The Night's Dawn Trilogy (307 page)

“Three, four minutes.”

“Plenty of time,” Quinn said smoothly. He checked the communications displays to ensure the starship’s secure lasers were
still linked with Jesup and the three abandoned asteroids. “An occasion like this, I ought to say something, but fuck it,
I’m not in the dignity business.” He typed in the arming code and watched as the display symbology turned a beautiful dangerous
red. His finger went straight to the execute command key and tapped it eagerly.

Ninety-seven fusion bombs detonated; the majority of them one-hundred-megaton blasts.

The sensors which were protruding above the fuselage of
Mount’s Delta
observed Jesup wobble. Quinn had ordered his trusted disciples to place the bombs in a line below the biosphere cavern where
the rock was thinnest. Huge flakes of rock fell away from the asteroid’s crinkled outer surface, allowing jets of raw plasma
to stab out. It was a precision application of force, splitting the rock clean open. The biosphere cavern was ruined instantly
as nuclear volcanoes erupted out of the floor to exterminate all the life it sustained. Shock waves hurtled through the rock,
opening up immense fracture patterns and shattering vast sections already weakened from centuries of mining.

Centrifugal force took over from the bombs to complete the destruction, applying intolerable torque stresses on the remaining
sections of rock. Hill-sized chunks of regolith crumbled away, rotation flinging them clear. Tornadoes of hot, radioactive
air poured into space, forming a thin cyclone around the fragmenting asteroid.

Quinn slammed a fist into his console. “Fucked!” he yelled victoriously. “Totally fucking fucked. I did it. Now they’ll know
His might is for real. The Night is going to fall, Dwyer, sure as shit floats to the top.”

Sensors aligned on the three abandoned asteroids revealed similar scenes of devastation.

“But—Why? Why, Quinn?”

Quinn laughed joyfully. “Back on Earth we learned everything there was to know about climate, all those doomsdays waiting
to bite our arses if we aren’t good obedient little Govcentral mechanoids. Don’t violate the environmental laws else you’ll
wind up drowning in your own crap. Garbage like that. Everybody knows the entire flek-load, the whole arcology from the tower
nerds to the subtown kids. I heard about nuclear winters and dinosaur killers before I could walk.” He banged a finger on
the holo-screen’s surface. “And this is it. Earth’s nightmare out of the box. Those rocks are going to pulverize Nyvan. Doesn’t
matter if they smash down on land or water; they’re going to blast gigatonnes of shit up into the atmosphere. I’m not talking
some crappy little smog layer up in the sky, it’s going to
be
the fucking sky. Wet black soot stretching from the ground to the stratosphere, so thick it’ll give you cancer just breathing
it for five minutes. They’ll never see sunlight again, never. And when the possessed take over the whole fucking ball game
down there, it still ain’t going to help them. They can shunt Nyvan out of the universe, but they haven’t got the power to
clean the air. Only He can do that. God’s Brother will bring them light.” Quinn hugged Dwyer energetically. “They’ll pray
to Him to come and liberate them. They can’t do anything else. He is their only salvation now. And I did it for Him. Me! I’ve
brought Him a whole fucking planet to join His legions. Now I know it works, I’m going to do it to every planet in the Confederation.
Every single one, that’s my crusade now. Starting with Earth.”

Secure communications lasers slid back down inside the fuselage, along with the sensors; and the
Mount’s Delta
vanished inside an event horizon. Behind it, the low-orbit battle ran its course, the protagonists unaware of the true holocaust
growing above them. The four tremendous clouds of rocky detritus were expanding at a constant rate, watched by the horrified
surviving asteroids. Seventy per cent of the mass would miss the planet. But that still left thousands of fragments which
would rain down through the atmosphere over the next two days. Each one would have a destructive potential hundreds of times
greater than the ironberg. And with their planet’s electronics reduced to trash, its spaceships smashed, its SD platforms
vaporized, and its astroengineering stations in ruins, there was absolutely nothing Nyvan’s population could do to prevent
the onrush. Only pray. Just as Quinn prophesied.
28

The
Leonora Cephei
’s radar was switched to long-range scanning mode, searching for any sign of another ship. After five hours gliding inertly
along its orbital path, there hadn’t been a single contact.

