The Night's Dawn Trilogy (330 page)

Over fifteen thousand heavily armed patrol voidhawks complemented the static defences; circling the volatile cloudscape in
elliptical, high-inclination orbits, ready to interdict any remotely suspicious incoming molecule. The fact that so many voidhawks
had been taken off civil cargo flights was actually causing a tiny rise in the price of He3, the first for over two hundred
and sixty years.

Consensus considered the economic repercussions to be a worthwhile trade for the security such invulnerable defences provided.
No ship, robot, or inert kinetic projectile could get within three million kilometres of Jupiter unless specifically permitted
to do so.

Even a lone maniac would acknowledge an attempted attack would be the ultimate in futility.

______

The gravity fluctuation which appeared five hundred and sixty thousand kilometres above Jupiter’s equator was detected instantaneously.
It registered as an inordinately powerful twist of space-time in the distortion fields of the closest three hundred voidhawks.
The intensity was so great that the gravitonic detectors in local SD sensor array had to be hurriedly recalibrated in order
to acquire an accurate fix. Visually it appeared as a ruby star, the gravity field lensing Jupiter’s light in every direction.
Surrounding dust motes and solar wind particles were sucked in, a cascade of picometeorites fizzing brilliant yellow.

Consensus went to condition-one alert status. The sheer strength of the space warp ruled out any conventional star-ship emergence.
And the location was provocatively close to the habitats, a hundred thousand kilometres from the nearest designated emergence
zone. Affinity commands from Consensus were loaded into the combat wasps drifting inertly among the habitats. Three thousand
fusion drives flared briefly, aligning the lethal drones on their new target. The patrol voidhawks formed a sub-Consensus
of their own, designating approach vectors and swallow manoeuvres to englobe the invader.

The warp area expanded out to several hundred metres, alarming individual Edenists, though Consensus itself absorbed the fact
calmly. It was already far larger than any conceivable voidhawk or blackhawk wormhole terminus. Then it began to flatten out
into a perfectly circular two-dimensional fissure in space-time, and the real expansion sequence began. Within five seconds
it was over eleven kilometres in diameter. Consensus quickly and concisely reformed its response pattern. Approaching voidhawks
performed frantic fifteen-gee parabolas, curving clear then swallowing away. An extra eight thousand combat wasps burst into
life, hurtling in towards the Herculean alien menace.

After another three seconds the fissure reached twenty kilometres in diameter, and stabilized. One side collapsed inwards,
exposing the wormhole’s throat. Three small specks zoomed out of the centre.
Oenone
and the other two voidhawks screamed their identity into the general affinity band, and implored:
HOLD YOUR FIRE!

For the first time in its five hundred and twenty-one year history, the Jovian Consensus experienced the emotion of shock.
Even then, its response wasn’t entirely blunted. Specialist perceptual thought routines confirmed the three voidhawks remained
unpossessed. A five-second lockdown was loaded into the combat wasps.

What is happening?
Consensus demanded.

Syrinx simply couldn’t resist it.
We have a visitor,
she replied gleefully. Her entire crew was laughing cheerfully around her on the bridge.

The counter-rotating spaceport was the first part to emerge from the gigantic wormhole terminus. A silver-white disk four
and a half kilometres in diameter, docking bay lights glittering like small towns huddled at the base of metal valleys, red
and green strobes winking bright around the rim. Its slender spindle slid up after it, appearing to pull the dark rust-red
polyp endcap along.

That was when the other starships began to rampage out of the terminus; voidhawks, blackhawks, and Confederation Navy vessels
streaking off in all directions. Jupiter’s SD sensors and patrol voidhawk distortion fields tracked them urgently. Consensus
fired guidance updates at the incoming combat wasps, determinedly vectoring them away from the unruly incursion.

