datavised the penthouse’s net processor to access the camera in the corridor outside there
was no response. The cut crystal wall lights began to flicker. “Stop!” she told Eriba, who had drawn his laser pistol. “That
won’t work against the possessed.”

“Do you think…”

He trailed off just as Voi burst back into the lounge. She was gripping a maser carbine tight in her hand.

The penthouse’s entrance door swung open. Three people were standing behind it, their features lost in the darkened corridor.

“Do not come in,” Alkad said loudly. “My weapons will work, even against you.”

“Are you quite sure, Doctor?”

Sections of Alkad’s neural nanonics were dropping out. She datavised a primer code at the small sphere she held in her hand
before she lost even that ability. “Fairly sure. Do you want to be the first experimental subject?”

“You haven’t changed; you were always so confident you were right.”

Alkad frowned. It was a female voice, but she couldn’t place it. She didn’t have the processing power left in her neural nanonics
to run an audio comparison program. “Do I know you?”

“You used to. May we come in, please? We really aren’t here to harm you.”

Since when did the possessed start saying please? Alkad thought the circumstances out and said: “It only needs one of you
to speak. And if you’re not a threat, stop glitching our electronics.”

“That last request is difficult, but we will try.”

Alkad’s neural nanonics started to come back on-line. She quickly re-established full control over the device.

“I’ll call the police,” Voi datavised. “They can send a Tac Squad. The possessed won’t know until it’s too late.”

“No. If they wanted to hurt us, they would have done it by now. I think we’ll hear what she has to say.”

“You shouldn’t expose yourself to a negative personal safety context. You are the only link we have to the Alchemist.”

“Oh, shut up,” Alkad said aloud. “All right, come in.”

The young woman who walked into the penthouse was in her early twenties. Her skin was several shades lighter than Alkad’s,
though her hair was jet black, and her face was rounded by a little too much cellulite for her to be pretty; it fixed her
expression to one of continual shy resentment. She wore a long tartan-print summer dress, with a kilt-style skirt that had
been the fashion on Garissa the year of the genocide.

Alkad ran a visual comparison program search through her memory cells. “Gelai? Gelai, is that really you?”

“My soul, yes,” she said. “Not my body. This is just an illusion, of course.” For a moment the solid mirage vanished, revealing
a teenaged Oriental girl with fresh jagged scars on her legs.

“Mother Mary!” Alkad croaked. She’d hoped the tales of torture and atrocity were just Confederation propaganda.

Gelai’s usual profile returned. The flicker of exposure was so fast, it made Alkad’s mind want to believe Gelai’s was the
true shape; the abused girl was something decency rejected.

“What happened?” Alkad asked.

“You know her?” Voi demanded indignantly.

“Oh, yes. Gelai was one of my students.”

“Not one of your best, I’m sorry to say.”

“You were doing all right, as I recall.”

“This enhances stress relief nicely,” Voi said. “But you haven’t told us why you’re here.”

“I was killed in the planet-buster attack,” Gelai said. “The university campus was only five hundred kilometres from one of
the strikes. The earthquake levelled it. I was in my residence hall when it hit. The thermal flash set half of the building
alight. Then the quake arrived; Mary alone knows how powerful it was. I was lucky, I suppose. I died in the first hour. That
was reasonably quick. Compared to a lot of them, anyway.”

“I’m so sorry,” Alkad said. She had rarely felt so worthless; confronted by the pitiful evidence of the greatest failure it
was possible to have. “I failed you. I failed everybody.”

“At least you were trying,” Gelai said. “I didn’t approve at the time. I took part in all the peace demonstrations. We held
vigils outside the continental parliament, sang hymns. But the media said we were cowards and traitors. People actually spat
on us in the streets. I kept going, though, kept protesting. I thought if we could just get our government to talk to the
Omutans, then the military would stop attacking each other. Mary, how naive.”

“No, Gelai, you weren’t naive, you were brave. If enough of us had stood for that principle, then maybe the government would
have tried harder to find a peaceful solution.”

“But they didn’t, did they?”

Alkad traced Gelai’s cheeks with her finger, touching the past she’d thought was so far behind her, the cause of the present.
Feeling the ersatz skin was all she needed to know she had been right to do what she’d done thirty years ago. “I was going
to protect you. I thought I’d sold my very soul so that you would all be safe. I didn’t care about that. I thought you were
worth the sacrifice; all you bright young minds so full of the silliest hopes and proudest ideals. I would have done it, too,
for you. Slain Omuta’s star, the biggest crime in the galaxy. And now all that’s left of us are the ones like these.” She
waved a hand limply at Voi and Eriba. “Just a few thousand kids living in rocks that mess with their heads. I don’t know which
of you suffered the worst fate. At least you had a taste of what our people might have achieved if we’d lived. This new generation
are just poor remnants of what they could’ve been.”

Gelai puffed up her lips and stared firmly at the floor. “I wasn’t sure what I was going to do when I came here. Warn you
or kill you.”

“And now?”

“I didn’t realize why you were doing it, why you went off to help the military. You were this aloof professor that we were
all a bit in awe of, you were so smart. We respected you so much, I never gave you human motives, I thought you were a lump
of chilled bitek on legs. I see I was wrong, though I still think you are wrong to have built anything as evil as the Alchemist.”

Alkad stiffened. “How do you know about the Alchemist?”