“How much longer do you expect me to muck in with this charade of yours?” Captain Knox asked scathingly. He indicated the
holoscreen which was displaying the ship’s radar return. “I’ve seen Pommy cricket teams with more life in them than this bugger.”

Jed looked at the console; its symbology meant nothing to him, for all he knew the flight computer could be displaying schematics
for
Leonora Cephei
’s waste cycling equipment. He felt shamed by his own technological ignorance. He only ever came into the compartment when
he was summoned by Knox; and the only summonses he got was when the captain found something new to complain about. He now
made damn sure he brought Beth and Skibbow with him each time; it made the whole experience a little less like being humiliated
by Digger.

“If this is the coordinate, they’ll be here,” Jed insisted. This was the right time for the rendezvous. So where was the starship?
He didn’t want to look at Beth again. She didn’t appear entirely sympathetic to his plight.

“Another hour,” Knox said. “That’s what I’ll give you, then we head for Tanami. There are some cargoes for me there. Real
ones.”

“We’ll wait a damn sight more than one hour, matey,” Beth said.

“You get what you paid for.”

“In that case we’ll be here for six months; that’s how much cash we bloody well shelled out.”

“One hour.” Knox’s pale skin was reddening again; he wasn’t used to his command decisions being questioned on his own bridge.

“Balls. We’re here for as long as it takes, pal. Right, Jed?”

“Er. Yes. We should wait a bit longer.” Beth’s silent contempt made him want to cringe.

Knox gestured broadly in mock-reasonableness. “Long enough for the oxygen to run out, or can we head for port before that?”

“You regenerate the atmosphere,” Beth said. “Stop being such a pain. We wait until our transport turns up. That’s final.”

“You flaming kids, you’re all crazy. You don’t see my children becoming Deadnights. Deadheads more like. What do you think
is going to happen to you if you ever reach Valisk? That Kiera is bullshitting you.”

“No she’s not!” Jed said heatedly.

Knox was surprised at his resentment. “Okay, kid. I understand, I used to let my balls think for me when I was your age.”
He winked at Beth.

She glowered back at him.

“We wait as long at it takes,” Gerald said quietly. “We are going to Valisk. All of us. That’s what I paid you for, Captain.”
It was hard for him to be silent when people talked about Marie, especially the way they talked about her, as if she were
some kind of communal girlfriend. Since the voyage started he had managed to hold his tongue. He found life a lot easier on
board the small ship; the simple daily routine in which everything was laid out for him in advance was quite a comfort. So
what they said about Marie, their idolization of the demon who controlled her, didn’t snarl him up with anguish. They spoke
from ignorance. He was wise to that. Loren would be proud of him for exercising such control.

“All right, we’ll wait awhile,” Knox said. “It’s your charter.” It always embarrassed him when Skibbow spoke. The man had
episodes
, you never knew how he was going to behave. So far there had been no anger or violence. So far.

Fifteen minutes later, Captain Knox’s little quandaries and problems were banished as the radar detected a small object three
kilometres away which hadn’t been there a millisecond before. There was the usual weird peripheral fuzz indicating a wormhole
terminus, and the object was expanding rapidly. He accessed the
Leonora Cephei
’s sensors to watch the bitek starship emerging.

“Oh, sweet Christ Almighty,” he groaned. “You crazy bastards. We’re dead meat now. Bloody dead!”

Mindor
slipped out of the wormhole terminus and stretched its wings wide. Its head swung around so that one eye could fix the
Leonora Cephei
with a daunting stare.

Jed looked into one of the bridge’s AV pillars, seeing the huge hellhawk flap its wings in slow sweeps, closing the distance
with deceptive speed. Disquiet gave way to a kind of reverence. He whooped enthusiastically and hugged Beth. She grinned indulgently
back at him.

“That’s something, huh?”

“Sure is.”

“We did it, we bloody did it.”

A terrified Captain Knox ignored the babbling, insane kids and ordered the main communications dish to point at Pinjarra so
he could call the Trojan cluster capital for help. Not, he guessed, that it would do the slightest good.