The habitat’s main cylinder started to coast up out of the terminus, a prodigious seventeen kilometres in diameter. After
the first thirty-two kilometres were clear, its central band of starscrapers emerged, hundreds of thousands of windows agleam
with the radiance of lazy afternoon sunlight. Their bases just cleared the rim of the wormhole. There were no more starships
to come after that, only the rest of the cylinder. When the emergence was complete, the wormhole irised shut and space returned
to its natural state. The flotilla of patrol voidhawks thronging round detected a capacious distortion field folding back
into the broad collar of polyp around the base of the habitat’s southern endcap that formed the bed of its circumfluous sea.

Consensus directed a phenomenally restrained burst of curiosity at the newcomer.

Greetings,
chorused Tranquillity and Ione Saldana. There was a distinct timbre of smugness in the hail.

______

Dariat did the one thing which he had never expected to do again. He opened his eyes and looked around. His own eyes in his
own body; fat unpleasant thing that it was, clad in his usual grubby toga.

The sight which greeted him was familiar: one of Valisk’s innumerable shallow valleys out among the pink grass plains. If
he wasn’t completely mistaken, it was the same patch of ground Anastasia’s tribe had occupied the day she died.

“This is the final afterlife?” he asked aloud.

It couldn’t be. There was an elusive memory, the same befuddlement as a dream leaves upon waking. Of a sundering, of being
torn out of…

He had fused with Rubra, the two of them becoming one, vanquishing the foe by shunting Valisk to a realm, or dimension, or
state, that the two of them grasped was intrinsically adverse to the possessing souls. Perhaps they had even created the new
location by simply willing it to be. And then time went awry.

He gave his surroundings a more considered examination. It was Valisk, all right. The circumfluous sea was about four kilometres
away, its clusters of atolls easily recognizable. When he turned the other way, he could see a fat black scar running down
two-thirds of the northern endcap.

The light tube was dimmer than it should be, even accounting for the loss of some plasma. It proffered a kind of twilight,
but grey rather than the magnificent golden sunset Dariat had experienced every day of his life. The grass plain echoed that
malaised atmosphere, it was uneasily torpid. Its resident insects had curled up into dormancy; birds and rodents slunk back
reticently to their nests, even the flowers had shrugged off their natural gloss.

Dariat bent down to pick an enervated poppy. And his chubby hand passed clean through the stem. He stared at it in astonishment,
for the first time seeing that he was faintly translucent.

Shock finally liberated comprehension. A location hostile to possessors, one which would exorcise them from their enslaved
hosts, denying them their energistic power. That was the destination he and Rubra had committed the habitat to.

“Oh, Thoale, you utter bastard. I’m a ghost.”

______

For nearly ten hours the lift capsule had skimmed down the tower linking Supra-Brazil asteroid with the Govcentral state after
which it was named, a smooth, silent ride. The only clue to how fast the lift capsules travelled (three thousand kilometres
per hour) would come when they passed each other. But as they clung to rails on the exterior of the tower, and the only windows
gave a direct view outward, such events remained out of sight to their passengers. Deliberately so; watching another capsule
hurtling towards you at a combined speed of six thousand kilometres per hour was considered an absolute psychological no-go
zone by the tower operators.

Just before it entered the upper fringes of the atmosphere, the lift capsule decelerated to subsonic velocity. It reached
the stratosphere as dawn broke over South America. On Earth that was no longer an invigorating sight; all the passengers saw
was an unbroken murky-grey cloud layer which covered most of the continent and a third of the South Atlantic. Only when the
lift capsule was ten kilometres above the frothing upper layer could Quinn see the army of individual streamers from which
the gigantic cyclone was composed, flowing around each other at perilous velocities. The seething mass was as compressed as
any gas-giant storm band, but infinitely drabber.

They descended into the slashing tendrils of cirrus, and the windows immediately reverberated from the barrage of fist-sized
raindrops. There was nothing else to see after that, just formless smears of grey. A minute before they reached the ground
station, the windows went black as the lift capsule entered the sheath which guarded the bottom of the tower from the worst
violence of the planet’s rabid weather.

Digits on the Royale Class lounge’s touchdown counter reached zero, an event marked by only the slightest tremble as latch
clamps closed round the base of the lift capsule. The magnetic rail disengaged, and a transporter rolled it clear of the tower,
leaving the reception berth clear for the next capsule. Airlock hatches popped open, revealing long extendable corridors leading
into the arrivals complex where treble the usual numbers of customs, immigration, and security officers waited to scan the
passengers. Quinn sighed in mild resignation. He’d quite enjoyed the trip down, mellowing out with all the facilities the
Royale Class lounge could provide. A welcome period of contemplation, assisted by the Norfolk Tears he’d been drinking.

He had arrived at Earth with one goal: conquest. Now at least he had some notions how to go about subduing the planet for
his Lord. The kind of exponential brute force approach the possessed had used up to now just wasn’t an option on Earth. The
arcologies were too isolated for that. It was curious, but the more Quinn thought about it, the more he realized that Earth
was a representation of the Confederation in miniature. Its vast population centres kept separate by an amok nature almost
as lethal as the interstellar void. Seeds of his revolution would have to be planted very carefully indeed. If Govcentral
security ever suspected an outbreak of possession, the arcology in question would be quarantined. And Quinn knew that even
with his energistic powers there would be nothing he could do to escape once the vac-trains had been shut down.

Most of the other passengers had disembarked, and the chief stewardess was glancing in Quinn’s direction. He rose up from
his deep leather seat, stretching the tiredness from his limbs. There was absolutely no way he’d ever get past the immigration
desk, let alone security.

He walked towards the airlock hatch, and summoned the energistic power, mentally moulding it into the now familiar pattern.
It crawled over his body, needle spears of static penetrating every cell. A swift groan was the only indication he showed
of the grotesquery he experienced passing through the gateway into the ghost realm. His heart stopped, his breathing ceased,
and the world about him lost its glimmer of substance. The solidity of walls and floors was still present, but ephemeral.
Irrelevant if he really pressed.

The chief stewardess watched the last passenger step into the airlock, and turned back to the bar. Secured below the counter
were several bottles of the complimentary Norfolk Tears and other expensive spirits and liqueurs which her team had opened.
They were careful never to leave much, at most a third, before opening a new bottle. But a third of these drinks was an expensive
commodity.

She began inventorying all these bottles as empty in her stock control block. The team would split them later, filling their
personal flasks, and take them home. As long as they didn’t get too greedy the company supervisor would let it pass. Her block’s
datavise turned to nonsense. She gave it an annoyed glare, and automatically rapped it against the bar. That was when the
lights started to flicker. Puzzled now, she frowned up at the ceiling. Electrical systems were failing all over the lounge.
The AV pillar projection behind the bar had crashed into rainbow squiggles, the airlock hatch activators were whining loudly,
though the hatch itself wasn’t moving.

“What—?” she grumbled. Power loss was just about impossible in the lift capsules. Every component had multiple redundancy
backups. She was about to call the lift capsule’s operations officer when the lights steadied, and her stock control block
came back on line. “Bloody typical,” she grunted. It still bothered her badly. If things could go wrong on the ground, they
could certainly go wrong half way up the tower.

She gave the waiting bottles a forlorn glance, knowing she was giving them up if she logged an official power-down incident
report. The company inspectorate authority would swarm all over the lift capsule. She carefully erased the inventory file
she’d started, and datavised the lounge processor for a channel to the operations officer.

The call never got placed. Instead she received a priority datavise from the arrivals complex security office ordering her
to remain exactly where she was. Outside, an alarm siren started its high-pitched urgent wailing. The sound made her jump,
in eleven years of riding the tower she’d only ever heard it during practice drills. The siren’s clamour sounded muffled to
Quinn. He’d watched the airlock lights quiver, and sensed the delicate electronic patterns of nearby processors storm wildly
as he pushed himself through the gateway. There was nothing he could do about it. It took all of his concentration to marshal
his energistic power into the correct pattern. Now it seemed that pattern had an above-average giveaway effect on nearby electronics—though
nothing had happened when he’d slipped out of the ghost realm into the Royale Class lounge at the start of the descent. Of
course, he wasn’t exerting himself then, quite the opposite, he’d actually been reining in the power.