Rocio Condra was ready for it. After several dozen clandestine pickups he knew exactly how the captains reacted to his appearance.
Out of the eight short-range defence lasers secured to his hull, only three were still functioning, and that was only because
they utilized bitek processor control circuitry. The rest had succumbed to the vagaries of his energistic power, which he
could never quite contain. He targeted the dish as it started to track around, and sent a half-second pulse into its central
transmission module.

“Do not attempt to contact anyone,” he broadcast.

“I understand,” a shaken Knox datavised.

“Good. Are you carrying Deadnights for transfer?”

“Yes.”

“Stand by for rendezvous and docking. Tell them to be ready.”

The monster bird folded its wings as it manoeuvred closer to the spindly inter-orbit craft. Its outline began to waver as
it rolled around its long axis; feathers giving way to dull green polyp, avian shape reverting to the earlier compressed-cone
hull. There were changes, though: the scattered purple rings were now long ovals, mimicking its feather pattern. Of the three
rear fins, the central one had shrunk, while the two outer ones had elongated and flattened back.

With the roll manoeuvre complete,
Mindor’s
life-support module lay parallel to the
Leonora Cephei
. Rocio Condra extended the airlock tube. Now, he could sense the minds inside the inter-orbit ship’s life-support capsule.
It contained the usual split between trepidatious crew and ridiculously exuberant Deadnights. This time there was an addition,
a strange mind, dulled yet happy, with thoughts moving in erratic rhythms.

He watched with idle curiosity through the internal optical sensors as the Deadnights came aboard. The interior of the life-support
module had come to resemble a nineteenth-century steamship, with a profusion of polished rosewood surfaces and brass fittings.
According to the pair of possessed, Choi-Ho and Maxim Payne, who served as maintenance crew, there was also a fairly realistic
smell of salt water. Rocio was pleased with the realism, which was far more detailed and solid than the possessed usually
achieved. That was due to the nature of the hellhawk’s neuron cell structure which contained hundreds of subnodes arranged
in processorlike lattices. They were intended to act as semi-autonomic regulators for his technological modules. Once he had
conjured up the image he wanted and loaded it into a subnode it was maintained without conscious thought, and with an energistic
strength unavailable to an ordinary human brain.

The last few weeks had been a revelation to Rocio Condra. After the initial bitter resentment, he had discovered that life
as a hellhawk was about as rich as it was possible to have, although he did miss sex. And he’d been talking to some of the
others about that; theoretically they could simply grow the appropriate genitalia (those that didn’t insist on imagining themselves
as techno starships). If they accomplished that, there was no real reason to go back into human bodies. Which of course would
make them independent of Kiera. For an entity that lived forever, the variety which would come from trying out a new creature’s
body and life cycle every few millennia might just be the final answer to terminal ennui.

Accompanying the revelation was a growing resentment at the way Kiera was using them—to which the prospect of fighting for
Capone was a worrying development. Even if he was offered a human body now, Rocio was doubtful he wanted to go with the habitat.
He wasn’t frightened of space like the rest of the returned souls, not anymore, not possessing this magnificent creature.
Space and all its emptiness was to be loved for its freedom.

Gravity returned slowly as Gerald drifted through the airlock tube, his shoulder bag in tow. The airlock compartment he landed
in was almost identical to the one he had left behind. But it was larger, its technology more discreet, and outside the hatch
Choi-Ho and Maxim Payne greeted him with smiles and comforting words where behind Knox and his eldest son had stood guard
over their hatch with TIP carbines and scowls.

“There are several cabins available,” Choi-Ho said. “Not enough for everyone, so you’ll probably have to double up.”

Gerald smiled blankly, which came over more as a frightened grimace.

“Pick any one,” she told him kindly.

“When will we get there?” Gerald asked.

“We have a rendezvous in the Kabwe system in eight hours, after that we’ll be going back to Valisk. It should be about twenty
hours.”

“Twenty? Is that all?”

“Yes.”

“Twenty.” It was said with deference. “Are you sure?”

“Yes, quite sure.” People were starting to bunch up in the airlock behind him; all of them curiously reluctant to push past.
“A cabin,” she suggested hopefully.

“Come on, Gerald, mate,” Beth said breezily. She took his arm and pulled gently. He walked obediently down the corridor with
her. He only stopped once, and that was to look over his shoulder and say an earnest, “Thank you,” to an oddly intrigued Choi-Ho.